Multiple voices, multiple memories: Public history-making and activist archivism in online popular music archives. (original) (raw)

Creative industry and cultural policy initiatives and interventions in the United Kingdom have begun to utilise concepts of popular music heritage. These initiatives have often focused on the role that popular music can play in stimulating the economy and tourism and as a form of ‘place making’ (Brown, O’Connor & Cohen 2000, Connell & Gibson 2001, Cohen 2007, Kruse 2010). Popular music heritage though, is a contested term interweaved with popular music history and archival practice. This is evidenced in the diverse ways popular music heritage is interpretated and realised in various projects that seek to celebrate local, regional and national music histories. This paper argues that new popular music histories and community music archives are emerging in online sites of practice. Created, curated, and populated by public history makers and activist archivists, these sites, I argue, challenge the traditional gatekeepers of popular music heritage and dominant popular music historiography. This paper will focus on the relatively new phenomena of online sites devoted to popular music heritage, history and archival practice and their role in local and regional music and identity making. I will highlight numerous examples of such practices but will focus in particular on sites that pertain to the city of Birmingham in the UK. I will argue that two distinct sets of practice emerge around popular music heritage in the online environment; official and unofficial. I argue that official online sites dedicated to popular music heritage mirror traditional history-making and archival practice by reinforcing traditional canonical historiographies of popular music. Unofficial online popular music heritage sites, created and curated by individuals and communities of public history-makers and activist archivists, challenge this historiography through the production of new narratives which provide new insight to music histories and the social and cultural function music plays for individuals, communities and cities. This paper meets the conference themes of popular music heritage, cultural memory and cultural identity and the sub themes of: • Music, place and local identity in issues of mapping popular music histories and heritage local and regional music and identity, • Popular music audiences and cultural memory through DIY Heritage • Popular music in heritage institutions in popular music memory in exhibitions and archival collections, online popular music heritage practices and DIY heritage.