Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory

Abstract

Recorded music is vital to the construction of personal and collective cultural memory. My examination of the interrelation between personal and collective memories of popular music assumes both that human memory is simultaneously embodied, enabled, and embedded, and that (re)collective experiences are constructed through narratives. Analysis of an online set of narrative responses to a national radio-event, the Dutch Top 2000, shows that we need public spaces to share narratives and to create a common musical heritage.

Keywords:

• Popular Music
• Cultural Memory
• Sound Technologies
• Recorded Music
• Autobiographical Memory

Acknowledgments

She thanks the members of the Sound Technologies and Cultural Practice team, Karin Bijsterveld, Ruth Benschop and Bas Jansen; as well as CSMC's referees and Linda Steiner.

Notes

1. Started as a one-time millennium event in 1999, the Dutch national public radio station (Radio 2) invited listeners to send in their personal all-time-top-5 songs, resulting in a collective Top 2000 (see http://top2000.radio2.nl/2005/site/page/homepage). The response to this one-time event was so overwhelming that the station decided to repeat it the next year, and a tradition has continued. In December 2004 and 2005, over one million Dutch citizens sent in their personal Top 5s. In 2005, almost 6.5 million people listened to the radio broadcast, 5 million people watched the accompanying daily television shows and the Web site registered 9.2 million page views in just five days. Cast against a population of 16 million, the event engaged more than half of all Dutch people over 12 years and older. The comments used in this article are derived from the 2004 database; this database is no longer publicly available but is archived by Radio 2. The comments used in this article were originally in Dutch; all translations are mine, and I have identified the respondents in the same way they identified themselves. I thank Kees Toering, station manager and initiator of the Top 2000, for making all statistics and archives available.

2. I concentrate on popular (rather than classical or experimental-artistic) music and its affective commitment to memory, because pop music is more conducive to the kind of mental mapping and narrative recall that is key to my argument. Other kinds of music may create a different connection to identity and memory.

3. A few cognitive psychological studies show that older adults’ memory grows more positive over the years; older adults are more motivated than younger adults to remember their past in emotionally satisfying ways, and older adults’ positive bias in reconstructive memory reflects their motivation to regulate emotional experience (see Kennedy, Mather, & Carstensen, 1994).

4. Clinical psychologists Schulkind, Hennis, and Rubin (1999) had younger adults (18–21) and older adults (65–70) listen to songs that were popular between 1935 and 1994, but only appeared on the hit lists during a defined period (in contrast to evergreens). Subjects were asked whether each song reminded them of a general period or a specific event from their lives.

5. On the material temporality of recording, see Sterne's (2003) discussion of “triple temporality.”

6. The emotional value of mix tapes or specific sequences of songs is also keenly exploited in the production of “elevator music” or “muzak.” Commercial companies specializing in the compilation of music for stores, waiting rooms, or other venues work from the same cognitive-psychological insights that sonic environments may be conducive to particular moods. For more, see Owen (2006).

7. Websites for mix-and-burn software (iTunes, Blaze Audio, The Music Tablet) tend to address users as “interactive creators” who “transform music buying into an instant creative experience.” Art of the Mix, which promotes the swapping of mixed CDs, lists several reasons for creating playlists and burning them onto a CD, including “the romantic mix, the break-up mix, the hangover mix, the airplane mix, and the sick-in-bed mix,” to match fleeting moods and personal circumstances. See http://www.artofthemix.org/writings/history.asp

8. Some studies of undergraduates show that current mood influences memory; see, for instance, Bower and Forgas (2000). Mather (2004) concludes that among younger adults, negative mood increases the likelihood of remembering negative information.

9. In December 2005, a national discussion erupted in Dutch newspapers when listeners voted a new number one song to top the ranking—Avond, a song in Dutch, composed and sung by Dutch artist, Boudewijn de Groot—thus defeating the longtime English number 1 (Queen's “Bohemian rhapsody”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José van Dijck

José van Dijck is a professor of media and culture and currently the chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam