Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID)

A project exploring popular music's contribution to narratives of cultural identity as well as representations of cultural heritage and memory in a pan-European context.

Background

Popular music has long provided a focus for individual and collective identity. In Europe it may be as potent a symbol of national or local identity as more traditional representations such as national and regional insignia, food, drink and sport. Increasingly, it has been officially categorised as ‘heritage’ by public and commercial sector organisations, a process shaped by specific national contexts.

The project

Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID) was a three-year project exploring popular music's contribution to narratives of cultural identity and representations of cultural heritage and memory in a pan-European context. Supported by the European Humanities in the Research Area Joint Research Programme, the project involved collaboration between researchers in England, the Netherlands, Austria and Slovenia. The research in England was conducted by Sara Cohen (Principal Investigator), Les Roberts (Research Associate) and Gurdeep Khabra (Phd student).

The first phase of the project examined dominant histories of popular music constructed through films, books, exhibitions and so on, and official authorisations of popular music as heritage. It involved extensive archival research and interviews with those working in the music and media industries and tourism and heritage sector. The second phase of the project was concerned with the music memories and histories of audiences. In England audiences were invited to share their music memories through a survey that attracted over 600 responses, as well as through face-to-face interviews and the creation of music memory maps.

Through Khabra’s doctoral research the project also involved a detailed exploration of music, heritage and England’s South Asian community that focused primarily on British Bhangra music.

Outcomes

By covering such a breadth of activity the research enabled an unprecedented overview of the music heritage sector in England. It revealed some of the diverse ways in which heritage is practised and related to popular music by archivists, historians, exhibitors and tourism bodies, whether for marketing purposes or to create a sense of shared musical identity and history. At the same time, it challenged the use of heritage as a theoretical framework by showing how popular music is embedded in vernacular memory, but audiences do not generally think about it in terms of heritage.

The project led to Re/Soundings: Documenting Music and Memory, a public engagement event involving a series of public screenings and workshops delivered in collaboration with the Rotterdam Film festival. It has also underpinned numerous published papers and conference papers, two special journal issues (International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20/3, 2014; Popular Music and Society, 1/36, 2016) and an edited book entitled Sites of Popular Music Heritage (2014, edited by Cohen, Leonard, Knifton and Roberts).

There were additional outputs from the England case study, including a short film, Pop Goes Heritage, and a workshop involving academics and those working in the music, media and heritage industries. The case study led to the public engagement project Music, Photographs and Stories from the Archives, which enabled members of the public to engage with archival materials and relate them to autobiographical memory.