Remembering the 1960s: popular music and memory in Europe

Abstract

Following the increasing attention paid to popular music in heritage discourses, this article explores how the popular music culture from the 1960s is remembered in Europe. I discuss the role of heritage organizations, media and the cultural policy of the EU in the construction of a popular music heritage of this period. Furthermore, I examine the ways in which attachments to local, national and European identities are negotiated. To this end, I draw upon interviews with representatives of museums, websites and archives. The article reveals a recurring tension between transnational and local experiences of the 1960s. It is found that media and heritage institutions like museums and archives predominantly have a national and local orientation, although narratives with a European vantage point are now emerging on the internet.

Narratives of popular music heritage and cultural identity: The affordances and constraints of popular music memories

“…The research for this article has been conducted in the context of a European research project on popular music heritage, cultural memory and cultural identity (Brandellero et al, 2014). It builds upon the findings of four case studies that focused on the ways in which cultural and heritage industries construct narratives of popular music heritage and cultural memory (Van der Hoeven, 2012, 2014, 2015; Van der Hoeven and Brandellero, 2015).…”

Grab it and change it, it’s yours: Affect, attitude and politics in 1970s Northern Irish punk music

“…While the introduction of non-representational thinking into musical analyses has prompted engagements with embodiments and practices in order to understand spatial dynamics (Revill, 2016: 241), the emphasis placed on the impact of these embodiments on space again overlooks the significance of time. Efforts to analyse acts of remembering through music consumption and music heritage have endeavoured to incorporate this temporal aspect (Anderson, 2004; Brandellero and Janssen, 2014; Van der Hoeven, 2015), but these attempts have been constrained by their focus on the momentary jump between the nodes of present and past, as opposed to a theorisation of the long-term, continuous impact of music on identity and its political import.…”