Popular Music and Materiality: Memorabilia and Memory Traces

Abstract

The material objects of popular music have featured significantly in studies of popular music. In particular, there are established literatures on physical playback media (including the re-emergence of vinyl albums) and playback devices, from the Walkman to the iPod. Recently, as popular music scholars have begun to explore the everyday use of music and music technologies by casual listeners, music has increasingly been described as sound and as an ambient presence in our lives. Yet woven through these increasingly digital cultures are concrete manifestations of music listening and fandom. Drawing on the findings of a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project on popular music and cultural memory, this article considers the implications of such manifestations of materiality for the way we understand the significance of popular music, and its linking of the past and the present, in contemporary everyday life. Using fieldwork data collected in cities across Australia, the article considers how various aspects of popular music-related material culture became palpable objects for the writing of personal histories. In some instances, these material objects of participation were less foregrounded but still present. In these cases, materiality was resigned more to the past, but material cultures were actively digitized and distributed. This process was always ongoing and incomplete. This article examines and develops a central theme emerging from our research findings, namely that popular music objects acquire meanings that raise them above their everyday status via cultural means strongly influenced by the contextualizing effects of online technology.