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.