Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage

Popular music is increasingly being represented and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage. In many places across the world, popular music heritage sites – including museums, archives, commemorative plaques adorning buildings, and what could be referred to as DIY music heritage initiatives – constitute some of the key ways in which popular music artists, scenes and events are being remembered. Bringing together a selection of wide-ranging contributions, the purpose of this book is to present a number of case studies from Europe and Australia that demonstrate the variety of ways in which popular music is being cast as cultural heritage and as a medium that invokes the collective memory of successive generations whose identity and sense of cultural belonging have often been indelibly inscribed by the musical soundscapes of their teen and early adult years. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited over 20 books including Popular Music and Youth Culture, Music, Style and Aging and Music Scenes (with Richard A. Peterson).

Susanne Janssen is Professor of Sociology of Media and Culture in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam the Erasmus Research Centre in Media, Communication and Culture, The Netherlands. She has published widely on the agents and institutions involved in the creation, dissemination and valuation of literature and other art forms.