The sound of yesteryear on display: a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for exhibiting pop/rock heritage

Abstract

The increasing presentation of popular music culture as heritage is manifested in the recent proliferation of museums of pop/rock culture. This calls for an examination of the current practices of disseminating pop/rock heritage through exhibitions. Two trends have been identified and criticised by previous commentators: first, the prominence of nostalgia in exhibition narratives and second, that exhibitions of popular music tend to display ancillary objects rather than music itself. This article offers a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for disseminating pop/rock heritage and explores the potential of music as a trigger for nostalgic experiences in exhibitions. While agreeing with much of the critique levelled at the nostalgic approach to pop/rock culture, we suggest that with a more nuanced conception of reflective nostalgia, the affective appeal of the nostalgic approach can be harnessed without giving in to glamourised oversimplifications of the past. Further, we suggest that mediated memories can form the basis of nostalgic feelings and thus enable the nostalgic approach to span the generational gap and engage visitors who do not have a lived experience of pop/rock heritage. We will illustrate this by contrasting our approach to that taken at ABBA The Museum.

Keywords:

• Pop/Rock Heritage
• nostalgia
• memory
• exhibition design
• sound in exhibitions

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments as well as the editor of IJHS, Professor Laurajane Smith, for her helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. Examples of European museums and experience centres dealing with popular music that have opened during the last few years include: Rockheim, Norway (2010), Popsenteret, Norway (2011), British Music Experience (2009), Museo del Rock, Spain (2011), Swedish Music Hall of Fame and Abba The Museum (2013), The Danish Rock Museum (opens in 2015).

2. It can be argued that Reynolds (2011) holds a simplified view of museums; his stated opposition between museums and pop/rock culture may be justified empirically from the places he has visited, but that does not mean the museum institution per se should only be about things or cultures that are no longer relevant. On the contrary, there is a shift towards twenty-first-century museums being in constant dialogue with the present – and there is no reason why that should not also be possible for a pop/rock museum.

3. We have also conducted empirical field research at other sites, most thoroughly at the British Music Experience (BME) in London and Rockheim in Trondheim, but since the issue of nostalgia is especially prevalent at ABBA The Museum, we have chosen this site as the most appropriate to include in our analysis.

4. Likewise, recently, examples of temporary exhibitions evoking simple nostalgia have been common in Danish museums, e.g. the Beatles exhibition ‘The Beatles forever!’ at Koldinghus (2011) and the 1960s exhibition ‘De dejlige ungdomsår’ [The Lovely Adolescence] at Gammel Estrup (2012).

5. This was seen in the exhibition Into the Heart of Africa (1989) at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto which resulted in allegations of racism by angry protesters picketing outside the museum (Hutcheon 1994, 169ff.).

6. The VW Bus was the vehicle of choice for the hippie movement when members wanted to explore the world on a budget. It is featured on several album covers, such as Johnny & The Hurricanes Red River Rock (1959) and Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ (1963). The most well-known example is probably The Who’s Union Jack covered version as an emblem of the British invasion of popular culture in the 1960s.