Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture 9781501368882, 9781501368899, 9781501368929, 9781501368912

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The place we’ve ended up
Chapter 1: The democratic [sic] vistas of popular culture
Chapter 2: Neoliberalism’s firmaments of fame
Chapter 3: Caught between the spectacular and the vernacular
Part II: Ideal musical objects
Chapter 4: Popular music museums and the experience economy
Chapter 5: Preferred itineraries of sight, sound and feeling
Chapter 6: Fetish, effigy and the resonant object
Ideal musical subjects
Chapter 7: The emergence and evolution of the rock imaginary
Chapter 8: Portraiture and the currency of musical repute
Chapter 9: Displaying ‘the popular’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Musician in the Museum

Musician in the Museum Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture Charles Fairchild

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Charles Fairchild, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Listening station at the Bachhaus in Eisenach, Germany. Photograph by author All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fairchild, Charles, 1967-author. Title: Musician in the museum: display and power in neoliberal popular culture / Charles Fairchild. Description: New York City: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An examination of the popular music museum and its relationship to commercialism and neoliberalism”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036648 (print) | LCCN 2020036649 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501368899 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501368905 (epub) | ISBN 9781501368912 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music–Museums–Social aspects. Classification: LCC ML3918.P67 F37 2021 (print) | LCC ML3918.P67 (ebook) | DDC 781.63074–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036648 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036649 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6888-2 PB: 978-1-5013-6889-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6891-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-6890-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

vi

Part I  The place we’ve ended up

1 2 3

The democratic [sic] vistas of popular culture 19 Neoliberalism’s firmaments of fame 32 Caught between the spectacular and the vernacular 47

Part II  Ideal musical objects

4 5 6

Popular music museums and the experience economy 81 Preferred itineraries of sight, sound and feeling 108 Fetish, effigy and the resonant object 131

Part III  Ideal musical subjects

7 8 9

The emergence and evolution of the rock imaginary 161 Portraiture and the currency of musical repute 185 Displaying ‘the popular’ 207 Conclusion 223 Bibliography Index

231 254

Illustrations Figures 1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

Advertisement for the British Music Experience, Greenwich, London, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011 Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum Exterior, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Exterior, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Music City Centre, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Music City Centre, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Grammy Museum Exterior, Los Angeles, California, 2016 O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 O2 Dome, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 O2 Dome, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011 Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool, UK, 2011 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011 Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011 Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011

31 46 46 55 59 61 63 63 66 69 69 71 71 72 72 75 94 95 95 101 101 111 114 118 118 121

 Illustrations vii 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 6.1 6.2

Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015 Salvador Allende’s Eyeglasses, Museo Historico Nacional, Santiago, Chile, 2014 6.3 Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 6.4 Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015 6.5 Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015 6.6 Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015 8.1 Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 8.2 Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 8.3 ‘Bronzeville Echoes’, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2019 8.4 ‘Bronzeville Echoes’, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2019 8.5 Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 8.6 ‘Elvis’ Tupelo’, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 8.7 ‘Elvis’ Tupelo’, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 9.1 Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 9.2 Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 9.3 The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015 9.4 Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 C.1 ‘Ragged Old Flag’ Exhibit, Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015 C.2 ‘Folsom Prison’ Exhibit, Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015

Plates 1 2 3

Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011 The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015 ‘Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound’, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, 2011

123 124 124 126 126 132 132 144 150 152 152 190 191 194 194 196 203 204 216 216 218 218 227 228

viii 4 5 6 7 8

Illustrations Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015 Birthplace of Country Music Museum, Bristol, Tennessee, 2015 Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015 Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015

Acknowledgements A book like this depends on a lot of people who help out, some without even realizing it. I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude for the support I have received from my colleagues at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney. I was given numerous opportunities to present my work in a range of professional forums and these moments of development have proven crucial over the years. Specifically, I’d like to thank the organizers of the Musicology Colloquium Series, Dr. Rachel Campbell, Dr. David Larkin and Dr. Chris Coady. I’d also like to thank the organizers of the About Music series, Prof Linda Barwick and Prof Matthew Hindson. I was also the recipient of a research grant from the Conservatorium which allowed me to travel to Europe and the United States to effect my first full immersion in this project. Further, I was given two semesters of study leave to work on various parts of this book. These institutional resources have helped make this project a reality. I would also like to thank the editorial and production staff at Bloomsbury Academic. The process for creating this book has been highly professional and extremely productive throughout. I’d also like to thank the reviewers from the academic journals Museums and Society, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, Music and Politics and Persona Studies, as well as the editors of the book Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Heritage – History – Memory (Anthem Press, 2019). In every case, I was able to pursue aspects of this project through the collegial and constructive auspices of many genuinely engaged scholars. Finally, the attentive reader will notice numerous photos credited to Rachel Campbell. Simply put, this book would not exist without her support, enthusiasm and sterling dedication to the issues it raises. Our continuing, challenging and inspiring conversations over the years about the ideologies of greatness and neoliberal capitalism in relation to popular and classical music have shaped this work at the molecular level. I am profoundly grateful for her.

x

Introduction The place upon which a good man has stepped is consecrated; a hundred years later his word and his deed can be heard by his grandson. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (quoted in Seifert, 1994:7) As my understanding of what I had undertaken grew and clarified, I realized a larger truth: That the souls may have departed but the songs will forever be their resonances. These are the poets of our time and their expressions must be handed down. Poetry is lasting and elemental like carvings in rock. – Anne Wilson (quoted in Blistein, 2018)

In February 2015, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed the details of a global, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar tax evasion scheme run by the Swiss private banking arm of the British bank HSBC. The clients whose HSBC account records were revealed included the expected array of scumbags, such as arms dealers, vendors of blood diamonds, money launderers and the odd Tory minister. But it also included a complex range of people wishing to hide money for perfectly legal and, in a very small number of cases, even innocent reasons. Of course, the only conviction recorded in Switzerland was that of the whistle-blower himself, in absentia, through the sturdy vehicle of a capitalist show trial designed to settle depositors’ nerves. It was a legal proceeding where the social rituals of justice were strictly observed so that the actual realization of justice could be neatly avoided (‘“Swissleaks” . . . ’, 2015; ‘Trial of Former HSBC Banker . . . ’, 2015). Interestingly, among the collection of genuinely disgusting people using HSBC’s services were also a small number of comparatively more agreeable account holders, well-known musicians such as Phil Collins, Tina Turner and David Bowie. When queried about their public association with the more unsavoury participants in the scheme, each responded by getting their lawyers and managers to answer questions that were not actually asked. They told the journalists that their clients were legal residents of Switzerland for perfectly valid reasons that really, honestly had nothing to do with dodging tax. Of course, it turned out that their exclusive superannuation schemes were not an isolated habit. The HSBC revelations were a comparatively minor event that preceded the ICIJ’s massive ‘Panama Papers’ exposé in 2016 and the even larger release of 2017’s ‘Paradise Papers’. These astounding amounts of secret information confirmed that many of the more accomplished artists of their generations had decided that paying tax really wasn’t for them. Musicians such as Madonna, Shakira, Bono, Keith Urban, Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow, Justin Timberlake and Kelly Clarkson were all named, most of whom funnelled substantial sums into such ventures as Latvian shopping malls or Bahamian pharmaceutical companies (Sheffield, 2017; Lynch, 2017; Pilkington, 2017). With comparatively more candour than many of his colleagues, or what he refers to as transparency, Bono explained that his own elaborate efforts to escape Ireland’s notably wealth-friendly tax system were ‘sensible’ for those who might be both as idealistic

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and as rich as he is (Gayle, 2015; Osborne, 2017; Cerniauskas, 2017; Browne, 2013:34). After all, he explained, he might use the platform provided by his work to demand social justice of others, but that doesn’t mean he has to abide by such concerns in his private business dealings (Browne, 2013: 40–4). While some dismiss criticism of these scams by some of the towering figures of popular music by noting that the rich can give a lot more than most of us and therefore have a greater moral latitude, this is not a merely theoretical or personal concern. Oxfam and others have presented numerous studies patiently explaining to those who might have an interest that tax avoidance is a primary cause of the unprecedented economic inequality that has ravaged the globe (Oxfam, 2016). One report noted that the rich have developed ‘an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers’ to make certain their assets remain ‘far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments’ (Rosenfeld, 2016). Further, as the economist Thomas Piketty told the ICIJ, The offshore industry is a major threat for our democratic institutions and our basic social contract. Financial opacity is one of the key drivers of rising global inequality. It allows a large fraction of top income and top wealth groups to pay negligible tax rates, while the rest of us pay large taxes in order to finance the public goods and services (education, health, infrastructures) that are indispensable for the development process. (Ryle et al., 2015)

My reason for recalling these tawdry bygone affairs is that the musical celebrities in question all seemed to skate over such concerns with no apparent effect on their reputations. These are the very model of ‘great artists’, their worth only ever discussed in terms of the value of their work, some universally acclaimed for their commercial and artistic successes, some even spoken of in the hushed tones reserved for the timeless and the transcendent, a pattern we will see throughout this book. The careful, deliberate and strategic abandonment of the social contract by these wealthy musicians seems to play little part in the public’s regard for them. Their ‘perfectly legal’ actions are in keeping with the dominant neoliberal economic system to which we are all subject. In short, they are all perfect neoliberals. And yet this fact is simply not part of the conversation. A significant number of some of the brightest stars in the musical firmament make certain to profit from social and economic relationships that have produced the most profound levels of inequality since the Gilded Age, but the key material bases of their wealth have no apparent relevance to their symbolic powers as artists. This fact is a marginal but telling indicator of much wider forms of social relations that both highlight and undermine one of the most potent and widespread myths about the popular music we have. The basic idea is as familiar and tautological as it is straightforward. Popular music is with ‘us’, the people. It has always been with us by definition, by the very virtue of what it is. ‘We’ are formed into a social imaginary, a demos of collective pleasure and power, by its makers and performers (see Chapters 1 and 7). This demos strengthens us against a whole host of antagonists: the state, the suits, the suburbs. By being with us and getting us through the hard times or helping us revel in the good times, it is empowering, subversive, liberating. Beyond this, it is often said, while popular music is most certainly

 Introduction 3 demotic, it is also very often claimed to be a profoundly democratic force giving sustenance to what many perceive as a universal thirst for freedom (see Chapters 1 and 2). It is, by definition, the music of the people, validated as such by the cauterizing power of the market. Popular music is only rarely imagined in any way that is opposed to this world view. This is strange, of course, because music does all sorts of things. It engages, pleases, excites, hurts, tortures, annoys, angers, damages, distracts, liberates, imprisons. It challenges, subverts, affirms, attacks, mollifies. It is a fluid and pervasive social force constituted and made meaningful by the uncountable number of social relationships in which it participates. As such, it cannot be said to ‘do’ any one thing. Claiming that music ‘does’ this or that above all else drags one into the trap of making ideologically freighted, trans-historical claims about the ‘power of music’ (see Chapter 7) (see Currie, 2009: 151–2). Beyond this, and just as importantly, musicians do all sorts of things as well, such as avoiding taxes, playing gigs for murderous dictators, endorsing the ‘good’ works of war criminals (not the bad), performing at the parties of billionaire oligarchs, entering into multi-year business partnerships with CEOs who impoverish their workers by raiding pension funds to enrich themselves and their families, producing and ‘curating’ lines of merchandise and brands produced by companies that use brutally exploited labour to increase their profits and even writing occasional lines of gushing poetry to right-wing evangelical preachers (Kreps, 2016; Kreps, 2017; Wallis, 2018; Montgomery, 2013; Michaels, 2013; Teitel, 2011; Jones, 2018; Goldberg, 2007; Breihan, 2017; Levine, 2017; Moss, 2016; Woodruff, 2018:16; Blais-Billie, 2017; Purtill, 2019; Woodyatt, 2019; Murphy, 2019; Etheridge, 2014). Yet the dominant mythology of popular music says that it is almost always charged with cheerfully bearing all the burdens of human freedom. Any deviation is merely a minor exception that proves this sacrosanct rule. But who is this ‘we’ that is presumed to form the heart of the social relationships between artists and their publics? Is it the one that deliberately abandons the social contract in accumulating its wealth and power? Or is it the one that provides emotional sustenance and the social structures of feeling that ‘we’ value so highly? My point here is that this particular ‘we’ is a very specific and limited ideological construct. ‘We’ has its limits. This book is about the material and symbolic construction of those limits. In its more influential appearances in the academic and popular spheres of popular music writing since the mid-1960s, the figure of popular music’s popular base has primarily been used to buoy carefully selected forms of expression such as those produced by artists mostly recognized in their own time as transcendent geniuses: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Bob Dylan. Over the last fifty years or so, the myth of a popularly validated, yet curiously self-evident greatness has been promiscuously expanded both retrospectively and prospectively to encompass almost all forms of popular music one can imagine (see Chapter 7). The greatness of many forms of music have been tautologically validated when they acquire the very thing their producers and performers most desperately seek, our attention paid in the form of time and money. The illusory demos said to be created when we place our attention on those most avidly seeking it has been imagined in a continuing and bewildering variety of forms, from concert halls to stadiums to mosh pits to cyphers to dance floors, all said to produce those indomitable forms of social solidarity in unique and perfect measure. This mode of thought is no

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longer a province dominated by a marginal claque of rock critics pining away for the gradual then sudden collapse of all of the oppressive forces nestled within Western civilization through various manifestations of rocking out. It has become the comfortable home to full-throated defences of everything from the Spice Girls’ ‘feminism’ to Kanye West’s ‘politics’ to Paul McCartney’s Christmas songs (Armstrong, 2016; Staples, 2018; Hargro, 2008; Gustavo, 2017; Zaleski, 2016). Each new manifestation, no matter how seemingly unlikely, only confirms some measure of its dominance and tenacity. The incorporation of all and sundry under this massive ideological umbrella is a defining feature of this mythology and the economic and social contexts which sustain it (see Chapters 1, 2 and 7). Most importantly, while this mythology is a decidedly useless measure of artistic or aesthetic success, it is an excellent measure of economic persistence and social prevalence. As such, this mythology is not new, it is not subversive and it is not liberating. It is a rhetoric of confirmation and continuity. It creates an aura of artfully delegated transcendent greatness around anything even remotely suitable in a manner that is often both cloyingly romantic and plainly credulous. One place where the sometimes subtle and surprisingly opaque dynamics of popular music mythology are displayed most fully is in popular music museums. This book is intended to offer a systemic critique of the kinds of meanings these institutions make from popular music in the form of popular imaginaries and mythologies about artists, art forms and the social relationships they are said to reflect and reproduce. I approach this critique of these institutions from the fairly basic supposition that they are a fairly typical reflection of the near ubiquity of a particular form of corporate power that is dominant across all Western societies: neoliberal capitalism. More specifically, I argue that these institutions reproduce the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism in their reproduction of the relationship between the affective labour of musicians, fans and spectators. Neoliberalism as a form of power is an appropriative force, the dominant motivation of which is to yoke every facet of society to some form of capital, whether human or material (see Chapter 2). This book is primarily about the character of this force as it appears in and around these museums. My intent is to make their innate links to neoliberal capitalism tangible. This sort of systemic critique is very plainly mainstream in a lot of critical writing on, say, the inner workings of such industries as the oil industry or the financial services industry (see Silverstein, 2015; Prins, 2014; Coll, 2015; Taibbi, 2011). However, one area in which this sort of critique has not gained much purchase, often passing with little notice or influence, is in writing about the music industry. This is at least in part due to the presumed and supposedly unassailable populist foundations of the production, circulation and consumption that are said to anchor that music and allow one to resist, if not conquer, the ravages of politics, time and fashion. Given that popular music so often acts as a force that allows for emotionally charged forms of social solidarity often said not to be available elsewhere, its populist credentials are very difficult to challenge. If you do engage in a systemic critique of popular music, you aren’t simply attacking the material bases of the global entertainment industry and its manifest inequities, abuse and exploitation. You are also attacking the very social basis of the music itself, the hardworking musician, the honest fan and their genial interlocutors. Given that these collectively constitute the basis of the communities that form around different kinds of

 Introduction 5 music, you might be suspected of not really believing that music is special or that those who make it can help us transcend the drudgery of everyday life. This further suggests that you might even resent beauty and pleasure themselves. Perhaps most damningly, it means that you are a snob and an elitist. You condescendingly assume that fans are dupes, dopes or passive drones unaware that they are the victims of a system expressly designed to screw them over (see Frith, 1991:103; Grossberg, 1992:65; Grossberg, 1995:75–6; Wilson, 2007:15–18; Morris, 2013; Weisbard, 2014; 2015). Tellingly, the long history of dismissing those thought to be the original anti-popular haters is mirrored with remarkable fidelity by those unabashed evangelists of corporate power who celebrate consumerism and branding as the very means that produces meaning in contemporary social life (see Frank, 2000:206–8). These celebrants embrace neoliberalism as an almost utopian force that acts as a unique resource for community building based on the shared immersion of all in a larger world of symbols and forms of knowledge that really do matter. For example, in his expansive and cheerful survey of the expansion of neoliberalism to churches, universities and museums, James Twitchell explains that consumerism has not damaged those institutions, but has instead been a force for their ‘rejuvenation’. Consumers of the services offered by these institutions found ‘a much less patronizing and much more responsive relationship with what used to be an arm’s-length culture. Word that once came from on high now comes from the felt needs of the consumption community’. Further, corporate branding acts as a ‘unifying force’ whose ‘cohesive power’ comes from ‘sharing’. Far from disempowering us ‘it is precisely the recognizance of jingles and brand names, precisely what high culturists abhor, that links us as members of various communities’ (Twitchell, 2004:274–7). This cheap, simpering populism conjoins a wide range of scholarship and commentary (see Chapters 1 and 2). My use of systemic critique throughout this book is meant to get beyond the fairly obvious forms of deep-seated ideological cohesion exhibited by those who appear to merely tolerate corporate power for the benefits it provides and those who fervently embrace it for the benefits it provides. Systemic critique demands we dig a bit deeper, symbolically and materially. The systemic critique of popular music museums offered here is focused on those forces that transcend us as individuals and overshadow whatever power or agency we might be able to individually or collectively create, exercise and pursue. Systemic critique entails the analysis of those moments when the larger forces governing our society are made real as they literally materialize right in front of us. Their actual presence takes many forms and any systemic critique needs to address them where they are found, not simply in the abstract. The simple unavoidable fact remains that the forces that make up neoliberal capitalism have gradually become dominant in most of the world since about 1975. Therefore, I argue that, while the powerful resonances that popular music produces are just as vital and powerful than they have ever been, they are routinely incorporated or recuperated into the dominant forms of economic and cultural power of our time. The institutions examined here are simply very clear examples of this. What this will entail is an understanding of the forms of symbolic power, ideological power and material power these museums exert and possess within the larger spheres of power in which they participate.

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Popular music museums have been established in recent years in several of the purported ‘music capitals’ of the world, such as Nashville, Memphis, Los Angeles, Liverpool and Seattle. Most have gaudy innards that are crowded with expansive experiential infrastructures centred around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying types and sizes. A smaller number are more modest, poignant reminders of the lives of those whose music may be still with us in various forms. To write this book, I examined the museums and exhibits listed at the end of this introduction. While I obviously address most of my analysis towards popular music museums, I have also included several composer museums I visited in Germany at the start of this project. I did this because they show two things. First, they show that there are aspects of music museum practice that are cut across more than just popular music museums that are helpful in framing those museum practices that are more or less specific to those concerned with popular music. Second, the composer museums exhibit an intriguing range of musically specific attributes which also appear in most popular music museums. This is telling because all of these museums talk about their ‘great artists’ in almost exactly the same ways. For those who imagine the discourses of popular music to be inherently set apart from those of so-called high art, this should give them pause, at the very least. What my analysis of these museums will show is that, through their myriad acts of display, popular music museums seek to act as influential intermediaries in the communication of specific sets of values and priorities in the public life of popular music (Reising, 2001; Bergengren, 1999). Their exhibits mostly work through the strategic deployment of the vernacular elements of popular music practice and experience within a spectacular logic of visual, aural and material display. The musical experiences produced by these institutions are authenticated first by the oddly commanding presence of artefacts which provide a material heft to the evanescent experiences of visitors, and then through the construction and reflection of a primal organizing mythology to represent the history and practice of popular music of which these objects are material representatives. This is a mythology riven with familiar, wellworn themes of origins and power without which these vast collections of mundane artefacts would be stripped of much of their aura, meaning and authority. These myths are deployed through the vivid amplification of the many forms of artistic transcendence routinely attributed to artists through the validation of the aesthetic value and enduring status of their canonically elevated ‘great works’. It is a mythology that is central to the dominant discourses that surround popular music generally (Blanning, 2008; Jones, 2008; Karja, 2006; Appen and Doerhing, 2006; Forde, 2001; Kelly and MacDonnell, 1999; Pattison, 1987). The crucial gesture mediating and holding in balance these two purportedly incommensurate social formations, one drawn from the traditions of the ‘high’ musical arts, the other drawn from the mundane experience of those thought to be more ‘everyday’ ones, is the constant yet inchoate assignation of demotic and democratic qualities to ‘the music’. The credibility and viability of these institutions depends largely on their ability to mask the inexorable and continuously vibrating tensions between their demonstratively spectacular infrastructures and intimately vernacular materials (see Chapters 3 and 4). We can see this through any reasonably straightforward inventory of the rich, cross-media, multisensory environments these

 Introduction 7 museums construct from a multitude of objects, images, sounds and moving images. This book will spend a good deal of time looking very carefully at them. While the purpose and meanings of these places may seem plainly obvious when measured from their selective, hagiographic and almost entirely celebratory displays, these museums are complex and telling markers of much larger and more assertive kinds of contemporary power. These museums provide a remarkably direct reflection of those forms of power that dominate contemporary public culture, most notably those that affect the acquisition, privatization and redeployment of broadly public resources for private gain, otherwise known as neoliberal capitalism (see Chapters 2 and 3). They do this by translating the demotic, social experience of music into built environments constructed from the leveraging of carefully stockpiled forms of cultural, political and economic power (see Chapters 3 and 4). This demands the transformation of varied forms of the affective labour of artists and audiences into singular, orthodox narratives of transcendent communion and aesthetic triumph. In turn, these narratives validate and legitimize the underlying structures, both ideological and economic, created by the sponsoring industry that produces these institutions. These narratives can only confirm rather than challenge the mode of their own production. These places are pervaded by innumerable implicit and explicit claims to the representation of a larger demos, a sort of people’s democratic republic of popular culture of the sort so many writers and scholars engaged in the study of popular culture have discovered in so many seemingly unlikely places over the years (see Chapters 1, 2 and 7). The recent appearance of these usually extravagant, but occasionally modest, spaces of popular worship and communion has been part of a much larger and arguably unprecedented expansion of museums globally. The phenomenon of the ‘new museum’ has been thoroughly explored and the conclusions of this extensive body of work bear directly on any understanding of the institutions examined in this book. As a great deal of contemporary scholarship has shown, there have been complex and contradictory economic and social pressures brought to bear on museums in recent decades. Funders and sponsors have demanded that museums become ‘relevant’ and ‘sustainable’. They have had to haul in larger and larger crowds in order to attract more and more popular attention (Message, 2006a, 2006b; Vergo, 1989; Witcomb, 2003; Knell et al., 2007; Ross, 2004). As such, the new museum has seen a notable expansion of the form, content and purposes of the museum. They are said to have evolved from a place in a mooted, nineteenth-century ‘exhibitionary complex’ to a role in a twenty-first-century ‘experiential complex’, in part, as the result of the multifarious ways in which many museums responded to calls for greater inclusiveness and diversity in their strategies of representation (Schubert, 2009; Bennett, 1995, 2006a; Hall, 2006; Karp and Lavine, 1991; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine, 1992) (see Chapter 4). Twinned with this enhanced responsiveness to a more broadly imagined public was an equally enhanced receptiveness to the market. Through such means, these transformed institutions are meant to produce nothing less than a new kind of ideal subject, one imagined to be equal parts consumer and citizen, a subject that is wholly commensurate with the new forms of neoliberal citizenship and social governance defined less by rights given as matter of course than by demands that must be met as a matter of survival (see Chapters 2 and 3).

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Musician in the Museum

The popular music museums under examination here offer an enticing prospect for analysis in that they meld and combine familiar forms of public display drawn from both the exhibitionary and experiential complexes that have definitively shaped the history of museums (see Chapter 4). The two most obvious histories of display are also those that have been historically present in museums since their creation, what I will call a populist-vernacular stream and an institutional-educational stream. The former was exemplified by various kinds of pre-cinematic entertainments such as department store windows, dramatic panoramas and wax museums which traded on varied, curious forms of drama and excitement evoked by a few scraps of the material presence of the great, the good and the notorious. The latter was defined by more sober and detailed ethnographically informed displays, comprehensive natural history museums, as well as world exhibitions, fairs and expositions, all of which balanced on a fulcrum of expertise and universality on one side and a rangy imagination and civilizational optimism on the other. These streams have had a long, intimate and mutually reinforcing association with one another dating back to the nineteenth century (Ames, 2008; Colligan, 2002; Griffiths, 2002; Rydell, 2006). Popular music museums, like many new museums, have developed a mode of address that plays on the drama and excitement of the spectacular display, perhaps through a film clip of Hendrix at Monterey or of James Brown ‘saving’ Boston, while remaining solidly anchored to a material culture built around the curious dynamism of their resonant objects, such as the historic remains of a Cobain guitar or the stark presence of John Lennon’s blindingly white piano (see Chapters 5 and 6). However, these museums do not simply display the neutral, fragmentary reminders of an accepted and settled past in some wonderland of institutional innocence. They are instead producing the directed arrangements of institutionally sanctioned displays, presented at the behest of the increasingly salient demands that the market and consumerism have inserted into even our most stolid museum collections (Buchloh, 2000; Duncan and Wallach, 2004; Fox, 2005; Storrie, 2007) (see Chapters 3 and 4). Popular music museums exist at the unstable intersection of several historically established fault lines of museum practice, caught between the appeal of the market and the demands of the past, trying to recapture the spectacular moment through the vernacular object, appearing to approach, but never quite reaching the open, polyvocal condition of what one scholar once dreamily called ‘the post-museum’ (HooperGreenhill, 2000; see also Bruce, 2006). Instead, while these ‘new’ museums do appear to offer at least some novel means of communicative connection and mediation, they also act to confirm the long-recognized functions of the museum as an institution of civic and social prescription and instruction (see Message, 2006b). Perhaps the most important point to take from this introduction is that the particular forms of civic and social prescription and instruction that museums have and continue to produce sit very comfortably with the role and work of corporate cultural intermediaries in the music industry. This is because their primary task has also been to produce the same kinds of ideal musical subjects through markedly similar forms of perceptual training and instruction (see Chapters 7, 8 and 9). As I have noted extensively elsewhere, the brokers of those salutary forms of feeling, knowledge and connection produced

 Introduction 9 through the social affordances of music have long focused on defining the terms of the contests waged by people over the meaning and value of music. In short, the primary focus of my past writing has been the cultural intermediation of popular music. This book is no different. I have traced these contests over the character and content of the channels through which music moves in the world through and within specific types of institutions by exploring how various forms of mediation, such as film, television, radio and digital media, shape the social experience of music (Fairchild, 2014a; 2014b; 2012a; 2011, 2008). As with these previous works, this one is also primarily concerned with sketching the links between the aesthetic experience of music and the social forces that work to make these aesthetic experiences meaningful in circumstantially specific ways (see Born, 2005; Prior, 2011; Hennion, 2003, 1997; DeNora, 2000). It is important to note that over the last decade and a half there has been a solid range of scholarly works published on the specific topic of museums and exhibitions dedicated to popular music and musicians (Baker, Istvandity, and Nowak, 2019; Cohen et al. 2015; Brandellero and Janssen, 2014; Bennett, 2009; Bennett and Rogers, 2016; Leonard, 2010; Leonard, 2007; Leonard and Strachan, 2010; Gibson and Connell, 2007). Most of these works have approached the topic from an interest in curatorial practice, tourism, heritage and conservation. These works are complex, nuanced and accomplished. They are built on a foundation of older scholarship consisting mostly of general works on the relationship between museums and popular culture and a range of essays reviewing specific one-off exhibitions usually in more generalist institutions (Moore, 1997; Brabazon and Mallinder, 2006; Reising, 2001; Forman, 2002; Suisman, 2000; Bergengren, 1999; Moore, 1995; Kalata et al., 1997). These generalist works helped produce a surge of work incorporating the analysis of popular music heritage and memorial sites into a more specific critical evaluation of the links between cultural memory and popular music. These have tended to focus on examinations of the representation of a presumed collective musical past through musical tourism and urban redevelopment (Gibson and Connell, 2007; Cohen, 2007; Lashua and Cohen 2009). The central concern for almost all of this work has been gauging the extent to which an adequate representation of a presumed collective musical past is possible or successful in the context of a museum. This book is built, at least in part, on this literature. But I don’t engage with it as fully as I might have done. This is because of a few very specific absences in this literature that I am addressing, those surrounding the development of neoliberal capitalism in the decades that also produced all of the museums examined in this book. Notably, this book is in many ways a thoroughgoing examination of the links between popular music museums and the expansive, expensive, laborious and largely successful efforts of corporate cultural intermediaries in the music industry to assert and fix very particular visions of popular music in place, especially through familiar romantic ideals of authorship, artistry, experience and aesthetics, through the vehicle of the contemporary museum exhibit (see Chapters 2 and 7). Few previous works examine how cultural intermediaries in the music industry, such as those who created the museum exhibits and displays examined throughout this book, bring the practice and understanding of popular music into an experiential context commensurate with the demands of global

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Musician in the Museum

neoliberal capitalism. The means used to do this, the supple, attractive, sensorially subsuming material multimedia environments created by these institutions, have mostly been assessed in ways little more expansive than a measure of their success or failure as effective museum exhibits. Tellingly, none of the existing works on this topic provide the kind of analysis of the relationship between the contents of popular music museums and the places in which these collections are housed and displayed. As I will show, it is this relationship in particular that tells us a great deal about the status and value imputed to these objects and the people who made and used them (see Chapter 3). I approach the cultural intermediating work of these museums through a very particular understanding of power and agency. As I have argued elsewhere, the goal of cultural intermediaries in the music industry is not the production of a generic musical subject, but an ideal musical subject that is both compliant and active, predictable and generative, all at the same time. This paradoxical, contradictory subject is the central necessity of the music industry. The ability of this industry to sustain itself depends on many forms of the widespread and continuous excitation of human agency that lies at the heart of social life and its multitude of nexuses with consumerism. But the consequences of this incitement to action are extraordinarily complex, sometimes predictable, sometimes bewildering. Therefore, the agitated agency of consumers also has to be constantly managed to mitigate the threats and risks it holds. This can only be done successfully if the mass of human agency whipped up into engagement and attention is carefully exploited. As such, cultural intermediaries in the popular music industry are employed to continually resolve the many paradoxes and contradictions thrown at them by the task of producing these contradictory kinds of musical subjects (see Fairchild, 2014b). However, these musical subjects are by no means historical universals nor are the museum displays that are meant to produce them in specific kinds of social relationships merely generic confirmations of the inevitability of the great artists whose superlative accomplishments they seek to ratify. These museums are complicated constructions resulting from a mass of human knowledge and activity that has taken place in a very particular set of circumstances. It should be obvious that these museums are not the only repository for these kinds of images, narratives or ideologies, but a very concentrated expression of them. As such, these places cannot but help reflect the interpretive and declamatory priorities of their times. Therefore, this book is a critical analysis of specific forms of cultural intermediation that attempts to codify and contain the complex historical experience of popular music by organizing it through those claimed to be its exemplary practitioners and then transforming that constructed consensus surrounding their ‘great works’ into a dominant expression of the nature and character of this art form. Given that this book is not a contribution to the history of vernacular music, but instead a critical examination of the cultural intermediation of that music, I am not testing or assessing the correctness or accuracy of any of the exhibitions I have studied. Instead, I am examining their predilections towards a certain type of mythmaking. Therefore, the primary analytical categories of this book will be power and agency. These categories will be applied to these museums specifically in terms of the ability and efficacy of specific institutions to exert definitional power over the mass of agency and experience that we commonly refer to as popular music.

 Introduction 11 In preparing this book, I often sought out expert commentary in the form of reader’s and referee’s reports on various arguments and interpretations I have put forward over the last few years. On several occasions I raised the ire of more than one anonymous reviewer. There were two unexpected criticisms that recurred. The first criticism was that I was apparently arguing that ‘any music produced through industrial means is, by definition, awful’. The second was that I was claiming that it is nearly impossible for people working within the music industry to have ‘articulate thoughts about how technical and administrative know-how produce good music and good musical experiences’. This was a revealing experience which has served as a useful diagnostic to show me where the really sensitive bits of the scholarly anatomy are. It strikes me that the hostility engendered by my sometimes robust criticisms of the music industry springs from a distinct lack of critical recognition, not of the people working within this industry, but of those forms of capitalism which currently dominate it (see Chapter 2). So I should be very clear that this book is a systemic critique of one form of expression created by one part of the music industry, a critique that seeks to link the master narratives of global capitalism to the work that makes these narratives into something we can actually see and hear. I don’t promote anything resembling an ethical critique of the individuals whose work is directed towards forging those links in their everyday working lives. Instead, what I want the reader to understand are the ways in which we are all constructed as musical subjects relationally to those working to address us in order to capture and exploit our engagement and attention. This address is made through complex arrays of specifically aesthetic experiences. This book builds its analysis of the aesthetic experiences these museums construct through the areas of analytical interest Born (2010) has identified as central to an adequate explanatory theory of an understanding of the social life of music: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. These museums are engaging objects of analysis precisely due to their direct relevance to all of these analytical constructs simultaneously. Our understanding of these experiences is shaped through our pre-existing, often inchoate assignations of value and meaning to music. Throughout this book, we can see how these understandings and meanings are shaped by the power and agency of both institutions and their subjects through the specific circumstances of these museum displays. If the purpose of the music industry is to construct musical subjects amenable to its purposes, how are we constructed in these museums? These institutions are in many ways something like laboratory conditions for the creation of exactly the kinds of subjects the music industry needs to survive. The agency that these museums exercise is the agency of the powerful, constructing and shaping a public that from all appearances would seem to be suitably engaged with the odd totemic fetish: a soiled t-shirt, a set list, a glittery glove. Judging from the wide range of exhibits I’ve studied, the musical subjects these institutions seem to want are those presumed to be more concerned with hagiography than critique and more accepting of dominant narratives than critical of them. The objects in these museums represent for spectators the stilled or frozen agency of performers and the music industry. They all sit in their cases

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waiting for the right subjects to come along to re-enact some element of that agency and make it present again. They need to construct a very particular type of subject in order to do this. One of the main issues in my analysis will be to deal with the forms of human agency these places use to incite, shape, contain and exploit. A second, just as important, issue is the role of corporate power in the construction of the ideological and material context within which these forms of agency are realized and which has made these museums possible. A primary goal of this book is to link these forms of corporate power to the material, content, meaning and experience of popular music and culture in these museums. I’ll start to do this in the next two chapters by examining how these places are in many ways defined by the development of an aesthetics we can call ‘capitalist realism’, a mode of expression that is directed to educating the masses about their role in the sustenance and limitless expansion of a conceptual and material order that appears to be almost entirely of their own making, but isn’t. Above all else, this horizon of thought tilts on the fundamental and inviolate idea that is very often said to infuse all of popular culture: democracy. I will start to address this in the next chapter. Importantly, while there is a huge literature on neoliberalism as a historical ideology and political formation, its broadly considered cultural expressions are only occasionally examined. There are a number of books and articles on neoliberal culture that I have relied upon in gauging the claims and evidence in this area of research (James, 2019, 2014; Ritchey, 2019; Chapman, 2018; McGuigan, 2016; Ventura, 2016; Gilbert, 2016, 2017). Yet, despite this growing body of critical texts addressing the specifically cultural aspects of neoliberalism, it remains a niche pursuit with specific regard to music. Generally, few works focus on the abstract precepts of neoliberalism directly and materially shape our experience of the world through music. This is unusually vexing in that the vast majority of popular music that has been made and sold in the neoliberal era has been produced by the very corporations who fought for, defended and benefitted from this regime of economics and politics. Part of my focus throughout this book, therefore, will be on whatever links I can draw, however robust or tenuous, between the stated values of neoliberalism and the experience or understanding of music. To close out this opening salvo, I’d like to return to the idea I started with, the myth that popular music is by definition a popularly constituted democratic force that continually attacks and subverts the dictates of oppressive forms of power in service of the forces of freedom. I want to turn our perspective away from this overly general conjecture by instead focusing on how popular music must also be understood as an integral part of the dominant forms of power that have governed much of the world since the mid-1970s, specifically by acting both as an attractive shield and distracting mirror for the constantly churning machinations of neoliberal capitalism. I’d like to do so by providing, in a tiny nutshell, a brief notation of some of the plainly evident ways in which contemporary popular music, embodied in its industry and its stars, has been part of the work of the dominant social, economic and political force of the last fifty years or so. While I explain relevant aspects of neoliberal capitalism in more detail in Chapter 2, I would like to present here only two of its defining features that are clearly reflected in the contemporary music industry (see also Fairchild, 2015). First, neoliberal capitalism functions through the extension of ‘the market’ to every possible realm of social relations

 Introduction 13 (see Brown, 2015). We can see this quite clearly in one telling passage in a lengthy description of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival from 2016. Bonnaroo is part of the suite of music festivals owned or majority-controlled by Live Nation Entertainment, one of the largest live event producers and promoters in the world. In order to design the sprawling multi-day event to best economic effect, the festival tracked the movements of all attendees throughout the entirety of the event through electronic radio frequency wristbands: The RFID wristband gains festivalgoers entry into Bonnaroo, a veritable ticket that festivalgoers are required to register beforehand and must not to be removed under any circumstances. Small devices resembling metal-detectors greet attendees as they enter Bonnaroo, and once they place your wrist inside, the bands are activated. When those RFID wristbands electromagnetically transfer and store data via an embedded chip [Bonnaroo knows] where those bodies are at all times. (Joffe, 2016)

As the journalist dryly notes, ‘the real-time analytics it collects double as invaluable market research’, ensuring that literally every act every audience member commits is part of one or more revenue streams. And yes I do mean every action. Festival-goer human waste, for example, is moulded into pellets which are then sold off as fertilizer (ibid.) This relationship between festival and spectator is marked by one of the defining features of neoliberalism, the transformation of otherwise ordinary and intimate acts entailed in flow of everyday life into profit extracted through specific forms of informational technology in the form of commercially codified data. Second, neoliberal capitalism has produced very particular kinds of structurally determined inequalities of social, economic and political power (see Piketty and Zucman, 2016). This has had some disturbing consequences, including a level of dominance of a small class of corporations and individuals not seen for a century (Stoller, 2019). This is true not only across the entire globe but within individual markets as well. So if we again consider the production and promotion of live music events, a very small number of large companies control the vast majority of this market. This has allowed some surprising people to have bought themselves a controlling interest in some of the world’s most ‘iconic’ live music events. For example, the majority owner of southern California’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is Philip Anschutz, CEO of the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) (see also Chapter 3; Fairchild 2018). AEG owns sporting and entertainment events and venues around the world. Just after the tickets for the 2017 iteration of Coachella sold out in only a few hours, several publications noted the Anschutz had spent years donating substantial sums of money to organizations formally designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American NGO that has tracked the activities of such groups for decades (Grow, 2017). The upshot of this is that artists and spectators alike have long been contributing to the work of the American Petroleum Institute and the Institute for American Values. (Google them. Seriously.) Even those high-profile musicians operating at the peak of their industry whose work and lives are dedicated to what they regard as positive social change can’t necessarily avoid being the fulcrum upon

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which the forces they sometimes attack can continue to do their often reactionary work (Hogan, 2017a. 2017b; Dandridge-Lemco, 2017). My point here is that the radical structural inequalities of money and power that define so much of our collective experience of the world are also reflected and enacted by the music industry. The question for this book is how we can link this reality to our experience of what that industry produces. I will take popular music museums as a particularly rich analytical case study of the seeming disjuncture between the power, excitement and sheer sensual pleasure of so many iterations of popular music and the underlying structures and forces that produce our experiences of them. We are all the heirs and targets of multiple discourses of aesthetic transcendence and artistic achievement that shroud the larger social relations on which these imaginaries rest. They act as masks for the kinds of power relationships that produce them, but they also act as mirrors which can show us very clearly how they work. The museums examined in this book are a primary institutional example of how these various kinds of masks and mirrors work and this book is meant to provide some small measure of corrective critique to our understanding of them.

How this book was made Before jumping into the analysis, it is important to understand how this book was made. The most basic methodological assumptions I have used throughout this lengthy project spring from the anthropology of media, assumptions which have informed nearly all of my work with varying degrees of clarity and coherence. What this means is that I attend to the symbolic, communicative and material aspects of media all at the same time and in constant relation to each other. This also means that I try to take into account the circumstances of my experience of specific forms of media without necessarily generalizing these to subsume all experience of the same media. The result is often carefully couched and directed writing that is at least in some part the result of personal experience. For this project, those experiences were many. The practical work on this project began in 2011 with visits to a series of composer’s houses and museums in Germany (see the list that follows). These included the Beethoven House in Bonn, the Bach House in Eisenach, the Bach Museum in Leipzig, as well as displays about Schumann and Mendelssohn which were also in Leipzig. During the same trip, I examined the British Music Experience in its original home in London’s O2 Dome at Greenwich. (It has since moved to Liverpool.) In Liverpool, I went through the Beatles’ Story at the Albert Docks on the city’s famed waterfront. In a trip later that year, I went to Los Angeles to go through the Grammy Museum and then to Seattle to tour the Experience Music Project (EMP). I revisited the Grammy Museum in early 2016. In the subsequent years, I have visited other one-off exhibitions that have also contributed notably to my understanding of the presentation of music and musicians in museums. My original plan was to carry out a fairly tightly focused comparison of composer museums and popular music museums. While this theme has shaped this book in some ways, it won’t appear as a particular analytical dynamic in this book. This is because this project actually changed dramatically after this first set of trips.

 Introduction 15 Due to the pursuit of another project (Fairchild 2014a), I put this project on hold during most of 2012 and 2013. When I returned to it, I decided to expand its scope and nature quite substantially. On visiting my family in Northern Virginia for Christmas in 2014, I decided to take a road trip from Alexandria on the recently minted Crooked Road, a trail of music sites scattered throughout Southwestern Virginia recently reconfigured as conveniently packaged tourist experience. This trip easily lent itself to visits to Bristol, Nashville and Memphis. This trip included visits to the Carter Family Fold, a memorial site and performance venue dedicated to the Carter Family at the site of A. P. Carter’s store in Hilton’s, Virginia. The site stands on the original location of the family store which contains a wonderfully crowded and very personal exhibit on the Carter Family’s musical career. It is now also the site of resituated Carter Family cabin which has been restored to something approaching its condition in the early twentieth century. In nearby Bristol, a town famously straddling the border of Virginia and Tennessee, I visited the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum dedicated to chronicling the Bristol Sessions. The Bristol Sessions were organized and run by Ralph Peer, a talent scout for Victor, in 1927. Among those recorded during these sessions were the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers and Ernest V. Stoneman. The trip to Nashville took in visits to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, The Johnny Cash Museum and smaller exhibits at the Ryman Auditorium and the Music City Center. In Memphis, I visited the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, the Stax Records Museum, Graceland and Sun Studios. The attentive reader may notice that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not included in this book. There are two reasons for this; both are pragmatic. First, given the long and expensive travel from my home in Sydney to Europe and North America, I was routinely faced with obvious shortages of time and money. I was eventually faced with a fairly stark choice on my final research trip to go south and visit many sites or go north and visit just one. Given that it was winter, the choice seemed obvious. Second, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the one popular music museum that actually has been written about more extensively than all others. I don’t regret excluding it. There were several things I did at each museum. First, I walked around each site making as substantial a photographic record of each as seemed reasonable at the time. This included taking photos of each building, their settings and the areas surrounding each. Second, I gathered as much relevant tourism material as I could from hotels, tourism centres and similar places. Third, and most obviously, I went through all of the exhibitions taking photos and making copious notes. Collectively, all of this material represents a fairly substantial source base for analysis. It consists of a little over 3,000 photos in total and includes museum guides, exhibition descriptions, maps and a solid pile of miscellaneous tourism materials. What I have tried to do in my writing is to weave all of these materials together to create an analysis that links the immediate material presence of these museums, the form and intent of the studied appeals of their exhibitions, and some tangible sense of the context in which I experienced within them. These are informed by the more abstract theoretical ideas and claims taken from a wide range of academic work in museum studies, popular music studies, history, cultural studies, urban and human geography and cultural politics. I’ve done my best to signal my intentions and assumptions clearly enough and early enough to have all of this make some kind of coherent sense.

Musician in the Museum

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Sites visited for this project (2011–19):

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Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. (Opened in 1893) Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany. (Opened in 1907; renovated in 2007) Schumann-Haus, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. (Opened in 1956) Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. (Opened in 1982) Bach Museum, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. (Opened in 1985) The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool. (Opened in 1990) Mendelssohn-Haus, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. (Opened in 1997) The Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee. (Opened in 2000) Experience Music Project, Seattle Washington. (Opened in 2000) Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. (Opened in 2001) Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee. (Exhibit opened in 2003) Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis, Tennessee. (Opened in 2003) Carter Family Memorial Museum and Cabin, Hiltons, Virginia. (Opened in 2004) The Grammy Museum, Los Angeles, California. (Opened in 2008) British Music Experience, London. (Opened in 2009; Moved to Liverpool, 2016) The Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. (Opened in 2013) The Birthplace of Country Music Museum, Bristol, Virginia. (Opened in 2014) The Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee. (Exhibit opened in 2015) Tina Turner Museum, Brownsville, Tennessee. (Opened in 2015) ‘Bronzeville Echoes’. Chicago Cultural Center. (On view in 2019) ‘Amplified: Chicago Blues’. Chicago History Museum. (On view in 2018–19) ‘Songs of Home’. Museum of Sydney. (On view in 2019)

Part I

The place we’ve ended up

1

The democratic [sic] vistas of popular culture

It was an inspired move, characteristic of all great counterrevolutionary theories, in which the people become actors without roles, an audience that believes it is onstage. (Robin, 2011:66–7)

In 2015, a freelance photographer publicly circulated a contract he was expected to sign to get work. The contract was drawn up by Taylor Swift’s management company. It demanded, among other things, that any image the photographer took could only be used once in print and once online and then only for ‘news purposes’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc. . . . ’, n.d.; ‘The Row Between . . . ’, 2015; Zhang, 2015a). The images could not be duplicated or republished anywhere and could not be exploited commercially in any way without written permission (i.e. signing another contract like this one). Swift, however, reserved the right to use any image taken by the contracted photographer anywhere, forever, without restriction. If the photographer breached the conditions of the contract, the management company reserved the right to ‘confiscate and/or destroy the technology or devices that contain the master files of the Photographs and other images, including, but not limited to, cell phones and memory cards’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc . . . ’, n.d.). Conversely, the management company would also be held ‘harmless from and against any and all claims, losses, injury, damage, and expense incurred’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc . . . ’, n.d.). After an apparently significant enough backlash erupted on various social media platforms, those representing one of America’s more recent sweethearts, much lauded as a champion of the rights of musicians and fans alike, relented. The offending passages were removed and the world continued to turn. While Swift’s offence was to overshoot the mark, she did so only marginally. Other artists, the Foo Fighters most visibly, have routinely made similarly onerous demands on photographers, specifically granting themselves ‘the right to exploit all or a part of the Photos in any and all media, now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe, in perpetuity, in all configurations’ (Zhang, 2015b). That is so rock. Few involved in this social media squall took much notice of the terms from the old, bad contract that were more or less reproduced in the new, improved version. These continuities are interesting not only for their content and general ubiquity in the entertainment industry, but for the kinds of power relations they establish between the

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‘Artist’, our ostensibly ‘free’ media and the public. Swift demanded the following in her new, good, amended legal document: You will only take photographs of the performing artists during the first and second songs of the concert in the credentialed media area, and you will not use a flash or lighting device while photographing the performing artists. . . . You acknowledge that any unauthorized use of photographs or use of unauthorized images taken at the Concert may cause irreparable harm, injury and damage to FEI and Artist. . . . If it is determined that you have taken photographs beyond the rules of this agreement while at the concert, you may be asked to delete those images. (‘The 1989 World Tour . . . ’, n.d.)

The new contract would seem to be, at best, a barely perceptible change of emphasis and methodology, not character. What is important to understand about this entirely common and somewhat revealing dispute is the type of power the ‘Artist’ has over others drawn into their orbit. First and foremost, the term ‘Artist’ does not refer to an actual person. It stands in for a range of interconnected corporate entities. The Artist is the entity in which the rights and benefits of those owning music are encoded and to whom they accrue. Second, contracts of this sort are almost entirely set in pursuit of the Artist’s intellectual property rights through which the Artist can usurp and control the work of others and use that work in a variety of ways depending on the circumstances. They are to be held blameless for any harm that results and they are allowed to cause as much unrecompensed damage as they wish. Those over whom they hold this power ‘voluntarily’ lose their rights to their property and free speech when they enter into these sorts of agreements. Given that most of the photographers involved in these situations are freelancers with only as much job security as their next offer from a newspaper, magazine or website might guarantee, the inequality of consequential agency here is stark. As one photographer noted, some of his colleagues ‘fear losing income if they get blacklisted for speaking out against these kind of contracts’ (‘The Row Between . . .,’ 2015; Zhang, 2015a). These situations are far from recent phenomena. As many have noted, celebrities of all stripes have long gone to what mere humans can only regard as extraordinary lengths to protect their images and reputations. In fact, the music industry only began to pursue these kinds of media relations comparatively recently whereas other parts of the entertainment industry have done so for much longer (see Forde, 2001). What contracts such as these show us is that the noble, empowering imagery and ideals that others are contractually obligated to drape over a wide range of artists are more than capable of disguising their material foundations. The range of measures that allow the more powerful to exploit the less powerful by shaping public perceptions and amassing power and property appear in public far too infrequently. When they do, the most important of them show us vividly and instructively how the subtle, gradual and seemingly relentless expansion of the scope of economic exploitation in the music industry is only seriously contested when it is pushed too aggressively by one party or

 The Democratic [sic] Vistas of Popular Culture 21 resisted too publicly by another. The kinds of formal and informal power made real by these contracts form a pervasive infrastructure of consequence in the music industry that is only occasionally apparent, but always active and effective. They shape our understandings of music as much as the far more obvious things do and, as such, they are unavoidable in our understanding of the central concerns of this book: tracking those forms of agency and power that are the most consequential. The forms of power contained in the contracts wielded by artists such as Taylor Swift and the Foo Fighters are of a very particular type widely apparent in most areas of our social and economic lives. People employed in precarious, contracted and timebound work have the availability of their labour strictly rationed and the content and practical parameters of that labour carefully controlled. The results of their labour are owned by someone else to do with as they please. As with other forms of neoliberal commerce, the owning party accumulates the manifold benefits of property rights and open access to the labour and productivity of others. This is neoliberal economics in its most definitive form. In this case, the benefits include regulating how others see, imagine and represent you. That Taylor Swift can be routinely honoured as a champion of the little person and gormlessly lauded for both her ‘chart success and clarity of artistic vision’ suggests that paltry concerns over exactly how she accumulates the power she appears to bestow so generously are at best irrelevant (Gormley, 2014). That power comes directly and indirectly, formally and informally, from labouring parties that can only accumulate a reputation for completing a certain type of work efficiently and effectively. Their work is only really valuable in order to gain the opportunity to do more of the same kind of work under similar conditions. The owning party has the power to fashion their own image, perceived character and legally validated identity while the labouring party only has the ability to gain a reputation for successfully fashioning the owning party’s image, character and identity as well. Again, this is hardly a new circumstance. This little story of empowerment and submission is meant to critically frame one of the more foundational ideas that has shaped the study of popular culture for a long time, the claim that popular culture is democratic. This claim is most often made in two ways. First, it is commonly argued that popular culture and consumerism create open, free and democratic social relations between ‘us’, the people, and those who make things for us to consume and enjoy. Second, it is also widely claimed that this places the power over popular culture in ‘our’ hands. And yet, these social relations are produced within the circumstances of power that are made possible by many different forms of agency which are almost all dominated by corporations of one sort of another. They are only occasionally regulated or constrained by forces we might loosely call ‘politics’. The claim that popular culture is democratic can only be made by ignoring particular circumstances within which the contents of popular culture are produced and consumed, and the vehicles through which this power is exerted most consequentially. In short, it is fairly easy to find a cultural democracy if you don’t see capital throwing itself around in the form of the demands of investors, or through the power of quarterly reports, sales targets and legally binding contracts. The forces of capital move through means such as these. These forces are powerful enough to create magical visions of

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unreal worlds that a lot of people seem to intuitively accept as truthful and authentic. In fact, as we will see in Chapter 3, whole precincts of major cities are devoted to the material facilitation of the expression and inhabitation of these worlds. Those that exercise and benefit from these forms of power receive levels of public largess, subsidy and goodwill that are sometimes difficult to fathom. It is remarkable that the mode of politics that supports and facilitates these forms of power is routinely called ‘democracy’. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to explain how I plan to go about analysing popular music museums by looking at the kinds of social relations they produce while bearing in mind that the terms most often used to describe these social relations, such as ‘democracy’, ‘consumerism’, ‘popular’ or ‘the market’, have not proved themselves capable of recognizing the animating forms of power that sustain them. We need a way of analysing the broad circumstances of experience in popular music museums in a way that can account for these forms of power and how they shape our understanding and perception beyond the pro forma use of a set of familiar terms that are simply not up to the task.

Attributions of liberation and democracy Across many fields of endeavour for a very long time, an impressively broad range of scholars have attributed the quality ‘democratic’ to the workings of popular culture. A crucial piece of the theory on which this lengthy tradition of attribution rests is the assumption that popular culture forms a kind of ‘other’ to so-called elite culture or ‘not popular’ culture (Levine, 1988; Pattison, 1987). The main pillar of the conceptual foundation for this ‘otherness’ is the fact that the perpetuation of many of the social relations found throughout popular culture are said to have been both tested and validated through the special kinds of social relationships created and experienced between artists and fans. This validating arena is almost always described as, but rarely actually called, ‘capitalism’. In almost every case, the use of the actual term ‘capitalism’ has been replaced with ‘the market’. As the economist Richard Wolff has explained, ‘the market’ is a very different concept than ‘capitalism’ despite being used more or less synonymously, and more often than not, incorrectly (Wolff, 2018). Usually ‘the market’ is defined as people making choices about how to use their time and spend their money. Social relations constituted and mediated by this thing many simply call ‘the market’ are in turn said by many to create a free and open sphere in which we all have the opportunity to interact with one another on as equal a footing as our civilization is capable is creating. Market relations are imagined by many to be a kind of gigantic, informal, yet decidedly binding referendum in which allegedly arbitrary traits like taste, habit, status or lived experience can be managed, deployed or tempered as needed, in the service of the greater collective truths of freedom and liberty. Very often the implication is that if capitalism can simply be pursued at the right scale or with the correct ethics then everything will be fine (see Born, 2013:64). The social basis of economic exchange is supposed by some to naturally reveal the most intimate, authentic and consequential desires and values of our society. This robust

 The Democratic [sic] Vistas of Popular Culture 23 and persistent line of thought unambiguously equates free markets with free people (see Dardot and Laval, 2013). I would like to be able to suggest here that there is more to these claims than this fiendishly simple calculation, but there isn’t. This framework of thought, action and consequence is most accurately called ‘market populism’. As one of its most incisive critics has noted, market populism is the defining popular ideology of the neoliberal era, an era which runs roughly from 1975 to the present. It is defined by the core conceit that ‘in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets [a]re also mediums of consent’ (Frank, 2000: xiv). Not only is the market said to be freedom inducing and sustaining, it is also said to be ‘democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, polls and focus groups, superstore and internet’ (Frank, 2000:29). Importantly, a corresponding form of academic populism has also run alongside its market-based sibling producing a particularly influential tradition of complementary thought. Often thought to be reflective of a broader ‘postmodern’ age, this variant of cultural studies has been sharply summarized by Graeber (2011). He describes a set of interpretive assumptions and methods surrounding the study of consumer culture that he argues were produced in response to a broadly mythic misreading of the baleful demon known as the Frankfurt School. This ‘little morality tale’, as he calls it, goes like this: Once upon a time, it begins, we all used to subscribe to a Marxist view of political economy that saw production as the driving force of history and the only truly legitimate field of social struggle. Insofar as we even thought about consumer demand, it was largely written off as an artificial creation, the results of manipulative techniques by advertisers and marketers meant to unload products that nobody really needed. But eventually we began to realize that this view was not only mistaken but also profoundly elitist and puritanical. Real working people find most of their life’s pleasures in consumption. What is more, they do not simply swallow whatever marketers throw at them like so many mindless automatons; they create their own meanings out of the products with which they chose to surround themselves. (Graeber, 2011: 490)

Graeber argues that this line of thinking and theorizing represents ‘a political choice’, one in which academics align themselves ‘with one body of writing and research – in this case, the one most closely aligned with the language and interests of the corporate world’ (500–1). If you contest the terms of debate or the framework of assumptions that guide this intellectual tradition, its adherents will say that you are a cynic, or worse, a ‘pessimist’ (Weisbard, 2014; Twitchell, 2004; Cowen, 1998). This chapter and the next will be devoted to working through this intellectual formation as an act of conceptual triage in order to establish a foundation for an understanding of popular music museums that is not based on the same conceptual slights of hand or similar forms of interpretive mysticism. To combat this mysticism, I will err on the side of analytical pragmatism. I will not simply assume that the terms ‘democratic’, ‘the market’ and ‘popular’ actually have

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the characteristics that have been habitually, if often implicitly, attributed to them. Instead, I will largely set these terms aside and rely instead on an interpretive analysis of more tangible actually existing power relationships. In this sense, as I have noted elsewhere, I focus on the quality and type of communicative and expressive social relationships apparent across popular culture. I have often used this idea as a kind of analytical fulcrum tilting back and forth across a complex range of contradictory and contested social relationships, from those characterized by the often disastrous inequities increasingly characterizing all aspects of our societies, called neoliberalism, to those I have defined elsewhere as reflecting ‘the transparent and accountable exercise of equitably distributed power’, otherwise known as democracy (Fairchild, 2012a:35). Throughout this book, my analysis pivots around the interpretation of the immediate experience of communicative power in order to examine the cultural intermediation of popular music, not as a field of vaguely defined, broadly construed, more or less equivalent forms of expression ‘competing’ for space in the agora, but as a broad, complex field of varied forms of power and agency that vary dramatically in consequence and efficacy. Terms like ‘democratic’ or ‘market’ are used far too often as if they are merely markers of larger set of already accepted understandings. In contrast, I will treat these terms as ideas that are constantly being deployed, insinuated or manipulated by specific agents for identifiable purposes. Very often the agent, their purpose and their power may not be immediately obvious, buried under decades of sedimentary assumption or muddled layers of inchoate, only occasionally explicit attribution. These ideas are too important to be treated like that. Museums are particularly revealing about the different modes of thought about democracy, the market and popular culture that have come to dominate our public life because they have long been thought to have been among the foundational institutional types of our civilization, along with institutions such as legislatures, libraries and universities. As such, they continue to be imbued with an aura of democratic optimism and empowerment. Further, popular music museums balance right at the fulcrum of debates about what constitute consequential forms of power and agency in popular culture. These debates have also been strongly characterized by presumptions of ‘democratic-ness’, but are seriously short on demonstrations of it. Therefore, I will not approach these museums or popular music or popular culture with an analytical framework based on the inescapable logic of their inherent ‘democraticness’. Instead, I will analyse them using an understanding of social power based on the identifiable social and economic relationships these institutions construct and reflect. This will help explain what seem to me to be two plainly obvious aspects of popular culture that are usually bypassed when discussing its ostensibly democratic character: the pervasiveness of private, unaccountable, corporate power and the extent of that power over collective understandings of the history, purpose and practice of popular music. For some reason, the shaping forces of the most powerful set of conditions in our collective social life, neoliberal capitalism, are rarely allowed any serious role in the analysis of the expressive and interpretive cultures of popular music. Given this, I will examine ‘democracy’ and ‘the market’ as they relate to material expressions of the lived relations of power facilitated through the specific kinds of musical experiences.

 The Democratic [sic] Vistas of Popular Culture 25 It is probably not too surprising to find a good deal of scholarship populated with sightings of a latent demos lying coiled behind the shiny surfaces of popular culture. After all, these only confirm what are said to be the dominant values of our time. What is surprising about these attributions, however, is the palpable and pervasive ambiguity that hangs over the indispensable concepts nestled in this line of enquiry, ‘democracy’ and ‘the market’. These terms are left fuzzy largely because there is no apparent or pressing need to define them. They are simply assumed. This has produced a peculiar and unfortunate kind of critical inertia that allows scholars to find democracy just about everywhere they look. And they have done so across a wide range of disciplines for a very long time. Examples abound. We have been confidently told that capitalism is a democracy (Hayek, 1944; Friedman, 1982; Iverson and Soskice, 2019); that popular culture is a democracy (Levine, 1988; Fiske, 1989; Cowen, 1998); that the internet is a democracy (Jenkins, 2007; Shirky, 2008; see Turner, 2006); that shopping is a democracy (Klingmann, 2007:76–7, 99–104; Twitchell, 2004); that television is a democracy (Fiske, 1989; Hartley, 1999); that musical celebrity is a democracy (Blanning, 2008); that music piracy is a democracy (Kot, 2009; Knopper, 2009) and that social media is a democracy (Jenkins, 2006, 2007). Even two of the most relentlessly and aggressively oligopolistic forms of media in the world over the last fifty years, American commercial radio and English-language right-wing tabloid newspapers, have also been said to be democracies (Hartley, 1998; Weisbard, 2014). Of course all of these claims depend on what you mean by ‘democracy’, and as I have said, this seemingly helpful point is most often presumed, usually left to the rest of us to infer or intuit. We are left to conclude that the field of democratic social relations facilitated by capitalist markets must include many wonders: the institutionalized forms of payola that defined American commercial radio for most of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Fairchild, 2012b), the harsh exploitation of the poorest workers by every major clothing label in the world (Cline, 2013, Kitroeff and Kim, 2017), covert government funding and technical development of the most important nodes of connection on the internet (Levine, 2018), the shaping of new digital technologies by strategic alliances of content providers, lawmakers and technology companies explicitly to exclude open and equitable access to the means of digital cultural production (Gillespie, 2007), the secret sale of the enormous amounts of user-produced data collected by social media companies to tech companies who used that data to covertly shape elections and referenda in the United States and the United Kingdom (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, 2018) and the illicit tapping of the mobile phones of celebrities, politicians and ordinary citizens by tabloid media for decades in order to bring to light those stories that their consumers seemingly cannot live without (Davies, 2014). Of course, it is unlikely that too many of the authors noted in the preceding paragraph would claim that it was these phenomenon that they were talking about when they said the institutions of a robust popular culture were democratic. However, given that these latter phenomena represent the material realities upon which the symbolic expressions of an allegedly democratic popular culture are founded, it is useful to try to understand some measure of the kinds of justification provided for the claim that popular culture is democratic.

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One of the main underlying justifications for these claims is the role and status of the audience in relation to the text. This justification has been produced by an expansive model of communication in which the contestation or negotiation of meaning is posited as the locus of power (Brooker and Jermyn, 2003; Turner, 1997; Cobley, 1994). This challenge, growing from the long tradition encapsulated by the catch-all term ‘active audience’, has been widely taken up throughout a fairly wide range of literature in many different fields in which the audience or the consumer or the spectator has been said to be able to take a certain form of symbolic ownership over the meaning of a text or an object or an event. Symbolic ownership provides benefits, such as enhancements of social status, strengthened forms of social connection and the many satisfactions of the popular hermeneutic. Advocates of these ideas apparently think that the rewards of symbolic ownership outweigh those of actual ownership, despite the fact that the latter is more often than not is accompanied by the accumulation of more tangible and consequential forms of wealth and power. This tradition of thought has argued that a great fragmenting and fracturing of structure, text, identity and meaning has washed over all of us since the mid-twentieth century. The formless, depthless surfaces of consumer culture, and persistent lack of any means through which narratives might cohere and persist, gave the mass makers of meanings (audiences) a pronounced advantage as they claimed the freedom they desperately sought and needed, bursting through cracks in the great walls of expressive authority, to get out from under that which oppressed them, textually, visually and personally. One bedazzled advocate called this ‘semiotic self-determination’ (Hartley, 1999:162). Contesting the symbols of our shared worlds of representation allowed the marginalized, excluded and forgotten to confront the conditions of their reality, contesting the rules of social life through their originating conceptual scaffolding. By taking up a stake in the great interpretive game played out in myriad, uncontrollable, autonomous venues and mediums, the argument goes, the great mass of humanity could change the terms under which that game worked. There were countless battles being waged over and through the meanings of cultural texts, and the goal of much of this work was to develop strategies for battle. For many, the audiences were winning: If old consumers were assumed to be passive, the new consumer is active. If old consumers were predictable and stationary, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or even media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If old consumers were seen as compliant, then new consumers are resistant, taking media into their own hands. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, they are now noisy and public. (Jenkins, 2006:37–8)

It seems strange to call the universal practice of interpreting things in useful, creative, varied and relevant ways, democracy. Even the most remedial understanding of the history of the audience tells us this is a massive oversimplification. And it hasn’t just been academics imaging these things. Corporate CEOs, marketing executives and account planners formulated precisely the same models of culture and communication

 The Democratic [sic] Vistas of Popular Culture 27 and characterized them in precisely the same ways, in some cases long before the academics got in on the act (see Frank, 2000:53–5). The secondary issue which flows directly from this is the issue of accountability. The mooted new world of popular power meant that producers would be held accountable to their audiences in new and far more effective ways. This accountability has largely been said to be the product of new technologies which allow for ever greater latitude in consuming and interpretive styles. This popularly constituted power has been affirmed in the accumulated residue of a tradition of thought that includes figures such as Milton Friedman (Steadman-Jones, 2012:108), and former Citibank CEO Walter Wriston (Frank, 2000:55), not to mention influential media scholars: Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and collective intelligence. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through collective intelligence, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. (Jenkins, 2006:35)

What clearly doesn’t concern the scholars, CEOs and account planners who have placed themselves within this tradition of thought is the fact that nearly all forms of accountability they can imagine have been privatized. Producers are, at best, only commercially accountable to their audiences. That is, if the free people aren’t satisfied with their free choices, they can freely choose something else over which to exert symbolic ownership and semiotic self-determination. The tautology is obvious: the market provides the freedom to shape the market which provides the freedom. Further, the terms of accountability are set by those meant to be held to account and can only be enforced by those who matter enough economically and who can act in sufficient numbers with sufficient tenacity to do something about it. This is a fairly obvious example of the model of regulatory governance which has defined the neoliberal state called ‘regulatory capture’; those meant to be regulated actually ‘capture’ the apparatus of regulation and empty it of everything but its form (see Shughart and Thomas, 2019). We will pursue this and other telling parallels in the next chapter. As I have noted at some length elsewhere, when we are constructed only as consumers, we only matter to the extent to which our agency can be measured through a producers’ own accounting of their own actions, their own assessments of a consumer’s value and their own assessment of the value of their own communications (see Fairchild, 2012a). Whatever else it might be, this is not democracy. A third issue that emerges from these withered conceptions of democracy is a kind of self-contained circular logic which has determined that popular culture is democratic because it is popular. Terms like democracy and the market resonate so widely and effortlessly because they are part of a much larger and broader social and political imaginary that has come to define this circular and perplexingly impenetrable consensus that has persisted throughout the neoliberal era (see Zizek, 2014; Fisher,

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2009; Curtis, 2007, 2016). This consensus has declared the exercise of any form of oppressive power within popular culture to be impossible, by definition. This is one of the most basic claims of academic populism. One of its most potent advocates once put it like this: ‘There can be no popular dominant culture,’ he argues, because ‘popular culture is formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination’ (Fiske, 1989:43). This is because ‘[e]veryday life is constituted by the practices of popular culture, and is characterized by the creativity of the weak in using the resources provided by a disempowering system while refusing finally to submit to that power’ (Fiske, 1989:47). As noted in this chapter, this is one of the many ideas about democracy that has had a long and influential life, spreading through a wide range of scholarship in many different forms ever since. Democracy and the market, in this dominant formulation, are not simply notional schematics for pragmatic political or economic programmes. They are what the Yaron Ezrahi calls ‘politically necessary fictions’ (Ezrahi, 2012:4). They are the ‘fictions, metaphors, ideas, images, or conceptions that acquire the power to regulate and shape political behavior and institutions in a particular society’. They gain power by generating what he calls ‘performative scripts that orient behavior and pattern institutions’. They do so based on their ‘apparent congruence with aspects of political and social experience and expectations’ as well as ‘their compatibility with norms that appear to legitimate their power’ (Ezrahi, 2012:3). Importantly, Ezrahi is talking about both formal and informal political institutions and practices. The informal democratic imaginaries of popular culture, those ideas, ideals, images and ideologies that produce a multitude of forms of guidance that ‘orient behavior and pattern institutions’ work to support existing centres of power just as more formal legislative ones do (Ezrahi, 2012:3). Thus, it is not important simply to know how we might practice democracy or participate in a market at any given time, but also how we imagine these entities in some broader historical circumstance and what consequences these imaginings might have. Taken as such, ‘democracy’ forms the heart of a consensus found across numerous seemingly disparate or even contrasting traditions of thought and action, from the mushy centreleft to the brawny neoliberal right. Each relies on a similar if general set of underlying assumptions and values. These include variously proportioned combinations of promarket and pro-individualist ideals and their necessary correlates, the rejection of anything deemed too collectivist, bureaucratic or hierarchical. It is hard to find any major institutional form of power that stands too far beyond this dominating horizon of thought. We will also see more of this in the next chapter. Finally, beyond these fairly direct connections, the main underlying factor that draws this broad consensus together is the type of democracy on offer. It is a type of democracy based on the self-confirming presumptions of predetermined procedural mechanisms. Put simply, whether we are talking about music, trade, housing, health care or war, if you set build a democratic house, then democratic things will happen inside it. If you have a market, then you will have a democracy. You have to. We will also pick up this story in the next chapter. However, to close out this one, I’d like to give just a succinct explanation of why I don’t think the broad social and economic formations that we call popular music museums are democratic.

 The Democratic [sic] Vistas of Popular Culture 29

Conclusion: High viz There is little question that popular music museums give off a warm glow of ‘democraticness’. They show us the ‘soundtracks of our lives’ in an engaging multisensory complex of historical exegesis and emotional satisfaction (Figure 1.1). We will see how this is done throughout this book, but it is important to note here that this pleasing aura is false. It is false because these institutions produce, and by definition must seek to produce, what Boris Groys would call strong images with high visibility produced for spectators (Groys, 2010). Groys argues persuasively that the development of contemporary art and specifically the avant-garde, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, has seen the proliferation of increasingly ‘weak images’ with ‘low visibility’ across many spheres of art practice. He argues that this is a form of resistance to ‘the strong images of change, the ideology of progress, and promises of economic growth’ that have defined the increasingly rapacious forms of modernity that have repeatedly wrought massive, churning, often brutal change throughout the world for over a century (Groys, 2010). The response of many artists has been to produce work marked by a radical reduction of means, a radical openness of form and structure, and very often few immediately apparent distinctions between the artwork and everyday objects or circumstances (Bishop, 2012). Artworks routinely meld into everyday life where art objects, performances and creative processes are often indistinguishable from their surroundings. As Groys explains, ‘generations of artists are increasingly interested in weak visibility and weak public gestures. Everywhere we witness the emergence of artistic groups in which participants and spectators coincide’ (Groys, 2010). This is work that is not merely open to interpretation. It is also purposely open to its own disappearance into everyday life. It is for this reason that Groys concludes that these weak images and gestures are far more democratic than their strong counterparts; it is precisely because of their weakness, the blurriness of their forms and meanings, the ambiguity that hovers over an audience’s experience and understanding of them. Groys insightfully notes that the same could be said of much of what goes on over social media, many forms of which uncannily mirror some aspects of the avant-garde artistic practices that preceded them in terms of their weakness and low visibility. Simply put, over the last four or five decades there has been a radical profusion weak images which are becoming less and less ‘visible’, not just across the contemporary art world but generally. This does not blot out the strong images produced by social media but simply notes the ratios and comparative relations between the two (Groys, 2010). If we think of popular music museums in this way, we can see that they are elite, professional institutions crammed full of objects, texts, sounds, and still and moving images that are organized into complex displays consisting of almost exclusively strong images with high visibility; in short they produce spectacles for spectators (see Chapters 3 and 9). As we will see throughout this book, their displays are dedicated to the unreserved celebration of transcendent artistry as well as exceptional mastery and knowledge. These institutions’ purpose is to exert power over ‘us’ and ‘our’ music in order to make our spectators’ understandings of this mastery and greatness meaningful by aligning our existing understandings of ‘the music’ and those who made

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it with the institution’s explanations of these same things. These museums are exacting, labour-intensive reflections of an industry that lauds a vision of ‘greatness’ that it can, by definition, only rarely achieve. It speaks to spectators through the same dominant discourses about popular music that flow through a world crowded to overflowing with very, very similar portrayals of the transcendent genius and unalloyed greatness one finds in their displays (see Chapter 7). These museums simply couldn’t exist if they were undermining the existing dominant discourses and cultures of popular music. Instead, they exist to produce strong, if not overwhelming, contexts for the meanings of their images, sounds and objects. They do not and cannot exist by producing weak images that disappear into the world by being largely indistinguishable from it. Given this, it is tempting to see these institutions as anomalies. We could see them as strange exclusive places that don’t reflect the ‘real’ music or the ‘real’ cultures of popular music. Indeed, there is a very common and persistent form of criticism of these places that claims exactly this and has done so for decades. For example, in a rant from 2014 about the shortcomings of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Tim Sommer perfectly encapsulated the prevailing mythology that I will later call ‘the rock imaginary’, even while trying to roundly criticize the very places that display it so faithfully (see Chapter 7). Sommer claims that rock ’n’ roll is ‘the sound of America’s disenfranchised and dispossessed cultures, celebrated, mainstreamed and displayed as art. It’s the angry but ecstatic dynamite of the MC5 and the apocalyptic beauty of Tim Buckley; it’s the dirt-yard hallelujahs of Sid Hemphill and the whorehouse hosannas of ZZ Top.’ The Hall doesn’t reflect this populist base, Sommer concluded. He demanded that the Hall dig deeper and work harder to show us the ‘real’ rock ’n’ roll that we all know is out there, in our heads and in our hearts (Sommer, 2015). Interestingly in 1992, a few years before the actual Hall opened, the editor of Goldmine, a record and CD collectors’ magazine, wrote a lengthy editorial in Billboard making almost exactly the same argument. The Hall, which at this time only consisted of an annual awards dinner and some grand ideas for the future, did not have popular legitimacy among the people, he claimed. He argued that ‘rock fans are perhaps the most passionate and dedicated supporters of an entertainment form in the world’ and that ‘they often live and breathe their favorite artists, spend their rent money on their records, follow them from town to town, build shrines to them’. This is what the legitimacy of popular music is built on, he claimed, calling the Nominating Committee merely a ‘politburo’. He argued that ‘rock ‘n’ roll music has always been populist, not elitist’ (Tamarkin, 1992:6). In both cases, separated by two decades, we have the same version of democracy said to be legitimated by the same social and economic relations we see in the market populism that has dominated so much writing on popular music for so long. In the next chapter, I will examine where this dominant culture came from and how it has shaped the ideology of contemporary popular music museums specifically through the forms of political and economic power that defines them.

Figure 1.1 Advertisement for the British Music Experience, Greenwich, London, 2011. Photo by the author.

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Neoliberalism’s firmaments of fame

A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification,’ as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. (Terry Eagleton, quoted in Higgins 446)

The term ‘capitalist realism’ has had a somewhat elusive, mostly quiet history. It has often acted merely as a snarky inversion of ‘socialist realism’, its users generally intimating that we who live under capitalism are not as free thinking as we might like to appear (Dienst, 2014). Its use has also suggested that the ‘reality’ this expressive form constructs, in the shape of possible futures, actual products, lifestyles, sensations or sentiments, was all you could reasonably expect out of life. As Mark Fisher has influentially argued, capitalism produced endlessly varied visions of futures that it routinely forecloses upon, creating a broadly untenable tension between contending forces (Fisher, 2009). As such, capitalism’s compelling forces and centres of gravity produce vivid contradictions between imagined futures and actual ones that mitigate against any neutral, purely ‘realist’ acceptance of its prescriptions (see Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014). This idea has functioned as a demonstration of the limits of what is ‘realistic’ while simultaneously trying to symbolically extend those limits to the far horizon of the collective imagination. In 1984, Michael Schudson presented an intriguingly sarcastic analysis of advertising as a dominant form of capitalist realism, smoothly and persuasively demonstrating its many conceptual and practical links with its less revered cousin, socialist realism. In paraphrasing a wide range of sources on the subject, he drew out a consensus that claimed that socialist realist art should do the following:

1. Art should picture reality in simplified and typified ways so that it communicates effectively to the masses. 2. Art should picture life, but not as it is, so much as life as it should become, life worth emulating.

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 33 3. Art should picture reality not in its individuality but only as it reveals larger social significance. 4. Art should picture reality as progress toward the future and so represent social struggles positively. It should carry an air of optimism. 5. Art should focus on contemporary life, creating pleasing images of new social phenomena, revealing and endorsing new features of society and thus aiding the masses in assimilating them. (Schudson, 1984) The correspondence between these demands and those emanating from the myriad forms of capitalist communication that constantly surround us should be fairly clear, and these dictates should be notable primarily for their persistence and increasing presence over the last four or five decades. Like its less glamorous twin, capitalist realism doesn’t have a reality-describing or reality-evoking effect; it has a reality-making effect. The reality both create is constructed through ‘a set of aesthetic conventions’ and a ‘political economy whose values they celebrate and promote’ (Schudson, 1984). However, there is more to the revealing fidelity between these two forms of worldmaking expression than this. As Boris Groys notes, one of the more pronounced and important aspects of socialist realism was this expressive form’s ‘future orientation’ often embodied in the many magical dream worlds it created. It was a ‘projective’ form, not a mimetic one. It sought to produce a new humanity and a new world. It did not seek to describe existing ones (Groys, 1992:113). Capitalist realism doesn’t deviate from this in the slightest. We can also draw from this line of inquiry the fact that capitalist realism and socialist realism ultimately have the same purpose: to sell whatever social and economic relations that might be standing behind them, producing them, legitimating them and holding the entire edifice up no matter how badly it might be creaking at any particular moment. Both forms of expression also produce a dynamic, interweaving of the images of persuasion and the instruments of dominance they facilitate. As I suggest in this chapter, while capitalist realism is riven with contradictions, these are routinely suppressed or resolved through the prospective or retrospective incorporation of as many forms of expression as possible. This is the core purpose of the many forms of popular music displayed in the museums I am studying. Their displays are meant to incorporate as many forms of popular musical expression as possible, no matter how contradictory, into the prevailing social and economic order, always aspiring to produce a perpetually coherent picture of the world, past, present and future. Importantly, we are asked to stand within a remarkable contradiction. In practical terms, everywhere we seem to go these days, we are told to accept less, at work, at home, in school, at the hospital, when we vote. Yet we are constantly presented with capitalist utopias that are held up to us as if they are already our implicit ideals, as if the mode of their construction somehow makes these extremely diverting corporate fantasies more palatable not less. Somehow this equation remains constant. The popular music museums examined throughout this book are not hard to slot into this analytical frame. They simplify and typify the history of popular music. They present us with lives worth emulating through the transcendent musical figures they present to us, however retrospective some of these designations might be. They focus on the

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larger social significance of that which they display and do so with a routine air of optimism. And yes, they create pleasing images of social phenomena by revealing and endorsing key features of society and helping us assimilate to them (Schudson, 1984). Further, despite their inherent retrospection, these museums also endorse the new worlds and futures capitalist realism always intends to invoke. They simply do so, somewhat paradoxically, though a thoroughgoing display of the past. However, it is not enough simply to understand these places through their displays and exhibitions as presented through such an analytical lens. As Shonkwiler and La Berge argue, an analytical term such as capitalist realism can only be useful if we use it to articulate the destruction and disruption ‘produced by a capitalism that constantly seems to expand its sources and strategies of accumulation’, to discern ‘the lived economic, social, and affective instabilities’ this form of capitalism produces, and explain how the many, varied forms of power exerted by it become a accepted form of ‘common sense’ in which a persistently and ontologically inequitable and brutal economic system ‘has seemingly achieved popular consent’ (Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014:6). The purpose of such an analysis, they continue, is to enable us to ‘describe the realization of market imperatives at an ideological level’ and to understand ‘[t]he role of representation and belief in producing that which becomes reality’. As they insightfully conclude, ‘[c]apitalist realism denotes the site upon which the limit of the imaginary is constructed. It insists on the circulation between imagination and reality, the ways in which this relationship is produced and disavowed’ (Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014:6). We can do this, of course, by examining the exhibitions presented by these museums as well as how these places were built, as I will do in the next chapter. But we must also do this by examining the kinds of subjects these places are meant to create and the contexts in which they are meant to be created. In other words, the prospective and retrospective incorporation of nearly any popular music phenomenon into the narratives and displays these museums present to us is not simply effected through the right forms of display. The particular forms of capitalist realism these museums construct are also made effective and consequential through the musical subjects they help create. And these musical subjects are, at least at this historical moment, neoliberal subjects who participate in producing distinctly neoliberal subjectivities. In Chapter 1, I suggested that a long and influential tradition of scholarly work hasn’t simply marginalized or even ignored the extent and consequences of corporate power in popular culture. Instead, it has declared any anti-democratic exercise of these forms of power in popular culture to be an ideological and practical impossibility specifically due to their vetting by popular will as expressed through ‘the market’. In this chapter, I will argue that the purpose of the popular music museums examined throughout this book is to act as part of a larger expressive system produced by the market and its dominant forms of power to construct worlds made from the appropriated affective labour of musicians and audiences which are both prospectively and retrospectively incorporated into a world view definitively shaped by the underlying and often submerged precepts of neoliberal capitalism. The expressive form that embodies these processes of incorporation is capitalist realism, as defined earlier, and the carriers of

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 35 both this expressive form and many elements of its ideological support structures are the generic types of musical celebrity and agency found throughout all of these museums. Understanding them demands that we come to grips with nature of celebrity and fame in a neoliberal world. The starting point for this is to understand the defining features of neoliberal corporate power.

The double truth of neoliberalism Three of the defining features of the contemporary understanding of neoliberalism are its complex and seemingly contradictory origins, its loosely affiliated clusters of ideas and, consequently, the many disagreements and extensive confusion as to what the term means. However, there is a broad consensus even among those with significantly incompatible views that neoliberalism is a social philosophy in which ‘all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even where those spheres are not directly monetized’ (Brown, 2015:10). As Chaudhary and Chappe observe, the goal of neoliberalism is to extend market relations and principles to every facet of society, from ‘the economy’ itself to the state all the way down to redefining basic understandings of the human being. Citizens become consumers; humanity becomes ‘human capital’, people become amorphous, reinventing, endlessly flexible, resilient, risk-taking individuals. (Chaudhary and Chappe, 2016)

Under neoliberalism ‘both persons and states are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value’ and ‘do so through the practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors’ (Brown, 2015:22). In pursuit of this ideal society, neoliberalism’s central planners have, rhetorically at least, long extolled all forms of individualism, decried all forms of collectivism, and have regarded the market as the most open, accessible and democratic force in human history (Brown, 2015; Steadman-Jones, 2012; Mirowski, 2009; Harvey, 2005). This world view is, in many respects, only a slightly more philosophically sober iteration of the market populism described in the previous chapter. Further, it will become clear that this dominant and widespread formulation reflects the central relationships posited by neoliberalism in the innate moral and rational choices provided by the market in music. Neoliberalism as a philosophy is focused to an almost obsessive degree on the twin ideals of rational choice and individual liberty as set against the twin evils of irrationality and collectivism. As such it is as much a moral philosophy as it is an economic one that explicitly seeks to change both political economic systems and their participants (see Cooper, 2017; Dardot and Laval, 2013). Developing as it did in the shadow of midcentury European totalitarianism, which the creators of neoliberal ideology regarded as the supreme expression of irrational mob rule, this is not too surprising. But this is a ‘thought collective’ that grew into an aggressive and extremely well-coordinated

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political movement that did not bother to make too many salient distinctions between different forms of ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’ (Mirowski, 2009:417). Its creators regarded the New Deal in the United States and the post-war British welfare state, for example, and almost any forms of public bureaucracy, economic planning and social democracy as nefarious collectivist enterprises that posed grave if not terminal dangers for human freedom. In regarding a project like the New Deal as ‘a quasi-constitutional disguise for dictatorship’, these social thinkers generally saw little to no legitimacy in the mechanisms of popular democracy if they produced the wrong results. Instead, ‘redistribution and greater equality were not simply disincentives to initiative’, they were ‘morally debilitating’ (Steadman-Jones, 2012:64). Interestingly, while talking in a carefully cultivated language of populism and freedom, central figures in the movement ruefully argued that ‘most people did not have the capacity for “independent thought”’ and concluded that ‘individual liberty within the framework of free markets could only be protected by an elite-driven and elite-directed strategy of opinion formation’ (Steadman-Jones, 2012:66, 4). This is the ‘double truth’ of neoliberalism, an idea to which we will return shortly (Mirowski, 2009:426). In practice, the abstract ideals of neoliberalism have rarely worked out as its architects planned (Taibbi, 2011; Prins, 2014). If we simply look at the economic state of the vast majority of the population of one of the countries that has most closely followed its prescriptions, the United States, we find these failures are very easy to demonstrate. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, for example, published a brief guide that found, among other things, that by 2011 wage inequality had reached levels not seen since the Great Depression (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2011). In 2018, Oxfam reported that half of all families in the United States could not afford food and rent and that 60 per cent had less than $500 in savings (Kottasova, 2018; Luhby, 2018). Beyond this, beginning in 2015, life expectancy in the United States began to drop for the first time in decades. Fortune reported that those studying this shocking phenomenon concluded that the main cause was despair (Donnelly, 2018; O’Grady, 2018). These iniquitous circumstances have been brutally exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. There are good reasons for neoliberalism’s failure. The first reason is that the kinds of imagined figures thought to either champion or contest the innate morality of the market in the real world bordered on cartoon-like social archetypes. Chief among them is the ‘rational chooser’ (Dean, 2008:48–9). Given that neoliberal planners regarded economic freedom as coterminous with human freedom, the figure at the centre of the market could not be the irrational spectre lacking the capacity for independent thought and autonomous action they so feared. Instead, there had to be free individuals whose choices were informed and authentic to buoy the market (Steadman-Jones, 2012:113–14). These rational actors would set the terms for the success or failure of all other actors in the economic system and do so through their collective strength and agency (seriously). Tautologically informed by the market signals they themselves were sending and guided by innate and enlightened rules of economic conduct, rational choosers would eventually and inevitably make the right choices because they were, well, rational (Mirowski, 2009:424). This could only happen, however, if

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 37 the second figure in this tepid little drama didn’t get in the way: the arrogant central planner. This figure was the villain that sapped the inherent energy and dynamism of the market with rules and regulations all of which are hubristically rooted in a desire to unnecessarily protect the rational chooser from themselves. The hero of the piece is the third character, the virtuous capital creator and entrepreneur. This figure is a politically neutral producer and distributor of material prosperity, uniquely tuned to the signals sent by the rational chooser, signals which the arrogant centralizer either cannot hear or refuses to accept as legitimate (Steadman-Jones, 2012:117). Despite their populist rhetoric, neoliberal philosophers invested the central power and authority in the market in this supreme entity. As Mirowski argues, ‘[f]or Hayek and the neoliberals, the figure of the Führer was replaced by the figure of the entrepreneur, the embodiment of the will-to-power for the community, who must be permitted to act without being brought to rational account’ (Mirowski, 2009:444). Naturally, all of this depends on the second reason for neoliberalism’s profound failure to protect or enhance human well-being beyond its own tiny elites. It is the stage on which this is all played out: the specific character of their imagined ‘free market’ and secondarily, the kind of state thought best to facilitate and protect it. For neoliberal philosophers, the market is the central mediating forum in which the relationship between knowledge and society is most effectively managed. In this sense, the market is an unparalleled mechanism for processing information and as such reflects the ‘natural and inexorable state of humankind’ (Mirowski, 2009:435; see also SteadmanJones). The central element proving the rightness and virtue of the information the market produces is competition. As Milton Friedman claimed, competition among producers would protect consumers and workers from exploitation, and competition among consumers would protect producers from their own necessarily incomplete knowledge of the market (Steadman-Jones, 97). Neoliberal court philosophers regarded competition as virtuous, morally straightening and politically neutralizing. It might seem incongruous, then, that these same philosophers also demanded a strong state to service their utopia (Mirowski, 2009: 441–3). However, they did not demand a state in the form of an open, democratic forum for the discussion and adoption of policy. In this arena, the virtues of competition were far less apparent to them. Instead, neoliberal philosophers advocated forms of ‘constrained democracy’ primarily in the form of different types of ‘techno-managerial governance that protected their ideal market from what they perceived as unwarranted political interference’ (Mirowski, 2009:436). It should be clear from my arguments in the previous chapter, this is a similar model of the market that those who claim popular culture to be democratic use in their justifications for their claims and theories. They just have a more expansive view of the capabilities of ‘the people’. The third aspect of neoliberalism’s failure is its conception of capitalism as a completely pervasive force that leaves no one and nothing untouched by its prosperitybearing mechanisms. This idea is of a piece with the idea drawn from critical cultural theory that everything is subject to commodification and will eventually be subsumed by capital so that no realm of thought or action will exist outside of it. In fact, this idea has already reached its nihilist apogee in some areas. A good example, and by

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no means an isolated one, is Dettmar’s assertion that all human relations are, as he so delicately puts it, ‘colored by commodity culture’. He tells us confidently and omnisciently: ‘Such is life under late capitalism; there’s no use wringing one’s hands about it, or worse, acting as if it weren’t, or hadn’t always been true’ (Dettmar, 2006:26). Shut up and dance, goes the populist incantation. But the neoliberal fantasy of the potential or actual marketization of all spheres of social life is just that, a fantasy. In fact, it is clear that neoliberal capitalism isn’t simply tolerant of spheres of life that sit outside commodity culture; it is utterly dependent on them for its existence. As Nancy Fraser has argued, ‘[m]arkets depend for their very existence on nonmarketized social relations, which supply their background conditions of possibility’ (Fraser, 2014:59–60). These background conditions are sources from which capital has to continually extract value in order to persist and expand. Without these spheres of non-market value, capitalism is limited to exchanging like for like, subsisting only on the continually decreasing levels of added value that human labour provides. But despite claims of the value added to what are otherwise called simply ‘raw materials’ or ‘natural resources’, Fraser argues that ‘[c]apital expands . . . not via the exchange of equivalents, as the market perspective suggests, but precisely through its opposite: via the non-compensation of a portion of workers’ labour-time’ (Fraser, 2014:61). This is the time most people spend doing the work of surviving and living beyond the formal arrangements of forms of work that are directly compensated with wages. Outside the compensations of the market are such things as ‘self-provisioning (the garden plot, sewing), informal reciprocity (mutual aid, in-kind transactions) and state transfers (welfare benefits, social services, public goods)’ (Fraser, 2014:59). As she suggests, ‘commodification is far from universal in capitalist society. On the contrary, where it is present, it depends for its very existence on zones of non-commodification’ that ‘do not simply mirror the commodity logic, but embody distinctive normative and ontological grammars of their own’ (Fraser, 2014:66–7). Fraser provides a few examples of this: [S]ocial practices oriented to reproduction (as opposed to production) tend to engender ideals of care, mutual responsibility and solidarity, however hierarchical and parochial these may be. Likewise, practices oriented to polity, as opposed to economy, often refer to principles of democracy, public autonomy and collective self-determination, however restricted or exclusionary these may be. Finally, practices associated with capitalism’s background conditions in non-human nature tend to foster such values as ecological stewardship, non-domination of nature and justice between generations, however romantic and sectarian these may be. (Fraser, 2014:66–7)

In their innate attributes, these ‘background’ practices diverge ‘from the values associated with capitalism’s foreground: above all, growth, efficiency, equal exchange, individual choice, negative liberty and meritocratic advancement’ (Fraser, 2014:66–7). The final element of the failure of neoliberalism’s heady notions of human freedom was its broad lack of concern for and simple ignorance of the practical consequences of its fantastical prescriptions. Strangely missing from a lot of examinations of the ‘governing

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 39 rationalities’ and ‘modes of reason’ that define this utopian project are plain old, garden variety kinds of political and economic opportunism flying under disingenuous flags of ideological convenience. Very often, neoliberalism, too often viewed as a pervasive form of governance, was little more than an expedient intellectual or political cover for the grubby, mundane power grabs and resource appropriations of international capitalism (Chomsky, 1994; Perkins, 2004). This has been accomplished by the attempt to transform the collected populace into individual, isolated subjects competing with untold numbers of similar subjects as what Foucault called entrepreneurs of the self (Foucault, 2008). As Brown argues, given that neoliberal subjects are conceived of as ‘human capital’, they are not valued in and of themselves ‘[n]or do specifically political rights adhere to human capital’ (Brown, 2015:38). Instead, such a figure is left ‘in charge of itself, responsible for itself, yet [is] an instrumentalizable and potentially dispensable element of the whole’ (ibid.). This neoliberal self is left with few forms of economic solidarity open to them and no broader institutions or social forums designed to contest the terms of their usefulness or value on their behalf (Brown, 2015:38–42). In sum, neoliberalism is defined by an explicitly acknowledged ‘double truth’ wherein an educated elite is ‘tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive . . . necessity of repressing democracy while the masses would be regaled of “rolling back the nanny state and being set free to choose”’ (Mirowski, 2009:444).

Counter cultures, incorporated As noted earlier, this chapter is primarily concerned with understanding how popular music museums facilitate ‘the realization of market imperatives at an ideological level’ (Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014:6). The main carriers of these imperatives in these museums are the musicians, especially famous musicians but also a number of musicians who are less well-known. Regardless of their renown, their images and biographies are all infused with the same broad suite of values and ideals. The vehicles for this are a series of social archetypes that typify various aspects of the history of popular music through ‘lives worth emulating’, investing these lives with a ‘broader social significance’ that appear to reveal key features of society that we can embrace (Schudson, 1984). As we will see in later chapters, the qualities attributed to these archetypes are familiar, if generic ones: the authentic, innovative, bold, risk-taking non-conformist whose transcendent genius allowed them to ‘capture the zeitgeist’ and create the ‘soundtrack to our lives’. There aren’t too many musicians or traditions of musical practice that are excluded from this formulation. This is the primary embodiment of the prospective and retrospective incorporation of the affective labour of musicians and audiences into the prevailing social and economic order. Of course, this process must do more than simply construct a symbolic system of representation. It must also incorporate all of the ideal musical subjects these museums produce into this ideology for their representations to be relevant, persistently meaningful and consequential. It is these subjects that must concern us now, albeit briefly; we will return to them in Chapter 7.

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There have been a great many assessments and interpretations of contemporary subjectivity in recent years, many of which make some fairly grand generalizations about who ‘we’ are and how ‘we’ feel about it. Some argue that as postmodern (or even post-postmodern) subjects we have been liberated from comparatively fixed accounts of ourselves and who we are. Our broadly construed experience of the world is said to have shifted from one of fairly geographically bounded lives played out in fairly limited frames of social and imaginative connection to a world in which we are bound up with genuinely global imaginative networks of connection, expression and self-fashioning. This is generally viewed as a creditable form of liberation. Others argue that the powers that govern us have gradually shifted away from those of a ‘disciplinary society’, in which formal institutions exercised power by setting the ‘limits of thought and practice’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:23), towards a ‘society of control’ in which we internalize the imperatives of those in power and in which our imaginations and experiences are far too necessary to the perpetuation of existing forms of power to dictate their content (Luke, 2002:xxi). Such a society exerts various types of flexible, pervasive forms of constraint over how we act within these purportedly self-directed forms of self-making (see Genz, 2015; Kokoli and Winter, 2015; Berardi, 2009). My interpretation of these ideas will remain stubbornly pragmatic, generally avoiding broad assessments or claims about what ‘we’ experience, know or feel. As I will show in Parts II and III of this book, the experience of these museums is not simply based on the relationship between a museum and its subjects. It is also based on the already socially meaningful lives of the images, objects and sounds these museums organize and present. As I have argued elsewhere, there is little doubt that the practical, immediate changes brought about through our constantly increasing ability to make some manner of social and imaginative connection with a wider range of texts, sounds, ideas and images that we could ever know or experience in a lifetime has obviously wrought lasting changes on how we see ourselves in the world (Fairchild, 2012; 2008). These museums and the objects and displays within them are part of a public culture that is ever more crowded with diverse and competing demands for our cognition and attention. Our experience of these museums is shaped through the materials and the tools these institutions use to present and contextualize music within their displays and how we experience the innately meaningful connections these things have with the increasingly complex world around us. A central aspect of a ‘society of control’ is the obvious fact of commensurately enhanced and similarly pervasive corporate power. These museums reflect this power through their efforts to control and subsume the meaning of the sounds, texts, images and objects they house into the larger narratives and forms of nostalgia and collective memory they mean to produce. Yet, at the same time, as we will see in later chapters, the content of these museums primarily plays on themes of freedom and liberation through the pleasure and power of music. This is the double truth of neoliberalism rearing its acquisitive head again. We are offered the various visions of freedom, but only within the reality of a framework of incorporation and control which is always structuring our experiences and understandings of that freedom. As Jodi Dean has argued, ‘neoliberalism offers its subjects imaginary injunctions to develop our creative

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 41 potential and cultivate our individuality, injunctions supported by capitalism’s provision of the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning’ (Jodi Dean, 2008:62). These ‘fluid imaginary identities created through consumption are as dynamic and volatile as the market’ (Jodi Dean, 2008:63). But it is precisely this fluidity, this flexibility and volatility tied innately to the market that has continually allowed cultural formations that appear to be contrary and incommensurate with the dominant neoliberal capitalist paradigm to be routinely incorporated into it. This has been particularly true of British and American popular music since the early 1950s, music that is, not coincidentally, the main subject of the displays in the museums I am analysing. What draws the material contents of these displays and the musical subjects they produce together are a series of values that have definitively shaped the meaningfulness of a great deal of popular music in the post-Second World War era. These are values drawn from various strands of romanticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have demonstrated a remarkable convergence with the dominant values of neoliberalism outlined in this chapter. These dominant values have a pronounced focus on individualism and personal autonomy, a powerful revulsion at all forms of perceived conformity, which is often presented as a form of ‘collectivism’, and an influential attachment to individual authenticity, an attachment that, while routinely pilloried by generations of popular music scholars, still remains one of the most widespread techniques of validation and social cohesion across many areas of popular music practice (see Chapter 7). The most evocative and widespread expressions of these values in specific relation to the recent history of popular music began in the late 1950s literary and musical undergrounds and continued through to define the late 1960s counterculture in the United States and the United Kingdom (Frank, 1997: 6; Warner, 2013). The ideals of great art and great artists have persisted well beyond the demise of the counterculture, shaping the translation of these romantic ideals for its descendants across a broad range of musical traditions and scenes. As I outline in detail in Chapter 7, these ideas have persisted in various guises ever since and have rarely been dislodged as central rhetorical features of the increasingly diverse forms of cultural intermediation. Romanticism and neoliberalism, despite what might appear to be obvious and deepseated philosophical antipathies, have underlying correlations which have rendered them strangely compatible. They largely valorize the same general qualities and this has facilitated the incorporation of the new and the cool into a dominant culture that values these qualities very highly for their economic dynamism. This is where the double truth of neoliberalism takes material form. In many respects, the transformation and correlation of the basic tenets of romanticism by advocates of neoliberalism seems a dubious proposition. Romanticism was in many respects an anti-capitalist philosophy founded on strident critiques of and practical resistance to what its adherents viewed as the excessive and destructive rationalism of modernity (Sayre and Lowy, 2005). However, it is romanticism’s prescriptions for contesting what adherents called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ that suggest its unwitting compatibility and overlap with neoliberal capitalism. Romanticism sought to combat the rationalization of society and humanity in service

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of ‘the self-liberation of individual consciousness and the simultaneous transformation of the social world’ (Lacoss, 2009:xiii). Such transformations were sought through the embrace of all manner of attributes, such as ‘love, liberty, hope, and joy’, as expressed through ‘change, growth, diversity, and the creative imagination’ (Sayre and Lowy, 2005:432). As Sayre and Lowy argue, for romantics this meant that myth ‘holds a special place’ in their world view, as the heavy demands of romanticism require ‘an inexhaustible reservoir of symbols and allegories, phantasms and demons, gods and serpents’ (Sayre and Lowy, 2005:436). American and British popular music have not been short of such apparitions nor the symbolism and aesthetic conventions to support them and make them meaningful. However, given neoliberalism’s rapacity for continual expansion, it too needs a robust field of creative imagination. It could not survive with it. And this is the critical point of convergence and overlap. Both neoliberalism and romanticism pivot almost exclusively around a vision of an autonomous free-willed and free-wheeling individual whose agency and liberty should be completely unencumbered by any form of collectivism or other such pernicious constraints. So does a great deal of our popular culture. Both assume a lack of any effective or coherent influence by the major forms of power to which we have all been increasingly and pervasively subject for the last fifty years or so. This is despite the fact that this power is simply so demonstratively in evidence that it is hard to maintain the fiction of a subject-centred universe imagined by these distinct, but related universes of thought. Lacoss credits periodic ‘outbursts of insurgent creative action’ with sustaining romanticism, outbursts that would seem to be every bit as crucial to neoliberalism as the forms of ‘human creativity, artistic autonomy, and open expression’ that make both ideologies possible (Lacoss, 2009:ix). Remarkably, many of neoliberalism’s keenest advocates have somehow managed to creatively sidestep or deflect most direct associations with ‘the ways in which the capitalist order relentlessly degrades the imagination and disenchants the world through alienation and reification’ (Lacoss, 2009:xii). Some of the more influential ‘outbursts of creative activity’ Lacoss describes were the many ideological claims and symbolic forms of the American and British counterculture of the 1960s which have held sway in significant measure over many of the broader cultures of popular music produced in both places in the ensuing decades. While traditional mythology regards the transatlantic counterculture as an organic, colourful, youthful force rising up to challenge the drab, conformist order that preceded it, only to be co-opted and eventually defanged, this isn’t the case. As I detail in Chapter 7, the animating ideals of the counterculture were not held only by a marginal collective of students, draft resistors and drop-outs. These values had a wide purchase across mainstream Western society, especially in the United States, and offered all and sundry ‘authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion’ through the good offices of self-help books, corporate management texts, academic sociology, and middlebrow magazines (Frank, 1997:9). According to this robust and diverse literature, the greatest danger the population faced was the threat of a ‘mass society’, as it was called, that would turn everyone into ‘the well-adjusted product of everincreasing bureaucracy and collectivism” (Frank, 1997:10). This explanatory system,

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 43 widespread as it was alarmist, posited that the failures of the prevailing capitalist order ‘were not so much exploitation or deprivation as they were materialism, wastefulness, and a soul-deadening conformity’ (Frank, 1997:11). Importantly, this explanatory system preceded and definitively shaped the transatlantic counterculture. It was this wholly mainstream critique that produced the counterculture, not vice versa. As one of the counterculture’s most incisive historians has argued, ‘we have forgotten the cosmic optimism with which so many organs of official American culture greeted the youth rebellion.’ Far from harassing and subduing the counterculture, it was regarded by many in the mainstream of American society as a laudable realization of the popular philosophies that preceded it and made it possible (Frank, 1997:13). Just as importantly, the counterculture of the 1960s had of course been preceded by plenty of others (see Gendron, 2002). But these earlier movements were not accompanied by an unprecedented demographic groundswell that produced a distinctly photogenic youth movement whose qualities were heightened by constant media attention in a world increasingly defined by the salience of spectacular imagery. Some have argued that the comparative ease with which important aspects of counterculture were adopted by mainstream consumerism were mere ‘distortions’ of a ‘radical potential’ which needed to be ‘neutralised and captured by a capitalist culture that found itself under genuine threat from radical forces in the early 1970s’ (Gilbert, 2017; see also Gilbert, 2008). But this greatly exaggerates the threat and flatly ignores the chronology and the longer, very well-documented history of the integration of the counterculture with the very mainstream from which it emerged (see Frank, 1997; Turner, 2013). This inherent enmeshment with the mainstream of society is what provided the counterculture of the 1960s with the kind of epoch-defining influence it continues to have. It is therefore probably not too remarkable that most subsequent generations have had their own officially sanctioned teen rebellions that followed along the same well-worn pathways of ‘resistance’ and ‘rebellion’. The overlap of neoliberalism and romanticism has produced a striking contemporary version of the double truth of neoliberalism. Its characteristic model of success is the musical genius, taking a form similar to that of the virtuous capital creator and entrepreneur noted previously. Capitalism needs this kind of singular, transcendent figure to routinely provide evidence of its efficacy. In popular music, the obvious model is the superstar, regardless of the musical tradition they dominate. Their self-evident greatness and artistic superiority acts as a primary vehicle of capitalist realism. Very often they are legitimized more by unambiguous commercial success than any always-contestable artistic success; they represent the world simplified and typified; they represent an exemplary life to be imitated, with their greatness acting as proof of its own larger significance, a significance that points us towards the future through pleasing images that reveal and endorse new features of society (Schudson, 1984). The domination of popular music by a small number of extraordinary figures shows us how this elite domination gives the impression of the liberty and freedom of the great artist, justified through the necessary presence of popular choice and consent (see Fairchild, 2015). What is striking about the iterations of prosperity and privilege embodied in the musical superstar is not their mere character, but how they directly and loyally

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reflect the consequences of neoliberal capitalism. They are the result of the growth of profound inequality. They accumulate great wealth that is inured to the accountability of public life. They are rewarded with great influence that only seems to increase exponentially affording them power that grows almost magically from little more than the great artist’s existing repute. As noted at the start of Chapter 1, musical elites such as Taylor Swift have the power to shape public perceptions of themselves even when these perceptions are produced by compliant (or cowed) intermediaries, powers few others possess. While this power grows from her abilities as an artist, it is also a form of power that is masked by them. The underlying material power grows from her role as the virtuous creator of musical capital. Within this formulation lies an assumption, almost always unspoken, that the making of ‘great music’ rarely has anything to do with the inherent deficits of capitalism, only its wonders. We will explore this idea in the next chapter.

Conclusion: The museum as archive The point of all this is to place popular music museums within a longer and larger trajectory of the recent history of popular culture. These institutions are mostly the very recent products of a long and complex heritage of memorialization and institutionalization within both popular culture and museum culture (see Chapter 4). However, the act of slotting a famous guitar or handwritten lyric sheet into a vitrine or wall display in a permanent exhibition is not simply an act of musical preservation, artistic recognition or, conversely, cultural vandalism, depending on your point of view. The debates surrounding these institutions have presumed a continuing underlying distinction or contrast between high art and popular culture, which these museums are inevitably tearing down to the liberation and empowerment of all (see Bruce, 2006). But this distinction isn’t particularly relevant or useful here. This is because popular music museums are not popular institutions. They are archives. There are a few reasons why this is important. First, archives are not simply places in which the past is organized and categorized as a form of discursive power over and subjugation of the past. Archives are also a form of self-legitimation. They are often a tool a dominant culture uses to affirm and perpetuate itself. Given that the primary self-justification for the products and expressions of popular culture has usually been commercial success, these institutions cut across this more familiar and traditional form of legitimation in an attempt to access a different type of validation and selfunderstanding, one that has only been a dominant part of popular culture for a fairly short period of time (see Funcke, 2009:34–5). Second, the archive is a marker of a particular type of historical consciousness, a form of discourse that ‘aims for potential immortality’ (Funcke, 2009:35). As Bettina Funcke suggests, the archive exists to reflect ‘something that will remain valid beyond its life span. It represents a space that interrupts the mercilessness of the distracted and distraught life in order to enable meditation beyond the plethora of phenomena we categorize under life, life-forms,

 Neoliberalism’s Firmaments of Fame 45 reality, or mass culture’ (Funcke, 2009:37). In short, these places are a central part of the dominant culture in ways that reflect the longer and broader trajectory of that culture’s way of defining and displaying itself. Popular music museums reflect the status of popular music and musicians in the popular culture of recent decades by implicitly reflecting back to us the constantly increasing institutional control that corporate power has exerted over the production, distribution and understanding of this music. They are not merely passive collections mirroring history. They are prescriptive tools that exert a particular type of historical consciousness that serves their sponsors, creators and patrons. When presented with their facades of spectacular attraction and vernacular authenticity, we are meant to see only open, demotic institutions (see Chapter 3). We are not meant to see the power relations that form these archives out of what is claimed to be a universally available common heritage, a heritage which has been displaced and preserved, but not sustained or reanimated. The many many portrayals of transcendent genius and unique expressions of aesthetic power these museums present act as power over ‘us’ and over ‘our music’. These museums are most neoliberal when they locate historical agency in an elite group of exceptional individuals and when they say these individuals represent the agency of ‘the people’. This is how the imperatives of the market are realized at the ideological level and in material form. These displays have a substantial social and material foundation that allows their very particular meanings to enjoy widespread distribution and persistence. One of my main points in this book is to present as thorough an analytical picture as possible of how these rich material repositories act as producers of potential understandings of popular music. It is important to realize, however, that this power takes on material form. Their breadth, form and ambition mirror very closely the post-war culture industry’s aggressive march towards amassing as much power and control over the market in popular culture as it possibly can. In the next chapter, we will see the practical, material forms and processes that are the products of this seemingly quixotic pursuit.

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Figure 3.1  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.2  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

3

Caught between the spectacular and the vernacular

Clearly, it was power that constructed these truths, and such truths were meant to express, justify, and occlude the cultural, economic, and political power that enabled it to operate in this manner. (Luke, 2002:xxiii)

When I first approached Seattle’s EMP, I saw a building that looked like to me a wildly colourful smashed guitar. Its huge bulging panels of pink, blue and silver metal were meant to reflect ‘the spirit of the music, with its flow and movement’ (Gold, 2000:23), glowed and shimmered even in the seemingly perpetual winter gloom of the Pacific Northwest (Figure 3.1; Figure 3.2). When I entered the building through the foyer I found I was in typically and a distractingly complex Frank Gehry space. Then, upon reaching the exhibits on the second floor I was confronted by an imposing sight: the ‘Sky Church’. As the EMPs guidebook tells us: Jimi Hendrix used the term ‘Sky Church’ to describe a place where people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds could come together to worship, learn and share a sense of communion through music. EMP uses its own Sky Church as a grand meeting hall and gathering place. (EMP, 2000a: n.p.)

This gathering space is dominated by what the EMP describes as the largest indoor LED screen in the world. Throughout the day, films about a variety of subjects related to popular music play continuously on this remarkably well-proportioned screen. While dominating a relatively shallow space, the screen can be clearly and comfortably viewed from almost any angle. Also, the sound is always balanced and attuned to the listener’s needs regardless of where they are in the space. The ‘Sky Church’ is a technological marvel. It is wired into a prodigious technical infrastructure of which at the time of its founding, this institution was inordinately proud (EMP, 2000b). Initially, this appears to be something of a paradox. It is somewhat disorienting to hear musicians reflecting on the personal and intimate details of their lives and careers on a screen roughly the size of a three-story house. The reminiscences of musicians or archival clips of the small passing moments of various regional American music scenes appear lost among the spectacular trappings of the EMP.

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This scene, with its celebrity architect, intimidating media infrastructure, and intimations of cultural glory made routine, provides us with a solid if not primal ground to explore the nature of the popular music museum. On the one hand we are presented with the nuts and bolts of American popular music: the gigs, the fans, the guitars, the nostalgia. The exhibits show us prosaic fragments that are the results of the work and lives of unknown numbers of people, famous and obscure, including musicians, engineers, roadies, producers and fans. On the other, we experience these materials within an enveloping material and experiential infrastructure that exerts the power of a particularly ‘pragmatic, matter of fact’ form of spectacle (Retort, 2004). It is a type of spectacle that dulls the sharp edges, straightens the ethical complexity and edges the inconvenient perspectives out of the frame. As the entry into the EMP suggests, popular music museums often inhabit a complex set of tensions between their vernacular content and spectacular forms. These tensions emerge very starkly when we examine these institutions in context and in situ materially, politically and historically. When we do this, as I will do in this chapter, a robust and complex story about the cultural politics they embody emerges. The purpose of this chapter is to bring into material focus the ideas about democracy and neoliberalism examined in previous chapters, specifically, how the artifices and intimations of the mooted cultural ‘democracy’ of popular music conceal the plainly obvious, yet strangely hard to see machinations of a political and economic system that has continually attacked the very conditions of possibility for popular democracy. The Sky Church, for example, with its easy reveries of an unproblematic togetherness through music, is actually girded from the outside world through a good deal of strategically deployed and highly exclusionary political and economic power. As we will see, many of the popular music museums examined in this book embody the system that produced them by presenting their spectators a vision of the freedoms and joys of popular culture but also simultaneously serving to mask the specific series of exclusions of the public from their conceptualization and realization. The material resources upon which these museums were built were the result of a good deal of strategically deployed political and economic power that are part of a very specific kind of economic and urban development regime of which they are a product. This regime is explained below. These museums were made possible through forms of power that reserve the most foundational rights to shape and reshape parts of the cities in which they are set for the most wealthy and privileged. Those who built the precincts in which museums such as the EMP or Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum or the British Music Experience are set were granted the power to reshape large swathes of the urban environments of Los Angeles, Nashville, London, Liverpool, Seattle and Memphis. This has happened in markedly similar ways in each city. The public for whom these institutions have been built, however, have only ever been offered the secondary rights of access and spectatorship. These rights can be arbitrarily constrained or revoked, subjected as they are to conditions which depend in each case on the specific contracts developers negotiated with public authorities to privately manage what used to be public space. In every case examined here, members of the public had no consequential role in the

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 49 remaking of their own cities for the purposes of development and tourism. Yet these museums fashion themselves as places for ‘the people’ to commune with ‘the music’ through the extensive exhibition materials that are continually coded as demotic and vernacular (Fairchild 2018; 2017). It is a striking fact that the exercise of these exclusive political and economic powers has resulted in the preservation of and broad access to collections of important historical materials provided by institutions that commonly work towards increasing this access across a wide range of the public. As noted in the Introduction to this book, there has been a recent surge of academic work that closely examines how the displays and exhibits within popular music museums are filled and how these institutions serve their broad publics in a variety of ways. However, little has done to explore the politics of how these places got built in the first place. As such, this phenomenon requires some detailed attention. In this chapter, I will focus on how a few key categories of material and historical fact can help us understand more fully the place of popular music museums in a range of cities in the United States and the United Kingdom. These categories include the buildings that house these museums, the urban contexts in which each is set and the ways in which these institutions fashion themselves as parts of larger networks of tourism and consumer experience. The material forms of these museums and the processes of their construction and self-presentation produce complex, continuing relationships with the contents they house. These kinds of relationships have been widely observed by museum scholars and others, often as symbolic disguises for unspoken or unacknowledged forms of power (Huyssen, 1995; Gottdeiner, 2001; Karp et al. 2006). The forms of power that created these museums are distinctly neoliberal in character, intent and consequence. They are the result of a careful and strategic collaboration between the state and the market enforcing rules and procedures that are ‘framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even where those spheres are not directly monetized’ (Brown, 2015). These institutions are part of larger spheres of power that required them to ‘comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value’ and ‘do so through the practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors’ (Chaudhary and Chappe, 2016). In every case, the goal was to take public space and public resources and use them for the profit and benefit of private entities. This is what connects these museums to the broader forms of economic, cultural and political power that define our historical era. In order to understand how this happened, I will examine how these places got built and the self-images they project. When we do this we find that these museums are built as one kind of institution but fashioned and sold as a very different kind of institution. As I explained in the Introduction, these places seek to translate the demotic experience of popular music into material environments constructed through the careful use of various forms of anti-democratic political and economic power. What allows these institutions to manage the inherent tensions produced by these contradictory circumstances is the attribution of various demotic qualities both to the music and themselves. These institutions claim to be custodians of ‘the music’ and their exhibits present the more or less standard mythologies of ‘great art’ as captured in the transcendence and triumph of the musicians on display in order to maintain

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their legitimacy as central interlocutors in stories that are repeatedly said to be of ‘the people’ (see EMP, 2000c; Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 2004; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, n.d, 2009). They do so through the display of extensive arrays of the vernacular materials of the music cultures that preceded them and reach well beyond them. These materials include objects, sounds, images and myths. I describe these materials as ‘vernacular’ in order to capture the fact that they are the products of the mundane, organic social, cultural and economic relationships of everyday life. In his wide-ranging study of the global rise of recorded music, Michael Denning makes a crucial distinction between ‘vernacular’, ‘commercial’ and ‘classical’ musics. ‘Vernacular musics’ are distinct from other types of music in that they grew, not only from markets or in marginalized relationships to what he calls an elite institutional ‘clerisy’, but from the everyday lifeworlds of a wide range of communities (Denning, 2017:7–9). Thus, while they may share characteristics and circumstances with commercial musics and even some classical forms, they cannot be reduced to either participation in commercial markets or struggles against elite institutions. In short, the social imprint of vernacular music is far wider than any of these concerns. However, I am calling these museums’ exhibits and infrastructure ‘spectacular’ because their defining feature is that their visitors are constructed primarily as spectators, or more precisely consumers of a spectacle. As the Retort Collective has argued, the spectacle is not simply a set of images or sensory experiences, but a meeting of contending forces in which ‘more and more facets of human sociability – areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination’, have been subjected to ‘a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, [and] virtual realities’ (Retort, 2004: 8). The production of vernacular cultural materials and their appropriation and use by more dominant social and economic powers is a defining feature of this form of spectacle. Of particular relevance here is the fact that in their publicity campaigns, these museums continuously recall what is presumed to be a universally available collective past with which we are expected to feel an undeniable connection and allegiance. Part of their pull is how ordinary these displays can appear to be while simultaneously cloaking their subjects in a form of artistic transcendence that is expressed and reiterated at regular intervals. These displays provide tangible pieces of the collective illusion of a form of communion they themselves produce. The spectatorial roles we are asked to inhabit in these institutions may be imagined slightly differently, but they all make the same general demands on us. They ask us to encounter these complex assemblages of pre-existing materials and organize our senses and attention in order to respond in the expected ways. Despite the geographic spread of the examples that follow, they all exhibit marked similarities in how they participate in larger spheres of neoliberal political and cultural power.

The non-place of the popular music museum Before looking at any specific examples, we need to understand what kinds of places these institutions are more generally. To do this, we need to understand the

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 51 animating social and ideological dynamics that have made them possible. All of the institutions examined in this chapter are integral parts of urban districts that are designed to encourage what Silk and Andrews call ‘consumption-intensive capital accumulation’. These districts are intended to facilitate what they call ‘the physical and symbolic reconstitution of select parcels of America’s [sic] urbanscape into spectacular, multifaceted environments’. These museums are pieces of larger efforts to transform areas regarded by planners and developers as derelict or obsolete into trendy, gentrified manifestations of an ersatz heritage made safely present and continuous with a presumed collective past (Silk and Andrews, 2008: 396). At the same time, these museums are also heavily populated with a vast range of aural and visual materials appropriated from the vernacular traditions whose lineages they seek to celebrate and whose meanings they seek to demarcate. The tensions produced between these two broadly contradictory characteristics make these institutions distinctly complex places. We can understand these tensions more effectively when we understand that these museums are built as what Marc Augé would call ‘non-places’, a spatial and social form spawned by a ‘supermodernity’ that produces spaces of perpetual process, instability and transience. However, they are presented to the public as what he calls ‘anthropological places’, or ‘places of identity, of relations and of history’ (Augé, 1995:52). Anthropological places do not reflect, exhibit or display social life, they produce it. By contrast, non-places are those in which Augé says we encounter ‘the image of what we are no longer’ by becoming ‘spectators of ourselves’ (55–6). He argues that ‘as anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality’ (Augé, 1995:94–5). By this he means, the user of the non-place is defined not by the social relations of everyday life, but by the social relations of what he calls the non-place’s ‘instructions for use’. These contrast with ‘the unformulated rules of living know-how’ that define and are enacted within anthropological places (Augé, 1995:101). Most importantly, Augé stresses the fact that the correspondence between these two kinds of places is not definitional, but rather relational. A place does not simply appear and usurp the non-place or vice versa in some kind of zero sum game of social and spatial power. Instead, ‘places and spaces, places and non-places, intertwine and tangle together’ (Augé, 1995:107). Places routinely emerge and evolve within non-places which can become anthropological places through the agency and exertions of the people who inhabit them, however briefly and partially. But these places can then slip just as quickly back into non-places, returning to a kind of default anthropological void. The empty museum in a deserted entertainment quarter is no one’s home. The places these museums and the larger entertainment districts in which they sit seek to produce are illusory. Neither these museums nor their surrounding districts are stable entities constructed through the persistent social and political relationships grounded on a collective exertion of self-conscious agency. Rather, they are constituted through the more capricious social ties of neoliberal capitalism. These places continually fashion themselves as the kinds of places in which organic social relations are fostered, but they are nevertheless unable to hold onto any persistent traces or lasting residues of the popular agency that may have briefly transformed them. Given the intertwining of

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place and non-place, we can understand the relationships between these buildings and their contents as part of a larger dialectic between how these places are constructed and how they are imagined and presented. These museums are centred around ways of imagining the socially sensuous, bodily and emotional experience of popular music, but they produce experiences in which popular music rarely appears as the subject of the laborious forms of intervention and cultural intermediation that produce our experiences and understandings of it. These facets of their existence are simply not part of their imagined worlds. This conceit is a defining feature of these museums. In both their settings and their contents, there is little to betray much of what has made them. As such, the primary objects of analysis in this chapter are the economic and ideological forces that built these museums, stocked their vitrines and populated their wall displays. When we look closely at the exteriors of popular music museums in Seattle, Memphis, Nashville, Los Angeles, London and Liverpool, we are able to see the place of these institutions in the ‘new geographies of exclusion and landscapes of wealth’ that have developed in the form of entertainment districts in each of these cities (Davis and Monk, 2007: ix). These geographies and landscapes are the result of the careful and strategic use of political and economic power by states and corporations to transform selected urban districts into privately operated, secure tourism and consumption bubbles. All of these districts have been created through an economic system that political economist Aaron Schneider has called ‘dual development’ (Schneider, 2018). This economic model has evolved since the mid-1970s as a central part of the larger neoliberal model of economic development (Harvey, 2005). In the case of cities like the ones examined here, dual development means a close focus on the tourism, services, construction and real estate sectors in which ‘elites impose highly unequal terms, characterized by a few good jobs and many bad ones’ (Schneider, 2018:2). Schneider explains that the markets served by these sectors are international; they operate at high levels of productivity and provide opportunities for significant wealth accumulation. Yet, typical of dualist patterns, these leading sectors are disconnected from the rest of the city; provide few linkages or spillovers to stimulate other activities; provide limited employment; do little to raise levels of productivity in other sectors; and offer little in terms of raising the income or consumption of the general population. (Schneider, 2018:21)

Popular music museums don’t imagine or present themselves as part of a predetermined, largely uniform development strategy of the sort used all over the world. They instead fashion themselves as popular institutions whose ratification has already been effected through the legitimacy of their contents and the potential experiences of these contents that are offered to visitors. However, Schneider’s findings demonstrate that while dual development often produces high economic growth, it also produces high levels of inequality and poverty. This is because most of the benefits of growth accrue to what economists call the ‘rent-seeking’ activities of international

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 53 investors who seek increased and predictable returns and profits drawn from the appreciation of assets such as intellectual and physical property without necessarily producing much beyond this (see Hudson, 2017). Importantly, Schneider concludes that ‘accumulation by dispossession often takes cultural form in the dispossession of the unique community cultures and practices of working classes and popular sectors’ in the service of these ‘rent-seeking’ activities (Schneider, 2018: 33). Such cultures and practices are transformed into symbolic resources from which some measure of profit can be extracted. We will see all of these aspects of this model of economics and urban development appear in each city examined below. These seemingly abstract economic concerns have practical and experiential consequences. These consequences often have a generally uniform cast and consequence, as Silk and Edwards explain: The attendant presence of, in various permutations, shopping malls, themed restaurants and bars, entertainment oriented museum and gallery installations, gentrified housing developments, conference complexes, waterfront pleasure places, and professional sport mega-complexes has, at least partially, precipitated the advancement of a new epoch in the material (re)formation of the American [sic] urban landscape. (Silk and Edwards, 2008:396)

The places they describe are marked by the evacuation of the kinds of social and economic structures and relationships that once marked them as anthropological places, replaced with the social relationships that define Augé’s ‘non-places’. It is crucial to note that the museums analysed here are not dominating institutions in and of themselves. Instead, these museums are symbolically potent, high-profile part of a dominant mode of urban development which prioritizes tourism and gentrification over social development. In the cases that follow below, multiple levels of government collaborated with their primary constituents, real estate developers and allied businesses, to effect the necessary harnessing of public subsidy and appropriation of public resources to provide a low-risk context for investors and, eventually, consumers. These measures displaced existing residents and dismantled pre-existing communities to smooth the way ahead. The museums merely moved into the places left behind. The EMP1 is set in the Seattle Center, a 74 acre plot of land 2 kilometres northwest of downtown that is the product of long tradition of central planning by American urban elites besotted by their own visions of the future. This land was the site of the 1962 World’s Fair, known as the Century 21 Exposition. It still sports the photogenic Space Needle and the once-futuristic monorail. In order to pave the way for ‘the future’, 1

The EMP is the original name of this museum. In 2004, it incorporated the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame originally set in Kansas City and devoted part of its exhibition space to science fiction. The new name was The Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. The name changed again in 2016 to The Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP. When I conducted this research, I only visited the music side of the museum which was called The Experience Music Project. Therefore, I have used this name for the sake of continuity and clarity.

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the city bulldozed large swathes of two of Seattle’s less wealthy neighbourhoods in 1961 (Berger, 2011). In a broadly enthusiastic paean to ‘progress’, one local historian noted that the Warren Avenue and South Queen Anne neighbourhoods had few defenders: The newspapers reported the historic carnage with enthusiasm: It meant progress toward the much anticipated fair. . . . There was comparatively little outcry from the public, no landmarks process or historic districts to protect significant structures. By and large, the Warren Avenue neighborhood was considered blight. . . . Slum clearance was thought to be good urban policy. (Berger, 2011)

Since its creation, this parcel of land has become a routine repository of varied and repeated planning efforts all supported through public subsidy and the friendly debt of publicly issued bonds to facilitate its maintenance and development. These periodic spasms of civic virtue have resulted in the gradual closing off of the district behind the virtual walls of high-profile, high-priced venues and attractions, few of which contribute to the costs of administering the area despite substantial public support (Brandon Sun, 2012; Eskenazi, 2008; Seattle Center, 2008; Associated Press, 2004). The gleaming colourful masses of the EMP sit uncomfortably on the boundary of a part of the city long known for its physical and economic disconnection from its surroundings (Figure 3.3). They loom over the sidewalks and plazas they abut as undulating, impenetrable masses. On my visit in 2011, the area adjacent to and surrounding the EMP was defined by the extensive, seamless presence of four to seven story office buildings, condo developments and parking garages with little to no apparent street life. The main roads surrounding the Seattle Center are little more than particularly efficient traffic sluices unusually well-suited for delivering cars from one part of the city to another. The east side of the Seattle Center was little more than a jumble of parking lots and small outlying structures that housed small nondescript offices. Interestingly, the Seattle Center is often marketed as a major social hub for the city. Images of throngs of young families wandering through a forest of stalls and marquees in blinding sunshine predominate in much of the marketing materials I gathered. And yet, while the Seattle Center hosts a large number of city-wide and regional food and music festivals, when such gatherings are absent the place clearly reverts to its touristic shell waiting for the next event. There are several persistent conceptual commonalities evident between the 1962 World’s Fair and the EMP, built in 2000, that are telling not only for understanding this museum, but the others examined here as well. First, both were the results of elite planning sold through brash promises of wealth and prosperity for all. In each case, planners pushed a vision of a future that was inclusive and would be produced through the grand achievements of social uplift made possible through open and accessible educational endeavours that were closely linked to science and technology. Second, in each case, Seattle was pushing back against a sense of its own perceived immaturity and marginality. As one contemporary observer of the World’s Fair noted just after planning for the event had begun, Seattle’s elites hoped that the exposition would ‘change the national image of Seattle from that of a rainsoaked sawmill town



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Figure 3.3  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

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surrounded by Indian reservations to the modern gateway to the Orient’ (Morgan 1960: 276). This Seattle, he said, was ‘comfortable on her hills’ and was ‘triumphant over neighbors who once dreamed they could break her’ (ibid.). Just as the World’s Fair made the city’s elite’s feel more ‘mature’ at their own ‘glittering projection of life in the year 2000’ (Seattle World’s Fair, 1962), so too has the EMP’s Gehry-designed building offered the city an iconoclastic, ‘world-class’ architectural statement (Russell, 2000). The slightly too rapturous official choruses of support that greeted both projects suggests a problem of maturity that persists across the decades. Consonant with visions of a harmonious future defined by the popular blessings of science and technology, the EMP has also routinely sold itself as an open forum for participation in the social life of the city and the attendant social uplift this inevitably produces. Among its own stream of intemperate claims was the claim to be not only reflecting, but inspiring and shaping, the music of the future. It did so in part through its own grand projections of 800,000 visitors per year, most of whom would clearly be expected to partake in some form of museum-sponsored tutelage (Gold, 2000:23) Education, outreach, and musical practice were central themes in the EMP’s initial salvos of public relations upon its very grand opening in 2000 across the range of magazine and newspaper articles chronicling the event. Co-founders Paul Allen, and his sister Jodi Patton, explained that the goal of the project ‘is built around trying to get people involved in making and experiencing music’ (Atwood, 1999:1, 78). Patton argued that her ‘goal at the highest level is to have people leave with a better understanding of how music affects them–how it affects their lives and history and how they fit into that world. My great hope is that they go out and motivate others to contribute and inspire’ (EMP, 2000a:10). One museum project manager suggested that the goal of the Sound Lab, where visitors can play a variety of computerized musical instruments, ‘was to give people the experience of playing music for the first time, without going into a music store, trying to play Led Zeppelin and being intimidated by the salesman’ (Fricke, 2000:48). Celebrity commentator Neil Strauss reported back for the New York Times that the Sound Lab was the EMP’s best feature. Visitors can ‘adjust the separate tracks of “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics on a mixing board as a studio engineer does’. He noted parenthetically that on opening day, ‘one visitor mixing the song was surprised to find Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, a friend of Mr. Allen’s, reaching over his shoulder to help him’ (Strauss, 2000:E1). Curator Chris Bruce argued that ‘if you can inspire the Jimi Hendrix of the future, you’ve done your job’ (Strauss, 2000:E4). Not surprisingly, the EMP has lashed itself quite tightly to the populist mythology of rock, and especially grunge. Long said to be a resistant expression of an anti-suburban ethos, this mythology has also proved a narrative thread that when tugged on tends to unravel (see Chapters 4, 8 and 9). In the end, placing their story of a music scene gloried for its dissenting autonomy in a carefully managed urban enclave was not the most coherent of strategies (see Lyons, 2004). Neither the Exposition, the resultant Seattle Center nor the EMP have lived up to their rather immodest promises. The Seattle Center has long been accused of failing to integrate into its immediate surroundings, a failure that was a result of design, not

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 57 happenstance. As one history of the area noted, planners treated the World’s Fair as an opportunity ‘to experiment with urban planning in order to improve the appearance of downtown, protect property values, and prevent the spread of the “slum conditions” that threatened to make Seattle like eastern cities’ (Findlay, 1989:5). The original district surrounding the fair precinct was regarded as the antithesis of both the central city and the region’s suburbs. Parts of the area were said to have ‘resisted prosperity’ after earlier elite planning efforts failed to produce the desired effects (ibid.). The development of the Seattle Center did not produce the improvements the city’s leaders sought. Instead, ‘in its urban detachment, the Seattle Center resembled such suburban enclaves as the shopping mall and the theme park’, exactly as its planners had intended (ibid.:10). In recent decades, the Seattle Center has been touted as a centre of activity and participation in the civic life of the city while also being consistently mired in a string of abandoned plans to revitalize and rejuvenate the costly facility (Seattle Center, 2008; Kelleher and Heffter, 2010). Despite the repeated investments the city has made in the Seattle Center, the city continues to suffer the characteristic outcomes of dual development. Tourism has been booming in the city for nearly twenty years, but so have poverty and homelessness, markers of economic inequalities that result from wages being kept aggressively low in large areas of employment (Murnan, 2015). This is due in part to ways in which investment has been directed towards a small range of industries that tend to produce more in ‘rents’, or returns on the appreciation of assets, than on more widely beneficial investments. And it is in this circumstance that we can see quite vividly the idealized image of the EMP as an ‘anthropological place’ of musical practice abutting its simultaneous status as a non-place constructed to appeal to transient populations of tourists. The museum does indeed seem to inspire and excite with visitor numbers and service to the community (Museum of Popular Culture (MoPOP), 2016). Yet, this cuts both ways. The EMP is part of a complex of symbolically effective images about Seattle that, when sold to the wider world, drive the very forms of dual development that undermine the communities that produced much of the music the museum celebrates (see Lyons, 2004). Similar tales of engagement and experience can be found in Memphis. These are also founded on the city’s musical patrimony, in this case, the city’s self-proclaimed mythological status, as the fount from which all contemporary American popular music has sprung. The official Memphis tourism guide presents it to us like this: If Memphis music moves you, how will you feel at its source? Energized, as you dance at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music? (There’s space designated, so bring your moves.) Star-struck, rolling through the gates of Graceland? Reverent, inside Sun Studio while hanging with the spirit of Elvis, Johnny Cash and Rufus Thomas? (Check the addition of the DJ booth Dewey Phillips used to broadcast Elvis for the first time. Ever.) Heady, walking Beale Street to the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum? That’s about the time it’ll hit you – how deep Memphis music runs, how it connects us all and how it lives on today. (Memphis Map and Travel Guide, 2015: 4)

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Again, we see an appeal to an anthropological understanding of place, a place of innate social and historical connection linking the past to the present. The primary material form of this engagement comes through the once-reviled but now-sainted Beale Street corridor and the adjacent Peabody Entertainment District, both of which occupy most of the southern end of downtown. Beale Street has been justly celebrated, not only as a particularly vibrant corridor of commercial activity, but as a socially and historically important place through which powerful and influential aspects of African American culture developed for nearly a century (Lauterbach, 2015). After the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, in 1968, the existing processes of ‘white flight’, deindustrialization, and the deskilling of lower paid workers were exacerbated in Memphis (Smith, 2018). Typical descriptions of the transformation of Beale Street from an African American business district in a violently segregated city to an influential example of heritage tourism typically describe the neighbourhood as a ‘wasteland’ prior to gentrification (Stout, 2015:103–10; see also Elkington, 2008). Over several decades beginning in 1980, the area around Beale Street has seen nearly all of the existing buildings replaced by the familiar array of building renovations and conversions, hotels, the construction of several purpose-built sports stadiums, and themed restaurants mostly housed in buildings that are only intended to recall the district’s past through their size and ornamentation. This literal reconstruction of the four blocks of Beale Street that are now the primary tourist attraction is seamlessly connected to the larger Peabody Entertainment District containing FedEx Forum basketball arena, the AutoZone Park baseball stadium, and several other attractions. At the eastern end of the tourist district, next to the basketball arena sits the Smithsonian Affiliated Rock and Soul Museum. Its placement at the edge of a jumbled plaza renders it strangely invisible, overshadowed as it is by billboards for events at the Forum and the looming sign for the Gibson guitar factory across the street (Figure 3.4). As with many cities across the American South, Memphis has been long subjected to forms of urban planning and municipal governance that entrenched the power of industrial interests and economic elites (Brownell, 1975; Biles, 1985; Abbott, 1981). This power has resulted in swathes of the historic city being periodically wiped away for various development and urban ‘renewal’ projects. At the time of my visit, beyond the reconstructions, however, there were multiple blocks of fenced off empty lots, and gated parking lots. Only a short ten-minute walk east from the tourist district, one is confronted with the now historic remains of a scorched earth urbanism. In huge swathes of the area around Beale Street, in what used to be a crowded and complex collection of buildings there is almost nothing left with the exception of a few fairly magnificent churches. As with the Seattle Center, Beale Street is more host than anything else. The street can spring into a life and vibrancy for which it is both symbol and inspiration when an event is on, slipping back into its sparse, touristic patience until the next one. The music-themed gentrification of Beale Street has become the conceptual anchor for the perpetually approaching but never quite realized renaissance of the city. Boosters have continually claimed that the immediate benefits of the project serve all (Elkington, 2008). Beale Street is routinely referred to as the most visited



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Figure 3.4 Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum Exterior, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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tourist destination in Tennessee, a claim perhaps sharpened somewhat by similar claims routinely made by those who run Graceland which is only a few miles south. As with Seattle’s vision of a prosperous future, Memphis too has been heir to a splendid vision of an enviable future, in this case a racially harmonious future that might put the ghosts of the region’s violently segregated history to rest. However, even the most studiously neutral observers have admitted that the redevelopment of Memphis has gradually demolished the possibility of the site remaining a continuous and living African American community, replaced with ‘a simulated landscape of former (musical) glories, packaged for tourist consumption’. While the processes of ‘urban renewal stimulated by cultural tourism has had negative impacts on black residents as gentrification has brought greater rents and other costs’, displaced residents have been left with the comforting thought that their ‘heritage is belatedly being recognized and promoted more effectively’ (Gibson and Connell, 182–4). The efficacy of dual development in Memphis has proved nearly identical to that in Seattle as the markers of tourism and real estate-focused development continue to define the city’s ec6onomy, including ample opportunities for wealth accumulation that do little to benefit the local population who are not directly invested in them. Importantly, the specific types of poverty very nearly match those found in Seattle, with African American residents accumulating the least wealth, the fewest assets, and the lowest salaries all despite a long boom in tourism (Delavega, 2018). As with Memphis, Nashville has also created a downtown entertainment district in which music-themed attractions, in this case the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the adjacent behemoth of the Music City Center, have displaced correspondingly wide chunks of downtown. Standing at the corner of 5th Avenue South and Demonbreun Street in the lower Broadway district, it is difficult not to feel intimidated by the scale of architectural hubris (Figure 3.5). The district now consists almost entirely of sporting facilities, themed restaurants and extensive hotel complexes produced by an extraordinary rate of gentrification. The short walk from the Sheraton Nashville Downtown on Union Street down to the corner in front of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum can tell us something important about what downtown ‘Music City’ is. In my case, it started in a room on the north east corner of the hotel on the top floor, due to some seriously attractive winter rates. The room was decked out in appropriate ‘Music City’ style with a Hatch Show Print over the bed reading ‘What Would Dolly Do?’ and a pillow on the bed with a stencil of a cassette tape printed on it in true hipster fashion. The view was fantastic, allowing a perfect overview of downtown’s mix of glass and chrome towers and brick and mortar anchors. As you leave the hotel after descending in a glass fronted elevator through the building’s massive hollow interior, you exit onto Union Street. If you walk down two blocks and take a left you pass the Hermitage Hotel, one of the more elegant reminders of Jim Crow Nashville. Before you make the turn, however, you might notice the same curious thing I did: music. Right at the corner, in a metal box affixed to the streetlight, is a speaker which perpetually plays country music. If you walk down 6th Avenue, I would suggest taking a left onto Church Street before you get to Broadway as the corner of 6th and Commerce is little more than



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Figure 3.5  Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Exterior, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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a concrete void with the original Nashville Convention Center in front of you and parking garages on both sides. On the corner of Church Street and 5th Avenue, however, you will find Puckett’s where you can get an excellent breakfast and possibly some live music, depending on the hour and the crowds. Turning right down 5th takes you towards Broadway past the legendary Ryman Auditorium, the ‘Mother Church of Country Music’, at least according to the t-shirt I bought there. The entrance to this elegant, acoustically renowned building is hemmed in by the architectural carbuncle that is the Nashville Convention Center. At this point you can either cross over Broadway or walk down to your left and take in the strangely empty shelves at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop or walk quickly past the depressing mini-spectacle that is Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville franchise. If you stand on the corner, however, you will notice that the tilted disc on the roof of the Bridgestone Arena and the squat block of the Hilton form a kind of consumerist backdrop to the faux turn of the twentiethcentury buildings that line Broadway to the left. As you cross over Broadway and continue down 5th you find that you are gradually enclosed in a kind of canyon that drops you on Demonbreun Street with the soaring peak of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum lurking over you to the left and the hard to fathom bulk of the three block long Music City Center stretching off almost literally as far you can see. Just over the road there is another outdoor stall of municipally supplied music, also in the form of the traffic box with a speaker in it. However, it is the east foyer of the Music City Center that holds a particular interest here. As you go to enter you may notice that you are stepping over a kind walk of fame with sandstone tiles with the names of musicians such as Conway Twitty, Chuck Berry and Marty Robbins etched into them. Upon entering the foyer, there is a row of off white rocking chairs sitting by the two story windows (Figure 3.6; Figure 3.7). You are free to arrange these chairs as you like and sit down in the rather spacious and reverberant foyer and watch the three screens in front of you. These show a disjointed series of quotes, images and remembrances of lives lived through music. You can then gaze at the vitrines which contain, among other things, Don Gibson’s pipe and ‘Whisperin’ Don Williams’ Nudie Suit. The foyer itself is elegant and sparse with a roof that almost floats four stories above you with white light fittings emerging from the warm red wood ceiling. Despite its scale, the space is surprisingly cosy, at least when it is empty and comparatively quiet. My purpose in narrating this brief walk is to emphasize how thorough and utterly coherent downtown Nashville can be if you follow along what is surely a familiar and expected tourist itinerary. This coherence suggests a level of meticulously thought out planning that seems to leave little to chance. It also bespeaks of a level of perceptual management that links this place to the others examined here, especially Memphis, which is something of a musical tourism sister city to Nashville. While Nashville has also been party to the same long-term dynamic of southern American urban governance that shaped Memphis, Nashville’s political and economic elites have recently embraced broader visions of the city more relevant to what contemporary urbanists have taken to calling ‘global downtowns’ (Peterson and McDonough, 2012). The recent transformations wrought on Nashville’s city centre, according Lloyd and Christens, have been designed to service both ‘extravagant financial



Figure 3.6  Music City Centre, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.7  Music City Centre, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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elites on the one hand and hipster creatives on the other’, both demographics being suitable to the increased ‘attention to cultural amenities and cosmopolitan symbolism’ that has shaped the city’s redevelopment (Lloyd and Christens, 2012:116–17). Much of this development has followed the ‘dual development’ model, funded by luxurious tax breaks and markedly creative debt financing devices many of which still hang over the city (ibid.). More directly, the state spent $623 million on the Music City Center, $128 million on the adjacent Omni Hotel and crafted a special tax district to enclose the site in a three mile radius of financial dispensation (Allyn, 2012). Unlike Memphis, however, a once tightly closed shop of elite planning and city governance has given way to a more inclusive, global elite-dominated planning regime, one that is more synchronized with not just local, but also the national and global economic paradigms described by Schneider (see Johansson, 2007). The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Music City Center in particular are the results of this synchronization. Each, along with the adjacent Bridgestone Arena, anchored a process that has drastically changed the shape of the South Broadway district. Against the arguments and influence of advocates of the ‘New Urbanism’ in Nashville, who argued ‘against suburban sprawl, as well as against attempts to lure capital back into downtown through prefabricated entertainment destinations’ (Lloyd, 2011:115), both buildings have acted as justifications for the rapid transformation of downtown. What has emerged is the exact sort of ‘Disneyfied downtown’ the New Urbanism counsels against (ibid.). Through the forcible demolition of buildings housing such community institutions as the old Musicians Hall of Fame, forced to relocate to the other end of downtown, one disgruntled local noted that the ‘lower Broadway region of downtown Nashville is the last bastion of what Music City used to be. Large civic projects like the new convention center continue to gobble up landmarks and venue space that keeps the music in Music City’ (‘Nashville Convention . . . ’, 2010; Ward, 2013). However, it should be clear that this disgruntled commentator holds a substantially different understanding of what ‘the music in Music City’ is for than do those charged with the continual and demanding task of attracting of the requisite density of touristic hordes. The January–June 2015 edition of the Nashville Visitor Guide, for example, provides us with the boisterous imagery and language that tells us what exactly ‘the people’ to communing with ‘the music’ should look like. Throughout this 106 page tsunami of ‘things to do’ in America’s fourteenth best place to live, something called ‘the music’ holds pride of place (Nashville Visitor’s Guide, 2015; Memphis Travel, 2015, 8). It is ‘intricately woven into the fabric of the community’ and spread throughout a tapestry of ‘neighborhood hot spots that offer their own hint of cultural authenticity all year round’ (Nashville Visitor’s Guide, 2015:8). We then see Brad Paisley, index finger raised in front of a frame-filling image of an American flag, panoramic shots of capacity crowds at Barbara Mandrell’s Fontanel Mansion amphitheatre and at the Ryman Auditorium, as well as the 4th of July celebrations in the Broadway Historic District. Throughout the guide, thin platinum blonde women and roundish, hairy men ply their musical trades as small groups gazing reverently at the displays at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on the opposing pages. The guide gives us a good

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 65 long look at the overwhelmingly dense forms of musical sociality for which Nashville is famous, the music acting as a synecdoche for the wider forms of communion on offer. The scale of development and rhetorical centrality of musical experience has been similar in the gentrification in downtown Los Angeles. Following the dual development model, the city participated in creating L.A. Live, a grim, brightly lit behemoth, home to the Grammy Museum, which occupies a similarly pacified urban terrain, its dazzling exteriors belying the complex and bitter contests fought over it for years. Walking the district around L.A. Live yields similar lessons as a walk through downtown Nashville does. The building itself hulks like an impenetrable wall of consumerism down two of the city’s famously wide, anti-pedestrian boulevards. If you stand on the south east corner where West Olympic Boulevard meets Figueroa Street, you are staring at sixteen lanes of traffic coursing by a massive building made from a series of rectangles variously arrayed in a complex and multilayered facade. These stretch off farther than you can see with much of the frontage laced with logos and billboards. As you walk around the adjacent streets you find that all of the buildings variations on the theme. There are blocks and blocks of boxes and rectangles, many spaciously set among extensive parking lots. One or two of the buildings in the area link downtown Los Angeles to its first building boom of what were then tall buildings, some from the 1920s, some notable for the stone filigree that graces their porticos. However, a cursory inventory of the buildings slotted around the L.A. Live ‘neighbourhood’ makes it clear that the same scorched earth urbanism was visited upon this section of downtown as that visited upon the other cities examined in this chapter. There are only a slight few buildings in the area that date back past the turn of this century and the scale of the development of L.A. Live, the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Convention Center, and the surrounding environs suggests the destruction was extensive. L.A. Live has been a central part of a larger redevelopment of the downtown centred around sports and art, and later, entertainment, shopping and upscale residences. As Marina Peterson observes, one of art’s roles here was ‘masking social relations and power dynamics’ by acting as a kind of border which marked ‘inclusion and exclusion [regarding] efforts around housing, amenities, and galleries’. These ‘have fixated on a divide between new residents and the homeless, granting authority, rights, and membership to some and not others’ (Peterson, 2012:211). Those to whom rights have accrued are those who ‘have substantial control of about a hundred acres in downtown Los Angeles’ (Bruck, 2012). In a New Yorker profile of Tim Leiweke, CEO of L.A. Live’s parent company, the cityscape that preceded its construction was imagined to be entirely without human form or value: Fifteen years ago, the area was an urban wasteland: thirty acres of flophouses, bars, strip clubs, and empty lots, forlornly situated near the 10 and 110 freeways. Now Leiweke can point to Staples Center, a twenty-thousand-seat arena, and to L.A. Live, a bustling entertainment district, which are almost entirely owned by A.E.G. Beneath flashing billboards advertising L.A. Live sponsors like Coca-Cola and Toyota, there are dozens of restaurants, a J.W. Marriott/Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the Nokia Theatre, the Grammy Museum, and a multiplex Regal Cinema. (Bruck, 2012)

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Figure 3.8  Grammy Museum Exterior, Los Angeles, California, 2016. Photo by the author.

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 67 The improvements spoke for themselves, apparently, and the same patterns of public subsidy and private gain noted above were repeated here. Further, despite a muchheralded Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) negotiated between community groups and the dominant parties, the same racially and economically exclusionary patterns of development played out in Los Angeles as they have elsewhere, with the outcome producing once again, ‘a more stratified and segregated urban space’ (Wu, 2012; Bader, 2016). As Marquand and Fuller argue, the ‘new modes of social control accompanying the “urban renaissance” and the continuing privatization of inner cities’ have proved as effective as the old. Further, these strategies of urban development ‘in effect steer possible political efforts away from dealing with the structural causes of social tensions. The efforts instead concentrate on a surface beautification’ (Marquand and Fuller, 2012:164). The gentrification of downtown Los Angeles has reproduced the most common outcomes of the dual development pathway in which international markets of investors and tourists are courted at the expense of the social development of those communities directly affected by the developments. The focus on tourism, real estate, and construction has confronted working-class and poor residents of downtown with the task of trying to afford increased rents on a dwindling number of places that could be described as ‘affordable’ (Collins and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2016). This in part exacerbated a rise in homelessness which grew into enough of a crisis to attract the attention of United Nations Human Rights Council who sent its envoy, Richard Alston to investigate; his response was highly critical (Alston, 2017). Yet despite the actual exclusion, displacement and stratification, both the Grammy Museum and L.A. Live are sold as open, inclusive, interactive experiences. The Grammy Museum in particular is presented to the public as one of a whole collection of vibrant anthropological spaces in downtown. Despite the actual exclusion, displacement and stratification, the Grammy Museum’s handbills, pamphlets and ads exhort us to ‘Visit Music’ or ‘record with famous producers and songwriters’ while using music ‘as a gateway to learning, inspiring and cultivating creativity, critical thinking and selfexpression’ (Grammy Museum, n.d.). Similarly, L.A. Live was sold as ‘Times Square West’ and ‘the centerpiece of a rejuvenated downtown’ that had the power to bring the city centre’s ‘old movie houses, art deco buildings, thriving fashion and jewelry districts, open-air markets and performing arts centers’ back to some form of a life worth living (Barrett, 2005; Martinez, 2007). Both attractions are enclosed in forms of experience made material, Downtown, ‘the most historical, multilayered and fascinating part of Los Angeles’, a place where ‘contractors are busy flipping historic buildings into condos, new galleries are luring patrons, and trendy restaurants and bars are turning on the lights’. Downtown’s ‘bump-and-nudge vitality isn’t to be missed’ (Downtown . . ., n.p.). Apparently, this ‘vitality’ didn’t include the DIY music venue The Smell or the Downtown Independent movie theatre, both demolished to make way for L.A. Live parking (Barragan 2016). Despite these paeans to the past, it is hard to view the L.A. Live precinct through the lens of the brand of urbanism that defines the downtowns of cities such as New York or Philadelphia or, until recently, San Francisco. When the real estate developers’

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achieved their perceived tabula rosa surrounding Olympic and Figueroa, pushing those who once lived their further south and east of downtown, they set in train a conflict that has yet to dissipate, between a tightly managed ‘live-work-play’ district and the surrounding areas which, while having intensely and increasingly concentrated poverty pushed at them, nevertheless display what one observer earnestly called the realization of ‘LA’s long-deferred dream of a bustling sidewalk culture’ (Marshall, 2015). Markedly similar patterns of urban governance and development have also been implemented in the UK. Interestingly, the two UK museums examined here are linked to one another in unexpected ways. The British Music Experience, which was housed in the O2 Dome in London until 2014, and the Beatles’ Story set in the Albert Docks in Liverpool, are both parts of ongoing, multi-decade, multi-billion pound redevelopments of two districts whose transformations are mind-bendingly expansive and expensive. In each case, the music museums are only tiny bits of glittery attraction whose confected image is far more impressive than their actual presence and whose appearance and connotations have been used to smooth the way for the much larger and more lucrative schemes that followed. These music museums formed small, not overly successful parts of much larger schemes to transform these areas in their totality. The O2 Dome, original home of the British Music Experience, stands as an appropriately crass monument to the distinct brand of old Tory and New Labour profligacy that fell under the euphemism ‘public-private partnership’. Born as the Millennium Dome, the building developed as a kind of World Expo housing the so-called ‘Millennium Experience’ exhibits, and is now a venue so vast to promoters are required to provide warnings to vertigo sufferers who might end up in the cheap seats (Davies, 2018:8). It fell into serious financial problems almost immediately after its opening when the anticipated annual flood of 12 million visitors did not appear. As The Economist disingenuously noted, many thought it a suitable ‘metaphor for the whole New Labour project: a large, grandiose exterior was commissioned, and only afterwards did anyone think about what to put inside it’ (‘Inside Blair’s . . . ’, 2000:53). The building was sold for a fraction of its cost and was eventually turned into a wellliked music venue comfortingly enclosed by a shopping mall. As in downtown Los Angeles, a huge parcel of the Greenwich Peninsula has since been ceded to a single developer to implement a 25-year master plan to develop one of the biggest and most luxurious housing developments in the UK (Hill, 2015; Thompson, 2015). As the larger redevelopment project emerged, the exterior of Thames-side location of Greenwich was increasingly pierced with surveillance cameras and public art projects, both necessary pieces of infrastructure for developments in their larval stage. At the time of my visit, the area surrounding the O2 Dome had more images of any potential development that those developments themselves (Figure 3.9; Figure 3.10). Long lanes of ads adjacent to empty bays for the anticipated tide of passenger buses told you that the Greenwich Peninsula was indeed ‘a place where you can’. The ads included glossy, high resolution images of the Antony Gormley sculpture that was just metres away placed on a stand over the Thames, attached to what I can only presume is now a busy passenger ferry wharf. At the time of my visit, the play and work portions of the future had been largely taken care of. The living was yet to come. As such, it was much easier



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Figure 3.9  O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.10  O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

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to see and feel the emptiness of the non-place of Greenwich asserting itself as we left on the train back to Moorgate on that late summer afternoon, the mocked up images of the massive development to come still vivid in my mind. When I visited in 2011, the trip from the Tube station to the British Music Experience, well inside the consumerist labyrinth of the O2 Dome, was long enough to get a pretty clear picture of this museum’s place in the larger development. At the time, the Tube station itself was pristine. It sported ads for the ATP event to be held there as well as ads for the Royal Philharmonic with Placido Domingo and Angela Gheorghiu, and of course the BME. As you leave the Tube station and cross Peninsula Square, with its row of trees and massive hedge, the place takes on the feel of a suburban housing estate and shopping centre. Importantly, at the time a significant part of the path from the Tube station to the interior of the O2 Dome was traced by a blandly populist timeline of British music, the ecstatic faces of generations of revellers enticing you to become one of them if you weren’t already (Figure 3.11; Figure 3.12). A series of canonic events in the history of popular music were ticked off, such as the vague ‘1959 The Miracles and Motown’ and the more specific ‘1982 Michael Jackson Thriller’. Each billboard hoarding represented a distinct era with the revellers’ stylings matching the events whose listing they are adorning. Further, these faces of music fans just like us confronted visitors in genre appropriate facial expressions and gear. Upon entering the building, I entered a circular shopping mall, providing a perceptually engulfing ring of amenities the well-used, high-profile performance arena. These included a protective wall of chain restaurants and themed eateries and pubs. On my circuit of the place, I periodically came across ads for events such a show by Q-Tip and ‘Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition’ as well as Sky’s sponsorship of the ‘World’s First 3D Gallery’. As you walked you were occasionally confronted with cheap, cardboard display ads for the BME, one of Jarvis Cocker pointing you in the right direction and another of Johnny Rotten leaning angrily, mouth open, sneer intact (Figure 3.13; Figure 3.14). The BME itself was slotted into a comparatively small space tucked away above the ground level. The BME hardly had pride of place inside the building, despite the extensive hoardings devoted to ‘the music’ outside. The BME was housed here for five years before its recent move that other capital of British music, Liverpool. Liverpool, too, bears the sharp marks of the ongoing transformation of its waterfront and extensive docks areas. This sprawling district links the City Centre to the waterfront through the sleek, privately owned Liverpool One shopping area and chunky, brick-laden, past renown of the Albert Dock complex, home of the Beatles’ Story museum. The regeneration of these substantial parts of the city have been claimed to be at least in part the result of the so-called Liverpool model that has produced what Cox and O’Brien call ‘a wider narrative of how British cities can develop and respond to the continued challenges of deindustrialization and global competition’ by linking urban regeneration to culture and creative industries (Cox and O’Brien, 2012:94). But despite such tags, Liverpool has followed the dual development model in the same way as the other cities examined here. And the champions of this model also presumed that focusing on tourism and real estate through the attractions of the ‘creative industries’ through public subsidy would acquire both the investment capital



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Figure 3.11  O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.12  O2 Dome Environs, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

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Figure 3.13  O2 Dome, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.14  O2 Dome, Greenwich Peninsula, London, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 73 to support high-tech industry and the desirable demographic of those who work in these industries as residents. As Connolly explains, within the UK, this approach, fostered by the ruling New Labour party, matched its much heralded ‘Third Way’ politics, in that it seemed to offer a ‘post-ideology’, politically appealing rapprochements between antithetical concepts: art/culture; social justice/economic development and city centre boosterism/community development. (Connolly, 2013:164)

Built on the same conceptual foundations as those described above as the New Urbanism, champions of this model presumed that expanding the creative industry sector through public subsidy would attract both the investment capital to support high-tech industry and the desirable demographic of those who work in these industries as residents. The arrival of the Museum of Liverpool in 2011 and the International Slavery Museum in 2007 filled out an extraordinary range of the similar amenities of the type the expected ‘post-ideological’ residents should be expected to crave. The more consequential recent policy development, however, was the granting of the Mersey Waters Enterprise Zone in 2011. Covering two broad areas on either side of the River Mersey, the zone offers substantial tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies to businesses that relocate there. Of particular relevance is the recently approved Liverpool Waters project that will spread across the entire waterfront area, ‘a development at the scale of Canary Wharf and designed like Dubai, covering 60 hectares with clusters of skyscrapers and 1.7 million sq metres of offices, homes and shopping’ (Smith, 2013). Like the 42 acres of the City Centre given over to Liverpool One, Liverpool Waters is also private. It will contribute to an unbroken expanse of private property that will stretch from Liverpool One, past the Albert Docks and all the way up to the Prince’s Docks at the north end of the waterfront. The jumble of material that confronted visitors on Liverpool’s waterfront in 2011, when I visited, is gradually being cleared and flattened to make way for what amounts to an entirely new waterfront district. In 2011, I walked through Liverpool One and along the waterfront up to the Princes Dock. At that time, the waterfront was in some stretches nothing more than a confused mass of clutter including building materials and decorations stored for future use, and in others was literally hundreds of square feet of completely empty ground, ground that had been cleared in anticipation of the final erasure of what was no doubt one of the more vexing ‘non-places’ in the city. I was very lucky to see this ground so fallow, so to speak. Walking through Liverpool One, the seamless clarity of the buildings and plaza are striking. The light green and aquamarine tint of the walls of windows trimmed with mottled, light brown and white stone. As open-air shopping centres on private land go, it was pretty luxurious. As you leave the shopping precinct and move towards the waterfront you pass through the Thomas Steers Way, a well-coiffed and meticulously landscaped passage with a Bierkeller on one side and a Hilton hotel on the other; the buildings on both sides curved inwards to subtly offer a slight sense of containment and insularity. There is an eerie and crisp emptiness to the plaza area that deposits you onto the Strand. From here you can cross over the road and walk by the Northern end of the Albert Dock complex,

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home to such attractions as the Beatles Story and the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Upon reaching the River Mersey, you might notice a statue of Billy Fury caught in midhip shake, as part of the Museum of Liverpool’s ‘On the Road’ programme in which some of the city’s ‘best-loved objects have escaped from the museum stores and will be turning up in surprising and unexpected places’. As you curl around to the right and walk north, there is a cityscape worth pausing to take in as it is a study in architectural contrasts. To the south is the red brick smokestack of the Pumphouse and moving along to the north you will see just next to it the white jutting angular glass of the One Park West complex. The contrasts continue as you move north with the sharp, jet black rhombuses of the buildings that house the Open Eye Gallery set behind the old Great Western Railway warehouses. Completing this scene is the Museum of Liverpool, an angular white building comprised of a collection of rectangles and rhombuses in a kind of yin and yang relationship with its dark neighbour (Figure 3.15). As you move further north and the George’s Pierhead Road turns into Canada Boulevard, you are presented with Liverpool’s justly famous ‘Three Graces’, the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building. These three magnificent buildings once defined the Liverpool skyline. These front onto a wide and spacious pedestrian plaza that houses the Liverpool tourism bureau, a smaller building the matches the Museum of Liverpool in jagged form if not scale. The Three Graces bring the public thoroughfares to an abrupt halt and what follows moving north is the private Princes Dock area, set aside for hotels such as the Crowne Plaza, residences like the Waterside and a range of offices. The billboard for this area, what is called the Mersey Waters Enterprises zone, offers ‘100% business rate discounts for five years’ and a ‘simplified planning process’. As with the other examples, Liverpool too has experienced a scorched earth urbanism as planners and developers simply flatten large areas of the city and fatten up what’s left for development. While the results are no doubt glossy and bright, the process is anything but democratic (Wainwright, 2014). Arguably, the Liverpool and Mersey Waters projects bring to a massive head the processes so strongly boosted during Liverpool’s European City of Culture year in 2008. This designation helped pave the way for the enterprise zone and the redevelopment plans which have handed over the majority of the city’s defining waterfront district to a private development company. The Liverpool model has proved itself to be a comparatively acceptable way to push public resources into private hands. The perceptual change, at least has been significant, as Cox and O’Brien explain: Perhaps the most significant – and widely reported, though not universally felt – element of success was the apparent corollary around morale, confidence and perceptions, particularly in relation to the city itself. Press coverage changed significantly in both tone and focus, national surveys showed improvements in public perceptions, and visitors felt safer, enjoying the overall atmosphere and welcome and rating Liverpool better than previously against other cities. (Cox and O’Brien, 2012:96)

As with the other examples noted here, intangible benefits such as improved civic morale and confidence accrued to a broadly construed ‘public’, while the perhaps more

Figure 3.15  Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool, UK, 2011. Photo by the author.

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tangible benefits accrued to other parties, especially those privatized for the use of businesses and affluent residents. Meanwhile, the Liverpool City Council has had to acknowledge that if current trends continue, it would no longer be able to fund even the most basic services in the near future (Murphy, 2015).

Conclusion: Creative class war One of the primary ways of analysing and explaining the range of developments examined here has been through the many extremely influential theses on the supposedly strong relationship between the arts sector and urban renewal (Florida, 2002; Zukin, 2009, 1995; Cronin and Hetherington, 2008). This tradition of work claims that the economic shift to an age of defined and dominated by technology and information has produced a dominant class of powerful people whose demands don’t stop at self-enrichment, but extend to living an authentic and psychologically rewarding life, uniquely and equitably tuned to the life of others. This in turn means that cities become the defining centres of creativity and innovation that has made the cities that host them most amenably safer, more prosperous, and more diverse (Florida, 2002:287–9). However, the methods, measures and results of this new form of urbanism are at best circularly self-satisfying (Peck, 2005:744–5). As scholars such as Aaron Schneider and Jamie Peck have shown, the tangible results of the models of dual development and the creative classes have not proved the economic successes many thought them to be. As Peck argues, ‘rather than “civilizing” urban economic development by “bringing in culture”, creativity strategies do the opposite: they commodify the arts and cultural resources, even social tolerance itself, suturing them as putative economic assets to evolving regimes of urban competition’ (Peck, 2005:763). Further, he says, the creative class thesis is ‘predicated on, and designed for, neoliberalized terrain. Repackaging urban cultural artifacts as competitive assets, they value them (literally) not for their own sake, but in terms of their (supposed) economic utility. In order to be enacted, they presume and work with gentrification, conceived as a positive urban process’ (Peck, 2005:764). One of the main outcomes of this brand of urban redevelopment has been the normalization of ‘flexible labor-market conditions, lionizing a class of workers that can not only cope with, but positively revel in, this environment of persistent insecurity and intense, atomized competition’ (Peck, 2005:764–5). While creativity and tolerance are universally regarded as both ethically and economically necessary for the ‘creative city’, the processes which have produced the seemingly open and diverse urban climes I have been examining have been here decidedly mired in a model of urbanism that seeks first and foremost to create the urban blank slates developers and planners seem to demand to produce the monumental consumerism that defines their work. Put simply and clearly, whether we are talking about the jumble of pleasure on a summer evening on Beale Street, a Christmas tree lighting at L.A. Live (which in 2011 was sponsored by Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol), it is not possible to shake off the fact that everything in these places is present to be put on sale and every key element was always an ad for

 Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular 77 itself. While these places do occasionally and briefly produce what Augé has called ‘anthropological places’, the empty plazas, foyers, parking lots of the non-places that are always lurking within them are impossible to erase, despite the best efforts of the state and their patrons. The museums I’ve examined here bear a few important characteristics that mirror those exhibited by the power brokers who created the contexts into which they have been set. Each museum has based its institutional legitimacy on the appropriation of the affective labour of the musicians and listeners whose agency they have sought to display in their collections and exhibitions. These museums have done this through the continuing collection and display of a huge range of aural, visual and material artefacts. This inevitably results in the imposition of some kind of institutional imprimatur on the music’s circulation and its meaning. The most important mediating influence found throughout all the music museums studied here is the imputation of an originating and persistent place to their subjects, an imputation that simply doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny if we wish to consider these institutions as more than merely a collection of famous objects, images and sounds. When we do this, we find another less comforting story. We find institutions that display the vernacular materials of popular music and culture in contexts defined by ‘the physical manifestations of synthetically conceived identities transposed onto synthetically conceived places, demarcating culturally independent sites where corporate value systems materialize into physical territories’ (Klingmann, 2007:83). These corporate value systems appear in a complex relationship with those presented in the displays found inside these popular music museums, where we are repeatedly told about and shown imagined worlds of which we are already a part, worlds only made possible through ‘the music’. However, these museums are not simply organizing systems for sets of cultural symbols that are intended merely to ‘disguise the instrumental exchange’ that is also at the heart of these museums; in short, that they not appear as simply ‘another relation between [a] commercial place and a consumer’ (Gottdiener, 2001:73). Instead, we are asked to exchange our time and attention for something more familiar and meaningful. ‘The music,’ much like ‘the fun’ or ‘the pleasure’ these urban districts promise and provide, makes these socially and politically consequential conglomerations of material and economic power feel far more immediately and enervating than they might otherwise. As a result, they become far more intimately affecting and personally eloquent than any mere conglomeration of bricks, glass, chrome and conceit could. It is this crucial, if not defining aspect of these institutions that needs far greater attention. For what we are meant to experience inside these places in some significant way dependent on forces pervasively in evidence outside. While thoroughly shaping and defining these places, the power that makes them, and makes them sensually satisfying, remains outside, excluded, without any immediate, apparent or necessary expression inside. As a result, they become far more intimately affecting and meaningful than any mere conglomeration of bricks, glass, chrome and conceit ordinarily would. As such, these museums are intimately and indissolubly connected both directly and indirectly to the broader forms of economic, cultural and political power and accumulation that define our historical era.Caught between the Spectacular and the Vernacular

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Part II

Ideal musical objects

4

Popular music museums and the experience economy

Phenomena such as the cult of the celebrity or the fetish for the painted masterpiece are revealing – the celebrity is not an individual but a social relation characterized by the accumulation of attention, and similarly the masterpiece accumulates the value of all of the gazes that have fallen upon it. (Beller, 2006/7)

We have reached an important turning point in this book. The point of the first part was to set out the broad purposes of this book and link the study of popular music museums to the cultural intermediation of popular music within neoliberal capitalism. More specifically, it has been to place the acts and consequences of that mediation in some direct analytical relationship with the defining forms of power and agency that have shaped their exhibitionary practices. I have argued that these forms of power appropriate the affective labour of musicians and fans and set the material and symbolic markers of this labour within social and economic relations defined by the privatization of public resources and the increasing exertion of corporate power. In doing so, I have been arguing against a particular tradition of scholarship which tautologically claims that popular culture is democratic because it is in fact popular. I have also shown that this long and influential tradition of scholarly work hasn’t simply marginalized or even ignored the extent and consequences of corporate power in popular culture. Instead, it has declared any anti-democratic exercise of these forms of power in popular culture to be an ideological and practical impossibility specifically due to their vetting by ‘the people’ who take the form of a ‘market’. As I have argued, these museums are extensive, exacting, laboriously-constructed, unintended contradictions to this claim. In looking forward to the rest of this book, a detailed analysis of two broad and fairly obvious concepts will be offered in support of these claims: the ideal musical object and the ideal musical subject. In analysing the ideal musical object, I will show how the exercise of neoliberal corporate power shapes and defines the material contents of these museums from the exhibitionary types these museums draw on to construct their exhibits to the ways spectators are led through them to the kinds of meanings we are meant to take away from their constituent elements. Neoliberalism has shaped and defined the kinds of images, sounds and stories we experience in them. In analysing the ideal musical subject, I will focus on the forms of celebrity and the kinds of portraits these places construct of musicians. The central claim of

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these chapters will be that these museums are important producers of the social and symbolic formation I call the ‘rock imaginary’ (see Chapter 7). The various tokens of this particular form of reputational currency, such as iconic images or classic stories and attributions of exemplary character or genius, contribute to an important form of contemporary musical celebrity that began to take shape in the mid-to-late 1960s. The emergence of this form of celebrity encapsulates the growing presence of multiple forms of greatness through aesthetic transcendence broadly attributed to musicians across almost all popular traditions and eras of the twentieth century both prospectively and retrospectively. In recent years, it has become difficult to find any relatively highprofile genre or tradition of musical practice whose members have been excluded from this particular way of talking about music. My goal is to draw firm links across all of these expressive arenas, from the broad contours of the dominant social and economic order to the expression of its core values in the material form of these institutions and the ways in which their often elaborate contents fit right in to it.

Popular music museums in an experience economy One of the more prominent and distinguishing characteristics of the ‘new museum’ has been a focus on ‘the experience’, the unique and compelling nature of which is meant to make these places stand out from within the competing ruck and maw of the shopping mall, theme park or the massive screens that are proliferating in ‘entertainment districts’ everywhere. On the one hand, the visitor is meant to do and feel things particular to museums and their extremely special collections of experience facilitators: new artworks, classic dioramas, old and possibly exotic objects. On the other hand, museums are meant to display their wares within a long history of related forms of display, a history that is meant to be implicitly present at least to some degree. However, as Martin Hall has argued, new museums are now less concerned with conserving and displaying their objects than they are with ‘enclaving’ and ‘diverting’ them into collections meant to enhance the value of the institution through the value of the visitor’s experience of them (Hall, 2006: 93). In other words, the purpose of a museum’s collection was not to simply to be present as a part of a broad historical narrative, the trajectory of which was meant to include the observer in the certain embrace of one’s civilization. The purpose of the collection was also to provide something subtly close to entertainment. In some contemporary museums, the spectator’s experience is meant to be an inherent contrast to the range of spectacular entertainments usually available nearby. In others, they are merely advertised as a moderately reflective supplement to them. There are two influential descriptors of the kinds of ideal social relationships new museums have sought to create that will form the background to this chapter: the experience economy and relational aesthetics. These ideas have developed almost as if in tandem, describing and advocating markedly similar forms of social encounter. These ideas, when placed side by side, form a complementary set of prescriptions for how to imagine the purpose contemporary popular music museum. There are two things I will use them to describe: the intent of the popular music museum to construct

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 83 what I argue is a largely illusory demos and the types of experience on which this demos is meant to be based. Both the experience economy and relational aesthetics were brought into being by what their creators regarded as the same suite of unavoidable changes in the wider world. The perceived necessity and inevitability of these two ways of constructing social relations is based on the ‘progression of economic value’ from an economy of things to an economy of ideas, according to the market strategists, and by the transition from the ‘society of the spectacle’ to the ‘society of extras’, according to the theorist of art and curating (Pine and Gilmore, 1998:97–8; Bourriaud, 2002:8–9). Rhetorical styles aside, they were largely describing the same things. The market analysts recognized new social and economic conditions that they claimed were threatening ‘to render irrelevant those who relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services’. They foresaw a world dominated by comparatively intangible forms of economic exchange (Pine and Gilmore, 1998:105). The art theorist saw this as well, perhaps a bit less optimistically, claiming that ‘we feel meager and helpless when faced with electronic media, theme parks, user-friendly places and the spread of compatible forms of sociability’. This has seen us all ‘reduced to the condition of a consumer of time and space’, hence his use of the term ‘extras’ (Bourriaud, 2002:8–9). He argues that ‘we’ want art that is ‘directly experienced’ and that produces a social space that is ‘partly protected from the uniformity of behavioral patterns’ (Bourriaud, 2002:9). Both theories are posited as forms of resistance to a world perceived to have become dominated by empty spectacles and inauthentic forms of exchange that alienate and isolate. Both sets of thinkers present their ideas as ways of exploiting the inherent sociability of their respective spheres of interest in order to imagine more grounded and meaningful relationships between producers and consumers or between artists and audiences. Both relational aesthetics and the experience economy are meant to create modes of exchange that are located at a unique moment of social and material opportunity. They claim to offer to a broadly construed ‘us’ the conditions of potential emergence from the dominant systems of social control (Bourriaud, 2002:16). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the market analysts who express this idea most straightforwardly: While prior economic offerings–commodities, goods, and services–are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level. Thus, no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind. (Pine and Gilmore, 1998:99)

Both theories suggest a resituating of subjectivity within a utopian levelling of the field of cultural production made possible through participation and collaboration. The artist is no longer the sole author of an art work just as the business is no longer the sole producer of the experience. Every work of art ‘is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world’

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(Bourriaud, 2002:22). It is the artist’s job to place themselves within these relations most fortuitously. More rigidly, the market analysts suggest that experience travels along dual axes of participation and connection simultaneously. We simply need to inhabit that elusive moment in which we are just active enough and just immersed enough to be deeply and perfectly satisfied (Pine and Gilmore, 1998:102). It is the business’s job to place themselves on these axes at the most mutually advantageous point. The broad, generic consensus of this body of thought claims that these kinds of experience are merely part of a ‘sophisticated game’ produced by ‘quintessential semioticians’ in which ‘the spectator’ is treated as an ‘intelligent participant’ in the production of collaborative meaning (Martin Hall, 2006:72; see also Fox, 2005). Those broader social relationships that stand outside of the meaning-making capabilities of the individual spectator, those which have the power to shape and direct these acts of collective agency, only lurk as shadows to be illuminated and rendered benign by the magnificent light of human perception. Both of these concepts have been influential in the development of new museums. They have similar blind spots. In a searching critique of relational aesthetics, Clare Bishop identifies a notable lack of recognition of the power relations that pervade and shape the art experience. Bishop argues that the works championed by relational aesthetics value ‘compassionate identification with the other . . . in which an ethics of interpersonal interaction comes to prevail over a politics of social justice’ (Bishop, 2012:25). She further notes that the necessary public cooperation inherent in such works often means that ‘idiosyncratic, or controversial ideas are subdued and normalised in favour of a consensual behavior upon whose irreproachable sensitivity we can all rationally agree’ (Bishop, 2012:26). This is also a pretty good diagnosis of a good deal of contemporary consumerism. Producers of consumer experiences are just a bit less conflicted about it. The notable commonalities between these two otherwise dissimilar sets of ideas suggest that ‘experience’ is not particularly useful category of analysis, at least in this case. Without extensive qualitative and quantitative work, it is far too multifarious, subjective, circumstantial, unpredictably generative and difficult to access to make anything more than thin generalizations about what ‘we’ learn from museums or what we can know about ‘our’ subjectivity as a result. However, we can think about experience in a more helpful way by seeing it as a mediating forum for competing and complimentary expressions of agency and power. In this sense, both the experience economy and relational aesthetics overlap substantially and tellingly. This can help us see how these concepts are used by institutions that mean to incite our engagement and harvest the resulting attention we supply, attention that sustains and nourishes the institution. Then we can look at the relationships museums create with their publics through the varied materials meant to capture, produce, and use those things that fall under the label ‘experience’, looking at it, not just as a set of circumstances, but as a socially produced phenomenon that we can examine as it is manufactured in specific situations. In this case, we are talking about how popular music museums excite and gather visitor engagement and attention and how they use our experience of sounds, images

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 85 and objects to do so. Further, they are doing so under a very particular prevailing social and economic order, a neoliberal one, in order to enhance the value of their collections and institutions. We need to understand these museums through a more direct understanding of the enduring relationships they create between the types of display they produce and the dominant social and political order our experiences are meant to serve. Instead of simply talking about experience or attention or engagement, we can talk about how museum displays work as concatenations of various forms of affective labour that are extracted, accumulated and formed into various kinds of value. Below, I will show how several popular music museums reflect a prevailing social and economic order through their displays and exhibitions, examining these as part of a broader collection of similar representations of this and other orders that have preceded and shaped them. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, if ‘capitalism has not only survived, but ceaselessly expanded its empire, it is because it could rely on a number of shared representations – capable of guiding action – and justifications, which present it as an acceptable and even desirable order of things’. It is ‘precisely the set of beliefs associated with the capitalist order that helps to justify this order and, by legitimating them, to sustain the forms of action and predispositions compatible with it’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005:10). If we consider the recent evolution of the ideals of neoliberal capitalism, as suggested in previous chapters, and the ideals of the new museum, to follow below, there are many intriguing parallels between them. Each developed across the same time period. Each stresses inclusivity as a primary value. This inclusivity is often expressed through concepts such as diversity, collaboration or equality. Each stresses open participation as a primary mode of engagement. Each increasingly relies on appropriating the value of varied forms of popular and unrecompensed affective labour to survive. Each also relies on the positive judgement and benevolence of elite classes of political and economic actors to survive. In this and the next chapter, we will see how these commonalities confirm how popular music museums are defined by a system of power that lies behind their sometimes lustrous sheen of open-ness, publicness and democratic-ness. This begins with an understanding of the social collectivity, that illusory demos, they are intent on creating. To understand this, we need to figure out where they came from and how they got to be what they are. This means briefly tracing the broad history of the similar kinds of institutions that produced them and specifying how the varied and often jumbled collections of attributes popular music museums display solidified into the kinds of social and material forms we see today in their buildings, exhibitions and displays.

Outlining the historical demos of the popular music museum Museums have always sought to produce an ideal demos through their various regimes of display. These institutions have long sought and possessed the power to shape a

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complex range of social relationships into coherent publics. The ideal forms of public connection which have long been said to define the social collectivities museums produce have taken many forms that have changed significantly over time. Demos is a complex and contested term, but as Wendy Brown has argued, it most often describes ‘the aspiration that the people, and not something else, order and regulate their common life through ruling themselves together’ (Brown, 2015: 202). That is, an ideal demos is meant to include everyone in the structure and processes of power. Importantly, a democratic demos is defined by equitable power relationships within which individuals and groups can exercise broadly commensurate forms of agency in a context that allows the social relationships that sustain this agency to be perpetuated over time. Popular music museums routinely construct visions of such relationships in their displays. These museums implicitly and explicitly claim to reflect a universal demos which is defined by a set of complex set of social relationships that extend beyond relationships of power and necessity to include elective relationships of civic and political affinity. There is a broad consensus that over the course of the last three or four decades the museum, as an institutional type, has evolved from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’. These institutions were once part of a cultural regime meant to inculcate a certain type of moral rectitude and disciplinary uplift in its publics. They sought to assimilate those publics into a coherent entity within which each individual spectator held an ideal, and ideally homogenous, collection of attributes. Old museums were said to produce a particular type of citizen who learned and accepted the formal boundaries of the prevailing regime of power (Bennett, 1995; Bennett, 2006a; Griffiths, 2002; Henning, 2006; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006). The new museum, however, is said to be a more open, inclusive kind of institution. It is meant to recognize and incorporate everyone equally, not by attempting to erase or flatten the differences between them, but specifically recognizing those differences and incorporating these into a prevailing social and economic order similarly said to be built on the same kinds of openness, participation and recognition. The new museum is expected to participate in the informal internalization of social norms of thought, perception and behaviour on the part of their subjects, norms that are markedly different than those of the past (Message, 2006a, 2006b; Vergo, 1989; Witcomb, 2003; Knell et al., 2007; Ross, 2004). Whereas the engagement and attention that is excited and aroused by museums was once said to be in the service of a certain form of discipline, now, the role and purpose of the subject, whether as an audience member, consumer, fan or museum visitor, has changed along with larger shifts in the economy and culture. The new museum is part of a complex of institutions that exert a form of power ‘that extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population – and at the same time across the entirety of social relations’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:24). As noted in the previous chapter, neoliberal capitalism is the proper name for the form of this power that predominates in our age. It is a system of power that must make use of the agency and imagination of consumers and audiences in order to expand and survive. As such, the forms of agency involved in looking and listening (i.e. ‘experiencing’) must be part of the social relations of a market whose goal is to make

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 87 our engagement and attention economically valuable. As Beller argues, this means that the social relationships we participate in through our engagement and attention to media are ‘not only a scene of representation, but of production’ in an economy in which ‘perception is increasingly bound to production’ (Beller, 2006:2–3). Our attention, however it is evoked, is a source for the production of value (Bueno, 2016; Wu, 2017). Popular music museums present us with an intriguing amalgam of multiple traditions of museum practice that they use to transform spectator attention and experience into value. These forms include those drawn from art museums, history museums, halls of fame as well as important aspects of corporate museums. They even reflect some hint of the history of shrines and pilgrimage sites. Therefore, when we link these comparatively recent institutions to the larger historical trajectory of the museum, we can do so in fairly straightforward ways as popular music museums are little different in many fundamental respects than a range of more traditional institutions and also bear some resemblances to the now established and familiar types of ‘new’ museum so well catalogued in the literature. I will briefly and broadly summarize the links between popular music museums in particular and the history of the museum generally in the pursuit of two goals. First, I want to use this brief overview to inform the typology of attributes that popular music museums possess that follows on from it so we can understand what kinds of museums they are and what they are meant to do. Second, I want to give a few salient examples of how they extract spectator engagement and attention considered in explicit relation to the history of museum display types in order to show how they serve the existing social and political order. There seems to be little question that modern museums were created to construct a particular kind of public made out of the relationships they fostered between particular kinds of objects and subjects. This is how the museum has been an important vehicle for the creation and shaping of an ideal demos. As Jeffery Abt has shown, the modern museum emerged out of ‘nearly two millennia of intersections among the uses of objects, the spaces of display, learning practices, and communities’ (Abt, 2006:115). He explains how in a wide variety of time periods and societies across Europe formal acts of public display often had complex effects on the symbolic delineation of civil society and the practical experience of power. Different acts and regimes of collecting and study often reflected and shaped different modes of understanding and perception. These in turn had important consequences for the diffusion and display of knowledge as access to collections and enjoyment of the social and material benefits that accrued from them was often deeply intertwined with dominant forms of political and economic power (Abt, 2006). Abt’s summary of the context which saw the emergence of the modern museum is particularly apt: The increasingly combustible swirl of grievances that sparked the English revolution, and resonated in the American and French revolutions, are best understood in the context of developing visions of the public good, economic opportunity, and political sovereignty that juxtaposed unbearable actualities with nearly utopian ideals. Throughout this sequence of revolutions, regressions, and

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Within this context, a particular concern over ‘the ownership and uses of cultural patrimony’ allowed the political and cultural space for the public museum to develop and solidify in the nineteenth century (ibid.). The form of modern museum that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was not simply the formal product of dominant forms of power and politics. It was also definitively shaped other forms of display often called ‘popular entertainments’, such as theatrical panoramas, world’s fairs and expositions, department stores, and wax museums (Greenhalgh, 1989; Griffiths, 2002; Sandberg, 2003; Colligan, 2002; Crary, 2002; Rydell, 2006; Mitchell, 2004). The links between the public museum and popular forms of display such as these have been carefully demonstrated with scholars showing that the modern museum has long been intimately associated with a wide range of associated forms and institutions. Despite the rhetoric of exclusivity and edification many of their advocates and defenders sometimes used to distinguish these institutions from those thought to be less than salutary, museums have nevertheless had to compete for the attention of the broader public for a long time by routinely seeking to both distinguish themselves from and sidle up to purportedly lesser places of social gathering. As such, the publics that museums have sought have not always been clearly delineated either in terms of their status, habits or expectations from those sought by producers of other forms of more ‘popular’ public display. Crucial aspects of the visual culture of the museum as well as its modes of address and concern with perceived contests between the effects of the spectacular with those of rational engagement are the results of these long and complex associations (Griffiths, 2002:18–26). Arguably, the most salient and persistent distinctions between these varied forms of public address have to do with the overarching purposes of these varied institutions. Above all else, the modern museum was meant to construct its public by using an institutional desire for social transformation in the form of moral and social improvement (Bennett, 1995; Crary, 2002: 9). The comparatively recent appearance of popular music museums has been part of the unprecedented expansion of all kinds of museums around the world. This ‘museum building boom’ (Guerzoni, 2015) has repeatedly stoked anxieties about the capacity of the museum to either withstand or engage with the barrages of the popular and spectacular to produce the kinds of robust cultural citizenship with which it has long been associated have been a central subject of debate since the 1980s. As a great deal of contemporary scholarship has shown, the phenomenon of the ‘new museum’ has been the result of a broad range of complex and contradictory economic and social pressures brought to bear on museums in recent decades. These pressures have come in the form of consequential demands for social ‘relevance’ and economic ‘sustainability’ demonstrated by ever growing crowds and an ever greater presence in the collective social awareness. These pressures have gradually produced new forms of museology and new kinds of museums (Message, 2006a, 2006b; Vergo, 1989; Witcomb, 2003; Knell et al., 2007; Ross, 2004). These new types of museums and allied professional practices are often marked by an increased reflexivity and transparency

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 89 in the collection, categorization and display of objects. They are also marked by a broader shift in museum practice away from a primary focus on the conservation and preservation of collections and a greater focus on the production of particular kinds of social experiences (Henning, 2006; Smith, 1989: 19–21; Graham and Cook, 2010; Ballantyne and Uzzell, 2011). The new museum is an institution working within a set of parameters designed to foster self-consciously inclusive and representative institutions. They are meant to promote experiential and interactive engagement on the part of publics already expected to be steeped in complex economies of attention and experience. As Kylie Message has argued, the new museum emphasizes ‘an interdisciplinary approach toward representation and diverse, multimedia strategies of address through interactive and multimedia modes of display’ (Message, 2006b:605). These institutions bear what Message calls a ‘connection to the commercial architecture of shopping malls, and the contemporary commodity culture of mass media and popular culture’. They also show themselves to be part of a ‘chronology that emerged in the mid-19th century with the emergence of new technologies and strategies of spectacle, experience, conspicuous consumption and novelty’ (ibid.). These strategies have borne voluminous fruit in recent years. One of the more important developments in the broader contemporary museum culture has been the comparatively recent assertion of corporate power and forms of governance over traditional forms of museum organization, development and display (Cummings and Lewandowska, 2004: 616–7; Wu, 2002; Rectanus, 2002; Stallabrass, 2004). These have taken various forms in traditional art and history museums, but are also turning up in increasing numbers of personal, corporate and private museums. Most of us experience them in the form of the ubiquitous corporate ‘partnerships’ in most art and history museums. These partnerships do not merely supplement a museum’s portfolio of supporters or benefactors, but define the range of allowable work the institution can carry out to a significant degree. As many scholars have argued, corporate sponsorship and philanthropy have transformed the status of the museum’s collections into assets which could be leveraged into those forms of power that define the museum sector, amount of wall space taken up, numbers of objects lent, and then used to produce ‘simulacral experience rather than aesthetic immediacy’ (Krauss, 2004:612). These developments have particular relevance for popular music museums in that the manner of exhibit conceptualization and institutional operation in corporate-oriented museums has acted as a necessary precedent for them by providing practical, implementable models of development and funding. Central to this historical shift is corporate involvement in museum culture that saw forms of support move away from a model based on patronage and philanthropy to those defined by contractual sponsorships or partnerships (Rectanus, 2002). These sponsorships were explicitly sought as part of informal arrangements between states and corporations to reduce public funding and increase private funding, as a kind of stealthy privatization of power (Evans, 2015; Stallabrass, 2004; Rectanus, 2002). Decisions over the use of gallery space or staff expertise and labour as well as the distribution of other institutional resources have been increasingly subject to increasing corporate influence, either directly or indirectly, for decades. This has resulted in the

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expansion of corporate expression and power in a sphere in which it had once been either absent, marginal, or comparatively minimal (Wu, 2002:122; Werner, 2005). As a result, ‘corporate models of institutional operation and management (e.g. the endless search for market approval, efficiency, etc.) are increasingly accepted as legitimate by government, nonprofit, and educational institutions’ (Rectanus, 2002:23). In most places where this process has occurred, it has bred a distinct set of instincts for survival on the part of nominally nonprofit organizations. Their legitimacy, stability and prescriptions for and definitions of success are determined by the interests they share with their sponsors (Rectanus, 2002:23–4). The interests of these sponsors should be fairly straightforward in that to be sponsored, museum content must ‘correspond to the corporation’s target markets’, generate a good deal of positive media attention, and promote themes that amenable to the aims and ‘add value’ to the self-image of the sponsors (ibid. 30; see also Stallabrass, 2004). These developments, taken in sum, created a welcoming context for the museums examined in this book. It is precisely these kinds of relationships that popular music museums are founded on. By their settings and exhibitionary agendas, defined by the particular pursuit of engagement and attention, we can place popular music museums within the history of museum practice along these lines. They initiate visitor engagement by displaying the sounds, images and objects of what they routinely advertised as ‘our music’ or ‘the music of our lives’. The idea of a collective musical past is front and centre in these institutions’ campaigns of self-fashioning. One of the main goals of the exhibits in popular music museums is to place museum visitors within the larger social formations they are expected to imagine themselves within already. As such, these institutions are not the somewhat idealized ‘differencing machines’ imagined by some museum scholars (Bennett, 2006b:46). Instead, they have a pronounced tendency towards fairly traditional iterations of contemporary museum practice, most often presenting themselves as entirely naturalized frames for their largely familiar materials. Their displays are posited merely as loyal representations of the wider musical world. This demands a broadly construed validation and justification for the shape and tenor of the exhibitions which, as we will see, is sought through the pervasive deployment of the mythic origins of ‘the music’. At the same time, their material infrastructures clearly draw on the ideals of the new museum, stressing a populism built on notions of inclusion, collaboration and intimate, personal attachment through musical experience. We will see examples of this throughout the second and third parts of this book. For now, however, we should have a clearer understanding of what these places are like in their more fundamental, practical attributes that define what kinds of display and forms of exhibition they create.

A typology of exhibitionary experiences As with most museums, all of the popular music museum displays I have studied for this book have at least one common purpose: to confer status and value to the contents

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 91 of their exhibitions, a status and value based on the relationship between the museum, its contents and their visitors. These institutions have a tautological relationship with their collections, as the act of collecting and displaying particular objects immediately confers at least some measure of elevated status to those objects. As Beller pithily notes, ‘the masterpiece accumulates the value of all of the gazes that have fallen upon it’ (Beller, 2006/7). Importantly, popular music museums have been markedly ecumenical in the different types of visual and aural display they have embraced. They have used a potpourri of methods, techniques, and strategies that have their origins in a broad array of institutional types, and exhibitionary styles and qualities that are plainly evident from their displays. One handy way to understand their broad range of techniques for attracting attention is to organize them in relation to two broad streams of museum practice implied in the historical survey presented above: a populistvernacular stream of museum display and an institutional-educational one. The former consists of the rich history of the display of commodities in department store displays and popular entertainments such as dramatic panoramas and wax museums. The latter is defined by those forms of display which, while sometimes similar in form, were often presented as more ‘elevated’ or ennobling. These would include traditional forms of exhibition in history museums, natural history museums and ethnological displays but also various kinds of related institutions such as world’s fairs, exhibitions and expositions. There are also a range of more contemporary museum types which do not fit into these broad historical distinctions, but instead draw on both. This would include corporate museums, halls of fame, personal or private museums, as well as shrines and pilgrimage sites. As Preziosi and Farago note, ‘we live in a world in which virtually anything may be exhibited in a museum, and in which virtually anything can be made to function as a museum’ (Preziosi and Farago, 2004:2). What conjoins the many diverse acts of exhibition and display found in popular music museums is the ways in which particular forms of value are ascribed to the contents of these displays by the museums themselves. The ways in which they do this are instructive to examine. One of the primary ways in which popular music museums enhance the value of their collections through particular modes of display is drawn from the long institutionaleducational stream of art museums and natural and social history museums. To start this analysis, there are several qualities that art museums and popular music museums share that show us this. Art museums exist to display exemplary works and those regarded as worthy of imitation. They enhance the reputation of the artist by cultivating their works with an aura of material and conceptual uniqueness (Henning, 2006:16–7). The canonization of exemplary works is organized by medium and historical period as well as through the thematic juxtaposition of various works and artists. These display techniques exist in an implicit and intertwined relationship with the many mediating critical discourses on art and art history. Popular music museums have drawn these characteristics from art museums to shape how they canonize artists and organize their works and biographies through the mediums and the historical periods in which these artists worked. That is, we are meant to see extraordinary works produced by extraordinary artists usually organized in a narrative or historical sequence centred around the musical traditions or genres to which artists contributed. Importantly,

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every museum examined in this book has done this under the presumption that their organizational schemas ‘mirror (on a smaller, partial, or fragmentary scale) the societies within which they are located, faithfully replicating or reconstructing social or cultural histories that at the same time are presumed to pre-exist their re-presentation’ (Preziosi and Farago, 2004:143). This fact has a few important implications. First, it presumes an ideal spectator who is already part of the social formation the museum is purporting to reflect, a formation which is also clearly meant to be already encompassing the music. This is a subject position shaped by the many mediating discourses surrounding popular music. Second, it suggests that these institutions are somehow not “representational artefacts” in and of themselves distinct or even separate from their contents (Preziosi and Farago, 2004:142). Instead, they try to appear as if they are some kind of neutral arbiter of the value of the materials they have collected and displayed. But they can only do this because their exhibits suggest that the value of the things they collect and display already resides elsewhere (Preziosi and Farago, 2004:142). These museums implicitly claim to be invoking an unbreakable, inevitable continuity in the ongoing value and relevance of the materials they exhibit to the past, a collective past which subsumes the artists, their art and their publics into a collective experience presumed to be out there somewhere. These museums claim a value in the histories they construct that goes beyond a plainly present, necessary and structured nostalgia. One important way they do this is by attempting to link their displays and exhibits to the deepest wellsprings of a particular music’s most storied origins. While examples of this abound, some of which be examined in later chapters, I will look at one example here that illustrates this point particularly well. At the end of the main exhibition hall on the second floor of Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, there is a shrine to the ancestors and forebears of country music. It is called the Hall of Fame Rotunda. This is the room in which the unique commemorative plaque for each inductee is displayed. This room is part of a larger set of symbolic architectural gestures produced by the museum that are meant to physically ensconce the visitors in the history of ‘the music’. As such, its symbolic and practical importance are intertwined. According to A Visitor’s Companion, ‘the building forms a massive bass clef when viewed from the air’, with the rotunda forming the round, hanging mass of that clef familiar to bass players everywhere (Visitor’s Companion, 2004:5). The rotunda anchors the east end of a building whose front is meant to resemble piano keys and whose dramatic upward sweep is meant to recall the tailfins of ‘a 1959 Cadillac sedan, a favorite of many rockabilly and hard country singers’ (ibid.). The rotunda itself is meant to variously resemble ‘a drum kit, a rural water tower, or a grain silo’ (ibid.). It is capped by tower that is both a replica of the distinctive diamond-shaped WSM radio tower, the long-time broadcaster of the Grand Ole Opry, and is also intended to recall a church spire; these are obviously central influences on this musical tradition. As the tower pierces the roof of the rotunda, it does so through a stack of circles meant to ‘evoke the evolution of recording media, from the 78-rpm record to the vinyl long-playing album, the 45-rpm single, and the compact disc’ (ibid.). The final adornments on the exterior are a collection of stone

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 93 bars ringing the rotunda’s entire circumference. Set on five bar lines carved into the concrete base, they match the melody to the Carter Family’s version of ‘Can the Circle Be Unbroken?’, a song long said to have started the country music industry upon its release in 1935 (ibid.). The rotunda is only a short walk from the end of the permanent exhibitions. As you exit those exhibits, you can go one of two ways. One path takes you to a large, flexible, highly interactive exhibition on the future of country music where, according to the audio guide, ‘you are about to discover your country’. These rooms feature booths in which you can sing along with selected songs and view a series of up and coming stars reflecting on their main influences and inspirations from country music’s past. The other path takes you to that past, ‘the actual Hall of Fame’. Just before you enter, there is a striking feature. There is a small round pool of water into which a small, but perpetual flow audibly trickles (Figure 4.1). The water then flows alongside the wide, curved, sweeping staircase that leads visitors back down to the main foyer. This stylized design gesture is accompanied by another, a verse from Ed Snodderly’s song ‘The Diamond Stream’, which is carved into the wall next to the fountain’s source. The song likens the endless flow of water to the endless flow of song. The fountain is trimmed in a type of light reddish brown sandstone called Crab Orchard stone which was quarried from eastern Tennessee. This kind of material symbolism abounds inside the rotunda as well. It is an open, quiet, contemplative space dedicated to acknowledging the presumed permanence of this musical tradition. East Tennessee sandstone adorns the walls of the rotunda which hold the plaques of the Hall of Fame members. The mottled brown and red flooring is made from southern pine, ‘like that used in the floors of southern warehouses and factories’. According to Dolly Parton, the narrator of the audio guide for this final stop on the guided tour, ‘this special room was designed to recognize hall of fame members in a style that’s in keeping with the high honor. Everyone who is recognized here is an equal. The members’ plaques are placed randomly around the room’ and ‘the room is round to ensure that every hall of fame member has a place of equal importance’. At the centre of the room and, to some extent, at the symbolic heart of what the museum calls ‘the pinnacle of country music’, (Visitor’s Companion, 2004:54) is a sandstone disc. This disc was originally installed at the entranceway to first Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1967 which was located on 16th Avenue in the heart of Nashville’s famous Music Row. It was moved to this new home in 2001. It reads: ‘Here lives country music: Its spirit, its soul and its history, its people and its songs.’ Directly above it rests the bottom half of the rotunda’s tower, dramatically descending from the roof coming to a sharp point to loom about fifteen feet from the floor. The top two-thirds of the rotunda is ringed with windows allowing in a great deal of light during the day, but also giving the room a distinctly spacious feel. Just below the windows is a thick band of a deep maroon with the words ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ stretching across half the diameter of the room in massive gold letters1 (Figure 4.2). The original hymn on which the Carter family version is based is called ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’

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Figure 4.1  Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.



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Figure 4.2  Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

Figure 4.3  Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

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The experience of this room is meant to incorporate the spectator into something bigger than they are through a collection of highly stylized design gestures. The most striking of these is the presence of the Thomas Hart Benton painting called ‘The Sources of Country Music’ (Figure 4.3). This painting was the last canvas produced by Benton whose later work was comprised of dramatic and stark representational paintings and murals mostly depicting ‘Americana and the simple, rural small town life’ (Visitor’s Companion, 1004:58). Building on Benton’s stated desire to produce paintings that ‘would carry unmistakably American meanings for Americans and for as many of them as possible’, this particular work is said to subscribe to Benton’s ‘notions of democratic art and its accessibility to the common man’ (Visitor’s Companion, 2004:59). As such, it is a material manifestation of the purpose of the rotunda itself. The six by ten foot painting is hung in the centre of the back wall of the rotunda so it faces visitors as they enter. The composition is organized around a series of figures each representing an element of the many traditions which constitute country music. In the upper left corner in the rear, we see a small group of women each wearing a bonnet and their ‘Sunday best’ singing from hymnals as their preacher guides their performance. Separated from them by a low wooden wall are two seated men with fiddles and two women, one seated playing a dulcimer, the other standing and singing. They play together on a simple wooden floor as several couples dance behind them. In the right foreground, a cowboy stands playing his guitar while slightly to his left and further in the background an African American banjo player mimics his pose almost precisely. In the far background, we see a church on a hill glowing in reflected light, while a group of African American women dance on the riverside below as a steamboat passes by. The painting is dotted with items heavy with meaning, such as a jug, a coil of rope, a saddle and a few regional flowers. The most dynamic element of the painting is the one which has commandeered the gazes of most of the main figures in the painting: an early-twentieth-century passenger train, its body lurching forward as smoke trails behind, roars through the middle background. The eyes of the musicians and dancers are locked on it as if their music is accompanying the inevitable march of progress it symbolizes. All of the elements of the painting seem to tilt dynamically towards the centre of the canvas and then the collective gaze of the main figures takes our eyes upwards towards the train that unifies this visually crowded and diverse scene. Benton was said to extremely concerned about getting the train exactly right, eventually using ‘as his model Engine No. 382, the “Cannonball Express,” the train in which Casey Jones perished in his famous wreck’ (Adams, n.d.). This painting accomplishes in comparative miniature what the museum as a whole attempts. It links together a diverse and complex range of social histories and finds a place for them all within a unified and harmonious landscape of American musical history. It does so through the judicious use of both fact and fancy, the verifiable and mythological. While the social histories of American popular music are deeply inflected with often brutal histories of racial, gender and economic oppression, these are completely elided and obscured here. As many scholars have demonstrated, the tidy unity of this history is as much a fiction as Benton’s imaginary landscape itself. It is a unity that imposes a premodern simplicity on the origins of country music,

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 97 preferring sunny stories of ‘settlement’, certainty and ‘universal progress’ over those of struggle, ambiguity and accommodation (see Miller, 2010). The Hall of Fame Rotunda is one of a number of ‘shared representations – capable of guiding action–and justifications’ presented by this museum to attest to the fact that is an important participant in an already existing and very much desirable social order (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). This is how this museum produces a naturalized frame for its choices. This is made particularly clear from the tremendous care the museum takes in demonstrating the legitimacy of the Hall of Fame. The processes by which new members of the Hall of Fame are elected are described in a curious amount of detail in both the Visitor’s Companion guide book and the audio guide for this room, both of which present almost exactly the same information. The criterion for admission to the Hall match those described above in the purpose and composition of art museums. New members are judged by ‘the indelibility of his/her impact’ and their ‘influence on others’ with a special category created for ‘deserving pioneers who have been overlooked in previous elections’ (Visitor’s Companion, 2004:55). A few particular passages in the audio guide are telling in terms of the rhetorical appeal of these blandly technical rules and procedures. As noted, the portion of audio guide for the rotunda is voiced by Dolly Parton speaking in her bright, familiar, eastern Tennessee drawl. Speaking in a tone and rhythm one might reserve for reading a set of instructions aloud to small children, she tells us that the Hall of Fame is made up of ‘a select group of mighty talented individuals’. The honour to which they have been admitted ‘was created in 1961 by the Country Music Association, or CMA, country music’s leading trade organization’. She then explains to us, apropos of nothing, that ‘the CMA is separate organization from the CMF, or Country Music Foundation, which operates the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The CMA conducts the Hall of Fame elections. The CMF runs this museum which displays the Hall of Fame plaques. Got all that? Okay.’ She laughs gently as she speaks as if anticipating a somewhat befuddled reaction to a presentation that has the ring of a disclosure requirement to it. In a slightly more intimate tone she concludes her lesson in the governance of country music: Here’s a little more inside info for ya’. The Hall of Fame elections are conducted by secret ballot. Each year a small percentage of the 6000 CMA members are designated to vote in the Hall of Fame election. Generally between one and four new member are elected to the Hall of Fame each year.

She then slides seamlessly into an explanation of the iconography of the rotunda, concluding by saying that this room is here ‘to remind us that country music’s pioneers will always be connected to its present’. It is this last passage, spoken by a beloved figure in country music and Hall of Fame member, that cements the appearance of an organic link between the complexities of social history and its rhetorical and material approximation in the Hall of Fame Rotunda. Another museum type that popular music museums have borrowed from is the social history museum, using display and exhibition types as well as organizational schemas based on a presumed chronology held together by the evocation of a larger

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thematic purpose. These displays are far less about the unique or singular object or work of art and far more about the display of the mundane, everyday object or work. These kinds of museums construct many of their displays from objects of largely equivalent value and status that are meant to be collectively representative of a whole social world (Henning, 2006:27). As such, these material synecdoche are distinctly able to facilitate, emphasize and foreground the construction of a larger historical narrative, contributing without getting in the way. As Timothy Mitchell argues, in the ‘exhibitionary complex’, what ‘reduced the world to a system of objects was the way their careful organization enabled them to evoke some larger meaning, such as History or Empire or Progress’ (Mitchell, 2004:447). As with the distinctly national myths on display in Nashville, the many display types in popular museums that are taken from history museums place the spectator inside a presumed community and narrative, narrowing the field of vision significantly and organizing the experience of history along a carefully laid track or a ‘preferred itinerary’. (Griffiths, 2002:11) This particular kind of materialization of national myths is a defining feature of a much wider and more historically grounded complex of representational systems, such as international exhibitions and world’s fairs as well as numerous species of historical and theatrical panorama. In those cases, the spectator’s experience is produced through a visual and material rhetoric defined by what one exhibitor described as ‘a combination of beauty and bombast’ (Masey and Morgan, 2008:110). Across several different kinds of visual display, this combination ‘solicited viewers ideologically’ asking them to perform their necessary role as a desired participant and willing receptacle in a story that appears in many respects to be self-evident (Oleksijczuk, 2011:4–5; see also Wallis, 1994:278–9). This is precisely what many popular music museums do. A good example of this is the first two rooms of the permanent exhibit at the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum. This Smithsonian Affiliate museum is marked by a very high quality main exhibition as well as engaging ancillary displays of musician biography and portraiture. The main exhibition reflects many of the priorities of the kinds of social history displays found at museums such as the Smithsonian’s American History Museum in Washington DC. However, the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum has one other aspect of relevance here, a collective regionalist hagiography that produces a larger intimation of racial harmony through music that appears as a framing gesture for the museum as a whole. Of its musical subjects it claims the following: Their groundshaking contributions led a harmonious civil rights movement which integrated the music industry, inspired many of the world’s leading musicians through today, influenced almost every known musical genre, and changed the cultural complexion of the world forever. (Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, n.d.)

This is the lens through which we can gain a profitable understanding of the two rooms of particular interest here. These rooms explain the social, economic, and cultural origins of the rock and soul music that was produced in Memphis between about 1945 and 1965. They do so by presenting us an originating mythos that is clearly meant to be largely fixed and uncontestable.

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 99 Entry into these rooms is preceded by an orientation video which provides one the standard narratives of early-twentieth-century Memphis and the broader American South: economic hardship sponsored a mass migration and urbanization across the region that was followed inevitably by the production of new forms of life and music. The narrator tells us the following: During the 1950s and 60s, Memphis was at the crossroads of a profound musical exchange as rhythm and blues, rock and roll and soul music exploded from the city reshaping the nation’s music and culture. The story begins in the countryside around Memphis where farmers and sharecroppers expressed the rhythms of their daily lives in country, blues, and gospel music. From these poor people emerged a rich musical heritage. (Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, n.d.)

The unique circumstances of this regional aesthetic catchment just happened to get caught up in the flows and crashes of modernity in just the right measure to produce the kinds of social tensions and collaborations necessary to produce the music that followed: So they came to Memphis by the hundreds, by the thousands, from sweltering cotton fields, rugged hills, small towns, and endless lowlands. They brought their hope for a better life and they brought their music, country, folk, jazz, and blues. It permeated the streets of Memphis and filled the air with possibilities. (ibid.)

This is just one of the more familiar stories plucked from a heavy and crowded field of narratives about this place and this region in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stories spread across multiple genres of academic and popular history writing. (Lauterbach, 2015; Guralnick, 1999) The first two rooms of the exhibition make this story material through the use of an array of largely anonymous, everyday objects set before us and images set on the walls behind them (Figure 4.4). This combination creates a kind of scene and setting for us. On the left as you enter the first room is a sharecropping scene. Taking up most of the wall are two images. One is a black and white image of a white man in a hat and tie measuring a bag of cotton as an African American sharecropper looks on. In front, on the floor before us is a small bale of cotton and next to it hangs a bag similar to the one being weighed in the image behind it; both appear to be full of cotton. The next image is a larger black and white panoramic shot of a cotton field with an older African American and a young African American boy working with hoes in the foreground (Figure 4.5). Behind them is a team of two mules tethered to a plough being led by another worker. Before us in the exhibit room is a typical plough, this one tethered to a wire frame in the shape of a mule. The rear wall just to the right of this display is a model of the front porch of a small wooden cabin complete with an overhanging roof, weathered wooden support beams, a brick chimney and window. Against the wall stands a life-sized posed portrait of an African American man and two African American boys. Each of the boys holds a small guitar. Again, the image is twinned

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with the everyday objects in front of it, in this case, a barrel, a wooden chair, as well as several parts of a plough which hang on the front wall of the cabin. In the second room, three scenes are present, both presented in a similar way. One is meant to evoke a typical scene inside a white farmer’s home. On a weathered wooden floor sits a small stove, wooden chair and wooden kitchen table placed in front of several life-sized images on the walls behind them. One is a floor-to-ceiling image of the wall of a family home with a portrait of a family patriarch and a guitar hanging from the wall. The other pictures are of family members, including a father standing with his two sons and another young boy sitting behind the table reading the newspaper. On the table are strewn various archaic cooking implements as well as empty Dr. Pepper bottles and a battery-operated radio. The radio is particularly telling as it allows the museum to tell us that many homes such as this did not have electricity until the 1930s or 1940s. The second scene is a horse-drawn cart piled high with a family’s modest belongings, including bedding and wooden chair placed on top. Behind the cart is another life-sized photo of a very similar cart with its accompanying family presumably on their way to Memphis. The final scene is of a small single metal-frame bed with two dresses and children’s bedclothes laid out on top. Around the bed are a wash pan on a bedside table and a bucket on the floor. The same wooden flooring as appears across the room in the kitchen display. However, this is not meant to be the same home. The images on the wall near this bed are of an African American family, one featuring a child operating a small phonograph. Musical instruments are scattered throughout this room and the previous one, including a dulcimer and fiddle, as well as record players, records and several radios. In addition to explaining the broad economic circumstances of the population whose lives are referenced in these displays, the audio guide also features a two fairly extensive playlists of songs, one from white performers such as Roy Acuff, Jimmy Rogers, and the Carter Family, and a second list of African American performers such as Big Bill Broonzy, Furry Lewis and Sleepy John Estes. The implication of these two rooms of this exhibit is that all poor southerners, African American and white alike, were subjected to more or less the same economic and social forces and were to some extent all lumped into a common daily struggle. The various scenes that face each other across these two rooms are populated with objects whose equivalence in status and value is as plain as their anonymity. Their arrangement and presentation suggests their owners responded to their respective hardships in mostly the same way. Music is posited here as a pervasive social consolation and emotional salve. It appears almost entirely separated from the larger spheres of racial and sexual politics long present in places such as Memphis, especially a Memphis right on the cusp of a peculiarly American modernity. Little mention is made of particularities of struggle faced by these distinct and segregated communities, with African Americans in particular facing a rampant and resurgent white supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was the cause of tremendous violence and subsequent migrations (Wilkerson, 2010; Kempton, 2006:199–203). These rooms tread a careful and ambiguous line between the only subtly invoked social regimes governing the population of this region and the agency of those trying to get out from under them. The objects are infused with an intimacy that in many cases does



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Figure 4.4 Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

Figure 4.5 Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

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call up connections with the past that go beyond the immediate, but they do so in such a way as to obscure their profound differences. Popular music museums display other kinds of objects as well, objects that are so specific that the museum explicitly produces a kind of aura around them (see Plate 4). The range of such objects across the museums I have studied for this book is fairly broad, from the sublime, such as the white piano John Lennon played in the video for ‘Imagine’, to the practical, such as Wanda Jackson’s acoustic guitar, to the curious, such as the letter a young Johnny Cash wrote to his member of Congress wondering if the National Security Agency or the Federal Communications Commission might provide him with career opportunities in the public service. Objects like these will be examined in more depth, breadth and detail in later chapters. However, for the moment I’d like to simply make another link between the collections of contemporary popular music museums and the history of museum collecting more generally. It has become a cliché of museum scholarship that the modern museum has its origins in the cabinets of curiosity or wonder that emerged in Europe in the 1500s. As Abt notes, what began as studies of materials from local sources soon broadened as objects and specimens were brought to Europe by explorers to the New World and traders returning from distant lands. By the late 1500s, the assimilation of this evidence included its more or less systematic arrangement in tidy cabinets, cases, drawers, and other specialized furnishings, often in specially designated rooms in the homes and workplaces of amateurs and scholars. (Abt, 2006:119)

Not only were such collections ‘a necessary accompaniment to great wealth’, (Henning, 2006:21) they were also enmeshed in networks of wealth, power and knowledge of which they were material evidence. These collection s weren’t just wondrous or encyclopedic, they were instructional, and the instruction went far beyond their contents. (see also MacGregor, 2007; Davenne, 2012) The links between the collections of contemporary popular music museums and the history of museum collecting appear very clearly at the EMP in Seattle where there is just such a demonstrative and instructional room. It is called the ‘Guitar Gallery: The Quest for Volume’. The stated purpose of the gallery is to show how ‘the electric guitar, like the automobile, became a symbol of American ingenuity and design’ (Experience Music Project, n.d.). Its wider purpose is to incorporate the music produced by a wide range of often marginalized people into the familiar and triumphant space of a universal American exceptionalism. At any one time, the museum will display about fifty-five guitars from its larger collection. On my visit, the gallery included a few highlighted items, such as one of four square ‘Bo Diddley’ guitars and Kurt Cobain’s light blue Fender Mustang. It also included a magnificent Spanish guitar from the 1800s with stunning wood and pearl inlay and decorative flourishes, as well as a 1920s Stroh Hawaiian guitar, an ungainly looking device with a small round metal body at the base with an acoustic amplification horn coming off the back. These thematic frames very often implicitly construct the guitar as a stereotypically ‘male’ instrument defined by its seemingly inherent qualities of power and loudness, qualities in keeping

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 103 with a long history of extolling such virtues in rock (see Weinstein, 2013; Fast, 1999; Waksman, 1999). As Reitsamer argues, this is of a piece with the broader ‘gendered narratives’ of popular music, and especially rock, in that ‘the formulation of a history of rock and specific criteria for attributing historical importance to performers which reinforced a definition of rock as a male art’ (Reitsamer, 2018:26). Indeed, as Adelt (2017) shows, these institutions are very broadly reflective of existing gender and racial hierarchies in their collections and exhibits. Further, these instruments are presented as a representative of retrospective validation of the music produced on them. Instead of presenting a malleable, or even labile tool of endlessly variable musical expression, many of the EMP’s most famous guitars are presented in a context that seems to suggest that what was once played on them was in some ways historically inevitable. As I note elsewhere, this sense of retrospective inevitability is present in popular music museums more broadly (Fairchild, 2018; 2017). Many of the guitars in the gallery are presented as ‘Signature Guitars’, each linked to their equally unique owners who are described as ‘Signature Guitarists’. For example, the collection boasts one of four Gretsch custom rectangular-bodied electric guitars made for Bo Diddley in the early 1960s. The text notes that the instrument was based on a design Diddley came up with in 1945 as a teenager while attending the Foster Vocational School in Chicago. Nearby, we find a light blue Fender Mustang that once belonged to Kurt Cobain, an instrument used on the 1993–4 In Utero Tour. It too was altered for use, in this case by Nirvana’s guitar technician, at Cobain’s instruction. Both guitars are framed through the qualities instilled in each by their users. The Guitar Gallery has also displayed many other visually iconic guitars such as Gene Simmons’ starburst design and Eddie Van Halen’s black, red, and white-striped guitar, one that Van Halen famously made himself. And yet, despite the assertions of curators and scholars suggesting that the Guitar Gallery really is about the instrument itself, it remains very difficult to detach these famous instruments from their owners (see Adelt, 2017; Baker, Istvandity and Nowak, 2016b). This is especially true with those guitars specifically contextualized through their owners’ biographies and those that still bear the marks of wear and use that indelibly stain them. More broadly, the guitars on display were curated to follow a forward-moving chronology noting the innovations, struggles, and inventions that took us from the quiet ‘parlour guitars’ to the resonant metal bodies of the National guitar to the ‘modern god of distortion’, the solid-body Fenders that created a new and distinct standard for this instrument’s sound (Experience Music Project, n.d.). As an ‘accompaniment’ to the ‘great wealth’ of the amateur scholar, collector and the museum’s founder and patron, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the Guitar Gallery is a consummate effort. It not only demonstrates Allen’s power and taste, but also his knowledge and his ‘cool’ credentials. Allen was, after all, the owner of ‘the white Fender Stratocaster that Hendrix played at the 1969 Woodstock festival’, (Fricke, 2000:41) and as such, the display of these ‘vintage, world-changing guitars’ (Experience Music Project, n.d.) is not simply an immediate educational exercise, but like the rest of the museum of which the gallery is a part, an exercise in the creation of a particular kind of perceived value. The Guitar Gallery suggests that these objects were produced and used by people all

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of whom were seeking some form of transcendent expression. Each unique item is a perfectly maintained, glossy reflection of a particular set of values around the concepts of artistry and skill, values thought by their advocates to be universal. As one observer argued, at the EMP it ‘seemed to be a given that a music that sells rebellion and disenfranchisement is now shared as a common language between the most troubled youth and the most powerful elite’ (Strauss, 2000:4). Again, we see a complex social history elided and simplified in the interests of the exhibitioner. The kinds of very special objects spread throughout all of the exhibitions in all of the museums I have studied are part of a much more widespread and very particular complex of museum experience: the reconstruction. Within this practice, these very special objects evolve from being mere curios to becoming material anchors within reconstructed historical scenes or becoming objects of pilgrimage within reconstructed or preserved sites. That is to say, the real thing, the actual guitar, the very shoes, the exact mixing desk, adds a particular form of social weight to a confected scene or imagined space of historical experience. As we will see in Chapters 5, 6 and 9, these scenes run the gamut from the fanciful to the earnest and from the substantive and memorial to the poignantly small and fleeting. On the materially substantial end of the scale we have the Stax Museum of American Soul Music which is housed in a building reproduced in large part from the plans for the original building which was demolished in 1989. On the other we have something small and intimate like the ornate sideboard and two dining chairs set in front of a stone wall salvaged from Johnny Cash’s old house overlooking Old Hickory Lake in Tennessee, a house that burned to the ground in 2007. What they all have in common is the production of the experience of a certain intimacy, closeness, contact or connection with the broader social formation these displays and exhibits both presume and construct, that is, ‘our’ collective past. It is this construction of a common past that links the historical presences built into special places such composer’s houses, artist’s museums, shrines or pilgrimage sites with the displays one finds at a wax museum or in the ethnographic group life display common to natural history museums. The former tend to play on the authenticity of the place the display inhabits. We touch the past simply through our presence there. The latter reconstruct that past in a thoroughly confected, but nevertheless extremely exacting manner. What these kinds of attractions offer is a subtle and dynamic relationship between a provision of a certain kind of proximity and intimacy with the past and an overarching didactic provision of carefully-curated knowledge about that past (see Griffiths, 2002; Koudounaris, 2013; Sandberg, 2003). They do so by providing an artfully crafted pretence to an immediate, material and sensory relationship to events and places that have disappeared, or in some cases never actually existed. As Sandberg argues, in these kinds of displays ‘the material world so carefully preserved has always in some important sense already expired’ (Sandberg, 2003:10). Therefore, what these kinds of displays in popular music museums are meant to offer is access to those parts of them that are not expired, most notably the connections between visitors to each other, their own experiences, and those they share with others like them, experiences that form them into a coherent social entity, or a kind of ideal demos. As with various kinds of museums and displays that began appearing in the late

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 105 nineteenth-century, contemporary popular music museums also share ‘a fascination with the authentic corporeal trace, with elaborate systems of effigy, and the spectator’s relationship to themed space’ (Sandberg, 2003:14). We can see this kind of fascination throughout the exhibits at the Beatles’ Story in Liverpool, exhibits that are defined by a similar attention to origins and the construction of a musical subject that is presumed to be one node in a larger pre-existing set of social connections which the museum claims merely to be activating. The efficacy of the Beatles’ Story as a whole turns on the ability of their extensive collection of photographs, important objects, and reconstructed scenes to recall those origins with a direct material presence, punctuating a fairly standard biographical narrative which is anchored by unique objects such as John Lennon’s hip flask and an original Sgt. Pepper suit, as well as several reconstructed settings. At the entry of the exhibit, we are initiated into the Beatles’ story with the fateful meeting of John and Paul at the Woolton Church Fete. We are then asked to follow the narrative through to Lennon’s death, the moment after which no mooted Beatles reunion was possible. There are many objects that punctuate this tale with a weight not available to sounds and imagery. Early on, for example, we are shown an oddly pristine guitar, but not just any guitar. It is the same type of guitar being played by the eerily familiar-looking child in the large family photo hanging on the wall behind the display case (see Plate 2). Remarkably, this exact model of guitar was found in the house at 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool in the late 1960s. Some fans will know right away that this was John Lennon’s childhood home. The museum then takes up the story in an accompanying panel. Ernest Burkey, the owner of the house since the late 1960s explained that builders had been carrying out some recent work in the loft and had discovered a few items hidden up there gathering dust. A Dallas Tuxedo guitar dating back to the late 1950’s and two banjo magazines dated 1939 and 1941. Although the banjo magazines almost certainly belonged to John’s mother, Julia, no definite link between John and the guitar has yet been uncovered. This does not rule out the possibility though . . . was this John Lennon’s guitar? [Emphasis in the original.]

As you work your way through further through the exhibits, you pass through the expected array of items and images, such as a map with important Beatles-related sites marked on it, photos of a bombed out Liverpool City Centre taken not long after the Second World War, and pictures of the very youthful Lennon and McCartney playing together in the Quarrymen. As you move through the section of the exhibit about Hamburg, however, something strange appears. Just off to the side of a small mock-up of the entrance to the Star Club, complete with a sign reading ‘Auf Verkauft’ posted in front of a large image of the Beatles performing, there is a life-sized image of John Lennon leaning in a doorway. About a foot away stands a wax model of a woman with a black vinyl raincoat, a sparkly red scarf around her neck above her low cut black dress, and bright red make up on her immobile, shiny cheeks. She is clearly a model of a sex worker, her presence meant to indicate the famously sleazy end of town in which the Beatles are said to have plied their early trade. The wax figure is confronting not

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simply because it meant to be a sex worker, but because it seems so out of place in a reasonably contemporary museum. Then, in another room you encounter a mock-up of the offices of Mersey Beat, a music magazine started by a school friend of Lennon’s in the early 1960s. On the audio guide, one of the original editors tells us with a sly laugh how it was they who made the Beatles famous. The room is incredibly detailed with a front page announcing “Beatles Top Poll” on the wall along with a poster for a show at the Royal Iris. A series of clippings are strung up from one wall to the other, over desks fully kitted out with vintage phones and typewriters, and there he is, one of the editors, fully realized in wax, sitting at his desk taking his cup of tea while talking on the phone. Then you work your way through a pretty good-sized mock-up of the Cavern Club (see Plate 5). Finally, after passing by the singles wall at NEMS, the family business in which future band manager Brian Epstein worked, you come across what has to be regarded as one of the main mock-ups in the museum, the Beatles playing in Abbey Road Studios. The mock-up comprises only a thin narrow space, complete with stiff, awkward-looking wax Beatles all wearing matching black vests and their familiar haircuts. The quality of the waxwork probably wouldn’t trouble the artists at Madame Tussaud’s very much. The room has the requisite number of guitars, amps, microphones and drums, but also several guitar cases notched along the front wall, a deft, subtle hint of verisimilitude in an otherwise unconvincing display. ‘Love Me Do’ plays on a constant loop outside. What is most striking about these wax figures is that, due to their poor quality and general lack of specific resemblance to their subjects, their purpose is actually more obvious than less. These particular wax forms cannot even remotely produce what Sandberg calls the ‘uncanny qualities of presence and absence’ or ‘the exploration of threshold space’ that early wax figures were expected to provide their viewers (Sandberg, 2003:19). Instead, these particularly bad wax figures evoke a slightly sad two-pronged nostalgia, one prong for the subjects of these displays, the young, effervescent Beatles who provided such a contrast to the dour post-war Britain we are shown at the start of their museum, and a second prong providing just the slightest hint of acknowledgement that certain of these ways of remembering these musicians are obsolete as well. In this particular case, these figures do not have the primary effect wax figures are meant to, but instead can only dimly recall that effect. Obviously this is not intentional, but neither can it be entirely unwanted. Otherwise these figures, which are by no means central to the museum as a whole, could simply be removed and replaced with the other kinds of recording media found almost everywhere else in the museum, and the stilled moment in time they represent could be frozen in some other form.

Conclusion: The corporate display One of the main conclusions we can draw from this typology of display and exhibitionary styles is that popular music museums have a style of engagement that

 Popular Music Museums and the Experience Economy 107 most closely resembles that of corporate museums. There are a few key commonalities. First, the modes of display found in corporate museums and popular music museums are widely varied and plucked from a broad range of practices present throughout the history of museums (see Messedat, 2013). The history of corporate museums includes historical museums, collection-based museums, product-centred museums and most interestingly early adopters of participatory, ‘collaborative’ displays such as the AT&T InfoQuest Center which operated from 1986 to 1994 (Danilov, 1992:11–21). Second, most popular music museums are very obviously concerned with conveying some part of the history of the music industry, a fact that is true even of those museums that are not directly or indirectly managed by the music industry. As with all corporate museums, they are also tasked with informing and influencing the public about the benefits of this industry (Danilov, 1992:5). Third, nearly all of these popular music museums produce a fair number of product-based displays, such as the walls of gold, platinum and vinyl records that take up so much space at so many of these places, but also the numerous exhibits devoted to individual musicians the descriptions of which take on the distinct shade of entertainment industry product. This almost always means that corporate museums are broadly positive about the relevant industry (see Livingston, 2011; Seligson, 2010). This takes us to our final and most obvious link, what isn’t there. In the voluminous mass of visual, textual and musical information presented in the museums I have studied none presented any criticism of the music industry. The few voices that did appear to suggest that perhaps, maybe the music industry wasn’t always the most entirely virtuous of corporate citizens were so muted and marginalized as to be translucent. If you weren’t paying some seriously close attention and exercising every ounce of your hermeneutic agency as an extraordinarily resistant and active spectator and audience member, you’d miss them entirely. This is because, like most other corporate museums, popular music museums work first and foremost to leverage the assets of their sponsors to tell stories that are both appropriate to these sponsors’ interests and reassuring for their chosen forms of corporate self-fashioning (i.e. brands). In most cases, the corporation is the central owner, provider or organizer of exhibition contents. They make the primary task of the museum to communicate the corporation’s values. The stories they tell are carefully crafted to reflect only a small and specific set of values consonant with their own. They work primarily through corporate forms of organization and frame their missions through the primary need to enhance the corporation’s identity. They seek to produce subjects whose values are aligned with those of the corporation (see Danilov, 1992; Messedat, 2013). It is this particular form of institutional self-interest and self-congratulation that spreads across all of the various places I have studied, from small to big, extensive to intimate, that most clearly defines these kinds of museums.

5

Preferred itineraries of sight, sound and feeling

A museum is fundamentally a mode of staging and making palpable preferred relationships while endeavoring to manage how these are to be received. Things are framed, contained, and stage-managed so that their preferred legibility may be palpably visible. (Preziosi and Farago, 2012:143)

In 1999, I was lucky enough to take advantage of an offer to go to China on a tour. It was a trip designed for Americans unfamiliar with the country and its history. The main itinerary items included sites such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, an evening at the Beijing Opera and a visit to one of the model hutongs. At that time, one item which was not on the agenda was the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. On the day I visited, the place was empty and silent. It cost the equivalent of about 25 US cents to enter and I was able to walk through at a leisurely pace having the place almost to myself. Only a few disinterested security guards even noticed my presence. The most memorable aspect of my visit was the aggressively didactic character of the exhibition. As I walked from room to room, I was led on a highly prescriptive historical and ideological path. Perhaps, not surprisingly, this path was explicitly anti-imperialist. As Denton explains, the layout of the museum followed the history laid out in Mao’s On New Democracy (Denton, 2014:56). The seven main sections moved from the Opium War through to what was called the ‘Third Revolutionary Civil War’. One section particularly caught my attention as an American. It bore the title ‘Big Powers Invaded China, China was reduced to a SemiColonial Semi-Feudal Society’. This section had panels on ‘Imperialistic prerogatives in China’ such as ‘Dumping commodities’ (capitalization as in the original). It culminated with a photograph of three American soldiers posing for the camera while sitting on the Emperor’s Throne in the Forbidden City. Text-rich panels recounted the story of how the ‘dark rule of the Northern Warlords threw China into an abyss of misery’ and how the failed Revolution of 1911 ‘put an end to the feudal rule in China in the past 2000 years and made the idea of a democratic Republic go deep into the hearts of the people’. Strikingly, the panels on the Long March were preceded by footprints on the wall leading the visitor from one room to another. The footprints started out muddy and ended up bloody. The exhibit concluded with the magnificent 1953 painting by Dong Xiwen entitled ‘The Founding of the Nation’. Set behind velvet ropes and dramatically lit, the painting acted as the final act of what many museum scholars have

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 109 described as the performance of a narrative form, a form ideologically imbued with a set of dominant themes or claims that the spectator experiences as what Bennett calls a ‘progressive subject’, one who is assigned a place and ‘an identity in relation to the processes of progress’s ongoing advancements’ (Bennett, 1995:179). In this sense the exhibit was entirely traditional. Much like the rest of Beijing, this museum has since undergone a total transformation, and I have not seen any of its more recent iterations. The place I visited simply no longer exists. I look at my unplanned, casual visit roughly akin to my visit to the Underground City that same week, a once-extensive Cold War era bomb shelter in Beijing. Both are remnants of another time, although at the time of my visit, only the bomb shelter was explicitly exhibited as such. In short, the story of the Chinese Revolution is still unfolding. What I found instructive about this experience is the fact that the three key elements often cited as the defining features of any museum exhibit, narrative, ideology and performance, were so plainly and obviously, so self-consciously, on display there (see Bennett, 1995). My goal in this chapter is to try to show how the same things are also on display in popular music museums, but in far less selfconscious ways. This chapter will provide a brief and broad typology of the kinds of itineraries that lead us through a museum’s preferred narrative; while not limitless, such itineraries are very numerous. And in many cases, the devil is in the details. The focus of this chapter is on how spectators are led through largely implicit ideologies about art and artists and how specific paths through displays make the material experience of abstract ideas more tangible. I will briefly summarize three broad kinds of preferred itineraries of the museums I went to as a kind of platform from which we will explore a few of these places in more detail. Each of the museums listed in the Introduction all share a few fairly broad characteristics in their layouts and how they guide spectators through their collections. Obviously the organizational schemes for all of the museums I visited tended to be a mixture of the thematic and chronological, but within these broad frames there are a few commonalities worth noting. One widespread frame is that of the fairly standard social history museum. Museums such as the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Beatles’ Story all reflect the priorities and goals of these sorts of museums. Each hews fairly closely to a strong and traditional chronological layout. Each begins with a statement of the sainted origins of the music the exhibits chronicle. At the Beatles’ Story it is the story of the Woolton Fete while at the Stax Museum it is the interior of the of the Hoopers Chapel AME Church, relocated from nearby Duncan, Mississippi. The displays that follow turn on the dynamic relationship between subsequent events and these symbolic beginnings. Another very common layout attends to museums that are more singular in focus. These might examine the life and work of one artist or one group, such as the Tina Turner Museum, Graceland, the Johnny Cash Museum, or Carter Family Memorial Museum and Cabin, or one event, such as the Birthplace of Country Music Museum does with the Bristol Sessions. This grouping might also include museums that focus on one place, such as with Sun Studios in Memphis and the Ryman Auditorium in

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Nashville. The displays in these places tend to be far more centred around broader themes, such as the ways in which Sun Studios helped shaped the early history of rock ’n’ roll or how the Bristol Sessions both reflected and propelled the entry of traditional forms of community music into the commercial music industry and into a modernizing world. These themes are then explored through a series of highly specific and tightly focused individual displays. Museums focused on a single artist or group often tend to be more idiosyncratic and are shaped around the particulars of that artists career and output. The Johnny Cash Museum, for example, had a whole room reserved for his somewhat uneven film and television career. A third type of museum follows the model of the ‘hall of fame’. This would include the Grammy Museum, the EMP and the British Music Experience. While none of these three formally presents itself as such, each follows the template of a hall of fame by giving over their exhibition spaces to various means of denoting what each institution has decided constitutes examples of artistic excellence and importance. The EMP, for example, does so by providing spectators extensive oral history materials spread throughout their various exhibition spaces. Further, the EMP, the BME and the Grammy Museum are all replete with opportunities to listen to, remix and re-experience singular ‘great works’ of popular music. Importantly, all three are defined by far more flexible layouts which allow spectators to move through their spaces chronologically, thematically or more or less randomly among extremely rich arrays of sound, text, video and interactive maps and historical displays. These three places most closely reflect the priorities of the ‘new’ museum outlined in Chapter 4. In what follows, I will examine a range of these places by analysing them through their physical layouts and what these tell us about both their stated priorities and unspoken assumptions about the music each chronicles. Importantly, I will begin with an example from outside popular music, the fascinating Bachhaus in Eisenach, Germany. I am doing this to confirm what I think I tried to make fairly obvious in Chapter 4, the fact that popular music museums are not all that unique or special in the ways in which they present their materials. They follow well-worn paths of museum practice, paths that we can find in many other museums. This should suggest to us that the heritage and history of popular music is by no means immune to the mythologizing impulses the produce ‘great works’, canons of artistic ‘excellence’ or the attribution otherworldly qualities that allow great artists and their work to routinely slip the bounds of the terrestrial. Quite the contrary, given how many forms of popular music are routinely made the subject of precisely these forms of mystical attribution (see Chapter 7), they seem right at home in these circumstances.

Bachhaus in Eisenach The Bachhaus in Eisenach is set in a small public square which features a traditional statue of the composer which has stood in the town since 1884. The monument moved once in 1938 from its original site in front of the church in which Bach was christened to its current place in front of the place in which he was once presumed



Figure 5.1  Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011. Photo by the author.

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to have grown up. The monument stands in a small garden of flowers and overlooks the cobblestoned meeting of two small streets. The scene is one of almost perfect preservation or restoration of the historic past, with one exception. A new building was added to the original Bachhaus in 2007, its sleek, modern, rhomboid lines and flat stone surface meant to act ‘in fugue’ with the original house (Bachhaus Eisenach, 2007) (Figure 5.1). The new building houses an exhibition chronicling not so much the life and works of the composer, but wider public perceptions and experiences of them. Between these two buildings and the exhibition contents they house, spectators will find a broad chronicle of Bach’s life and world in the old house, and a broad contemporary experiential display in the new building. The relationship between the two points us towards two complementary understandings, both of which guide us towards recognizing both the ordinary world in which Bach lived, specifically as an ordinary person, as well as his extraordinary contributions to that world and ours. The house that stands now is built from two houses, one built in 1456, the other in 1468, that were combined into one building in 1611. The museum explains that this house was typical of those of the social standing and occupation of members of the extended Bach family. While claims that Bach grew up in this house have long been disproven, the museum helpfully points out that this building, ‘with its original 17th century furnishings . . . remains, nonetheless, an authentic locus from the Bach era, down to the door fittings and locks, and a worthy setting for a Bach museum from Bach’s native town’ (Bachhaus Eisenach, 2007). You enter the museum by going into the new building, and in the foyer you find two items of interest for establishing the museum’s narrative. The first is the original door to Bach’s apartment at St. Thomas’ School in Leipzig, where Bach taught. The door was salvaged when the school building was demolished in 1902 and presented to the museum by a benefactor. An explanatory plaque tells us that ‘through these doors passed Bach, his wife Anna Magdalena’, several of his children and many of his famous students. The second is a haunting image taken of the house in 1945 after the end of the Second World War Bachhaus Bombed during Second World War (see Plate 1). The roof lay in pieces both in the street and in those places where it had collapsed into the upper floors. The windows appear to have all been destroyed. The image is taken from the public stairs behind the Bach monument which we are shown to be still standing, apparently unharmed. These two items bring spectators into contact with the range of historical events this place encompasses. And this is one of the more important themes of this museum. Unlike the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, which is replete with the composer’s possessions, the Bachhaus has only one item that has been definitively linked to the Bach family, the so-called Bach Cup of 1735. The rest of the objects on display, not to mention the house itself, are all generic objects from the period from which we are expected to generalize. Given the lack of Bach-specific objects, the exhibit takes us on a tour of ‘Bach’s Eisenach’ through a broad range of musical instruments, furniture, clothing and small mock-ups of residential rooms filled with objects ‘selected in 1906 by the Weimar court antiquary’ with some ‘once in the possession of the Bach family’. As you walk across the creaking wood floors, said to be many centuries old, you find items used to symbolize aspects of the composer’s personality or famous episodes from his life. For example,

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 113 one vitrine contains a ‘Man’s Shoe, Brown Leather, around 1700’ and underneath it is noted the following: ‘Together with his schoolmate and lifelong friend Georg Erdmann, Bach walked from Ohrdruf to Luneburg, 350km away.’ The fifteen-year-old’s goal was to hear the famed church organist Dietrich Buxtehude play. Similarly, another case shows us a ‘Double-Edged Solingen export blade, ca. 1620’. This object is used to tell us that such swords, ‘very popular amongst the middle classes in the 17th century’, could be lethal. Bach apparently used his as a stern response to ‘the blows and insults of his student Geyersbach, three years his senior’. One room in particular emphasizes this theme of evoking Bach and his world, in the near total absence of specific objects that reached us directly from him. It is called the ‘Eisenach Panorama’. It is backed by a large, inwardly curved, backlit image of an engraving of the town from Bach’s era. It takes up most of the back wall in a broad half-circle. Eight glass cases are arranged in a semicircle in front of this image, each containing an everyday object such as cutlery, pitchers and bowls. All of the objects are the product of archaeological work in and around the town. Spectators are also presented with a range of sounds such as church bells pealing, horses trodding and the sounds of carts and blacksmithing. Here we are presented the ordinary world of Bach through an appeal to multiple senses.  The final part of the exhibit is set in the new building (Figure 5.2). The contrast is evident as you leave to old, dark, creaking floorboards and enter the new building by treading on its bright, blond wood floor while passing by a mottled, grey stone wall that matches the exterior of the new building. The exhibit materials here are far less concerned with evoking the specifics of Bach’s world and instead concerns itself with the multiple interpretations of and experiences offered by his work. The room is large and is subdivided into multiple areas through which you can pass very easily. Notably, the first area you enter is hung with several transparent, egg-shaped, listening pods. Each has headphones and cushions. When you sit in them you are physically and acoustically separated from the room and can focus on the music provided in each. The walls are crowded with memorabilia, such as the marks for one of Bach’s Latin classes in 1692/3 (96/100), as well as dozens of different visual representations of Bach, including a skull cast from his own which was controversially exhumed in 1894, and a cast of his head forensically extrapolated from the skull by a professor of pathology in 2008. There are also dozens of listening stations, many with scores provided, some presenting multiple performances of the same piece made over the course of several decades for comparison.  The centrepiece of this large, rich room is the so-called walk-in composition. This is a small area walled off from the rest of the room where a range of performances of Bach music are projected onto translucent walls. Some of the performances shown here are by formal professionals, some by soloists performing only to themselves and a camera, some by casually dressed amateurs rehearsing and some by contemporary musicians collaborating with dancers seeking to create new inflections on old works. As one passage on the screen inside notes, ‘Bach’s music, which has, at the end of the day, survived all fashions and all attempts to subsume it, will continue to challenge new generation of young, curious musicians. And our very own way of playing it and listening to Bach will also be the mirror of our own aesthetic values.’ This room in

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Figure 5.2  Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011. Photo by the author.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 115 particular seems to focus the purpose of the museum as a whole, a purpose captured by one text panel which suggests: Bach was not a ‘magician’; it is fascinating to see how Bach’s works grow out of a close interaction between musical stimuli, modes and traditions. His pioneering innovations are based on an extraordinary command of musical craftsmanship. An investigation of the fundamental techniques of his art helps to understand how his music ‘works’ and what makes it so wonderful. We can look at musical instruments, collate documents and discuss problems – but the overwhelming vibrancy of Bach’s music must be heard to be experienced.

What the exhibit in sum seeks from spectators is engagement through a recognition that Bach, his music and his world may not be as distant as they might sometimes appear. We are never simply told that Bach is a singular genius whose works transcend time. Instead, the museum focuses on the ordinariness of life in the seventeenth century in what was eventually to become Germany, as well as on placing the almost bewildering variety of interpretations and realizations of Bach’s work and life in the context of his everyday life. Further, his work is seen as material for the expression and interpretation of contemporary values as much as those of the past. This museum offers us an invitation, an appeal to a perhaps surprising familiarity that is made resolutely at eye level. The displays give us the materials and in some cases even the tools to look, hear, think and reflect on our present and our past. We will now see how a similar range of materials is used in a broadly similar way in a popular music museum, EMP. However, what is striking here is the distinct means through which this museum makes claims towards the historical importance of their subjects.

A preferred itinerary for punk When the EMP opened in Seattle in 2000, it did so through a flurry of carefully cultivated publicity that had one overriding, albeit implicit, theme: this is not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The purpose was to make the EMP feel like a popular institution, unlike the ‘establishment’ Hall of Fame. The museum’s co-founder, Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen made this clear in a lengthy New York Times article written by Neil Strauss. Strauss described how Allen ‘sent a small contingent’ to examine Rock and Roll Hall of Fame upon its opening and asked them to complete a thorough critique of it. Their main conclusion, according to Strauss, was that, in contrast to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the EMP was to be built for the people; it was built for the rock fan, by ‘a rock fan’ (Strauss, 2000:E1). In Straus’ account, we learn that the EMP talked about itself through its numerous billboards in Seattle as the kind of ‘museum for those who sing in the shower or drum on their car steering wheels’ (ibid.). Further, along with its computerized karaoke stage and high-tech musical instruments on which ‘in just a few technology-aided minutes’ anyone can learn how to play the guitar, it is an institution

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that ‘overwhelmingly favors independent music’ (ibid.). The EMPs focus was not to be focused on those hoary old myths and legends of the rock age. Instead, ‘Husker Du and the Replacements get three times the amount of space given to the entirety of the blues’ (ibid.). These central themes were mirrored exactly in the EMPs own catalogue of their collection, Crossroads, as well as in their visitor’s guides (EMP, 2000a; 2000b; 2000c). It is not surprising, then, that these themes also define the narrative and progression of one of the EMP’s primary music exhibits, ‘Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’, which began showing in April 2011 and, after a short tour to Brazil in 2017, reopened in 2018. The exhibit’s narrative follows closely to the ways in which the historical trajectory of punk in general and grunge in particular have been construed as popular eruption of resistance against those perceived as corporate musical overlords from the 1980s (see Lyons, 2004; Moore, 2010; Strong, 2011). Fittingly, a varied collection of objects is used in this exhibit to evoke what is presented as punk’s necessary populism to nudge spectators towards a collective experience defined by what is continually suggested to be an already-existing social formation to which they are meant to feel an inherent and intimate connection. These displays routinely play on the idea that all visitors are already part of a larger punk demos made coherent by ‘the music’, not the museum. The EMP’s curatorial director had already suggested as much over a decade earlier in the institution’s inaugural catalogue, although in a somewhat elliptical and emotionally charged manner. He argued that the EMPs collection had been assembled in the way it was because the objects ‘are all of value in preserving the puzzle of our cultural heritage and because we’re pretty sure they contain some magic’ (EMP, 2000c:8). This magic, he continued, was inhered in the fact that ‘the value of these common everyday things, this stuff of material culture . . . has the capacity to explode the divisions of time, musical genre and geography’ (ibid.). In other words, it is the objects on display that link us indelibly to one another and to the music. Across all of the examples I am analysing in this chapter, we can see how the objects presented in museum displays are brought to bear on the two tasks that grow from these claims: establishing a direct connection between the spectator with the mythic origins of the music and placing them within a larger encompassing subject position within a preferred narrative about that music. The preferred narrative of ‘Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’ is set out fairly straightforwardly in the publicity blurb on the inside cover of the exhibition catalogue. The exhibit was said to explore ‘the emergence of punk rock in the mid-1970s and its evolution throughout the ‘80s, culminating in late 1991 with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind’ (McMurray, 2011). The EMP’s senior curator, Jacob McMurray, expands this capsule narrative in his introduction to the volume and in the exhibit itself. Punk developed in the United States, he argues, ‘driven solely by fellow travelers whose primary impetus was music rather than cash’ (McMurray, 2011:vii). This theme continues on a panel near the start of the exhibition which claims: For most of the 1980s, the underground music scene was largely left to its own devices, allowing for an unfettered flow of creativity despite the lack of resources afforded by the major labels. During this time, scores of underground bands toured the country in cramped vans, spreading the gospel of punk.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 117 The catalogue continues this story, noting that some bands ‘broadened their sound while maintaining punk roots’, and that those roots burrowed their way with all seeming inevitability into ‘mainstream consciousness’ (McMurray, 2011:ix). As music once thought to be commercially unviable gradually notched up greater and greater sales figures, ‘the majors began seeing dollar signs’ (McMurray, 2011:x). Eventually, ‘Nirvana brought a punk message wrapped in a pop package’ to that mainstream, thereby ‘changing popular music forever by instantly turning upside down the methods and assumptions of the major label record industry’ (McMurray, 2011:x). However, it was not just their music that made this band different. Nirvana were also regular people who ‘wore regular clothes, gave props to other underground bands, and stuck up for the freaks, geeks and outcasts everywhere. Instead of creating a barrier between the fans and themselves, they indicated by their affect and actions that they were ultimately one of us’ (McMurray, 2011:x). If we take this to be the dominant story of punk reproduced in miniature, then we can more easily understand and interpret the mass of sounds, images, objects and ideas this exhibit presents to spectators. Interestingly, given that the focus of this exhibit, Nirvana, simultaneously represents both the preferred populist narrative of the exhibit as well as the most successful example of the corporatization of punk, the exhibitors had to tread very carefully when establishing their story of a mythic punk demos. It seems clear that exhibition designers took great care to craft an experience of punk that could, in both intellect and affect, give this myth material form. The exhibition consists of multiple parallel paths running across interconnected aural, visual, textual and material displays that run more or less simultaneously throughout the exhibition. To anchor these displays, the curators presented extensive collections of objects, the collective impact of which is twofold, to link the past to the present and to authenticate it for visitors through some sense of the material reality once inhabited by the exhibition’s subjects. We are guided through the narrative that defines this exhibit through text, imagery and objects all placed in close, strategic proximity to one another. The exhibition designers displayed these in a series of small multimedia assemblages of thematically linked materials that act as visual and physical anchor points in the exhibition space and its story. The first is placed at the entrance of the exhibit where the visitor is confronted with a massive introductory image that sets a definitive tone for the exhibit as a whole. This overwhelming image is a close up detail of a series of hands holding up a guitarist whose ripped jeans form the dominant texture of the image, that of stretched flesh and frayed denim. Underneath are two quotes. The first is from Krist Novoselic, the bassist for Nirvana. He says simply, ‘Music is an art form that thrives on reinvention.’ Just beneath this, in a much smaller font, is another more telling quote, this one from photographer Charles Peterson, the author of this and most of the other iconic images presented in this exhibition. Peterson says the following: ‘It’s when the band and audience are melded into one that the true nature of what they are trying to accomplish – the cathartic release of pent up angst and rebellion – reached its chaotic fruition. I feel fortunate to have been there to capture that.’ The musician is, of course, the late Kurt Cobain, captured as he surfed his adoring crowd in an image that is far bigger than

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Figure 5.3  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

Figure 5.4  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 119 mere life-size. We are welcomed into this exhibit through a visual manifestation of the very populism that is literally holding the great artist aloft (Figure 5.3).  The next anchor point is just inside the formal entrance to the exhibit in the first gallery. It consists of a guitar, a bass and a drum set, each in their own vitrine, all of which were played by members of Nirvana during their career. The guitar is a Fender Mustang played by Cobain for several years in the late 1980s until he smashed it at the end of a show in 1990. An extensive biography of the instrument is provided explaining the modifications and the ultimate disposition of its shattered pieces. Nearby is a similarly sized photo of Novoselic, with an accompanying quote: ‘When Nirvana hit it big, it was overwhelming because we were part of the counterculture. Nirvana didn’t go the mainstream – the mainstream came to Nirvana.’ A similar image of drummer Dave Grohl is accompanied with a text attesting to his love of both the Beatles and Bad Brains. In the panels of text placed throughout the exhibition, noted luminaries are repeatedly given the space to guide our thinking on what we are seeing. For example, music critic Everett True, alleged to have coined the term ‘grunge’, tells that all of this magic and frenzy was simply the work of ‘four guys from rural Washington’ who, True claims, would simply be ‘working in a lumberyard or fixing cars’ if they weren’t making music. Of the early Nirvana gigs he witnessed, photographer Charles Peterson said, ‘there were no rock stars in the room, just fans and bands reveling in each other’s embrace’. The well-respected musician Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi tells us in one panel what punk was: Kids for the first time were writing their own songs, forming their own bands, putting on their own shows, putting out their own records and magazines. It was underground, without state, government or corporate sponsorship. It was true rock ‘n’ roll.

These claims are placed strategically and emotively over images that act as visual synecdoche for the constellation of punk values upon which the moral economy of this exhibition turns. For example, a larger than life image of someone’s legs capped with Converse All Star resting on a dashboard of a travelling car is meant to recall for us the hours of necessary travel that their geography uniquely demanded of musicians form the Pacific Northwest (Figure 5.4). We are also shown the visual frenzy of a mosh pit on one wall while a fan and a musician confronting each other face to face mid-song on another. These images form part of the core of the expressive dynamic the EMP engages in between the exaltation of the singular transcendent artist and band and the wider polity that supported him. One final panel assessing this artist’s legacy provides the spectator with this food for thought: Regardless, the health of independent music throughout the United States and the Pacific Northwest has been indelibly changed: music now matters, not just to the hipsters in the know, but to everybody. It has become part of our communal fabric, and music has continues to flourish. The underground has become mainstream, and the mainstream will never be the same.

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The key themes that run throughout this exhibit are plain: exceptional circumstances, exceptional artistry and the ‘magic’ that brought them together in a momentous way. However, if one were forced to rely only on the images and text to tell this story, spectators would only be offered a mostly attention grabbing volume of ideas and moments of the sort that are easily found elsewhere in the many books and documentary films that continue to appear about this band and ‘their’ scene. While this exhibit could be mostly a familiar chronicle made into a series of rooms, it is the EMPs collections of objects that give the images and text a life and experiential cohesion they would not otherwise have.   Set among the hagiographic superlatives describing ‘the immortal music that they made’, a music which subverted ‘the calcified world of contemporary corporate rock’, there is set a series of objects, often small, often poignant, that take us out of the world of retrospective comment, analysis, and assessment and slightly closer to the world that produced this ‘revolutionary’ music. The objects are diverse. They include musical instruments of definitive vintage and history, a collection that includes, for example, the battered red suitcase Cobain used as a makeshift drum on his earliest four-track recording. The exhibit also includes the guitar on which ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was first played in public. Next to the vitrine in which it sits is nearly life-sized image of Cobain playing that very guitar (Figure 5.5). The collection includes ancillary musical objects such as demo tapes, tape recorders, setlists, backstage passes and even the original record contract between Nirvana and Sub Pop Records. There are a great many personal items present as well, such as family photos, band tour photos and letters to fans. The photos are particularly affecting as they are presented, not simply as images, but as objects and personal mementos (see Chapter 8). There are several candid shots of Cobain with his young daughter, the emotional affect of which belies their small, blurry stature. Importantly, there are many iconic items of clothing, such the greyish, green cardigan Cobain wore on Nirvana’s MTVs ‘Unplugged’ special. Most often, these objects were placed next to an authenticating image of the item in use. So for example, the neatly typed set list for the ‘Unplugged’ special sits under the iconic image of Cobain performing on the show in that very cardigan. Similarly, Cobain’s Sears-brand bass sits just a few inches away from two family pictures of a very young and serious-looking Cobain with headphones using that guitar to record one of his early cassettes.  These objects have a varied effect, sometimes immediate and striking, sometimes gradual and cumulative. But their effects are an integral part of the encounter the EMP has staged for us, an encounter to which these objects are clearly meant to provide some kind of cognitive spark and emotional scintillation. However, these objects cannot express the central myths of the exhibit directly. Instead, they offer tangible hints and material corroboration for the claims of a wider popular demos, the foundations of which this exhibit has attempted to demonstrate. They act as confirmation of a wider polity of punk, so to speak, a polity that is produced most vividly through the resonant meanings of the unique objects put before us. We can see the traces of the musical activities that clearly mark so many of the objects that the objects themselves almost take on some residue of the agency that has been exerted upon them. Given this, these



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Figure 5.5  Experience Music Project Exterior, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.

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objects are still weighted with the potential meanings of the future they were integral in creating, the future we are experiencing. In this sense, an early Nirvana demo tape or Krist Novoselic’s lime green collared shirt, worn in a picture just next to the shirt itself, possess a kind of material proof of the inevitability of the exhibit’s narrative. It is the past which they are now used to construct that takes on the subtle, but definitive charge of the future their owners were eventually going to experience. The spark of curiosity or recognition these objects produce springs from the fact that, despite the fact that most are genuinely mundane and would appear generic in any other circumstance, they are not presented anonymous objects. Instead, these are objects that possess a distinct and explicit sense of their own life history, often taking on the shape of the biographical narrative that surrounds them in the exhibit (see Wehner and Sear, 2010). We can see the same sort of spark as it is produced in the Stax Museum in Memphis. 

The sacred spaces of Stax Records As you enter the Stax Museum of American Soul, you are confronted with a remarkable set of images that take up the entire back wall of the lobby (Figure 5.6). Each is an image of the building you are now standing set in three distinct panels. The first shows the original building when it was the Capitol Theatre. It is lit up at night to invite the   neighbourhood into see the latest feature. The second shows the building when Stax was in its heyday. The third shows the building in the process of disintegration. The Stax Museum now stands on the original site of Stax Records. Set in a former movie theatre, the original building was torn down in 1989 with nothing more than a state historical marker to mark its passing. After a good deal of organizing and fundraising, the museum was opened in 2003 in a new purpose-built facility including a privately owned and operated charter school. Throughout the museum, the story of the record label and the museum commemorating it fuse thematically, the central themes being that of rebirth and revivification, themes central to the African American musical experience generally. They constitute an interesting iteration of a ‘discourse of expectation’ as one historian of African American community life described such ways of interpreting the world (Hahn, 2003). Given that these kinds of world-making discourses are prevalent in the broader understandings of soul music, it should not be too surprising, then, that these themes are central to the experience of this museum (see Bowman, 1997; Guralnick, 1999). At the start of the main exhibit, the theme of the rebirth of a sacred space is presented in a dramatic way. The first object on display is the entire frame, including most of the roof and the walls, of the Hoopers Chapel AME Church, built in 1906 near the town of Duncan, Mississippi, about 100 miles south of Memphis (Figure 5.7; Figure 5.8). In the gallery that surrounds the building are a series of panels showing the structure in its original location with panels that explain how it was built and the meaning and value it had for the local community. The rough textures of wood and peeling paint dominate the visual field both inside and outside of the structure. Inside, there are the original



Figure 5.6  Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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Figure 5.7  Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 5.8  Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 125 pews, the pulpit with a framed print of the Last Supper, the original wood-fired stove, an original cornerstone and a television that plays a loop of one of the services from this church. One panel is particularly evocative:    The pews, collection table, and altar were hand-made by the church members. They saved to buy a fancy pulpit and also bought an old piano that was never tuned. For warmth, a cast iron pot-bellied heater burned wood. In summer, church windows were raised and fans, donated by regional funeral homes, stirred the sweltering air.

Importantly, the other panels provide extensive explanations of the place of gospel in the story of rhythm and blues and soul music in general, and Stax Records in particular. Gospel is one of the foundation stones of both this exhibit and the musical tradition it chronicles. The combination of the rigorously reconstructed church and the extremely detailed and evocative texts and imagery gives this building its own biography, a story that is intricately woven into the history of Stax Records. The social context that, in part, produced soul music, is presented to spectators as a living tradition, its values and meanings evoked as much from the text as the peeling paint and warped roof beams, to some extent allowing the museum to ‘perform’ the origins and meanings of this music through this building (see Wehner and Sear, 2010). At the other end of the main exhibit, we find another space that performs the same meanings of Stax Records in a different way. It takes the form of the other bookend of main exhibit, a reconstruction of Studio A. The studio was set in the main theatre of the original building. As a plaque helpfully explains, this space has long been thought to be ‘integral to the raw sound that became the signature of Stax Records’. The space museum visitors enter, we are told, is a ‘near-exact recreation of Studio A. It was designed and built according to blueprints, photographs, and the memories of Stax musicians, engineers, and administrators, whose lives were changed forever in that room’ (Figure 5.9; Figure 5.10). Visitors are guided through a very carefully rendered experience of this place. As spectators enter the studio area, they first pass the Tape Library: This corridor is the brain stem of Stax, connected directly to Studio A, Stax’s heart. Stored in this outer room were the master tapes, the company’s blood. Music is vibrations, and here those lucky, masterful, wonderful, beautiful vibes were kept safe.

Across the corridor from the Tape Library is the original Altec Power Head speaker, sitting heavily at about 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and 4 feet deep. It was once used in the movie theatre as the main sound source and was used at Stax for playback. Next to it is a mock-up of the original lounge area strewn with old magazines, newspapers and soft drink bottles, all firmly fixed in place to evoke the years of activity that passed here. As we move through, we hear and see the recollections of Stax musicians, engineers and producers musing about the uniqueness of the space. These reminiscences sit comfortably with a recreated control booth dominated by a mixing desk which is the same model as the one Stax used in its heyday. On a television above the lounge area

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Figure 5.9  Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 5.10  Stax Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 127 is a video loop of various musicians and producers, such as Steve Cropper, Tom Dowd and Sam Moore, describing the moments when the iconic songs such as ‘Hold On’ and ‘Green Onions’ were made. Each explains the different ways musicians used the existing structure to their advantage. They describe the unusual spaces and materials they used as archaic, their methods as haphazard and experimental, and their products as unique and special. While these stories have been told many times before, hearing them in this reconstituted studio charges the space with meanings unavailable elsewhere. One plaque captures the tone of the display:   An observer of a Stax session might say it worked as a lucky quirk of nature. The playback speaker has been built for movie projection and was outdated, as was most of the other equipment. The artists, producers, and engineers had no formal training. But the repeated success of what happened here belied any suggestion of happenstance. Music was made here, and so was magic.

Just before the entrance to the studio, a wall panel reinforces its status. It explains that with ‘little extra funds at hand’, the label owners, their business partners and family members ‘renovated the space themselves, building an acoustic tile wall to divide the spacious theater into two distinct rooms’. They ‘turned the former theater stage into a control room and put in large burlap sound baffles to reduce the echo in the room’. Importantly, the label owners did not level the sloping floor of the old movie house ‘which added to the concert hall feel and sound of the studio’. When you enter the sacred space of the studio you see five instruments from the Stax house band, Booker T. and the MGs, set out around the room (which now has a level floor). They are all tucked snugly in their own vitrines. As we move through the capacious studio, we hear outtakes from various Stax recordings while a montage of moving and still images loop endlessly above and around us. We are asked to recall, or realize, it all happened just about ‘here’, sort of. When you look closely at the instruments, you can see the occasional telltale signs of wear and tear on some of them. The polish on Wayne Jackson’s trumpet is slightly worn and there are still hints of dust and rust inside Booker T. Jones’ Hammond M-3 organ, marks that collectively add a sense of lived experience to the nostalgic vibrancy of the studio.

Guided by voices One important tool for guiding spectators through a few of these museums are audio guides. Only a small number of the places I visited had such guides, usually in the form of a handheld device, such as iPods at the EMP, or the museum-quality audio players at the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame. Graceland had the most sophisticated guides as spectators were given iPads to access extensive audio commentary narrated by musician and actor John Stamos. This was accompanied by imagery of the sites they were seeing at the time they were described. The only other places I visited that offered spectators audio guides were the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum and the Beatles’

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Story. The uses made of these guides by all of these places were fairly traditional and familiar, using them as sensory organizing devices to help spectators focus on specific ideas, stories and objects these museums deem of particular importance. First and most obviously, the audio guides at these museums are meant to take spectators through the exhibits step by step by shaping their experiences of what and how they see, read and hear. A good example is how spectators are introduced to the main exhibition hall at the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame. The guide is narrated by Bill Cody of 680 WSM Radio, Nashville’s original country music radio station. After explaining the general layout of the museum, Cody intones the following: The look of this floor is intended to suggest an old time stage atmosphere, with hardwood floors, curtain-like glass exhibit cases, low hanging lights hung from cables, and the colorful show posters from Hatch Show Print on the wall above.

This passage is clearly meant to orient the spectator towards both the practical aspects of the exhibition as well as broader themes that they might not notice immediately. As noted in the previous chapter, the thematic resonances of the materials with which this particular building was constructed are repeatedly highlighted. This passage also suggests perhaps a slightly more subtle use to which these guides are put. They can also act as a sonic ‘guide’ through what can often be sensorially chaotic spaces. The act of putting on headphones and listening carefully, or even casually, to a specific text intended to enhance one’s understanding of a display can have a significant focusing and clarifying effect. Many of these museums are simply cacophonous places in which spectators participate in sensorially rich spaces often with large numbers of other people. The careful explanations, engaging storytelling and musical selections offer a kind of personal routine that carries you through these exhibits. Also, there is a certain plodding constancy in the experience of these audio guides. Those from the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame and the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum often resemble a set of simple instructions as much as they act as aural enhancements of the exhibition materials. Second, the audio guides for several of these museums marked the intersection between oral history and material history. There were a few particular ways in which this happened. One is the testimony of witnesses or participants in the events or social worlds presented to spectators is used to provide some specification of the exhibition materials. These audio passages worked to thicken the experience of the objects presented to spectators. Old instruments and long-dead artists were brought back to life through a carefully chosen song or particular performance. Some audio passages were crucial participants in allowing spectators to imagine the past in some material way. The audio guide to the early rooms of the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum do this when evoking the life of the sharecroppers in and around Memphis in the early twentieth century. As the spectator is presented with a scene of cotton farming, the narrator says the following: In front of you is a harness a mule would wear. Mules can be unpredictable animals stubborn and ornery. But sharecroppers spent long hours plowing with their mules and came to know them as individuals. Like dogs, mules were part of the family.

 Preferred Itineraries of Sight, Sound and Feeling 129 This is followed by a man described as a ‘Memphis businessman’ explaining how the motorized tractor replaced the use of mules, all the while with ‘Mule Boogie’ by Jim Boyd playing in the background. Many of the audio guides used various combinations of witness testimony, music and theatrical sound effects and soundscapes in tandem to impute some kind of life into evocative, but otherwise inert objects as with the example from the Bachhaus noted earlier. Third, witness testimony was often solicited from direct participants in the events described, many of whom have attained celebrity status themselves. Celebrity voices to authenticate a museum’s display through a certain authority and intimacy by providing a kind of proxy intimacy and closeness. The Beatles’ Story is probably one of the most effective at this, creating a veritable lattice work of luminaries commenting on the full range of events and historical moments the museum seeks to convey. The voices included the musicians, their family members, friends, collaborators and interested onlookers. The main narrator at the start is Julia Baird, John Lennon’s sister. She recites the familiar descriptions of the four main band members, ‘John was the clever, sarcastic one’, and after that the historical narrative begins. The first sounds are of the war, accompanied with images of bombed out sections of Liverpool interspersed with propaganda posters and national identity cards. The cumulative message is one of hope amid the destruction in the form of the ‘war babies’ who would one day lead people out of a dark time. The balance of the audio guide is a judicious mix of nostalgic storytelling paid in a rich background of sound effects and songs. Interestingly, the displays and exhibits mirror this collage-style of sources with most panels and displays presenting some careful amalgam of objects, explanatory text and illustrative quotes from the principal actors in this drama.

Conclusion: Paths to greatness While each of the examples presented in this chapter have distinct topics, they all use plainly similar means to convey their dominant themes and guide us through their respective paths to greatness. The stories they tell, their stated and unstated priorities, and implicit assumptions about the music each chronicles are all fairly similar. We are taken through each stage of a retrospectively inevitable rise to prominence and eventual importance and are progressively presented with aural, visual and material evidence to confirm the validity of each narrative. Each exhibit places their subjects in their respective historical moments in such a way as to emphasize their subsequent transcendent importance and lingering influence that, while actually needing little validation, still demands more or less full expression. This is because it is the moral of their stories, the rise to unchallenged artistic and commercial supremacy, that underpins the purpose of all of these institutions. These are the stories they exist to retell for us despite the fact that they are available in various forms elsewhere. These museums don’t simply display the heritage and history of popular music in a studiously neutral way. They are not offering spectators a meticulously impartial narrative. Instead,

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one of the main pillars of their purpose is to help spectators see exactly how the great achievements they chronicle were realized. We are meant to have that realization made materially and viscerally present, enriched through our eyes, ears, bodies and minds. With the testimonies of eyewitnesses as well as the protagonists themselves playing in our ears, the underlying choices and ideologies shaping our experience of their stories are neatly elided.

6

Fetish, effigy and the resonant object

We are virtually universally exhorted to engage with artworks without distraction, as if imagining a direct and unimpeded confrontation between an ideal singular subject and a unique imaginary object. (Preziosi and Farago, 2012:155)

In museums around the world, one comes across a seemingly endless range of highly emotive objects. They are most often placed very carefully along the museum’s preferred routes for spectators in order to serve the institutional pursuit of periodic visceral impact. For example, a set of artificial teeth that once belonged to the first American president, George Washington, rest in a museum built on his former plantation. They sit in a cylindrical case in their own gallery, surrounded by an elegantly curving timeline chronicling his persistent dental issues. The space, somewhat secluded from the other exhibits, highlights the intimacy of the object and its revealing history. Similarly, Beethoven’s ear trumpets are placed in the museum set in his family’s home in Bonn so as to capture the decline of his hearing as he aged. Spectators are enjoined into this understanding through manipulated sound recordings of the composer’s late works intended to mimic his gradual loss of hearing across nearly all parts of the frequency spectrum. Near the end of this part of the story, one can barely hear his Ninth Symphony, its triumphant strides straining to reach us from beyond the headphones. These fairly obvious prostheses have a lot in common with the numerous displays of eyeglasses across many different types of museums and displays. A pair of John Lennon’s glasses sit in small case at the end of the Beatles’ Story museum exhibit (Figure 6.1). We are told they are the glasses he wore during the recording of the 1971 album Imagine. The case is adjacent to a large mostly empty space in which sits his famous white piano and light brown hollow body electric guitar also used on these recordings. The glasses are part of a larger memorial to the artist and in sum, form a touching part of a kind of material catharsis to the story spectators have just been told. More movingly, in the Museo Historico Nacional in Santiago, Chile, the final room of the story of this country house the remains of former president Salvador Allende’s eyeglasses (Figure 6.2). They were smashed during the Chilean Army’s assault on the Presidential Palace when Allende and many other elected officials and public servants were killed, an assault which marked the final success of the US-backed military coup of 1973. The remaining lens is damaged and the entire right side of the frame is missing. This case is accompanied by six framed front pages of newspapers from around the world which all chronicle the events to which these glasses refer.

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Figure 6.1  The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 6.2  Salvador Allende’s Eyeglasses, Museo Historico Nacional, Santiago, Chile, 2014. Photo by the author.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 133 While all of these objects are intimate and memorializing, they are also part of several layers and types of meaning that take them from being simple objects endowed with particular historical meanings to becoming objects infused with seemingly transcendent qualities as symbols that resonate with much wider forms of social and cultural power. I will use two familiar terms to describe these meanings in this chapter, fetish and effigy. There is little question that objects related to famous musicians often acquire the qualities of a fetish. Fans take rolled up bits of carpet that Take That may have stood on, pilfer a half-finished bottle of beer once held by Kurt Cobain, or buy John Lennon’s school records that list his apparently solid number of detentions (Hann, 2019; Bakare, 2013; Shaw, 2012). But the line between absurdity and a museum piece is pretty fine. It is usually defined by the wider symbolism some objects acquire. So instead of casually flirting with Ian Curtis’ kitchen table on eBay, we might take one step closer to ‘the music’ and go see Jimi Hendrix’s gold-brocade vest at the Smithsonian or vicariously join the search for his elusive ‘Purple Haze Telecaster’ undertaken by the owner of a suspiciously similar guitar many years later (Adams, 2016). Clearly not all of the intimate objects once associated with famous musicians make it into a museum. The ones that do, the glasses, the guitars, the family photos, do so in large part because the range of other things they call forward. They don’t simply possess some collection of innate qualities that compel us to commune with them. It is the lost worlds and ‘missing bodies’ of their absent owners they imply or intimate that produce this effect (Sandberg, 2003). As Sandberg suggests, in this way they act as effigies. Using what he calls an ‘extended conceptualization’ of this word, he argues that the ‘effigy culture’ of the late-nineteenth-century wax museum can be understood by relying an older usage of this term which can account for both the ersatz wax bodies of their famous subjects, but also their absence, a lack often explicitly called into being through settings, dioramas and related imagery (Sandberg, 2003:5). We will see in this chapter that this is precisely what many displays in popular music museums do. They use a wide array of objects such as clothing, musical instruments and personal effects as effigies to call forth the missing bodies and past lives of their famous owners. When we consider these objects from within the networks of human agency in which they are always implicated, we can understand their resonances as specifically meaningful objects. These meanings are produced through the spectator’s multisensory experience of multimedia displays that create what Bjerregaard (2015) calls ‘atmospheres’ designed to produce specific kinds of meaning. The displays examined in this chapter do this by placing a wide array of objects in careful and often exacting proximity to the familiar sounds, texts and images that have already come to define the subjects of these exhibits. Before examining specific cases, it is important to get a sense of what the main purposes of displaying the kinds of objects I describe here actually are. Most importantly, the legitimacy, importance and status of these institutions is directly tied to their presentation of the material cultures of popular music. As noted in Chapter 4, popular music museums are much like most social history museums. They hang their reputations on both the quality and breadth of spectator experience and on the quality and breadth of their exhibitions and collections. The objects they display are legitimating presences for their respective institutions that demonstrate the quality

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and historical relevance of their collections. They are marketing hooks used to attract spectators as the material, literal and physical connections with the vanished past their exhibitions recount. Items such as the guitar on which Jimi Hendrix played his version of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock or some of the original instruments of Booker T and the MGs are important pieces that accomplish these goals. The display practices of most popular music museums which are intended to encompass a broad range of distinct musical histories and traditions, all betray a few common characteristic features of relevance here. First, they all take a range of both notable and utterly mundane objects and use them to implicate spectators in a preexisting narrative particular to the music and musicians being exhibited. Second, these narratives are necessarily much larger than the exhibit or institution presenting them and the mix of the remarkable and the ordinary is a crucial facet in recounting them. Third, as I have noted elsewhere, we are repeatedly told in exhibit after exhibit that the people whose lives are being retold in some fashion were both uniquely worthy of the attention paid to them, but also very much like us in some fundamental respects. It is the constantly thrumming and productive tensions between these various formations that define the purpose of these displays. More specifically, through their immediate presence, these objects are enlisted to confirm wider, farther-reaching historical narratives and ideologies of artistic value and aesthetic transcendence that are encapsulated by the famous artists who are the subjects of these exhibits. However, the use of these objects in these exhibits is not directed towards some sort of generic confirmation of a general kind of ‘greatness’. Popular music museums rely very strongly on persistent, long-circulating and fairly specific myths about popular music in order to assert the authenticity and meaningfulness of the often very mundane objects on display (see Chapter 7). Their collections are used to uphold a range of musically specific myths, especially those surrounding a musical tradition’s character and origins, as well as those attributing various forms of transcendent artistry and greatness to prominent musicians. The objects on display therefore, become meaningful by acting as material markers of the connecting threads of familiar musical myths. As such, these objects are there to be viewed as part of a larger instructional assemblage. They become meaningful not simply as objects whose material presence is important in their own right, but as museum artefacts whose meaning is meant to be expressed through their careful placement and contextualization within larger encompassing narrative. They do this in order to enhance the perceived value of the spectator’s experience, and by extension, the perceived value and legitimacy of the collections and the institutions themselves. Given that the exhibits I examine in this book are clearly formed from within the already-existing understandings of the musical traditions in question, they are particularly effective at promulgating, not challenging, the foundational myths of those musical traditions whose material remnants they display. This is what most effectively explains why so many dissimilar museums nevertheless use very similar arrays of objects in very similar ways. In short, this form of display is not an ideologically neutral act. Instead, it is through these displays that the spectator’s agency is not simply collaboratively engaged, but also actively incorporated into the broader exhibitionary designs of the institution.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 135 This confirmation of existing mythologies forms the basis of the meanings these objects have attributed to them. This makes them materially convincing. Therefore, a second major area of concern we have to consider is the kinds of material display characteristic of these kinds of museums and how the specific materiality of their exhibits participate in the production of meaning about famous musicians. As Webb Keane has suggested, it is not sufficient to simply ‘read’ objects symbolically as variously coded messages that museum spectators then simply decode. Instead, he argues that we need to take account of what he calls the ‘unending process of signification’ which is not defined by static, endlessly repeated meanings, but instead by the ‘sociability, struggle, historicity, and contingency’ of the trajectory of such meanings (Keane, 2005:186). In other words, such meanings persist not only through repetition, but through very particular modes of meaning making that exceed the capacity of the literal or immediate qualities an object may possess. This allows us to attend to the dynamic ongoing relationships between the qualities of the objects on display and their relationship to the musicians whose ‘missing bodies’ they evoke and recall (see Sandberg, 2003). Webb argues that an object’s most obvious qualities are always bound up with other qualities, some less obvious, some not visible or material at all. He calls this ‘bundling’. No one quality can, Webb suggests, become apparent ‘without some embodiment that inescapably binds it to some other qualities as well, which can become contingent but real factors in its social life’ (Keane, 2005:188). This helps us link the identity of disparate objects in different museums which all possess similar, bundled qualities and conversely, to understand how very similar objects can embody very different qualities depending on how they are attached to those who once owned or used them. These moments of experience, habit and intuition place these objects in an ongoing web of social relations that, for some, allows these objects to take on various forms of agency (Gell, 1998). According to this theory, material objects and their circumstances act not only on individuals and groups, but on the worlds of meaning they inhabit, and according to many, actively shape (Chua and Elliott, 2013; Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini, 2010; Morphy, 2009; Bowden, 2004). I am drawing on these debates to acknowledge that what has been described as a fairly traditional view of museum or art objects as passive or inert is not tenable here (Küchler, 2013; Smart, 2006:21). Instead, I will view the objects examined in this chapter as key participants in a network of social relations and meanings that the museum itself clarifies and mobilizes to reduce to a singular interpretation. However, I see the agency the objects examined in this chapter are said to possess as reflecting only what ‘we’ attribute to them and without this they are indeed inert things. The relevant questions here are these: what constitutes the ‘we’ and how ‘we’ are constituted by these museums and their collections. I will work my way up to an answer to this question in the final section of this chapter. There are a few reasons for my departure from the by-now common attribution of agency to objects, or ‘non-human actors’, as they are often called (see Sayes, 2014). First, the particular nature of the objects found in music museums do not always possess the same mysterious aura of the transcendent and sublime that is claimed as the source of an art object’s agency (Van Eck, 2010). The objects described and

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examined in this chapter possess no such mystery and evoke no similar sense of the sublime. Even the most famous of them are now humble and mundane, quietly at rest in their glass vitrines. They refer to past events and their power does not come from their constitution as objects charged with some kind of otherworldly meaning hidden in the material work once performed on them. Instead, it is their mere materiality, the very fact of them that charges them with meaning. Second, the attribution of meaning to these objects comes from an understanding of the networks within which they sit is not simply symbolic or conceptual, but also material and circumstantial. These material and social circumstances in which we encounter these objects simply matter more than the circumstances in which we meet art objects. This is because these objects are not ‘the work’, they merely refer to the work, and usually do so very indirectly. These objects are not an extension of the artist in the same way that art objects are. Objects examined below such as Tina Turner’s dresses or Johnny Cash’s guitars have to be actively directed towards a larger sense of coherence in ways art objects usually do not. As such, they must be continually invested with particular meanings through what surrounds them, not what is ‘within’ them. As we will see, the purpose and qualities of the objects and their setting in what often amount to theatrical tableaux are meant to create a credible space around the missing bodies of absent musicians for spectators to inhabit. This is how these exhibits can become emotionally convincing. These environments include the full array of tools used in contemporary museum displays: objects, music, sounds, video, curated playlists, audio guides, informative panels, interactive kiosks and recessed lighting. The ways in which they convince us of their very reality is the analytical focus of this chapter.

Guitars! Guitars! Guitars! A good place to start is the display of guitars. In popular music museums, guitars are used in a wide variety of ways. First, they are potent symbols used to commemorate the passing of eras and artists. At the Beatles’ Story Museum in Liverpool, for example, the main exhibit both begins and ends with guitars once used by John Lennon. The first is ambiguously posited as the very one that he (may have) used at the famous Woolton School Fete, the last sitting somewhat forlornly in a large empty space next the white piano he used to perform ‘Imagine’. There are many similar guitars spread across many similar kinds of museums, such as those that once belonged to figures such as Ike Turner, Hank Williams, Maybelle Carter and Elvis Presley. These instruments are unique and most often used to tell us a singular story. Second, there are other guitars, owned and played by less luminous stars that, while they are unique in similar ways, are instead used to narrate the wider social history of popular music. Figures such as Wanda Jackson or J. Mascis, for example, simply do not loom quite as large in the wider perception of the history of popular music. As such their guitars do not provide quite the same material presence as many of the more famous guitars. Instead, these less famous instruments are enlisted to fill out a few telling details of what are mostly

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 137 familiar stories. They are presented to us as important and valued objects in glass cases, worthy of preservation for what they are presumed to be able to tell us about the past. Third, the image of the guitar is no less important to the experiences these institutions provide to spectators and images of guitars abound. They appear in old publicity photos of the artists whose life and work these places chronicle. They appear in candid shots of everyday life from the distant past. We are initiated into the main exhibit of the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame, for example, by an image of an old man sitting on a dilapidated front porch strumming an acoustic guitar. Similarly, as we pass by images of the homes of both black and white sharecroppers in the Memphis Rock and Soul Museum, old images show us instruments set in places of esteem in their respective homes. And of course guitars appear in the advertisements and tourism guides these museums use to attract spectators. The central qualities attributed to famous guitars are present in the texts and images surrounding these instruments which more or less explicitly play on what spectators might already be expected to know about them. From these exhibits it seems clear that we are expected to place the electric guitar in a larger discourse that posits the instrument as a symbol of power and rebellion that has long acted as a witness to, if not venue for, social change (see Ostburg and Hartmann, 2015). More broadly, guitars, especially electric ones, are often spoken about by some advocates as ‘real’ instruments possessed of a certain innate weight of authenticity. Unlike those mysterious black boxes that produce beats and faux strings or horns, there is a certain apparent or perceived transparency about how guitars and guitarists make sound (Carfoot, 2006:35–6). As Carfoot explains, such perceptions are a part of a ‘range of actively produced . . . culturally constructed ideologies around the instrument’ (Carfoot, 2006:36). In the paragraphs that follow, it should become clear how several displays of a few particularly famous guitars evoke wider perceptions and assumptions of those many indispensable ingredients of rock authenticity. These instruments are redolent of a certain brand of purported directness and immediacy that characterize the artistic achievements of their owners. Notably, only a few of these exhibits talk about the actual sounds these instruments once made as sounds. Instead, they are used as vibrant props in a larger story of transcendent artistic achievement. A few examples can show us very clearly the kinds of implicit frames these museums employ when displaying such instruments. From these we can distil a fairly typical way of displaying guitars. To see how guitars fit into the broader narration of particular traditions of popular music through similar forms of exhibition, we need to understand how they are presented in conjunction with other objects as well as images and sounds all of which combine to place these instruments in the context of whatever larger story a museum is telling. A good example is the main exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. This exhibit is a massive sprawling display that occupies two full floors of a massive building and purports to tell the entire history of American country music. It proceeds mostly chronologically, but sets aside space for slight departures, such as a case with a range of odd and unusual guitars, a display on the 1970s television show ‘Hee Haw’, whose main attribute is a sizeable plot of fake corn stalks, and a massive wall of gold records. The bulk of the exhibit is dominated by a series of glass cases,

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most of which are probably about ten feet high and fifteen feet across, dedicated to a specific moment in history. Within each case is a collection of objects, images, and panels of text which highlight a distinct period in the history of American country music through the presentation of three or four members of the Hall of Fame. The Hall resides in a special room at the end of the exhibit. These artists are by definition ‘exemplary’ as the life history of country music itself is folded seamlessly into the life histories of individual artists whose possessions make up most of the displays. These are the artists chosen by their peers and colleagues, and the museum itself, for admission into the Hall. Two examples can show us a few distinctions in how guitars are used to tell the story this museum wants to tell. The first is the typical collection of the kinds of objects that populate the many large glass cases that dominate this exhibit. One glass case in particular is entitled ‘Settin’ the Woods on Fire: New Sounds of the Jukebox’ and is meant to concisely sum up a few developments in American country music in the 1930s. The main text tells us how ‘tough roadside nightspots forged an amplified steeland-fiddle style known as honky tonk’. This music was geared towards a younger rural population and ‘dealt with loss and spiritual dislocation, but also celebrated steppin’ out on a Saturday night’. The case also incorporates the birth of bluegrass, music which often dealt with similar themes. The case includes instruments used by the Stanley Brothers in their bluegrass ensemble, a guitar once used by Kitty Wells, whose song ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’ was the first ever number one for a female country artist, as well as Lefty Frizell’s ‘Nudie Suit’. A Nudie Suit is a personalized jacket and pants/skirt combo generously laced with extensive designs of sequins and rhinestones by Nuta Koltlyarenko, professionally known as Nudie Cohn. The suits were a kind of sparkly rite of passage for emerging artists from the 1930s through to the 1980s. Most of the large cases in this exhibit, present both musical instruments and items of clothing to mark the importance of each member of the Hall of Fame. In each case, spectators are presented with highly personalized items, custom clothes and guitars, each of which marks the uniqueness of each artist and bears some direct trace of their passing through the world. These are strung together across the lengthy expanses of this exhibit to encompass what the museum frames as the entire social history of American country music. The second example is a series of individual guitars donated to the museum played by such figures as Jimmy Rodgers, Maybelle Carter and Hank Williams. The first is Rodgers’ Martin 00-18 acoustic. This was the guitar the artist used to record at the legendary Bristol Sessions in 1927, which the accompanying panel tells us ‘marked a turning point in the history of country music’. We can see clearly that ‘this plainlooking, but elegantly designed mahogany and spruce’ instrument is worn away just below the sound hole, the direct result of Rodgers’ strumming and picking. Maybelle Carter’s Gibson L-5 has similar marks on it. We are told that this model of guitar was designed to be louder than any other model then available and Carter used it to ‘revolutionize the role of the guitar, transforming the rhythm instrument into a distinctive lead voice’. A third is Hank Williams’ Martin D-28, on which he created his ‘unsurpassed legacy as a country singer and songwriter’. The panel points out how

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 139 Williams’ son, Hank Williams Jr, left the guitar as it was when it was given to him after his father’s death, the scratches reflecting ‘the wear and tear of countless personal appearances made by the charismatic Williams, everywhere from nightclubs and outdoor concerts to national television’. In these cases, there is a perfect and seamless unification of the social history of country music with the artists and the carefully preserved instruments they used to create pieces of that history. The presence and material specificity of these guitars speaks to the lived experiences of those who were there. Beyond the social history of popular music these guitars are enlisted to help recount, prominent artists are placed within these streams of history and how their guitars help draw very personal accounts of them. The links between famous guitars and the stories of their owners appear in far more detail in exhibits dedicated to individual musicians. In two separate exhibits, one dedicated to Jimi Hendrix and the other to Johnny Cash, we can see a concisely distilled consensus in portraits of each artist proceeding without any apparent selfawareness of the constructed nature of either artist’s fame. Both exhibits are clearly built on the extraordinary amount of mostly retrospective commentary dedicated to the lives and work of these two artists, both having been the subject of numerous books, feature films, television programmes and documentaries, very few of which have departed from the established historical patterns described below. Interestingly, Cash himself was a central participant in the construction of his own biography through his autobiographical writings and reflections. These strongly shaped the tone and tenor of the collection and exhibits at the Johnny Cash Museum which opened in Nashville in 2013. Each exhibit mostly reflects the existing themes and priorities of the almost exclusively retrospective works that constructed each artist’s legacy. There are a few central attributes to Hendrix’s historical celebrity that should be noted before seeing how this is reflected in the EMP’s exhibit. First and foremost, Hendrix is predominantly spoken of as a guitarist, and is uniformly regarded as popular music’s greatest guitarist, if the unending stream of ‘Best of ’ lists that regularly appear in major music publications are any guide. While he sang, wrote songs and played bass routinely during his career, there is little question that he is indelibly linked to the electric guitar. The story that has been told about Hendrix over and over again was how it was his use of the guitar that redeemed his early struggles in various backing bands and touring outfits and answered the questions that surrounded his ultimate status. It was the guitar and Hendrix’s use of it that elevated him into the highest strata of the rock canon. To note just one turning point in the narrative of Hendrix’s artistry, in a 1969 article from Rolling Stone, Sheila Weller describes noticing an old photo of Hendrix in ‘a fifties Coasters-type R&B group; processed hair, metallic-threaded silklapel suits, shiny shoes’. Hendrix responded to her obvious mirth by saying, ‘That’s okay . . . I don’t try to cover up the past; I’m not ashamed of it.’ He follows this by saying, ‘I don’t want to be a clown anymore. I don’t want to be a rock and roll star.’ Instead, the balance of the piece describes as an artist struggling to escape into his artistry and realize what was then, what was still to be accomplished (Quoted in Potash, 1996:24– 5). This trajectory, from gigging musician to transcendent presence, is a consensus that reaches into the academic literature as well, with one of the most prominent scholars

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of the electric guitar carefully noting nearly precisely the same ‘truths’ presented in the numerous popular biographies and evocations of his life and times that have continued appearing for decades (Waksman, 1999:77; see also Roby and Schreiber, 2010; Potash, 1996). This historical consensus appears with particular clarity in the EMP’s extensive rotating exhibition of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia that has been housed at the museum since its opening. Paul Allen’s unparalleled collection of Hendrix memorabilia was often said to be the catalyst for establishing the museum itself and there has always been a gallery dedicated to exhibiting it in various forms. The forms this exhibit has taken are varied ranging from an initial ‘life story’ iteration to later versions focusing on specific periods in the artist’s life to those focusing on particular aspects of his specifically musical influence. Here we see in a very tangible way the historicity and contingency of the meanings of Hendrix’s fame as expressed, in part, through the items he left behind. The exhibit I examined in 2011 was called ‘Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound’ and fit retrospectively into the historical consensus. The exhibit was set in a gallery dominated by a so-called ‘Hendrix Life Map’ which stretched across the lengthy back wall of the exhibition space. This wall consisted of text, images, objects, and video and audio stations spectators could trigger to watch or listen to studio recordings and live performances. The wall was divided into five time periods that cut across Hendrix’s life under the titles ‘Hendrix in Seattle’, ‘Chitlin Circuit’, ‘The Village’, ‘Swinging London’ and ‘the World Stage’. To the right of this was a wall displaying several extremely large images of lyric sheets and several photos of Hendrix taken while he was writing the lyrics pictured (see Figure 6.3). The front of the gallery consisted mostly of large double-sided glass cases with various famous objects in them, such as a drum kit used by Mitch Mitchell when he played with Hendrix, a psychedelic jumpsuit Hendrix wore on stage, and a blue velour suit in which Hendrix was famously photographed. As you walked in to the main room, there were several glass cases on the left which housed a series of Hendrix’s guitars. The centre area of the exhibition included several large padded seats with listening stations built into them. The exhibition’s larger narrative is supported through displays that highlight the material qualities of all of its objects, including the guitars, through the use of lighting, text, groupings of other related objects, and extensive imagery. The presence and particular qualities of the guitars on display are central to the exhibit’s story. Again, the life histories of the guitars and the guitarist are folded seamlessly into one another and into the bigger story the exhibit is designed to tell. As the EMP’s chief curator noted, this particular iteration of the periodically changing Hendrix gallery was meant ‘to celebrate the creative power of Jimi Hendrix and how he has affected the fabric of popular music’. It was also intended to enhance what the curator called the ‘undying aura [that] now surrounds Hendrix, placing him on the throne of a blazing pantheon of rock ’n’ roll’ (McMurray, 2008:6). The exhibit did so by using the five major periods it had divided Hendrix’s life into and creating a materially rich historical arc that bent ineluctably towards the moment at Woodstock when Hendrix played the Star-Spangled Banner on the white Fender Stratocaster, the very one sitting in the last case in the row. It is worth exploring how the guitars contribute to this narrative.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 141 There were five guitars in this exhibit, each one displayed to match a period in Hendrix’s life as defined by the exhibit. The first, ‘Seattle Scene’, presents a humble Sears Silvertone guitar that was owned by Hendrix’s childhood friend, Joe Gray. The guitar was set in a case with photos from a performance of one of Hendrix’s early bands, The Rockin’ Kings, and photos from the Washington Junior High School yearbook with Grey and Hendrix’s smiling faces highlighted. The text explains how Grey let Hendrix use the guitar as Hendrix did not have one of his own. Hendrix used the instrument to play with several different bands at clubs in Seattle’s Central District. The guitar has a simple, unadorned light brown body and a single pick up. It speaks to the humble origins of the figure who would eventually ascend to the ‘throne’. The second is a black 1955 Les Paul Custom that Hendrix and band mate Larry Lee bought together in 1963 when both were playing with Bob Fisher and the Bonnevilles for six months. The text explains that the instrument was used when Hendrix was playing the ‘Chitlin’ Circuit’, the nickname for the string of theatres, nightclubs and other performance venues that employed African American artists in the era of Jim Crow segregation. It stretched across the American East, South and Midwest and became synonymous for many with long gruelling tours and low pay. The guitar speaks to these in material form while the text tells us how it witnessed Hendrix’s move from the backing bands of the deep south to the clubs of New York City’s Greenwich Village, a moment of important and influential transition. The third instrument is a bass guitar, a Hagström 8-string that Hendrix played while performing and recording with Curtis Knight and The Squires. We are told that this period of immersion in this ‘nexus of jazz, folk, blues revival, and rock ’n’ roll’ proved to be a ‘formative influence on the evolution of Hendrix’s sound’. The fourth guitar is actually two guitars presented in the same case. They can only be presented to us in fragments as Hendrix destroyed each during shows at the Saville Theatre and the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1967. He was said to have done so to commemorate his final shows in the UK before heading off to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival. Strikingly, he had written the lyrics to ‘Love Or Confusion’ on the back of one of the instruments, explaining that he regarded smashing the guitar as a sacrifice of something he loved for the greater good. The final guitar is perhaps the most famous of all, the white Fender Stratocaster on which he played his symbolically raucous version of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. This is an object that speaks to both the triumphs of Monterey, Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, but also the fact of his death at a young age that has stalked those final performances ever since. The guitar hangs, through a trick of the light, as if it is suspended in mid-air in its display case. When read against the accompanying text, which speaks of new collaborators and new musical directions, the gleaming white of the body and blonde wood of the neck is suggestive of the unknown, unfinished music that would never make its way into the world. As with the guitars in the EMP’s Guitar Gallery mentioned in Chapter 4, these too have specific material histories that have left their marks on each. Hendrix’s guitars are grounded firmly and organically in Hendrix’s formal designation as a great artist. The meaning and presence of each guitar grows from Hendrix’s historical, and by definition, retrospective status. Each guitar is described almost as if they too had witnessed the

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events and circumstances that linked them to the musician themselves and now sit before us as mute witnesses to his paths through the world. While these objects sit in fairly close proximity to many others, such as family photographs, clothes and other personal effects, the guitars are different. They are more symbolically resonant. While each is used to denote familiar points in the recounting of the life of a great artist, their humble origins, greatness forged in the cauldron of struggle and hard work, and the final realization of the changes they wrought on the world, these guitars feel as if they speak to us about the artist in a different way. They seem to speak as a proxy for Hendrix’s actual presence in a way that is both publicly familiar and privately intimate. In these exhibits, it is impossible to imagine Hendrix without these instruments and we are never asked to do so. We can find similar forms of display at the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville, another biographical exhibit that bears many similarities to the Hendrix exhibit in Seattle. We should also briefly summarize the historical consensus on Cash in order to frame this exhibit. Cash was unusually expressive in his life and his music about who he thought he was. His efforts at self-fashioning were rich and numerous (see Edwards, 2009). From his earliest hits, the narrative of Cash’s life and career reflected struggles with a certain darkness, in the form of very public struggles with faith and addiction for example, but also with the stories of his redemption and transcending the many manifestations of that darkness. As Richard Goldstein wrote in Vogue in 1969, ‘When Johnny Cash sings a hymn, you get this very solitary search for grace. . . . That’s a kind of aloneness The Beatles never touch. It’s something Bob Dylan is reaching for now, in the guise of simplicity. To Johnny Cash it’s right out there, like a goddamn scar’ (quoted in Streissguth, 2002:89). This ‘scar’ has proved a persistent theme in Cash biography. From recent academic work to popular essays to fairly recent retrospective collections of historical writings about Cash, the themes of injury, healing and redemption through faith, faith in his god and in his work, predominate (Hayes, 2018; Edwards, 2009; Streissguth, 2002). In the Cash Museum, we find that the life histories of the guitars on display are nestled quite closely with that of the artist. However, this museum is even more personal and, given the fact that it is a standalone institution, it creates a far more comprehensive and personal narrative for spectators to follow. It was created about a decade after Cash had passed away and the process benefitted from the availability of a huge range of personal and professional items, including the expected array of musical instruments and stage clothes, but also non-musical items such as a sideboard and a dinner service from Cash’s lake house in Hendersonville, Tennessee that was his home from 1968 until his death. This exhibit is also framed at the beginning and the end by guitars. At the start is a small mock-up of a stage set for Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, his first group. It is backed by a floor-to-ceiling image taken from the cover of the album ‘His Top Hits’ from 1958. In front of the image is an approximation of the band’s original set up. On the left is guitarist Luther Perkins’ small amp with a guitar case behind it and a Fender Esquire electric to the right. In the centre of the slightly raised stage area is a larger Fender amp and Johnny Cash’s Martin acoustic and to the right stands an acoustic upright bass. There are two aspects of this scene which suggest

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 143 its underlying purpose. First, there are two signs on the stage that were handwritten by Cash himself, both noting the provenance of the guitar and the small guitar amp. In the case of the amp, the note tells us: ‘On this amp was recorded “Hey Porter,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line” and others.’ The other reads: ‘My first “professional” guitar. 1955–56.’ Second, the curators have threaded a dollar bill through the strings on the acoustic guitar, a trick Cash used to use to help get the famed, percussive ‘boomchicka-boom’ sound the band often produced. These two facets of this imagined scene, the handwritten notes and the dollar bill, provide traces of the artist that the museum left for spectators to signal that this is a very personal exhibit. There are several guitars set in larger panels that chronicle Cash’s life. The first is part of a larger panel called ‘Life in Dyess’, the Arkansas town where Cash spent most of his childhood. The panel contains a battery-powered radio from ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, an acoustic guitar, also from the Sears catalogue, both of which are described as the same type and model as those owned by the Cash family, not the actual ones they owned. These are placed in their own cases which are surrounded by several images taken from family photos and that form a kind of collage around other smaller items such as Cash’s birth certificate, marbles Cash played with as a boy, and his high school yearbook from his junior year where he is described as ‘J.R. Cash, Droll’. Similarly structured panels are repeated in this part of the museum with one devoted to Cash’s time in the Air Force, another describing the shows he performed at various prisons, and two that give broad overviews of the various episodes in the early part of his career. The two guitars that appear in these displays are notable for their personalization. The first is also set in its own lighted case. It is a Gibson J-200 acoustic model with a warm red body with a wide black playing area. The instrument was designed especially for Cash in 1959 and he used it in performances and recording session, but just as importantly in publicity photos, one of which forms the back panel of the case. The curvy script spelling out the artist’s name on front face of the neck acts as a confirmation of the singer’s increased status. The museum highlights this by including a handwritten lyric sheet for Cash’s first number one hit, ‘I Walk the Line’, a sheet written long after the fact, that was given to the museum’s founder and placed in the case with the instrument. Several subsequent cases include similar guitars, each symbolizing a different era in his long career. The famous Cash-designed Grammer Guitar, played routinely on the short-lived ‘The Johnny Cash Show’ sits in one, and a custom Martin with complex mother of pearl inlay on the neck and body (also designed by Cash) sits in another. Still another was signed by all four members of The Highwaymen. This so-called country supergroup was formed in 1985 and was comprised of Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. While each guitar adds a certain material heft to the chronicle spectators are presented, the last item in the museum is perhaps the most poignant. It is another custom Martin acoustic, also in its own lighted case. It is a jet black Johnny Cash Signature Model, D42 from 1997. Cash also designed this instrument of which fewer than 150 were produced. This guitar was used to record many of Cash’s final recordings on the American Recordings series, a series of six studio albums recorded from 1994 to 2010, the final two released posthumously. The series brought Cash more high-profile praise and success than he had

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Figure 6.3  Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 145 had in over a decade. His recording of songs such as ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails, ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode, and ‘The Mercy Seat’ by Nick Cave surprised and engaged a much younger audience than he had been used to in many years. These albums, recorded in a starkly minimal fashion, mostly with only limited accompaniment, became very publicly associated with a rapid decline in Cash’s health from 1997 and his eventual death in 2003. This particular guitar appears in the much-lauded video he shot for ‘Hurt’ (Figure 6.3). The museum explicitly links these recordings to Cash’s long-standing, but often conflicted religious beliefs. The final panel of the museum explains at some length how Cash was raised ‘in a God-fearing family as a Southern Baptist’ and while he ‘struggled with the temptations throughout his life . . . he never turned his back on his faith of God’. This included continually recording gospel songs as well as ‘earning an associates degree in theology from the Christian International University’. The story ends with the following melancholy notation:  The last song Cash wrote was titled ‘My Lord Has Gone’. He had taken the manuscript to the recording studio intending to come up with a melody to accompany his lyrics, but the session ended before he could accomplish his goal. He never returned to the studio, passing away on September 12, 2003.

The guitars displayed by the Johnny Cash Museum materially punctuate the chronicle of the artist’s life in a manner similar to those in the Jimi Hendrix exhibit noted earlier. They support the overall narrative the museums curators seek to establish, provides a very specific material focus for each panel of which they are a part, and have certain of their qualities highlighted through their own life history as well as the object to which they are linked by proximity and by their contextualization in Cash’s own life trajectory. In this case, the displays moved from fairly generic guitars, bought by others for Cash to use, to carefully designed custom instruments that become iconic objects in their own right. The displays repeatedly call spectator attention to the uniqueness of each through the accompanying text, imagery and other objects that also help fill out the story spectators are told. This museum’s story is one of the extraordinary longevity of Cash’s career. The museum notes that Cash was one of the few recording artists to have recorded on formats that included ‘78, 45 and 33 1/3 RPM records, reel-to-reel audio tapes, 4 track and 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, CD’s and Mp3 digital downloads’. Notations such as these help to suggest and later confirm a story that tells us how Cash’s life history took him from being a fairly traditional commercial country singer playing on borrowed guitars to a globally recognized and respected recording artist whose life work continued right up until his final days. Within this story, we are also told of the many continuities despite the passage of time and the depredations of age, made visible through five carefully chosen images, one per decade, that dominate the initial gallery. The latter galleries build on this theme with panels entitled ‘Writer’, ‘Humanitarian’ and ‘Artist’, which describe Cash’s activities beyond writing and performing music. In one sense, within the broad range of claims, stories, objects, images, video clips and sound recordings, the guitars are generally on an equal status with objects such as the family radio, or the radio receiver and frequency metre of the type he would have

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used during his time in the military. They are narrative props of a sort, illustrative and demonstrative of the world as Cash knew and experienced it. But as with the Hendrix guitars, these instruments are special and especially intimate. The artist’s hands were routinely placed on them and marked each of these instruments in visible ways. His use of them is confirmed not only through the marks on the guitars themselves, but through associated moving and still imagery. They stand in for the performances made with them and speak to those evanescent sounds that can no longer exist and they do so in ways few other objects in this museum can. Interestingly, despite the fact that these museums produce a good deal of sound to surround their spectators and shape their experiences of the objects and images they display, offering much more on interactive kiosks and audio guides, it is rare for guitars to be presented as sound producing instruments. There are no audio recordings of them solely as guitars, but only as part of long-completed sound recordings or archival videos. There are only a few whose sound qualities are described in any detail at all. Such descriptions are almost always presented because the instrument is so unusual as to be an oddity or outlier. Instead, we are continually told that these are the instruments through which important things happened in the past, but we are rarely asked to focus only on the quality and character of the sounds they made. Instead, those sounds are almost always placed within the stories of the exemplary lives of the artists who made them. We are not asked to listen to specific sounds in quite the way we are asked to consider the specific moments when these instruments were brought to full musical life. This makes the physical presence and material qualities of these guitars that much more important, carrying far more weight in these exhibits than any distinct qualities their sounds may possess. This places these objects permanently in the past as, simply put, they will never make any sounds ever again. And yet, instead of simply being passive musical instruments, the guitars described in the preceding paragraphs are central pieces of markedly personal narratives told through text, images, and objects constructing the ‘affective clusters’ that ‘coalesce around stars’ (Marshall, 2014:165) in order to create the complex amalgam of the intimate and the historical on which the expressive dynamics of these exhibits turn. Also, while these instruments are central to the retelling of the artists’ lives they represent, they are also part of larger sensory arrays of aural, visual and textual materials without which these muted objects would be far less meaningful and symbolically resonant. In museums all over the world, spectators are asked to observe or engage with the material qualities of the personal belongings of famous people. They are often used as concise markers of larger stories, such as Virginia Woolf ’s eyeglasses or Beethoven’s ear trumpets (Hancock, 2010; Eckhardt, 2008). The presence of these guitars stands in for familiar historical narratives and implicit ideologies of artistic value that are already embedded in the famous artist’s persona. They are displayed in order to link spectators in what feels like a more immediate way to the artists who once owned and played them. These objects are marked, not just conceptually or symbolically through the accompanying stories, images and recordings, but also materially and tangibly through signs of wear or use. They are located in history and geography through accompanying text and imagery. And as such, they represent and stand in for, an overarching value

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 147 system defined by the consensus personas of the artists in question and by what are presumed to be already-held beliefs about the value and meaning of their artistry. We can more readily imagine the artist’s presence when we are in close proximity to the instruments through which they made their music and it is this presence these institutions so assiduously try to produce for their spectators.

The continuing American Dream The Tina Turner Museum is set in a car park just off the I-40, an interstate highway that bisects Tennessee lengthwise. While its postal address is Brownsville, the museum is actually few miles from the town. The next town up Route 19 from Brownsville is Nutbush, a town that resonates mightily in Turner’s biography. The museum is surrounded by a few of the familiar institutions of contemporary American roadside capitalism, an Econo Lodge, a Rodeway Inn, a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen. The museum consists of a small building that houses a collection of memorabilia donated by Turner, including several dresses from her concerts and films, as well as personal items such as a high school yearbook and a letter from Prince Charles. The adjacent buildings include a range of related heritage displays. One is the nearly bare cabin in which blues musician ‘Sleepy’ John Estes once lived, like the building in which the Turner Museum is set, also recently relocated. Just across a short span of dark brick and black asphalt is the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center, a somewhat grand name for a nondescript building housing the West Tennessee Music Museum, the West Tennessee Cotton Museum, and the Hatchie River Museum. Each museum sits in one of the small number of rooms in this rectangular, red brick building. This prosaic setting will become the analytical context into the exploration of the Turner Museum that follows here. Given the museum’s setting in a such a generic landscape of pale signifiers of comfort and somnolence, this museum’s work of investing meaning in the power of its collection is all the more evocative and noticeable. Further, given the context of their display, the objects in this museum are possessed with far more precarious meanings than those found in more established institutions. As such, they must have what we might call their ‘expressive’ qualities inscribed on them by their settings and circumstances to maintain their aura as objects of interest, if not fascination. From this, then, it is fairly easy to see and understand the objects in the Turner Museum as part of a much larger and diffuse network of social relations through which the ‘agency’ of these specifically musical objects might be constituted. We can see these objects in multiple ways simultaneously, as signs of the innate importance of their former owner, as physical evidence of the valuable and exemplary life she lived, and as markers of the transformative power of music that can take someone from the cotton fields of rural Tennessee to the grandest of global performance stages. At least, this is the story the museum tells us. All of the elements of this tiny museum contribute to this fairly straightforward and conservative narrative repeated in various parts of the small exhibition space. The exhibit’s unifying story is expressed through repeated

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exhortations towards the value of hard work and learning through which anyone can realize their dreams. Turner herself is the most central and powerful piece of evidence for this creed, otherwise known as the American Dream. This may make more sense if I can explain this museum and the circumstances it establishes for its collection in more detail. The most important object at the Turner Museum is the most obvious, the building itself. While in most cases, describing a building as an object might be suspect, in this case it is the most effective way to understand it. The building which houses the Turner Museum is the primary school Turner attended as a young child in the 1940s. It was a one-room, clapboard house with a small stage on which the teacher stood during instruction. It was built on an acre of land leased by her great-grandfather and his brother to the Trustees of the Flagg Grove School. The building was the only school for the African American children in the region from the 1890s to the 1960s. After it closed, the building was used as a barn and corn crib for several decades until it was eventually abandoned entirely. The Stephens family, a local white farming family, bought the land and the building from the Haywood Country Board of Education in the late 1960s. Members of the family began the process of salvaging and restoring the building around 2010. The building was moved from its original site in a field near Nutbush to its current location in 2012 (‘Restoration of the Historic . . . ’). The restoration was undertaken with extreme care using as much of the original materials as possible, and when that was not possible, taking similar materials from similarly aged buildings in the region to complete the work. Southern Living magazine characterized the process as follows: This was not a renovation of the Flagg Grove School, but a true restoration. Each piece of wood that was moved was numbered so it would be put back in the right place. Those that could not be repaired were replaced with those from a Tennessee schoolhouse from the same time period. (Street, n.d.)

I call this building an object because that is how it has been implicitly characterized by the museum’s displays. The story of its salvage and restoration is one of the crafting of a singular ‘thing’ made of many disparate parts that have been intently sought and carefully reintegrated into a carefully fused narrative and material coherence. It was not only restored, it was resurrected, transformed from a corn crib back into a schoolhouse, or at least the remnant presence of one. The singularity of the museum’s narrative of renewal reflects the ideals and values of public education that have long had a powerful resonance in African American communities, especially in the American South, a region which violently tried to deny these communities effective or equal education for hundreds of years. Of particular resonance is the original school bell that has been posted outside the front steps of the building. Once used to signal children from the areas surrounding Nutbush, the bell is still used for special occasions, providing a visceral sonic reminder of a seemingly lost world, the dynamics of which nevertheless persist and repeatedly intrude on the present. One can easily imagine the sharp sound, pealing across fields in which generations of African Americans worked, first as enslaved, racialized others, then

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 149 later as an economically indentured, politically marginalized underclass. This object expresses a rich, if sometimes dark continuity (Figure 6.5). Inside, the modest exhibition space has two distinct areas defined physically and thematically. There is a ‘U’-shaped collection of tall glass vitrines that surround a glass-topped, display table. Behind this is the school’s stage, next to which sit two rows of desks and a wooden bench which have survived the building’s various transformations. Inside the tall cases are several costumes Turner wore for some of her more spectacular performances. One contains her costume from the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. A third contains a miniature model of the stage set for Turner’s performances on the ‘Wildest Dreams’ Tour at the old Wembley Stadium in London in 1996. The Wembley performances, which run continually on a screen inside an adjacent case, helped her set a world record for concert attendance that she still holds (Perry, 2016). Each case also includes gold or platinum records of her various hits. The glass display table contains a range of personal items, such as a letter thanking Turner for performing at the Prince’s Trust in 1986, a formally typed letter with the Prince’s warm thanks offered in a handwritten addendum. It also includes her high school yearbook, a copy of her autobiography, and other ephemera. Behind the tall display cases is what amounts to a separate exhibition area about education in the African American community in the region. It encompasses the teaching stage adorned with a world map with a series of Turner’s more famous performances indicated on it. It also has two neat rows of student desks as well as the teacher’s desk (Figure 6.4). The nearby panels provided both a history of this specific school as well as contextualizing images and text explaining the value of the school to the local community. One case contains a facsimile of the deed of sale from 1889 from Turner’s ancestor, Benjamin Flagg, and the check made out to the Haywood Country Board of Joe Education from Joe Stephens for $100 when the land and building were sold to him in 1967. It was Stephen’s descendants who decided to salvage and restore the building. Above these facsimiles is a small screen that plays a short message from Turner about her involvement with the project and some background on the school itself.   It is here that, were we to assign agency to these objects, we would do so by noting the particularity of the story they are enlisted to tell. However, I’m not convinced that the responsibility for this exact story should be placed on the decidedly slim foundations of these objects. These objects did not efface the history of structural violence that was long imposed on African Americans in West Tennessee nor are they capable of evoking it in this context. As the display panels unwittingly tell us, this violence placed African American children in schools that were ‘plain on the inside and the outside’ containing ‘benches and uncomfortable desks’, providing ‘no indoor plumbing’, only ‘separate outhouses for boys and girls’. Further, visiting in January, I found it hard not to think about just how cold these buildings probably were sometimes for their charges. There is no explanation as to how the land came to rest in the hands of the Board of Education who sold it off for what seems a paltry sum. Even the objects outlining the transactions are silent on this topic. Instead, we need to expand our scope slightly and try to take in what I prefer to call the ‘expressive’ capabilities of the objects displayed in this museum. It is not only

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Figure 6.4  Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 151 possible, but very easy to imagine what these objects might mean. They might tell us a story of brutal inequity that persists to this day. They might tell us a story of the singular person who escaped the region, through hard work, painful struggle, in the face of often ugly violence, rarely if ever to return. They might show us a story of dreams deferred or denied alongside those attained. The narrative they support is a very particular one, with inclusions and absences that form an all-too coherent pattern. In short, they are comprehensively managed to support the narrative we get and to evade the ones we don’t. The narrative we get is evoked in multiple ways both conceptually and materially. Before you enter the Tina Turner Museum, it is hard not to notice the windows on the left side of the building (Figure 6.6). The original windows have been replaced with photographs of cotton fields. This motif is repeated inside as well as we look out past the teaching stage into an imagined world of cotton. It is redolent of the kinds of picturesque visions of ‘The Old South’ that persist into the present. It is not explicitly suggestive, however, of the back-breaking labour and indispensable economic support structures this crop provided to slavery and Jim Crow for so long (see Baptist, 2014). This gesture helps create an atmosphere that serves to solidify its primary message of hard work and learning through which people are expected to achieve their dreams. I am using the term ‘atmosphere’ in the manner Bjerregaard (2015) does, as an extension of an object’s meaningfulness beyond its immediate context. Bjerregaard argues that ‘we may think of atmosphere as the excess of the real that may not be transported by the museum object per se and which cannot be confined to the information that may be referred to the object’ (p. 75). A museum might create what he calls ‘a kind of embracing experience [that] seems to dissolve the individual objects at display allowing them to become part of the general experience of space’ (Bjerregaard, 2015:75). As such, an atmosphere belongs ‘neither to a human subject nor to a material object’ (Bjerregaard, 2015:76). As he suggests: In terms of the status of the object this means that while we conventionally have focused on the object as an enclosure, a finished entity to be interpreted as a complete work, an attention to atmosphere should point our focus to the object as a physical extension in space. The object is, thus, not characterized by what it ‘contains’, but by the way it radiates into space. (Bjerregaard, 2015:76)

The specific atmosphere of the Turner Museum is evoked with particular visibility when we look at a glamorous dress of Turner’s set against the simulacrum of a view over the cotton fields (see Plate 8). We can see, and probably feel, the immediate effect of the juxtaposition, that of a particular kind of triumph, which, while embodied in one person, is universally transferable, or so we are told. As Bjerregaard has argued, such moment allow for ‘a close encounter with objects [that] may create a more intimate and empathic relation to the past’, possibly allowing an exhibition to be ‘turned into a sensate, even emotional encounter, rather than a didactic or critical exercise’ (Bjerregaard, 2015, 74; see also Dudley, 2010; Wehner and Sear, 2010).   

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Figure 6.5  Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 6.6  Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 153 We might feel similarly when we look past the teacher’s stage and into the illusion of another West Tennessee cotton field. Between these two scenes, we see the full scope of the story the museum wants to tell us. The teacher’s desk is placed in what we might see as a something fairly close to its natural setting. A teacher’s desk did once sit in this approximate spot and did look out on something at least recognizable as the scene we are shown. In this sense, surrounded by the period clapboards and desks, we are asked to feel something of what the long lost original might have been like. We are asked to stretch out with our imaginations to connect with Turner’s origins. Then, when we stand on the other side of the transparent glass case holding a dress Turner wore long after her monumental success had been assured, we still see the glowing image meant to recall the place where she first start her journey. What ties the atmosphere this place produces to an understanding of its meaning is the narrative of hard work and learning that is both stated and implied in both the objects and the ideas this museum presents. If we understand these objects as having a life history, or even a ‘biography’, then we can see what parts of those life histories are presented to us (see Joy, 2009). There are three broad types of objects present in this museum. There are the famous objects, such as the costumes. Most in this exhibit were worn in various performances during Turner’s 50th Anniversary Tour in 2008–9. They were designed by fashion luminaries such as Bob Mackie and Giorgio Armani. These outfits, as well as objects such as the gold records are signs of the importance of their owner. They testify to her standing as a performer. These are part of highly visible global networks of signification which is confirmed to us on the screen sitting inside a glass vitrine next to the costumes. We see these very objects in use in performance. We are asked to acknowledge Turner’s general presence as an artist, or even directly remember moments in which we experienced Turner’s artistry for ourselves. There are also the mundane objects, including personal items such as the yearbook, personal correspondence and a tour itinerary. These stretch the personhood of Turner displayed here beyond the professional and artistic work to that elusive something else, Turner as an actual person. We see items that we could not have experienced elsewhere that are meant to provide some tangible sense of her life as she has lived it, not as we have witnessed it. These are meant to be direct material evidence of the valuable and exemplary life she lived. Finally, there are the generic objects, such as the desks, school books and wall map. Most of these have little or at best a glancing relationship to Turner personally. However, they are symbolic of markers of the transformative power of the hard work and learning Turner engaged in, at least in part, in this very building. We know a good deal about some of them (famous), the general story of some of the others (mundane), and only the broadest and dimmest outlines of the remainder (generic). We are meant to take all of these objects as a collective representation of the narrative that each individually could not sustain, but that all three collectively solidify. The careful arrangement and juxtaposition of these three types of objects produced the museum’s atmosphere and that is what constitutes us as spectators. We are constituted as fans whose expectations, experiences, and knowledge are served through specifically familiar objects that we more than likely have had some experience of previously. But

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we are also constituted as people who aspire to learn in a different way. We want to look at the mundane ephemera produced by the exhibition subject in the shadow of the achievements and presumed greatness. The mundane objects work on us differently than the familiar and famous ones do, precisely because of their seeming normalcy. The charge of meaning invested in the mundane objects is only produced by their proximity to the famous ones. Third, we are constituted as people who might be willing to imagine further than the immediate and beyond the material through the generic period objects, especially those connected with the school. We are asked and expected to link the known and the unknown and test the limits of what we can know about the person whose life we are there to revisit. Finally, we are constituted as believers. We are there to accept an ideal so thoroughly acceptable that its repeated expression is made entirely without any form of apparent self-awareness, The American Dream. The overriding purpose of this museum is to provide material, historical, and emotional proof of this one idea, one that their website proclaims with some clarity: A collection of costumes, gold records and more will be on display for all to see, at no charge. A strong message to young people on the importance of education; and no matter your circumstances, it is possible to achieve your dreams and success in life. (‘Flagg Grove School’, n.d.)

Taken individually, even the most famous and recognizable of the objects in the Turner Museum are still always caught in an elusively indirect relationship with the artist and her work. They all can only refer to the music. The musical objects found in this museum are not ‘the work’ nor are they an extension of the ‘artist’ in the same way as an art object is. Therefore, the collectors and curators must create some kind of atmosphere to link the objects to the art and the artist and beyond that to story that animates them. It is this story which possibly overshadows any independent or autonomous agency we might assign to the objects which support it and it is this story that subtly signals that precarious character of the meanings this museum is trying to reinforce for us.

The Carter Family Fold The final example of interest here is the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia. This location is home to the A. P. Carter Grocery, the relocated Carter Family cabin, officially entitled ‘A. P. Carter’s Boyhood Home’, and a working music venue called the Carter Family Fold. The grocery store is now the Carter Family Museum, a small building housing a substantial collection of family memorabilia. The cabin was moved from its original location in a pasture about 10 miles away and has been renovated significantly to allow it to act as a museum in its own right. The cabin is populated with family heirlooms as well as a great many more generic items that, while not directly part of the Carter Family’s history, are meant to recall the kinds of lives A.P., Maybelle and

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 155 Sara Carter led in this corner of southwest Virginia, about 30 miles north of Bristol. The Fold is now part of the Crooked Road, a tourist road similar in shape and intent to the Mississippi Blues Heritage Trail. Both are broad conceptual frameworks that draw together geographically and historically disparate sites into a common framework of musical tradition. The purpose of the Carter Family Museum and cabin is to commemorate those the informative plaque refers to as the ‘First Family of Country Music’. It is strongly informed by the version of country music history that places the Carters at the centre of what is commonly referred to as the ‘big bang’ of country music (see Wolfe, 1996; Malone and Neal, 2010). ‘Here’, a plaque outside the cabin tells us, ‘Alvin Pleasant Carter’s genius absorbed and reshaped folk songs, vintage parlor ballads, sacred pieces and Tin Pan Alley pop tunes into over 300 songs, new compositions that defined an era’. This is, in miniature, one of the central myths of American country music. On a plaque near the cabin, bluegrass musician Marty Stuart summarizes what these places are meant to evoke: Few places speak to me like A.P. Carter’s Cabin. Many of America’s songs and stories come from within these walls. While the cabin was still standing in the middle of a pasture, I loved going there just to feel the wind blow through the rooms. It was the same wind that carried A.P.’s and the Carter Family’s songs out to the rest of the world.

On another plaque, Stuart comments, ‘If you look at country music as if it were a musical bible, I’d say he would be in the Genesis. Where God says, “In the beginning, God created A.P. Carter.”’ The objects housed in the cabin and the store are used to uphold this narrative very much in the ways we have seen already. In these two buildings, the early history of American country music and the Carter Family’s place in it become difficult to distinguish from one another given how the latter inhabits the former so seamlessly in these exhibits. Only the two downstairs rooms in the cabin are open to the public. One is the kitchen, the other the main family room. Each is filled with objects either donated by the Carter Family or made to act as representative examples of possessions they would have owned. The kitchen contains a small, white stove with a stove-top coffee pot and soup pot. It is festooned with seed bags from the Southern Seeds Cooperative. Next to this are shelves with various Mason jars with food stored in them as well as dinner settings and a water pitcher. The main room is spare in its furnishings and is set up around a large round rug, an old wooden rocking chair, once a favourite of Johnny Cash, and a large number of family photos that are spread around the room. There are stockings over the fireplace, a wood pile next to it, and several display cases of personal items taken from the family. The three or four oil lamps set around the place suggest that the cabin is clearly meant to reflect the Carter’s austere living conditions as faithfully as possible. Next door, all of the space in the large front room of the grocery store is given over to a formal museum display tracking the Carter Family’s musical career narrated through

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panels of text and imagery. These are very detailed and effective at noting crucial points in the development of their repertoire, performance style and influential catalogue of recordings. However, despite this, the panels are simply overwhelmed by the large number of personal items that surround them taking up almost all of the space on the floor and each wall. For example, one wall is completely covered in large display cases presenting outfits A.P., Maybelle and Sara Carter wore on stage at different points in their careers. Each has an associated photograph nearby showing the clothes in use. There are several musical instruments in the display, including a full-sized upright piano, once a status symbol of those aspiring to middle-class comfort, an old autoharp sitting in for Maybelle’s which we are told is in Nashville, a guitar once played by Sara, and one of A.P.’s mandolins. The numerous glass cases contain a wide range of personal items, such as many pieces of Maybelle’s china setting, again a symbol of middle-class aspiration, and a good many books on folklore and folk music as well as pieces of sheet music published by A.P. during his lifetime. The room is striking for the warm, intimate sense of a family museum. It is also notable for the precise and exacting narrative of the Carter’s musical career which is laid out in a significant amount of detail in conjunction with the heirlooms that surround it. It is in this way that the story of the Carter Family as musicians and folklorists merges seamlessly with their history as a family from Southwestern Virginia. Their seeming unremarkableness, as evidenced by A.P.’s Grocery cash box and rusted metal sign reading simply ‘A.P. Carter Gro.’, rubs up against their oft-cited extraordinariness as professional musicians captured in the panels of text and imagery. The displays at the Carter Family Fold capture the arrival of modernity in the American South and the simultaneous defence of a valued tradition that we are told was brought into the modern world more or less intact. In this way, there is a telling contrast between the cabin and the Grocery. While both tell of a vanished world they do so is significantly different ways. The cabin is starkly austere yet exudes an undeniable intimacy. We are told how the eight children slept tightly packed together until the family could afford to build a second floor. The grocery, however, bespeaks of a style and elegance necessarily absent from the cabin. We see subtly hand-coloured china plates and a set of handmade formal dresses and suits the Carters used for performing in so many far-flung places. In one sense the cabin tells us where this music came from and grocery store tells where modernity took it. Both are necessary to uphold the narrative that places the Carter Family at the originating moment of the history of the musical tradition they are said to have brought into the modern world.

Conclusion: The stains of greatness Across nearly every museum I visited and studied for this book, deeply personal and extremely specific objects recalled both the presence and absence of their former owners and users (see Fairchild 2018; 2017). Spectators can see clothes they have worn, which in some cases are ripped and stained. They can see notes they have written

 Fetish, Effigy and the Resonant Object 157 to bandmates and loved ones, battered suitcases, worn instruments and personal photos from their past lives. It should not be too hard to see how this infrastructure of recall constructs a sort of lattice work of presence around obvious, but strangely invisible absences. But it is the absences that we are asked to inhabit, briefly, and learn to feel and see the specific kinds of presence these museums are trying to create for us. These presences are of those we are told are the greatest of artists and the most transcendent figures. They are recalled for us through the sounds of their voices, their music, the testimony of their friends and associates, images of their accomplishments and textual explanations of their importance. We are meant to reach out historically, imaginatively and emotionally to a past we are expected to already some connection with, a connection the museum merely claims to enhance and solidify. This brings to a close the focus on the contents of these museums that have occupied us in these last three chapters. The goal has been to draw both the broad contours of how these places mean to speak to us through their collections and also present more fine-grained detail as to the expected experience of them. Popular music museums emerged as a product of a widespread shift towards the values and exhibitionary techniques of the so-called new museum. They represent a shift to a concern with codifying spectator experiences to conform with a regime of economic value rather than a primary focus on the prescriptive, educative focus on the traditional museum. They sit on the foundations provided by the affective labour of musicians and those associated with them that are then shaped into forms of value, mostly in the form of power over the collective musical past. Spectators are then guided through their own experiences of this musical past with the intention of gradually incorporating their knowledge and experience of that past into the authoritative narratives and sensory demands of the museum. The ideal iteration of this encounter takes form of the core figure of the popular music museum, the musical celebrity. This is what we turn our attention to next.

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Part III

Ideal musical subjects

7

The emergence and evolution of the rock imaginary

Rock music was born of a revolt against the sham of Western culture: it was direct and gutsy and spoke to the senses. As such it was profoundly subversive. It still is. (Eisen, 1969:xv) Pop music has always provided a surface for projections: the specific joys and struggles of its stars take on a universal aspect, as though the artists are dreaming on our behalf. (Hsu, 2017) http:​//www​.newy​orker​.com/​cultu​re/cu​ltura​l-com​ment/​ jay-z​-dr-d​re-an​d-the​-musi​c-of-​succe​ss/am​p

In the final three chapters, we will turn our attention from ideal musical objects to ideal musical subjects. The primary subjects that are the main characters in most exhibits in popular music museums are first and foremost, famous musicians. These museums act as a stage for their relationships with that other kind of subject, the secondary ones, their audience. The great musician’s renown acts as an ideological marker for a set of ideals, detailed in this chapter, which define the primary musical subject’s greatness through their popular validation by the secondary subject, ‘the people’. The artists featured in these exhibits are, by virtue of their very presence, already ‘great’. Their greatness is tautologically validated by the spectre of popular acclamation which lurks pervasively throughout all of the museums I have examined. While these musical subjects are defined by their already-present greatness, they only become ideal music subjects at the moment they are met in public with those forms of validation that confirm that greatness from the other ideal subject. One particularly important dynamic of most exhibits in popular music museums, then, is the relationship between the attribution of various forms of greatness, aesthetic, social, personal, and economic, and the affirmation of those designations of greatness through some form of ‘popular’ ratification. These attributions and their subsequent endorsement take the form of multimedia and multisensory exhibits that incorporate imagery, objects and sounds into coherent narratives of the inherent greatness of individual artists and demonstrations of the widespread, unalloyed public approval of those artists and their work. We will look closely at how these are expressed through specific portraits of artists in Chapter 8 and broader systemic forms of representation I will call ‘the popular’ in Chapter 9. We will see how ideal musical subjects are framed through

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displays that draw on more than a half century of imagery and ideals about the ‘great art’ and artists of popular music and then see how that art is displayed as a tribune of ‘the people’. However, greatness is not some innocent or irreproachable measure of aesthetic value. It is instead a sharply pointed designation of political and economic value. Music is a wildly variable object of attention, understanding and appreciation. Our very perception of it can vary dramatically depending on the circumstances in which it is experienced. These are facts. Given this, our assessment of its value can also fluctuate radically depending on the social, political, economic, cultural, personal forces that might be brought to bear on it. As such, designating any work as ‘great’ is always a political gesture subject to all the pressures, forces and hegemonies of any such gesture. Paraphrasing Beller (see Chapter 4), greatness is ‘a social relation characterized by the accumulation of attention’ (Beller, 2006/7). In our version of capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, the designation of greatness is a tool for the accumulation of political and economic power through the accumulation of specific kinds of attention. As such, the great art and artists presented in popular music museums are indelibly neoliberal in character and the authenticating relationships between artists and their audiences are neoliberal social relationships. There are several reasons for this. First, as noted in Chapter 2, the advent of neoliberal capitalism was part of a larger transition from a disciplinary society to a society of control (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Power in such a society is based on what Foucault called governmentality, a term encompassing those procedures, techniques and habits inculcated in a populace or assumed by that populace that make a society governable. Such techniques include forms of what Foucault called ‘bio-political production’, or social relationships that are marked by the spread of power across the whole of a society through the internalization of that power in the bodies and minds of the population. This internalization takes place through more or less ‘voluntary’ acts of understanding, connection and experience, acts that are by definition necessary to let us function successfully in society. As Hardt and Negri note, the mere appearance of voluntary acceptance gives the dictates of power a certain ‘democratic’ character through the simulacrum of popular consent. Second, one of the hallmarks of neoliberal capitalism is that system’s necessary capacity for communicative and symbolic production about itself. As Hardt and Negri explain, this communication both expresses and organizes the social relations of the market (Hardt and Negri, 2000:32–4). It does so by producing the very stories validating its own greatness and efficacy. This is not a fact noted only by critics of capitalism, but by its architects (see Chapter 2). The very idea of greatness is an important ideological marker of the internalization of the agendas of the powerful. Its acceptance marks the moment when that power is internalized. The genius is a particularly prominent carrier of the kinds of stories that attest to the wonders of the systems that produced them. The moment at which a mooted greatness meets its necessary corollary, public acclaim, is also the moment when the system that has produced that vision of greatness confirms it through its own chosen mechanisms of popular consent. The story of popular music as told by popular music museums is one of genius and inherent greatness, recognized, evoked and

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 163 embraced by ‘the people’ who then hold that greatness aloft in mutual celebration. This is the virtuous circle of neoliberalism: the great artist meets the rational consumer and, unleashed by the very circumstances of their encounter, pursue a courtship free from the constraining dictates of outside power in an authentic and empowering ritual that makes all involved better off. The visions of greatness in these museums present us with a historically specific and contingent coming together of two ideal visions of the world that already had a lot in common and both have very deep roots in Western thought: artistic transcendence and the freedoms of capitalism. These visions of greatness are one part a story told so often across such a huge range of sources describing so many iterations of itself that most are simply accepted because they are so self-evidently ‘true’. They become true in ways so obvious that there is no real point in either asserting or contesting their veracity. Any challenge to such a designation of greatness usually runs aground on the shoals of the phantasm of an already-exerted popular will. Any claims about them that stray beyond mere confirmation are superfluous. As Hardt and Negri argue, ‘the machine is self-validating, autopoietic – that is, systemic.’ They argue that the social fabric of societies of control are marked by communicative systems that absorb any potentially destabilizing difference in ‘an insignificant play of selfgenerating, self-regulating equilibria . . . . Far from eliminating master narratives’, they argue, a society of control ‘actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:34). Before we see how these ideas are present in the exhibits of popular music museums, however, we need to understand the images and ideals that have come to define one of the dominant discursive formations of popular music, a historically specific ideological formation that regularly tells us exactly how and why popular music counts as art and how its makers matter as artists. It is a formation that began to emerge at least as early as the mid-1960s and has codified what has been deemed to be the ‘great’ art and transcendent artistry of popular music that has been our expanding inheritance ever since. The name I have given this formation is the rock imaginary. This formation and its subjects are ideological constructions formed out of the dynamic and highly specific sorts of relationships between artists and audiences parsed through the mediating influences of the music and entertainment industries in a bewildering variety of guises. It is a now construct so pervasive as to be almost invisible. It is an ideological formation cobbled together from pre-existing ideas of what constitutes greatness in music and art more generally. The tangible markers of that ideology in these popular music museums take many forms. In order to understand the ideal musical subject as it appears in these museums, we need to set aside standard conceptions of the generic pop star, rock star or musical celebrity that populate the literature and instead look at how the parameters of the construction of the very particular kinds of musical subjects of the sort on display in these museums have emerged and developed since at least the mid-1960s. It is not at all coincidental that the emergence of this subject coincides with the emergence and enforcement of neoliberalism in the political and economic spheres of the Western world. Both are part of same shifts in how the most basic social relationships of

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vast numbers of people were constituted both symbolically and materially. Further, as we will see in this chapter, the connections between these musical subjects and neoliberalism are not merely contextual or circumstantial, they are substantive. In short, the content and value of most forms of contemporary musical celebrity have been definitively shaped by the precepts of neoliberalism. The museums examined in this book encountered their ideal musical subjects long after the template for them was fully formed. These museums therefore reflect and perpetuate the ideologies that underpin these subjects rather than challenge them or push them along new historical trajectories. Before outlining the historical trajectory of this formation, I want to set out what I mean by the term the rock imaginary. Obviously, the term ‘imaginary’ is not meant to imply ‘made up’ or ‘not real’. Instead, this term is most often used by those working in history, anthropology or cultural studies to refer to a kind of implicit social agreement about the meanings of broad abstract terms at any given point in time. The concept of a ‘social imaginary’ circulated most influentially through the work of historian and anthropologist Benedict Anderson who argued that the complexities of mass abstractions such as a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’ are best understood through the imagined connections people produce to sustain their coherence and legitimacy. As Charles Taylor argues, a social imaginary ‘is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality’. Instead, he says, it includes ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor, 2002:106). Taylor points out that such imaginaries are ‘carried in images, stories, and legends’ that are ‘shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society’. It is this ‘common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. It is an often implicit understanding that is ‘both factual and “normative”; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice’ (Taylor, 2002:106). As Arthurs (2003) suggests, the social imaginary ‘derives from the usual, the quotidian, from everyday attitudes, behaviors, and opinion making. It flows from events and ideas, the realities that citizens live with most intimately and immediately’ (Arthurs, 2003:580). The social imaginaries we all live with and help enact everyday are ways of managing and mediating our relationships with the great mass of people who are strangers to us, but with whom we share a great deal of common understanding. What this understanding of the imagination offers us is not simply some esoteric or special realm of creativity and expression, but a tool to understand how we connect to one another through both implicit and explicit shared understandings of the world around us through abstract ideas that are both constantly changing, but which can also seem surprisingly stable. One such abstraction is the rock imaginary. What I mean by this term are the shared understandings we have of how we assess and make common meanings from various forms of popular music. I use the term ‘rock’ not to value this form of music above any

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 165 others, but because the particular imaginary I am describing first came to coherence, prominence and eventual dominance through the kinds of ideas specifically used to talk about rock in the mid-to-late 1960s. This imaginary has several key defining features outlined in this chapter. First, drawing on various models of ‘great art’ from the mid-tolate nineteenth century, the rock imaginary demands that its representatives be ‘true to themselves’ and more importantly, to their art, especially its origins and historical lineage. This stipulation usually goes under the catch-all term ‘authenticity’. This means that an artist’s work must be a genuine reflection and legitimate extension of the tradition of which they are a part and that the artist’s links to their tradition of practice are deeply felt and honestly acquired. Second, it demands that their work represent the highest standards of emotional and intellectual expression, a state often reflected in terms like ‘depth,’ ‘gravity’ or ‘maturity’. Third, the rock imaginary demands that works of art admitted into its charmed circle transcend everyday life and attain some sort of ‘timeless’ quality specifically because of their possession of the above-noted characteristics (see Fairchild, 2019; see also Regev, 1994). While this may sound like it would inherently exclude the shiny, spangly, seemingly deliberate depthlessness of the tradition of contemporary pop music, it doesn’t. The rock imaginary excludes nothing because it is not defined by any specific collection of musical attributes. Instead, it is defined by the act of laying claim to a self-conscious historicization and aestheticization of a tradition of musical practice and linking this tradition to broader shared values that extend beyond the immediate work of art in question. There are simply endless examples of contemporary popular music writing in which we are told that the ostensibly superficial, disposable pop that has become a prominent, if not dominant cultural form, is in fact a deep, authentic and serious reflection of some part of our society’s most cherished beliefs and values. We will get to a few of these later in this chapter. From this set of values, we should be able to see how the rock imaginary reflects and embodies the values of neoliberal popular culture I outlined in Chapter 2. It is populated by the same characters and the same blessed relationships between the virtuous creators of art and the rational choosers of the fandom. It is defined by the same kinds of tautological estimations of value both created and legitimated by the market and it rewards assignations of a pronounced individualism and personal autonomy, a powerful revulsion at all forms of perceived conformity, and innate resistance to any form of centralized power. The rock imaginary in this sense is defined by an obscuring of the processes of persistence and longevity behind a discourse concerned with the mystical qualities of great art, qualities which provide a more than adequate explanation for the greatness already presumed to be there. It is the consummated relationship between artists and their publics that provide the most visible form of self-validating evidence of this greatness. The rock imaginary is our collective way of acknowledging it.

The musical subject and modernity It is not entirely clear from the existing literature when exactly the defining attributes of the rock imaginary first emerged. But it is clear that the explicit ideals of aesthetic

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transcendence, authentic emotional immediacy, and superior individual expression that originated in the nineteenth century had been directly and explicitly applied to popular music before rock emerged in the 1960s. They appeared outside the context of European classical traditions primarily in writings about jazz, most clearly in repeated demands to treat jazz as high art which became increasingly common by the mid1950s. These demands were based on attributions to jazz musicians that would not have been at all unfamiliar to anyone familiar with how composers had been characterized throughout the preceding century (see Gennari, 2006). Beyond this, there is little question that it was the application of these traditional ideals of great art to artists such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles that validated rock as great art and that made the rock imaginary possible. I will briefly draw out a few basic, constituent elements of what we can see as a modern musical subject from a range of writings which can eventually point us towards the defining elements of the rock imaginary. Its various parts have been drawn from some of the bedrock assumptions about the function, purpose and value of art and artists that have persisted in Western culture for centuries. A primary aspect of the rock imaginary is the conflicted status of rock as a ‘popular’ tradition that also produces transcendent works. But we should understand that it is the presumed basis of the ‘great’ works of popular music in some kind of mass social base makes everything else about them possible. By definition, the designation ‘popular’ depends on its supposed opposite, ‘elite’, and this distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ depends on the preceding distinction between ‘art’ music and ‘folk’ music. While this distinction is much older than the more modern terms ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ or ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, Gelbart explains at length how these two designations could and have only ever existed in relation to each other (Gelbart, 2007:7). The distinction itself depends on a shift from categorizations based on a particular form of music’s function to ones based on its origins that took place across the nineteenth century, a shift that ended with ‘folk’ and ‘art’ music taking on ‘connotations more or less consistent with their present meanings’ (Gelbart, 2007:9). A concomitant shift from a focus on the broadly mimetic capacities of art to the agency of the singular creator of that art also signalled a shift to a focus on the origins of a work and an attendant concern with the status of its creator as a uniquely capable figure, the genius, a category capacious enough to accommodate both ‘folk’ geniuses and ‘elite’ ones (Gelbart, 2007:80–1). For our purposes, the key aspects of this fairly complicated and protracted shift are those that concern the function and origins of a work of art. As I will suggest shortly, the shift in how many people talked about popular music after the 1960s and the extent to which popular music could be counted as art turned on the extent to which individual works might be thought of as merely functional and the extent to which their origins might be attributed to something more than merely the circumstances that may have produced them. The newly codified nineteenth-century category of art music was defined, in part, as a negative. Art music was not functional, it was not meant to be used in everyday contexts, and it was not produced using methods that were replicable across society. Instead, it was defined by those who made it and just as importantly those who it represented (pp. 192–5). It is the representational relationship between creator and

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 167 public, where the public was regarded as much as the sponsor of or subscriber to the work of genius, as the recipient or repository of it, that has helped secure the distinct, and distinctly elevated, status of art, artist and by extension the art-loving public, that has persisted into the present. It was this status that allowed some works to transcend the material world, despite or paradoxically because of their dependence on that world for economic survival (Gelbart, 2007:192–5). As many scholars have noted, this period saw a substantial and irreversible reorientation of musical taste and judgement which was directed towards the development of new aesthetic criteria and the emergence of new canons of great works based on them (DeNora, 1995:3–4). As Goehr has concluded, ‘All these changes shared a common aim. They marked a transition in practice, away from seeing music as a means to seeing it as an end’ (Goehr, 1992:206). Among other criteria for ‘great’ works that have persisted into the present is the distinction between works whose success is based on the superlative skill or craft of those who made them fit for a particular purpose, and those whose success is based on their superlative expression of some purpose beyond the merely functional. As Goehr summarizes, ‘Circumstances gradually changed so that music came to be regarded as an art that resulted from the activity of composition not just in performances but also in works of art’ (Goehr, 1992:149–50). A work of ‘art’ implies an ‘artist’ and in this case, the fusing of work and creator. Further, ‘artists’ did not produce kitsch, as it was called, that is, work that was mechanical, calculated or manufactured (Dahlhaus, 1979:100). Instead, works of art made by artists, defined as such by the tautological assignation of this elevated status, carried an assumption that perhaps inevitably produced a ‘cult of genius’, a genius whose works were implicitly regarded as ‘fragments of autobiography’ (Dahlhaus, 1979:98). As Samson suggests, Beethoven came to be viewed as the epitome of the engaged or committed artist, one who expressed through music his affinity with the radical, humanitarian thought of the age of revolution, and bequeathed to his successors an unprecedented sense of the ambition and pretension of the musical work, its quest for an epic status. (Samson, 2002:263–4)

This understanding of the artist as a singular and expressive force reflected a larger culture of individualism and originality that produced the classic ‘modern subject’, a culture that also saddled music with new and potentially onerous social and ethical obligations. Great music needed to embody what Samson calls ‘ambitious individualism on the one hand’ and ‘the weight of an (invented) past on the other’ in a composercentric art world that was always conscious of the presence of history (Samson, 2002:262). Importantly, it is the act of self-conscious historicization upon which the classical canon depended that has been particularly influential and persistent. Samson argues that the figure of the great composer gradually became an increasingly complex entity. It became ‘a measure of the widening distance between an exemplary past and a modernist present. That distance, along with the continuing need for historical validation of the present, had the effect of supplementing, if not replacing, the sense of

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a continuously evolving tradition with a growing awareness of the more distant past – the “roots” of the tradition’ (Samson, 2002:265). Finally, despite identifying and often celebrating its origins, this ‘great’ art paradoxically sought autonomy from the everyday world that had produced it. Indeed, it was works that were said to have made this leap, this step up to transcendence and timelessness, that were denoted as ‘great’. It was not the fixed attributes of these works of art where their greatness was said to lay, but the ends they reached that determined their greatness. That such works and their authors could traverse the same world as we did and then somehow escape the commerce, the compromise and the contention, was demonstration enough of their inestimable value. Samson concludes: In a nutshell the early decades of the [nineteenth] century saw a remarkable synthesis of artistic skills and commercial enterprise as musical culture was increasingly commodified, its products tailored to the demands of a new middleclass establishment. It is against this background that the emergence of a canon and an avant-garde should really be understood. Even as they identified and validated bourgeois culture, these categories challenged its modes of production and reception. Essentially it was the challenge of the aesthetic to the marketplace, though the latter threatened always to embrace the former. The category of greatness, then, took shape in opposition to an emerging ‘culture industry’. (Samson, 2002:279)

This should be a familiar set of circumstances for those familiar with the so-called Age of Rock, one that we will revisit shortly. First, we need to see how a few important precursors helped prepare the ground for the emergence of the rock imaginary.

Mediation and authenticity In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new and important infrastructures of mediation grew and developed in the form of modern celebrity and entertainment journalism as well as a newly expanding advertising industry. Mostly consisting of print, text and image, this media sphere was a primary shaper of public perceptions and experiences of famous entertainers in music, vaudeville, theatre and film for decades (see Ponce De Leon, 2002). Themes such as expressive authenticity and truth in performance also posited in opposition to the culture industry were present here as well (Ponce De Leon, 2002:226–7). This was especially true in the United States where the experience of performances and performers such as, for example, the voice of famed opera singer Jenny Lind, when described in extraordinary detail through the words of critics and fans, were thought to provide access to a higher plane of existence (Cavicchi, 2011:14–19). Such writing was offered as testimony to explain the experience and effects of her singing, her character and the uplift they produced. As Vella notes, ‘Lind’s sonic purity, supposedly a reflection of inner character, gets caught up in broader Victorian ideals of bourgeois femininity. It constitutes a symbolic

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 169 space where vocal qualities, operatic roles and personality are conflated with and negotiate sociocultural norms’ (Vella, 2017:240). Notably, these discourses of artistic greatness were deeply bound up with the language of advertising, the two often being indistinguishable. Another sphere in which the qualities of music and musicians were sent off to ‘negotiate cultural norms’ routinely appeared in jazz criticism as practised in the early to mid-twentieth century. This form of writing was the most direct and important antecedent of the rock imaginary in which we can find ways of describing jazz that bear a striking resemblance to the first generation of writers who wrote about rock as a serious art form. Although the discussion of jazz was far more contentious than the examination of film stars by the largely compliant celebrity press, celebrity journalism did a good deal to enhance and solidify public perceptions of the exceptional and exceptionally authentic character of its favoured celebrities, and this included numerous musicians (Ponce De Leon, 2002:226–8). Indeed, some of the most influential jazz critics such as Leonard Feather had begun their careers writing in trade publications in the film industry (Gennari, 2006:19). However, it should be noted that extensive arguments about the music’s purported morally and musically corrosive effects as well as its potential to breach social and economic barriers of race and gender thought to be sacrosanct were also a significant aspect of writing about the form (Brennan, 2017; Gennari, 2006; Gendron, 2002; Leonard, 1962). From its earliest incarnations, jazz criticism worked to highlight the superlative talents of its most well-known exponents largely through the extensive efforts of some of the music’s most confident partisans. As Gennari explains, a good deal of the most supportive commentary routinely looked to the often intense interest European writers and composers had in jazz as legitimation for a form under continuous rhetorical attack from some quarters in the United States. These writers, Gennari says, ‘set out to convince the world that a music born of slavery and segregation was the true American art, the singular twentieth-century art, and as such a symbol of America’s emergence as a self-sustaining cultural entity’ (Gennari, 2006:22). As Gennari concludes, one of the primary goals these writers had was to fix the self-conscious historicization of jazz and its creators in what they saw as its rightful place in music history. Similarly, prominent musical gatekeepers outside of the jazz press such as the conductor and media personality Walter Damrosch praised white artists like George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman for their efforts to mould this music into symphonic form which for many, even presaged a potentially national ‘American’ music (Brennan, 2017:38; Welburn, 1986: 111). The important point here is that from the late 1930s through to the 1960s, a major stream of jazz criticism was focused on extolling the music, not merely as a form of functional dance music, but as an art form in its own right, to be considered at least on par with European classical music. Within this stream of criticism there were a great many contests over the African American origins of jazz as well as the varying degrees of fidelity to those origins that different artists’ work were perceived to have exhibited. As several sources have explained, critics such as John Hammond influentially insisted on musical qualities they viewed as authentically African American, designated as such by their marginality

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to the white commercial mainstream (Brennan, 2017:45–6). Several viewed such music as ‘authentic, unadulterated popular art’ (Gennari, 2006:34). As Gennari argues: Under Hammond’s influence, jazz gravitated from the primitivist aesthetic discourse of the Harlem Renaissance to the folkloric and popular culture discourses of the 1930s; the jazz musician, in this new paradigm, was less an unrepressed exotic than a voice of the people. (Gennari, 2006:35)

This often placed Hammond in particular, in conflict with musicians who did not meet these standards. In his insistence that jazz meet ‘the black folk provenance of this newly legitimized art music’ (Gennari, 2006:47), he pushed forward carefully selected musicians he viewed as ‘standard-bearers of a folk purity and sincerity not to be found in the glibly commercial productions of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley’ (Gennari, 2006:48). Given the fact Hammond embraced music he thought to be natural and unaffected, Duke Ellington’s aspirations to integrate jazz and concert music in his own practice, for example, violated Hammond’s curatorial ethic, leading to sharply worded confrontations between the two in the pages of the jazz press (Gennari, 2006:49–53). Gendron argues that these kinds of conflicts were almost completely based around a series of binary oppositions that were all part of the same larger modernist discourse (art/commerce, authentic/commercial etc.) and that they had ‘a formative and enduring impact on the way in which jazz history got constructed and jazz as an art form got legitimated’ (Gendron, 2002:141). They would also persist throughout the Cold War and exert some influence over the development of rock history as well. Further, if we consider the often contentious discourses around rock to be part the same larger discourses of modernism, then we can see how the rock imaginary emerged from them. Of particular prominence and importance to the exhibitions at most of the popular music museums examined in this book are exhibits that chronicle the period from about 1955 to 1970, especially as experienced in the United States and the United Kingdom. Most of the displays that take in some or all of this period in these museums rarely if ever depart from the consensus history of this period and its popular music. It is worth briefly characterizing this consensus history and tying it to larger discourses of the ideal self from that era. It is important to note that the consensus history of rock ’n’ roll is almost an entirely retrospective construction. Most of the music’s purportedly defining characteristics were attributed to it later, often much later, and were often strategically deployed as part of larger agendas for the legitimation of rock ’n’ roll’s descendants. The same features were laced over the 1960s counterculture, but in this latter case, this form of mythmaking was done ‘in-house’, so to speak. That is, the ideology of the popular music of the counterculture as well as its historicization was effected by its own participants from its inception. Second, it is also important to note how this consensus history stretches across a diverse range of academic and popular sources, from sober historical inquiry to knowing memoir to many excitable documentary films. Despite its breadth, range and longevity, this consensus history has been sharply constrained conceptually, agreeing on a few key issues for decades.

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 171 The first point of consensus is that rock ’n’ roll was rebellious, subversive and dangerous because it soundly and permanently transformed race relations, political relations and relations of the body among the young, shoving a sharp and permanent ‘gap’ between the generations. Most of this has been attributed to the fact that this music had its roots in African American popular music which, as many commentators have claimed, ‘had no connection with the musical heritage of Europe’ (Palmer, 1976:211). This music was new, it was generational and, as Roger Daltrey suggests in the lengthy documentary series The Seven Ages of Rock, it was ‘very, very dangerous’. Robbie Robertson, another self-reflective talking head in this epic documentary series, agreed: ‘There was a revolution going on and looks like we won. . . . It ended up influencing everything and changing everything.’ The second point of consensus follows on from this rhetoric of permanent revolution. The narrator of this film tells us that ‘In the early 60s, music for teenagers was safe, sweet, and slightly soulless. The airwaves were filled with manufactured pop created by songwriting teams in pop factories’ (Seven Ages of Rock, 2007). Robert Palmer, historian of rock and the blues, agrees: Mainstream pop music was somnolent and squeaky-clean, despite the occasional watered-down pop-boogie hit. Perry Como crooned for suburban snoozers in his V-necked sweaters, Frankie Lane whinnied ‘I must go where the wild goose goes’ and warbling Miss Patti Page wanted to now ‘How much is that doggie in the window. Pop enthusiasts like to pretend that their brand of music was ‘good music’ but for the most part fifties pop was treacle. (Palmer, 1995:16)

Keith Richards, whose presence in such retrospective films is pervasive, summed up the change with characteristic succinctness. Hearing Elvis for the first time ‘was like the world went from black and white to technicolor’. The third point of consensus was that rock ’n’ roll was ‘universally vilified or dismissed by adult culture’ (Gendron, 2002:161). But despite all of this, its saving grace was its astounding success in the marketplace. This dubious dynamic is vividly captured by a particular kind of anecdote wherein a rock ’n’ roll partisan who knew what the future sounded like dismisses the music’s critics with a mildly sadistic satisfaction: ‘I was leaving the studio one evening’, Jack Good, a British television producer who pioneered rock on TV in America and Britain, says, ‘when the head of BBC Light Entertainment asked me how long rock and roll would last. Boldly, I replied that it could go on forever. He said: “More likely to be three months at the outside.” That was 1957. I met him again at the Beatles’ Carnegie Hall concert in 1965 and asked him again how long he gave rock and roll. He had to admit that he couldn’t see the end of it, although he wished he could. He’s dead now. It lasted longer than he did.’ (Palmer, 1976:211)

The widely agreed upon narrative is that it was the small record labels, the rebellious disc jockeys and a few unusually powerful performers and their masses of fans who effected a wholesale cultural revolution. The fact that this music was a central

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economic driver of the global mainstream music industry for more than a decade, on radio, television and in movie theatres, is often elided in favour of the more standard narrative of marginalization and radical change (see Friedlander, 1996). Some such stories go further, presenting musicians such as Elvis Presley as the de facto leaders of an organic folk movement, much in the same way some American jazz musicians were framed only a few years before. As Bertrand suggests in his reflection on the death of Elvis Presley, even as late as 1977, the mainstream of American media didn’t get it. They were, he says, ‘unprepared for the passionate and ubiquitous response that Presley’s passing engendered’ (Bertrand, 2007:63). On the twentieth anniversary of this most American of deaths, Bertrand looked back and saw a proto-class warrior, one who ‘routinely erased artistic and societal borders’ and used his ‘unsystematic, imperfect, and “apolitical” efforts’ to ‘implicitly advocat[e] that working-class African Americans and working-class white might have more in common than not’ (Bertrand, 2007:64). Even after decades of unprecedented success across all forms of media all over the world, Bertrand could still claim that ‘Elvis remained a proletarian provincial, an exotic, repulsive Other’ and ‘never convinced leading arbiters that he was anything but an uncouth and untalented truck driver’ (Bertrand, 2007:64). But this can only be truthful if we carefully extract an ‘establishment’ from the cultural producers of the era. These mythic arbiters of reality who rejected Elvis could not have been the people who financed all those films, produced all those television specials, or sponsored the many forms of advocacy that resulted in the canonization of rock ’n’ roll and its most prominent artists in a relatively short period of time (see Gendron, 2002:162–3). What is missing here is that fact that popular music in this period was just one part of much wider suite of changes. When contextualized to any significant degree, these changes help explain how this apparently most seditious of expressions was incorporated into mainstream institutions as ‘art’ incredibly quickly. As Zak and others have shown, the allegedly somnolent fifties were actually a frothing mass of sonic experimentation offered through new media in new markets to new audiences. Many of these sounds had little to do with rock ’n’ roll. As Zak demonstrates, ‘throughout the early years, rock and roll was more a process transforming the pop mainstream than a concrete musical type. It was part crossover, part appropriation, part revision, part accident, and part market dynamics. It was born of the transitional turbulence that had roiled the pop scene ever since it began throwing off the conventions of the swing era’ (Zak, 2010:175). Further, despite the commonplace opposition offered between ‘pop’ and rock ’n’ roll, the much reviled methods of ‘manufacturing’ popular song were often used to manufacture rock ’n’ roll as well (Zak, 2010:192). As Zak concludes, ‘During the decade’s latter years, thousands of records were released on the nation’s soundscape, sending reverberant tremors through a musical economy whose eclectic tone had become its only constant’ (Zak, 2010:203). One of the things that nearly all of the consensus histories of rock ’n’ roll and rock have in common is an inability to account for the nearly two decades of radical social, political and economic change that occurred across huge swathes of many societies simultaneously after the Second World War. This change encompassed politics, family life, educational ideals and practices, social and geographical relationships, literature,

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 173 film, visual art and patterns in the consumption of symbolic and material goods. Further, these often radical changes were not simply observed or merely tolerated by so-called elites. They were very often championed by them (see Turner, 2013; Suri, 2009; Frank, 1997). Perhaps most importantly, this lack of accounting makes it impossible to understand the formal advent of neoliberalism that began to become the dominant mode of economic and political power around the world from the mid1970s onwards. My purpose here is to briefly explain, not the ruptures of a cultural revolution, but the continuities that allowed and facilitated the incorporation of those ‘revolutions’ into the mainstream institutions of many societies in the ensuing years. Institutions such as the rapidly expanding international film and television cultures of the time as well as a newly global advertising industry thrived in no small measure because of its attachment to new sounds, new looks and new consumers. While the story of rock ’n’ roll and rock is often a story of disruption and irreversible change, that story is often told within a very constrained and truncated idea of freedom that can account for the realization of many personal freedoms, but not a lot else. The broad absence of the wider ideals of freedom that proliferated from the end of the Second World War well into the Cold War is profound. These broadly shared ideals of freedom, democracy and consumer capitalism contributed significantly to the canonization of jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and rock. It was the widespread establishment embrace of these ideals that saw jazz used by the US State Department and the CIA across the ideological battlegrounds of Europe as an explicit symbol of a specifically capitalist freedom to counter Soviet claims of racial discrimination in the United States (Davenport, 2009). It is useful, then, to explain something of those wider ideals of freedom that formed a welcoming context for the counterculture and much that came after. Therefore, before examining some of the more prominent themes of the writing from rock’s first decade that set out the specific parameters of the rock imaginary, it is important to gain some sense of the broader culture that produced them. Most importantly, this era, even the oh-so-dire 1950s, produced new imagined selves that had at least as much consequence in ushering in social change as did a collection of unusually successful regional American record labels and radio stations. As Fred Turner has meticulously and engagingly demonstrated, the fifteen to twenty year period preceding the much-heralded arrival of the telegenic transatlantic counterculture was crowded with competing visions of new forms of human freedom. This was especially true in the United States where imagined entities such as the ‘free personality’, or alternatively the ‘democratic personality’, and a ‘people’s capitalism’ were developed and debated by writers, artists, critics, corporate leaders and academics in bestselling books, well-attended lectures, and in the most consequential halls of power (Turner, 2013). These ideas grew from the concerns of fighting communism and any other non-capitalist political systems that appeared during the Second World War and the Cold War. Such constructions were meant to not only be able to identify, but develop an individual psychology many thought best suited to an open, tolerant society. More specifically, many ‘establishment’ figures quickly became directly concerned about the fairly fantastical claims continuously put forward by the Soviet Union about precisely which system of social, economic and political organization might best serve

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the cause of human liberation. They set out to ‘prove’ that capitalist democracy was the answer to that particular question. However, these issues were not limited to formal or even informal geopolitics. These worries formed a sprawling, nearly all-encompassing medium of concern, addressed across the visual arts, industrial design, music and the social sciences. The models of ‘personality’ that developed in this period bear a striking resemblance to those put forward by the youthful authors of the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto of the counterculture, only a few years later: The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image or popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn. (SDS, 1962)

Like the student activists who sought to put these ideas into practice, pundits, scholars, and politicians across the 1940s and 1950s spoke fondly and optimistically of whole, integrated people who allowed for the tastes, preferences and values of others in order to cultivate an explicit appreciation of difference while still serving the larger common good. Turner describes a model of ‘good-natured tolerance’ that was placed at the heart of those ideal subjects imagined to be most at home in capitalist democracy. The role of major institutions in such a society was not simply to provide opportunity or prosperity, but some kind of psychological stability (Turner, 2013:59). Importantly, the development of such personalities could not be left to civil society. Instead, the ‘state would need to create the structural conditions that could simultaneously sustain the individuality of its citizens and their power to act collectively for the common good’ (Turner, 2013:59). Turner further argues that the ideals of a ‘democratic personality’ came to ‘represent the utopian optimism shared by many Americans in the late 1940s’ and they ‘clearly presage the person-centered social movements of later decades’ in how they imagined a ‘flexible, highly interactive society, united in its heterogeneity’ (Turner, 2013:158). This unity was not to be left to ‘the people’ themselves to sustain. Instead, planners turned to the economy intent on the ‘fusing of consumption and politics’ (Turner, 2013:215). Under the banner of a ‘People’s Capitalism’, official pronouncements from the US government and capitalism’s self-appointed representatives such as the Ad Council argued that, unlike communism, capitalism was ‘grounded in universal human values’ that saw individual citizens become the ‘owners of the means of production– not through the state but directly, through the stock market’ (Turner, 2013:217). From this grew all of the fruits of economic, social and personal opportunity and prosperity. As Turner concludes, the idea of a ‘People’s Capitalism fused the pursuit of abundance

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 175 and the pursuit of democracy’ (Turner, 2013:219). It should not be too difficult to see the stark outlines of the ideal neoliberal self beginning to emerge here. Indeed, the key link between the cultural ‘revolutions’ of this period and the economic system that facilitated and enfolded them is the close connection these various forms of subjectivity had to consumerism and capitalism through to the present. Far from rejecting the challenges to the established order, ‘American business was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s’ (Frank, 1997:20), one that ‘paralleled – and in some cases actually anticipated – the impulses and new values of the counterculture’ (Frank, 1997:26). As the author of a complete and effective puncturing of the myths of the 1960s explains, Like the young insurgents, people in the most advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they were secretly planning to subvert it or even because they believed it would allow them to tap a gigantic youth market (although this was, of course, a factor), but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalize American business and the consumer order generally. (Frank, 1997:9)

The point here is that when we take into account these broader sets of ideas and values that shaped the emergence of the rock imaginary, we can see a reasonably close correspondence between the ideal forms of individualism that take the shape of the ‘democratic personality’ and the ‘people’s capitalism’. These ideas helped shape and define the counterculture, itself a direct and self-conscious outgrowth of the era that birthed and sustained rock ’n’ roll. From this it is a fairly straightforward and lengthy trajectory to the ‘resistant’, rebellious consumerism of revolutionary footwear and subversive soft drinks found in the subsequent eras of cool capitalism (see also McGuigan, 2009; Moore, 2007; Heath and Potter, 2005; Frank and Weiland, 1997).

The gradual ubiquity of the rock imaginary From within this larger social and political formation, the rock imaginary emerged somewhat gradually. Key elements of it, such as the dominant and defining idea of authenticity, are apparent at least as far back as the phonograph ads of the early twentieth century and have gradually become broadly pervasive in more contemporary reporting and writing about musical celebrity. Others, such as the aspiration to ‘depth’ and the attribution of the timeless transcendence of ‘great art’ in popular music emerged somewhat later. The final section of this chapter will very briefly trace the trajectory of the rock imaginary from the mid-1960s focusing on a few key themes that link a range of examples of popular music writing and the representation of artists and artistry through ideas about the character of the music, the musician and the relationship between musicians and their audiences these forms of writing hold in

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common. The goal is to set out the larger ideological context into which popular music museums entered in the 1990s and 2000s and, in Chapters 8 and 9, to show how this context shaped some of the foundational assumptions of their exhibits. Importantly, this period has seen the development of an increasingly extensive infrastructure of canonization of musicians through films, documentaries, proliferating ‘Best-of ’ lists, various forms of biographical and historical writing, as well as increasing numbers of awards ceremonies and similar events (Huber, 2011; Jones, 2008; Von Appen and Doerhing, 2006; Watson and Annad, 2006; Schmutz, 2005). One result of this is that, in the last several decades, there has been a broad expansion of the musical traditions deemed worthy of the accolades bestowed upon ‘great art’. Since at least the mid-1960s to the present, the continual enhancement of the reputation of musical celebrities has become an industry in and of itself. Popular music museums are simply one part of it. By the mid-to-late 1960s, the rock imaginary came into its own as a coherent and stable entity. The self-conscious historicization of various traditions of popular music and their explicit aestheticization as forms of art come into full view. We can see this form of discourse in particularly febrile ways when critics wrote about Bob Dylan and the Beatles. In 1967, for example, the musicologist Joan Peyser claimed that Sgt Pepper was not simply ‘comparable to a new sonata or opera, but [was] far more important’ (Peyser, 1969:131). Peyser’s analysis of the album hit nearly all of the stops on the ‘great art’ journey noting its maturity, depth and perhaps inevitably its authenticity and honesty, dealing as the Beatles did with ‘identity, illusion, loneliness and death’. For Peyser, ‘the Beatles represent[ed] their generation and its overwhelming sense of anomie’ (Peyser, 1969:131). Popular musicians were no longer merely tasked with providing entertainment, insight or even virtuosity. They were expected to offer a voice that spoke to a wider public by making art that captured the tenor of its times and mirrored the experiences of their fans. They were expected to speak for those who supported them and held them close to bask in their glory. Ellen Willis’ famous essay on Bob Dylan did something similar, although in an even more florid idiom. Willis argued that ‘Dylan has made a revolution. He expanded the folk idiom into a rich, figurative language, grafted literary and philosophical subtleties onto the protest song, revitalized folk vision by rejecting proletarian and ethnic sentimentality, then all but destroyed pure folk as a contemporary form by merging it with pop’ (Willis, 2011:4). Willis’ argument that Dylan’s impact was not simply on popular music, but on society as a whole, was by no means an isolated sentiment or marginal claim. Dylan was not alone in being said to have fomented a revolution in which the very nature of popular expression was at stake. Writers such as Ralph Gleason and Richard Poirier made similar claims about the Beatles in venues as august as Partisan Review and American Scholar. Both attributed the widest possible import and relevance to popular music with Gleason identifying a ‘cultural revolution’ among the young that was invisible to their parents speculating that through ‘pop music . . . unarticulated protest is made specific . . . for kids in remote towns who wouldn’t otherwise know they were part of a vast movement’ (Gleason, 1972:138). Poirier excoriated an establishment that he felt deliberately ignored the arts of the ‘lower orders’, wondering ‘how much longer the literary academic adjudicators could claim to be taking the arts seriously by promoting

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 177 a couple of distinguished novels every year, a few films, some poems, maybe a museum show and, if they’re really lucky, a play’ (Poirier, 1967:160–1). Central to these sorts of claims were the unprecedented commercial success of the musicians they celebrated and it was from the brute fact of these artists’ commercial supremacy that these and many other authors then argued that popular music was not simply ‘a’ real art form, but ‘the’ real art form of the moment, with the kinds of wider social impacts long expected of musical traditions of far longer standing than the rock tradition. Such claims are the primary pieces of what has proved to be the very sturdy foundations of the rock imaginary. Despite the often overheated, overwrought rhetoric of ‘generational’ uniqueness and significance used to describe the 1960s, multiple historians have explained in great depth and at extensive length that the broad transformation of a dominant subjectivity linked with the Sixties was actually a very long process that, far from being confined to the ideals and challenges of a single generation, took place over twenty or even thirty years. While the raft of social, political, economic and cultural changes responsible for this transformation are far too massive to recount here, I would like to make one crucial link that is rarely made in discussion of this time period or its music. What made the rock imaginary become what it has become since the 1960s are the links between the evolution of capitalism in the post-Second World War era and the radically expanded attributions of artistic greatness to forms and traditions of art never considered for such attribution before. To put this as simply and as clearly as I can, contemporary capitalism’s characteristic embodiment of success is the figure of ‘the genius’. Capitalism needs this singular transcendent figure as evidence of its efficacy and substance. We find such figures in music, art, literature, business, science, the military, politics, social movements and even academia. In specific relation to music, the often overlooked links between the counterculture and consumerism are key to understanding the rock imaginary. What the rock imaginary drew from those forms of aesthetic critique and assessment that preceded it was the implicit melding of languages of aesthetics and the languages of commerce. However, in the hands of many rock critics, this melding was more often than not simply subsumed under the demands of the more rarefied discourses of great art. As Kramer astutely observes, any thorough assessment of the rock writing in the 1960s finds that ‘from the inception of pop music criticism, its practitioners have been obsessed with the relationship between artifice and art, between taking music – rock or pop – seriously with one ear and enjoying the artistry of its sheer superficiality with the other’ (Kramer, 2012: 592). By the start of the 1980s, the institutional power through which popular music was produced had reached the turning point in a multi-decade journey to corporate dominance. This dominance grew clearly and directly from the extraordinary and unprecedented amounts of money being made by continually expanding entertainment corporations that came to define that era and subsequent ones. Therefore, the near total, seamless and eventually invisible merging of the commercial and aesthetic languages used to describe, analyse and make sense of popular music had become the norm. Among the more important changes in the latter years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century that helped produce and define this norm

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have been the changing relationships between artists and music journalists. While only usually acknowledged in the breach, the shifts in how artists have related to the public through the dominant infrastructure of cultural mediation have transformed public narratives about artists and their work. As both substantial academic and anecdotal journalistic evidence has confirmed, the broad access journalists and publications once took for granted atrophied after the 1980s. Writers have since been subjected to more exacting and aggressive news management techniques by record labels, press officers and PR teams whose main goals have been to ration access to artists and more tightly control the agendas of interviews (Forde, 2006, 2001; Hope, 2015). Instead of artists speaking to journalists or writers at length both formally and informally, artist representatives trade access for the submission and approval of the questions journalists would be allowed to ask and the time and circumstances in which they are allowed to ask them. Further, with music writers increasingly employed as freelancers (or at-best, on short term contracts), the balance of power between artists and journalists swung significantly towards artists, and more importantly, to their handlers: managers and media companies. Forde (2001) notes the results of these techniques. He explains that there was ‘a symbolic crossing-over into music journalism of the Hollywood approach to press management where journalists are “screened” by public relations officers before having access to artists approved’. Writers ‘paid on a word-rate’ usually had to bow to an ‘economic pragmatism [that] dictates that they cannot challenge such interventionist practices. If they do, they run the risk of being professionally blacklisted.’ He shows that ‘as the professional power of the freelance writer has decreased throughout print journalism, the power of institutionalized PR as a “primary definer” (in terms both of a news agenda and the critical discourses within which artists are discussed) has increased, meaning a depletion of expensive investigative and immersion reporting’ (Forde, 2001:38). These changes are part of a larger suite of changes that have seen arts criticism and journalism being increasingly encased as an adjunct to the range of products offered by media companies about their own products (Hartman, 2016). One journalist explained that what she called the ‘economy of worship’ in contemporary celebrity journalism is increasingly the norm (Hope, 2015). In this economy, writers are compelled to write as fans who have no motivating professional interest in writing critically about stars and, as easily disposable freelancers, are offered little to no support if their perceived criticism incites blowback, often in the form of social media criticism mobilized in defence of a purportedly beleaguered celebrity. While this economy of praise may often produce articles little more upsetting that an unreasoned fawning, the power vested in artists and their management can have far more disturbing consequences. In early 2016, for example, MTV News was relaunched as a bold experiment in long form critical journalism. The network hired several respected editors and writers and set about the task of assessing the music and musicians of the moment. Within only a few months, the entire enterprise was shut down. The precipitating event was an article about Chance the Rapper who, while in the midst of ‘high level negotiations for linear specials’ with MTV said that ‘he would never work with the network again’ due to what he perceived as unflattering coverage (Sargent, 2016). MTVs corporate

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 179 owner, Viacom, worried about its relationships with Chance and other artists, made sure this sort of thing would never happen again. Despite the fact that ‘everyone agrees that [the article] was a fair and reasoned piece of criticism’, the offending piece was disappeared. Chance, often lauded for his artistic independence and sensitivity simply noted, through his manager, that he was happy the ‘editorial misstep’ had been rectified so he could appear on the season premiere of MTV’s ‘Wild ‘N Out’ as planned (Sargent, 2016). This feverish amalgam of brand fragility and editorial timidity has reached a notable plateau in the form of ‘poptimism’, a type of music writing that is purported to act as a critique of the priorities of popular music criticism, but more often acts as a populist representational discourse. Poptimism emerged into the beneficent light of mainstream validation in 2004 when Kelefa Sanneh, then a music critic for the New York Times, published an article about long running arguments between rock critics and pop fans. Sanneh wrote under the banner of ‘poptimism’ to launch an attack on ‘rockism’, the latter being a term of abuse directed at those perceived to be too tightly bound to the tradition of rock criticism said to have begun in the mid-1960s. Given that Sanneh linked rockism with imperialism, racism and sexual assault, it is probably not too surprising that his article sparked a good deal of contention (Sanneh, 2004). While he broke little new ground, his article acted as a kind of an argumentative lens that put into sharp focus what was at the time already a very tired argument. The general idea lurking behind these debates is that popular music in general and ‘pop’ music in particular have been cruelly excluded from the many discourses of critical assessment that have been used over the years to legitimate some forms of musical expression and experience and denigrate others. Of course, it is generally true that some music criticism has been used for this purpose. This is exactly what criticism is for. However, poptimism is not criticism. It is an evolving collection of unequivocal expressions of professional fandom. While it was clear what Sanneh and his fellow poptimists were arguing against, what they were arguing might seem quite strange. What they demanded was that the deeply conservative critical and conceptual pillars long used by some to uphold the legitimacy of a wide range of musical traditions such as European art music, jazz and rock, also be applied to ‘their’ music: pop music. They did so in the very sympathetic name of diversity and recognition of the marginalized. Despite the claims of poptimists that they were not simply trying to establish new outposts of acceptable achievement in a mildly expanded pantheon of great art, this is more or less what happened. Instead of marking a break with the past, poptimism was less a revolution in taste making or aesthetic value than a part of the continuous expansion of broader and much more widespread demands for inclusion of diverse forms of popular music within a common critical infrastructure, the origins of which go back to at least the early twentieth century. Like all of the traditions of music criticism noted in this chapter, poptimism was guided by modelling an ideal relationship between creator and public, where, as with the older traditions noted above, the public is regarded as much as the sponsor of or subscriber to the work of greatness, as the recipient or repository of it. Interestingly, it is no more difficult to find the same pretentions to aesthetic universality, artistic seriousness and

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transcendent importance in writings about contemporary pop than it once was to find them in writing about rock. One pervasive genre of popular music writing posits the universality of the personal experience of great art, where the great artist doesn’t simply speak to ‘us’, but speaks for ‘us’, all of ‘us’. One writer tells us that ‘pop culture is so much more than a guilty pleasure’. Instead, it is an ‘“access point” – for education, entertainment, critical inquiry, politics’. It is ‘available and accessible to most everyone in one form or another, unlike often exclusionary academic theory or biased formal education’. There are, he argues, ‘electrifying and sometimes suspenseful moments when pop culture gets powerfully translated into politics, when what entertains us also educates. And if we’re paying critical attention, they’re when we, as an audience, change too.’ For this author, Beyoncé’s music exemplifies this dynamic, ‘encompassing the entire organization of society and our various roles in it’ (Allred, 2019). For another author, pop music in the right hands is ‘a code sequenced specifically for my DNA, made to produce emotions I really want to feel, thoughts I really want to think’. This author’s music and its fans ‘are a reminder that the intellect does not alone belong to suffering and seriousness but populates girly things just as fully’. This writer’s chosen object of affection ‘reminds me that love, joy, giddiness, even hysteria are crucibles of intelligence’ (Hunt, 2015). The extraordinarily complex social formations noted by these writers, ‘intelligence’, ‘politics’, ‘education’ are not the product of larger structures blessed or cursed with power to shape the agency of countless people. Instead, they are the product of the singular, the massive, the important. As with the praise once bestowed on great artists of the past, today’s pop stars also tightly bind ‘our’ subjectivities to the most powerful forces of society, and apparently do so only for our benefit. Another common story is that of the musician who transcends the merest of society’s strictures, whether these be garden variety narrowness of mind or a failure of the imagination to accept their greatness. Prince for example, was ‘a human question mark, a mystery creature who could not be contained by conventional categories, someone whose very being transgressed and transcended any division or boundary that stood in the way of total emancipation’ (Reynolds, 2016). David Bowie, for another critic, was singularly responsible for ‘all of what I understand popular music to be – a theatre of rebellion and transformation; the pre-eminent modernist art form; a stage upon which to mean it and not mean it simultaneously, staking your life on a chord change while laughing out the side of your mouth at just how flimsy, just how impermanent it is’. Failing to understand this is ‘a failure to recognise or to honour just how much popular music can mean to our lives. Bowie understood, better than any other pop artist ever has, how a life might be changed by a gesture, an outfit, an attitude. . . . There were never rules to learn or measures to live up to before you could engage with Bowie’ (Crawford, 2016). Like its lately maligned forebears, such popular music writing continues to set out its own highly prescriptive models of personal improvement, self-realization and empowerment though music. Very few of its interpreters and advocates display much capacity to recognize or even acknowledge the relevance and immediacy of structural or economic forms of power in the production and consumption of the phenomena they champion. Instead, they work to invest singular artistry, expressive power, and

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 181 even the very possibility of social change, primarily in their preferred figures of a presumed transcendent, timeless greatness. These sorts of paeans to the great are even prominent in the work of writers whose own reputations have allowed them to avoid toiling under the manifest inequities of the precarious work of personal essay writing, suggesting the something more than mere workplace coercion is at stake. Many portraits of great artists come from those whose own reputation as journalists allows close personal access to and intense regard for the artists they hold dear, almost flaunting their access through the notation of a latticework of experiential specificities in their writing. Simon Hattenstone, for example, has produced hundreds of highly personal portraits of celebrities for The Guardian (see Fairchild, 2019:6–11). Typical of his writing is his description of the experience of interviewing Stevie Wonder. Hattenstone writes in the insular idiom of personal experience as the portrait he makes manages to sprawl in only a few thousand words, to cover the musician’s entire life and career, in episodic, aphoristic bursts of nostalgia and admiration. The reader is taken through the key moments of the journalist’s experience. He describes ‘one of the greatest gigs I have seen, at the historic Abbey Road studios’ where Wonder’s ‘voice was superb, by turns swooping and soaring, honeyed and roaring, cajoling and bullying’ (Hattenstone, 2005). We are taken question by question through the interview, but it is Hattenstone’s knowing asides that really drive his story. When Wonder talks about his music, Hattenstone hears ‘the giddy choruses in my head and want to sing along’. Wonder’s ‘songs were full of light and air’ for Hattenstone and as we move seamlessly between the writer’s feelings and the artist’s words, we see the greatness embodied through the writer’s own thoughts and emotions: It’s a terrible thing to admit, but there’s something pleasing about the fact that he can’t see me: I feel he can judge me objectively rather than by appearance. There are no distractions. For a moment, I start to envy his blindness. . . . While his head sways like a metronome as he talks, he seems endowed with an inner stillness. He has a gift for intimacy. (Hattenstone, 2005)

Cameron Crowe, a contributor to Rolling Stone for most of his life, is one of the masters of the lengthy ‘cover story’ genre. In a 2017 article, Crowe slots former One Direction singer Harry Styles neatly into the ‘boy singer grows up’ narrative that has been around at least since Paul Anka. It begins exactly the way such a story must: January 2016. There’s a bench at the top of Primrose Hill, in London, that looks out over the skyline of the city. If you’d passed by it one winter night, you might have seen him sitting there. A lanky guy in a wool hat, overcoat and jogging pants, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Harry Styles had a lot on his mind. He had spent five years as the buoyant fan favorite in One Direction; now, an uncertain future stretched out in front of him. The band had announced an indefinite hiatus. The white noise of adulation was gone, replaced by the hushed sound of the city below. (Crowe, 2017)

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The tightly written tale follows explains Styles’ transition from his youthful phase of obsessive fans and relentless media to that of a searching, self-reflective artist. Styles’ journey sought one thing, authenticity: ‘I didn’t want to write “stories”, he says. “I wanted to write my stories, things that happened to me. The number-one thing was I wanted to be honest. I hadn’t done that before”’ (Crowe, 2017). Crowe dutifully jots down the artist’s musings on life and music and, like Hattenstone, intimately tells us the story of the interview. We learn of Style’s subtle vocal inflections, the ‘pomegranate-scented candles’ flickering in the studio, and lyrics that are ‘are full of details and references – secrets whispered between friends, doomed declarations of love, empty swimming pools’ (Crowe, 2017). Through the conveyance of Crowe’s knowing questioning, Styles manages to take the nice, fat target of an imaginary figure of mockery and distaste, the ‘30 year old hipster guy’, and knock it out of the emotional park: Asked if he spends pressure-filled evenings worried about proving credibility to an older crowd, Styles grows animated. ‘Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenagegirl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act “too cool.” They like you, and they tell you.’ (Crowe, 2017)

For his troubles, Styles was the recipient of the kinds of universal praise usually reserved for recently deceased American presidents (Siede, 2017; Patrick, 2017; Harris, 2017). On the odd occasion, even the most obsequious, devoted journalist still fails to produce a product suitable for an artist of great stature. Vanessa Grigoriadis, who occasionally produces celebrity portraits for the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, discovered this to her peril. In her 2015 feature about Nicki Minaj, we get the same broad-stroke narrative. For Grigoriadis, artists such as Minaj have succeeded by ‘crossing over many genres to keep up with the current caldron of hip-hop, electronic music and R&B; signing sponsorship deals to make up for the lack of album sales; performing live everywhere from sheikhs’ parties to worldwide arenas – these women are the pop business now, and they’re not feeling particularly shy about telling us that’ (Grigoriadis, 2015). Grigoriadis further explains that ‘Minaj has become expert at modeling the ways that women can wield power in the industry. But she has also drawn attention to the ways in which power can be embodied by a woman standing up for herself and speaking her own mind.’ We also get the same telling details and vibrant descriptions as the articles noted above when we learn that ‘Minaj has a shockingly beautiful and complex face, with a wide, high forehead, dark, almond-shaped eyes and deep dimples on both sides of her cheeks that materialize when she smiles’ (Grigoriadis, 2015). Later, Grigoriadis notes that ‘she laughs for the first time in our conversation, dimples popping everywhere, sun radiating through the room’. Unfortunately, even this sort of professional flattery wasn’t sufficient to earn the writer any credit for asking

 The Emergence and Evolution of the Rock Imaginary 183 a ‘bad’ question. When Grigoriadis asks about an ongoing dispute between other artists at her record label and whether there is a ‘part of you that thrives on drama’, things got ugly. ‘As soon as I said the words, I wished I could dissolve them on my tongue,’ Grigoriadis wrote. Minaj’s affront is diligently documented: ‘She pointed my way, her extended arm all I could see other than the diamonds glinting in her ears. This wasn’t over yet.’ The journalist, it would seem, quickly learned her place, deftly linking her own disgrace to the unacknowledged theme of the relentlessly fawning portrait she herself was producing, that theme being power: Minaj’s actions made sense, in some ways: Even though I had no intention of putting her down as a small-minded or silly woman, she was right to call me out. She had the mike and used it to her advantage, hitting the notes that we want stars like her to address right now, particularly those of misogyny and standing up for yourself, even if it involves standing up for yourself against another woman. (Grigoriadis, 2015)

Conclusion: Expanding canons Popular music museums began proliferating at the start of the twenty-first century. This was no accident of history. The two previous decades witnessed a substantial and influential expansion of the range and types of commemoration, remembrance, recollection and documentation of the history, practice and experience of popular music. These forms of heritage appear as documentaries and feature films examining the revered ‘great artists’ and the sanctified ‘great works’ of the popular music canon. They appear as competing canons and lists serving the interests, demands and desires of a diverse, complex and growing audience. They take the form of ghostwritten memoirs, biographies and long form think-pieces by and about musicians, bands, groupies, managers, promoters, executives, journalists, photographers, publishers and roadies. The discourse these forms of writing play their respective parts in producing manages to be historically presentist, while simultaneously acting prospectively and retrospective to continually subsume an ever-larger body of work into its prescriptions. New works are championed, old works are salvaged and the stars of the moment are slotted into places seemingly ready-made for them, placed in a tradition of similar places similarly made for similar ancestors. And yet, despite a multiplicity of sources, the forms that produce this form of reputation and reverence display the same themes, ideals and imagery as centuries of commentary and thought about great art and great artists have before them. As with the models of greatness in art which emerged in the nineteenth century, there are few forms of contemporary popular music which have been able to escape the dictates of the rock imaginary. It demands that its representatives be ‘true to themselves’ and their art, that an artist’s work act as a genuine reflection and legitimate extension of the tradition of which they are a part, and that their work represent the highest standards of emotional and intellectual expression, a state often reflected in terms like ‘depth’,

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‘gravity’ or ‘maturity’. This produces an endless chain of works of art that are admitted to that rarefied air found only in those special imaginary spaces that transcend the material world and reach ever higher planes of existence that can even surpass time itself. Most importantly, the rock imaginary is by definition, a universal aspiration, defined, not by any particular musical styles or gestures, but by the very act of laying claim to a self-conscious historicization and aestheticization of a musical tradition and then finding ways to legitimate these claims by tying those works ever more tightly to broader, shared values that extend beyond any specific work of art. In the final two chapters of this book, we will see how popular music museums have made their own claims to be arbiters and facilitators of these values.

8

Portraiture and the currency of musical repute

What was originally iconoclasm has turned into iconophilia. (Groys, 2008:43)

All portraits are partial. The directions in which their partialities might sway depend on the particulars of the temporary and mutually sustaining relationships between subject, commissioner and portraitist. There seems little question that all of the museums I have visited for this book contain, in some substantial way or another, a multitude of portraits. Some are plainly obvious, such as the grand scale of portrayal found at Graceland and the jam-packed Johnny Cash Museum, or the more modest portraits found at the Tina Turner and Carter Family sites. All can be considered portraits both in sum and in many of their parts. Some museums have entire collections underpinned by portraits. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, for example, contains at least one small portrait of almost every member in its august grouping placed in key spots in its overarching historical exhibit. Occasionally, and usually temporarily, one of their number even gets a room-sized portrait presented to the public. Central to all of the portraits that appear across all of these museums is the photographic image, or more specifically, a profusion of such images. They appear in different sizes, versions and material forms. Some are reproductions spread across entire walls while others are originals set in their own cases to be viewed as rare and precious objects. These images can be personal; they can be commercial; they can be historical; they can be generic; they can be idiosyncratic. They abut one another; they are overlaid on each other; they stand alone; they crowd one another and fill the spectator’s field of vision. Taken as a whole, a broad range of images confronts the spectator with images nestled within images nested within images. Yet, despite this profusion of imagery, what we find in these museums is that all these different kinds of images are used to tell the same story. Whether it is told about the Beatles or Tina Turner or the Carter Family or Frank Sinatra, we encounter the great artist whose greatness has already been borne out by popular acclaim. Their stories are the same because the social relations these exhibits seek to create are the same. And these social relations are the same because the ideology that grounds these exhibits in their institutional and symbolic homes is the same (see Chapter 7). In order to make sense of all of this imagery, this chapter will focus on the ways in which famous musicians are presented across multiple sites and exhibits. I will place the uses made of

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photographic imagery in these exhibits within larger and longer-standing sets of ideas about the sorts of social relationships photography constructs, and within these, I will examine the sorts of social relations photographs of famous musicians construct. This demands an understanding of what Azoulay calls ‘the event of the photograph’, the ways in which spectators in these museums are expected to look at them, and the sorts of value conferred by the concentration of attention paid towards these ubiquitous representations of greatness (Azoulay, 2012). I am not pursuing the ‘original’ meanings of these images, but instead trying to work out how this body of imagery is being incorporated into decidedly contemporary, but historically referential narratives of greatness. These narratives are at least as resonant with the present as they are with the past.

Photographic relations in the popular music museum Debates around the symbolic and material characteristics of photography have been long and complex. But the great bulk of these debates have been concerned primarily with the value and social and political potential of photography as art and secondarily with its social impact through documentary photography and photojournalism. However, the vast majority of the photographs in popular music museums began their lives as the products of broadly related systems of commercial photography. Therefore, my focus here will remain somewhat pragmatic, examining photographs as a central part of larger visual and textual forms within which they are set and then relying of ideas about photography offered in more wide-ranging debates to interpret them. While these museums have taken pieces of what amounts to a fairly substantial visual heritage and reorganized them for new purposes, they have still done so by capitalizing on the long-standing kinds of meaningful resonances photographs have provided spectators in museums more generally. As such, the photographic imagery that popular music museums provide creates kinds of social relationships I will call photographic relations. These relations have been shaped not so much by the originating circumstances of these images, which leave few tangible traces in these exhibits, but by the legacies of portraits of all kinds that have long been a staple of art and history museums and the history of photography more generally. These relations as I present them depend on a particular understanding of photographs not just as material remnants of the past, but as ‘events’ that continue into the present. Extending from this, I will describe the ways in which spectators are expected and relied upon to bring to bear their own ways of looking and understanding to these museum exhibits. The circumstances of these kinds of encounters between museum and spectator have occupied a solid proportion of this book so far. This discussion is an expansion of that. In this chapter, we can see how different forms of power wear on the event of the photograph to render the images that remain more compliant to the aims of these institutions. We can also see how all of these images and photographs, despite all of their diverse origins, authorships and travels, end up being used for the same purposes in telling the same kinds of stories. Finally, we can see how the closeness and contact

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 187 we have with these kinds of images act as the means through which we are touched by the techniques of power. One of the core disputes about the status and potential of photography is its ontological status, especially in terms of its status as art. These debates have grown from the fact that the innate nature of the photograph itself makes it distinct from other artistic media that preceded it such as painting and sculpture. As many have argued, photography is not a representational medium because it has a complex and sometimes befuddling relationship to the real world. As Walter Benn Michaels suggests, ‘the photograph’s distinctive relation to the real doesn’t guarantee it any distinctive relation to the true’ (Michaels, 2015:13). Photographs act as both a material referent to the real world and an index of those parts of the real world it captures. In some ways, a photograph belongs as much to the world it seeks to capture as it does to the person who tried to capture it. This is because there will always be visual effects present in a photograph that are not the direct result of the intentions of its producer and cannot necessarily be attributed to them. As Roland Barthes famously argued, there are two distinct but intertwined aspects of the photograph that account for this complex relationship to the real, what he called the studium and the punctum. The former is meant to capture the intended form and effect of the photograph, the latter, the unintentional or worldly effects. As Benn Michaels explains, The difference between the painting and the photograph, which Barthes understands as the difference between a representation and what he will call an ‘emanation’, is at the same time a difference between the kind of control available (and necessary) to the maker of representations and the kind of control neither available nor necessary to the maker of emanations – thus, for Barthes, photography is ‘a magic not an art’. (Michaels, 2015:14)

As such, the medium itself holds out a distinct kind of hope for access to the real world beyond the forms of representation and direct authorial intention found in other artistic mediums. Benn Michaels continues: We may find fossils beautiful or we may not; we may find the painting of a fossil beautiful, or not. The difference between them is that the painting is meant to be beautiful and we don’t (whether or not we find it beautiful) understand it as a work of art unless we recognize the intention. Whereas the fossil isn’t intended to be anything and there’s nothing about it as a work of art to understand; it’s not a representation. In the notion of the punctum, Barthes insists that the photograph is more like the fossil than it is like the painting of the fossil. (Michaels, 2015:17)

The deceptively simple fact that there will almost always be referents in any photograph that are outside of any system of representation captured in the photographs we see in popular music museums is crucial to understanding them. This fact definitively shapes the relationship between these museums and their spectators. This model of understanding the photograph gives a specific kind of space to the observer, a space

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some see as so expansive as to constitute a global sphere of free citizens, what Azoulay calls ‘citizens of photography’. Azoulay explains her altogether admirable and wildly idealistic formation: Photography has thus formed a citizenry, a citizenry without sovereignty, without place or borders, without language or unity, having a heterogeneous history, a common praxis, inclusive citizenship, and unified interest. (Azoulay, 2012:131)

This citizenry, she argues, cannot be ‘assimilated to any sovereign or regulating source possessed of omniscience and capable of extending its reach to that which, or those who, threaten its power and unity’ (Azoulay, 2012:27). Beyond even this, she says that this sphere stands autonomous from every imaginable system of power that exists in our world: It can be assimilated neither to ownership nor to domination. It evades all forms of sovereignty such that no one can argue that it belongs to him or that she embodies it; just as no one can fully obliterate or erase it completely and for all time and by so doing, impose upon others longstanding relations of repression and domination, or reified contractual relations. (ibid.)

These claims spring from Azoulay’s concept of ‘the event of the photograph’. As with Barthes, Azoulay also sees things inscribed in the photograph which are realized by the spectator in such a way as to defy any attempts to author, control or erase them. Therefore, for Azoulay we ‘watch’ photographs as events rather than ‘look at’ them as things. This idea allows us to attribute a certain form of continuance to the medium, an acknowledgement of the ongoing social relationships inhered within what we might otherwise perceive as a fixed object. As spectators we are central participants in what Azoulay calls ‘the event of the photograph’ and this is where the medium’s political and social potential lies. Others have argued for more or less the same idea, but often in far more florid form, as with Agamben claiming the photograph ‘is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope’ (Quoted in Saltzman, 2015:151) or Silverman arguing that the photograph is ‘the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us – of demonstrating that it exists, and that it will forever exceed us. Photography is also an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies’ (Silverman, 2015:11; see also, Hariman and Lucaites, 2016:92–3). While I have also written about similar spheres of action and communicative connection in broadly similar terms in other contexts, I have done so with far less optimism (see Fairchild, 2012a). Given this, I have far less expansive ideas about the kinds of space granted to spectators in their photographic relations within these museums. My primary point of difference with Azoulay’s model of politics is that she is far more concerned with ideal forms of human connection that she claims require us to shed much of our existing experience of the world in our encounter with others. In other words, she implicitly diminishes what people bring with them into their

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 189 encounters through photographic relations in favour of what they might gain from them. This is of course the very definition of optimism. But the problem with this is that much of our experience of the world necessarily subjects us to systematic social and political relations which impose things on us whether we like it or not. These can be values, ideologies, assumptions and so on. These shape our very ability to perceive and make sense of what is right in front of us. The simple fact of the matter is that the photographic relations of popular music museums rely very heavily on what we already bring with us when we view their exhibits. It is absolutely necessary for them to evoke our already-held stores of ideas and understandings and transform them into particular kinds of feelings and experiences. They necessarily work to confirm our already-developed beliefs and values in concert with what is already in their exhibitions and displays and appropriate these in service of the validation of the institution itself. We will see this here and in the next chapter. We can see how these photographic relations are made manifest in two museum portraits of blues guitarist B.B. King. These two fairly small displays are suggestive of the more broadly held characteristics of the kinds of displays dedicated to famous musicians. The glass case dedicated to King at the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum presents two of his guitars surrounded by images of the artist at different points in his life and career (Figure 8.1). The largest image is a life-sized black and white picture of King playing with the Bill Harvey Orchestra. He is flanked by two saxophone players, Evelyn Young and Bill Harvey. The image takes up the entire back wall of the case. In front of this, next to his guitars, sits a biographical panel. Above the short text, three images on the panel stretch to cover most of the first half of King’s life. The largest of the three is of a teenaged King wearing a straw hat, a white shirt and black jacket. He has one foot placed on a stool, and he is holding a partially hidden book or card. He stares with some apparent uncertainty just past the camera. This would seem to be a personal photo given the lack of a guitar, a feature found in every other photo of him. The other two images are of an older King onstage at slightly different periods, one at least from the late 1950s and the other from at least the late 1960s. At Sun Studios, a similar display also presents three images (Figure 8.2). Towards the back of the display is the same image of the youthful King in his straw hat. Next to this is a more famous portrait, produced by WDIA, the Memphis radio station on which King appeared regularly in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Again, a youthful King has one leg up on a stool. But this time he holds an acoustic guitar that has his name crudely scrawled across the front, and, below the sound hole, the call sign and frequency for the radio station that did so much to enhance his reputation. This time King is looking directly at the camera. The third image shows us a much older King with headphones strung over a plaid roadster cap and an electric guitar drawn over a suit jacket and white, open-collar shirt. He has a broad smile on his face as he reaches for the headphones. Backing all of this up is a bright yellow poster for a live show which simply testifies: ‘In Person: “B.B.” King. Sings: “Everyday I Have the Blues” Million Seller.’ We can look at these and similar images of King to understand the main uses to which such images are put in these kinds of exhibits. Above all else, the primary purpose of the portrait in the popular music museum is to confirm, not establish,

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Figure 8.1  Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.



Figure 8.2  Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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the greatness of its subject. However, these displays only blandly and barely suggest that King was a great artist in the small print in the text panels. They make little obvious effort to persuade us of the truth of the claim. They do not try to demonstrate greatness through any form of analysis nor do they seek to convince us of its presence through argument or explanation. Instead, spectators are asked to feel its presence and experience it through its evocation in the intimate forms of contact these photographic images are meant to create. The pictures of the youthful King are particularly striking in this regard. The teenager’s smooth and almost cherubic face in the earliest photo marks a point in his life that seems remarkably distant given all that the artist achieved afterwards. One can imagine more directly the young farm hand, the son of sharecroppers, years before his arrival in Memphis, and track his transformation into the jobbing musician and WDIA disc jockey he became in his twenties. The rest feels foreordained and this inevitability is in stark contrast to early photos that allow us to see and perhaps feel the possible precariousness of those most distant moments. The whole point of these images is that they are made to have the power touch us. They do so by acting indexically, by feeling like direct visual notations of past events, and materially, as tangible testimony to the reality and truth of those events. In these displays, King’s greatness is concisely subject to multiple permutations. We are shown what feels like unimpeachable evidence of its origins, its various moments of emergence, its public confirmation and specific historical moments of its expression. These many common versions of greatness appear all jumbled together in these images. However, while we can understand the immediate use of these images fairly straightforwardly, these images of King, and indeed all similar sorts of images, also need to be understood as part of a larger and more encompassing historical trajectory of similar kinds of imagery. The use of photographic images in all of the exhibits I have studied visibly and generally track alongside the evolution of popular music photography from a pronounced predominance of staged publicity shots prior to the mid-1950s to the gradual comparative prevalence of candid performances shots by the mid-1960s to the inclusion of a whole range of personal photos taken by musicians themselves or their family members or members of their travelling entourages. All of the exhibits I have examined for this book display genres of musician photograph that are more or less typical of whatever means were available to produce them at different times. It is worth briefly surveying a few examples of them. Pictures of musicians that date before the mid-1950s that appear in the museums I have examined for this book are almost always staged publicity photos. They are little different in form and content than the familiar ‘Hollywood glamour’ shots of that age. These photographs are usually of a high technical quality, taken by expensive, finicky and comparative large cameras. They were mostly produced by professional photographers at the behest of artists, agents, managers, producers and record labels. They align formally with similar styles of imagery from other similar industries, especially the film industry and vaudeville. One of the more obvious examples of this are the photographs used in the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia. I say obvious because virtually all of the images used are publicity photos of

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 193 the musicians involved in the storied Bristol Sessions. The formal portraits extend to include several of Ralph Peer, the talent scout who ran the sessions. As many of the artists appearing on these recordings were already commercial recordings artists, or subsequently became so, the use of their formal posed publicity portraits is not too surprising. These images are notable in their formality due to the historical moment of their creation to which we are linked through the ‘event’ of these photographs. As noted in Chapter 5, the phonograph was a potent symbol of the modernity that was just making its way into the mountains and hollows of Appalachia when the Bristol Sessions happened. We can see this influence in the publicity photo of Ernest Stoneman’s Dixie Mountaineers from the Bristol Sessions. The five members of the ensemble appear in solemnly holding their instruments, several in a mock performance pose. The guitarist is seated in a low chair, the banjo player on a stool to his right, with the others are arrayed in standing poses behind them. They stand in front of backdrop painted with a bucolic landscape. They are all formally dressed. Images such as these were visual markers of the new kinds of social relations that came to dominate the music that eventually became ‘country music’, those of a formal and cosmopolitan music industry centred around recordings and live performances on vaudeville stages and in radio studios across North America and eventually the world. These new means of production dwarfed in scale the regional touring networks that once housed musicians such as these. These photographs mark and visually notate this moment of expansion for us. Another example of the use of these kinds of photographs appears in the exhibit ‘Bronzeville Echoes’ which was on display at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2019. (Figure 8.3; Figure 8.4) The exhibit consists of a wide range of printed materials produced in support of the large number of performance venues in the historically African American neighbourhood south of Chicago’s downtown. These include sheet music and record sleeves, postcards and posed studio photographs taken both in music venues and in photographic studios. The only three images in the exhibit were taken in situ in the clubs, theatres and venues that lined the streets of the neighbourhood, and even two of these were clearly posed. The primary visual focus of this exhibit is on photographs of musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers or the full cast of performers on stage at the Pekin Theatre and the Sunset Café. All of the performers pose as if in mid-performance, with Morton’s band mates providing the typically exaggerated poses jazz musicians often struck in photographs from that era. The chorus at the Pekin Theatre are all standing on one leg as if caught middance. These staged shots exhibit an event of the photograph that also speaks to an emerging modern cosmopolitanism present in Chicago in the early twentieth century. Bronzeville was a primary destination for African Americans who had recently absented themselves from the lynchings and brutality of the American South through the Great Migration. Most of these materials were made to appeal to a radically shifting public, diverse in origins, but close in experience. These images show us an appeal to their patronage made by pianists and horn players in formalwear and stages holding dozens of spectacularly attired appearing under elegant lamps and painted stage décor evoking exotic locales, one of which clearly represents the American South. Despite, or

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Figure 8.3 ‘Bronzeville Echoes’, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2019. Photo by the author.

Figure 8.4 ‘Bronzeville Echoes’, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2019. Photo by the author.

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 195 perhaps because of this, the distance between these Chicago stages and the places so many had just left seem epochal from these images. Different kinds of images begin to predominate surrounding artists from the 1960s onwards. Overlaid on these previous photographic genres are the kinds of photographs that are more candid and often more personal. Artists who were prominent from the mid-1950s onwards are most often represented in these museums through these same kinds of somewhat awkward and highly theatrical PR photos. However, these are supplemented with images of them taken mid-emote, that is, in performance. These sorts of genuinely candid images eventually came to predominate as the classic era of rock photography took hold and eventually demoted the staged publicity photo to secondary importance. Produced through the use of less bulky, less expensive and more agile photographic equipment, these images appear to capture the real life of popular music in its fleeting moments. Both of the main exhibits at Sun Studios and the Stax Museum in Memphis show us this very clearly. Along with the familiar array of publicity shots we begin to see an increasing number of photos of musicians rehearsing and performing. One doesn’t even need to enter Sun Studios to see this as both posed publicity shots and candid performance photos of Sun’s most prominent white artists adorn the outside of the building (Figure 8.5). On the back wall is an image of a young Jerry Lee Lewis playing the piano in his familiar standing pose. On the side wall are posed shots of Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, while two shots of a young Elvis performing appear a bit further down the side of the building. Near the front of the building is the famous picture of the Million Dollar Quartet rehearsing at the piano. The events of these photographs seem to want to capture for us only those few, fleeting years of Sun’s initial rise to prominence through the exuberant and youthful white faces of its most famous musical protagonists literally built into the place itself. The overwhelming vision Sun Studios presents through these and many other images is one of a burgeoning musical excitement and emerging racial harmony. We find a similar experience across town at the Stax Museum. Their lengthy and very rich main exhibit chronicles the history of the label through the same array of image types. But the larger number of photos of Stax artists performing and rehearsing as well as the large number of personal photos taken by many who worked there bring the exhibition’s narrative conceit that Stax was more a family than a business into continual view. The events of many of these photographs also seek to confirm a narrative of intimate social fellowship through the faces of musicians smiling at us and each other from stages and studios. While claims about the indexical function and realist character of the photograph have been thoughtfully challenged, the use of photographic imagery in these museums seems to me to be intrinsically marked with their indexical relationship to the real. Their very legitimacy as museums depends on forging this kind of connection to the past. It is this indexicality that helps produce the ideologically charged lattice work of imagery that seeks to legitimate the already-presumed-to-be-present greatness of those portrayed. And it is this very specific relation of these images to the real world that underwrites the institution’s value and purpose as an arbiter of a collective understanding of the past of popular music. In this sense, most of the photographic

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Figure 8.5  Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 197 imagery in these museums is little different than the objects to which they are so often adjacent. We are routinely told: ‘this happened to these people and this is a close as you can ever get to those storied events.’ Many argue that the photograph can be detached from its index to the real and in some cases this is probably true. But it seems to me that the very category ‘photography’ is far too complex, varied and capacious to support any singular or universal understanding of its purpose or consequence. Indeed, the whole point of these museums, like the rest of the mediating industry of which they are a part, strongly mitigates against the specific forms of forgetting that would be required to detach their photographs from their reference points to the real world. For it is exactly this moment of connection to the real that these museums must produce to validate their whole enterprise. There are many examples of the primacy of the indexical relationship to choose from in these museums and we can see it clearly in the more personal kinds of portraits we encounter in these places.

The portrait in the popular music museum Popular music museums are rife with common and widespread ideas about what constitutes greatness in music, and indeed with presumptions about the very nature of music and the social connections it facilitates more broadly. These ideas are continually evoked through arrangements of imagery that I have called portraits. As Freund argues, portraiture has long been shaped across ‘three domains – the aesthetic, the economic, and the subjective’. The genre is formed by and responds to the aesthetics of its time, is shaped by the economic transactions and conceptions of value that produce it, and ‘participates in discourses about the self and its relationship to larger sociopolitical categories’ (Freund, 2015:5). As such, portraiture is what Pointon calls ‘a slippery and seductive art’. It offers a likeness of its subjects that not only is meant to transcend time in some form or another, but also demands immediate feeling in the moment as a response. It provides what she calls ‘an illusion of timelessness’ that has at its heart a viscerally demanding form of immediately obvious representation and connection (Pointon, 2013:28). This seeming contest between the past and the present is what often gives portraits their uncanny powers. The indexical quality of portraits, that is their ability to present both a recognizable likeness of their subject and a credible representation of them, is a main source of their potential power. But it is not simply their correlation to the real that makes portraits powerful. There is often a presumed and illusory form of contact and intimacy in portraits the leads spectators to think they can feel a subjects “air” or imagine to be in touch with some part of their individual ‘essence’ (Freeland, 2010:42–4). In this respect, portraiture speaks to the wider societal value attributed to the individual and their life history, as well as to infrastructures devoted to their production, circulation, and display (Pointon, 2013:18, 28). For our purposes, the life history in question is that of the famous musician, a kind of portrait that, as many have noted, often carries with it the features of the icon. Given that we are talking about portraits made from photographic images, their status as icons is particularly apt. As Freeland argues, photographic portraits act on viewers in ways

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similar to painted religious icons in that the photograph is regarded as an authentic manifestation of its subject specifically because central aspects of the effects of the photograph are attributable to the subject not the portraitist. This highlights, argues Freeland, what Patrick Maynard has called the ‘depictive’ and ‘manifestation’ functions of the photograph (see Maynard, 1997: 234–43). The depictive function is that aspect of a photographic portrait which shows us someone we recognize in whatever way we might be able to. The manifestation function is that aspect of the photograph which is said to capture and embody some part of its subject’s character and presence or ‘aura’ (Freeland, 2010: 48). It is these two functions, when yoked together, through which the photographic portrait is meant to elicit an emotional response in the spectator that is transferable to any iteration of it, meaning that the effects the photograph has on the believer can happen anywhere some version of it can be beheld (Freeland, 2010:56–8; see also Howells, 2011). The photographic portraits found in popular music museums have all of these characteristics. As with many forms of portraiture, they act to display the elevated status of their subjects, exercising their power through the illusions of contact and intimacy they provide. In this respect, these portraits are little different than portraits of the famous have always been, in that they act as venues for the shoring up of forms of social power. The overarching name I have given to this form of power is the rock imaginary (see Chapter 7). The photographic relations of the rock imaginary grew out of forms of celebrity and glamour photography prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. As Keating notes, the modern meaning of the term ‘glamour’ specifically ‘as something you could see’ is a very recent shift in understanding (Keating, 2017:105). He argues that the use of the term in the early-twentieth-century celebrity press was not simply about worshipping perceived beauty. ‘Far from upholding glamour as an inherent trait to be worshipped’, he argues, ‘these sites of visual culture represented glamour as exhilaratingly modern – and as cynically false’ (Keating, 2017:106). But this not the withering criticism of glamour that it might seem to be. Keating shows that glamour was indeed a false and obvious construction in the sense that it was presented as one that was both transparent and attainable. In short, consumers could build it for themselves, with the correct guidance (Keating, 2017:115). The rock imaginary also walks this line, extolling ineffable greatness, but routinely acknowledging the moments of its construction, implying that it may not have always been there, at least in a form anyone else could actually see. Photographs of famous musicians often seem to capture this dynamic, most often retrospectively. As Zuromskis argues, the credibility of the celebrity photograph ‘lies in equal parts on the perceived authority of photographic technology as a faithful mirror of reality and the affective and embodied experience of the photographer as both eyewitness and participant in the event captured on film’ (Zuromskis, 2017:272). One of the ways in which rock imaginary is implemented in popular music museums is through extensive collections of photographic imagery which are placed precisely in this circumstance. When we examine seemingly small examples of photographic imagery across displays typically concerning prominent male artists, such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, we can see this imaginary embedded in pictures of the artists as children, or as not yet famous artists,

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 199 or as ‘normal’ people momentarily untethered from their greatness. We are meant to feel the greatness by identifying its origins, its moments of emergence and by participating in public validations and remembrances of its inevitability. At the entrance to the Grammy Museum’s exhibit ‘Sinatra: An American Icon’, there was a very large picture of the artist. He was probably nine or ten years old and his subtly smiling face is staring directly at the camera under a child’s slightly cocked fedora. Underneath is an undated quote: ‘When I was nine or ten years old I would sing with the piano roll at my father’s bar. One day I got a nickel for singing and that’s where it all began. I thought, “This is the racket to be in”.’ This family photograph manages to be familiar and alien at once, as if the young boy was somehow playing at being an older self only he could have possibly imagined, but that we can clearly see. It seems strange to suggest that this resemblance rises to the level of the uncanny, but it does. The ‘event’ of this photograph is not only long gone but impossible to reconstruct. Instead, the museum uses it to imply the fullness of the biographical narrative that is about to engage the spectator in the exhibit. It orients the spectator’s gaze to approach what was routinely described as an unusually personal exhibit and to train it on the range of images to Sinatra’s greatness that would inevitably come (Hermann, 2015). There is a similar photograph of John Lennon at the start of the Beatles’ Story. As noted in Chapter 4, it spreads across the wall behind what may, may, have been his childhood guitar (see Plate 3). This photograph is also a family photograph and it too features the eerie resonances of uncanny resemblance. The very young Lennon stares directly at the camera while holding what is at the very least a guitar very similar to the one sitting in front of us. The photographic relations created by these museums ask spectators to train their eyes on a singular moment in time that could only realize its meaning for us in retrospect. In both cases, we are brought closer to the meaning than even those involved in making these photographs could have ever been, seeing as we already know that greatness that was inevitably to follow. Our illusions of intimate contact with those moments set the desired frame about our experience of each exhibition. Similarly, two central aspects of the Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana exhibits at the EMP are the very personal narratives each tells about their central characters, Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. In each exhibit, spectators are presented with a large number of images whose ‘event’ can only be understood from our vantage point in the present. That is, we are shown photographs of both artists well before they were famous, but nevertheless engaged in their unavoidable callings to eventual greatness. Many of these photos and images are personal and had been rarely seen in public displays prior to their use in these exhibitions. As such, they are far more pliable to the demands of the tightly constrained narratives in which they are set, narratives that in and of themselves constitute extensive remembrances of the inevitability of each star’s life trajectory. It could hardly be otherwise. Still, these moments of ‘pre-greatness’ are coloured by everything that happened after in ways that are important to understand. Spread across the ‘Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound’ exhibit at the EMP were photos of every genre noted here, personal photos, posed publicity photos and performance shots (see Plate 3). Several are extraordinarily familiar, others only generally so. The images are mostly used to narrate the five eras of his life the exhibit

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uses to tell their iteration of his life story. There are two photos in particular that emanate the intimacy and contact sought by the exhibit, contact that feels immanent to the photographic medium itself. The first is a black and white picture of Hendrix playing with the Rocking Kings at Washington Town Hall in Seattle on February 20, 1960. It seems to be the only such picture in existence. The version on display in this exhibit is printed onto the temporary wall as part of timeline of images. The original image had a paper mat around it onto which was handwritten the words ‘The Rocking Kings’. This mat is also reproduced here. The grainy, indistinct image shows us five musicians on a mostly bare stage with only a few unused folding chairs at the back. Hendrix stands at the front left and is more immediately identifiable from his left-handed guitar than his poorly rendered face. A drummer sits off to the left behind a very limited drum kit that edges out of the frame. On the other side of the frame a pianist sits on a folding chair with his back to the stage. Hendrix stands just off centre next to two saxophone players. All three musicians stand in the middle of the frame. They are wearing matching white jackets, black ties and black pants. The image is candid, casual, catching Hendrix with a half smile looking downwards while the sax players each look away blankly in different directions. It has none of the elements of an ‘iconic’ rock photo. If anything, it is an indifferent, mundane moment nonchalantly captured by an observer only to be rendered more widely meaningful years later. Starting at it, one can imagine not being particularly impressed with these slightly mismatched looking musicians. While it is hard to think of Hendrix as anything other than young, here he appears not just youthful, but immature, standing awkwardly in his band uniform appearing every bit the accompanist that he was. The second image is of the King Kasuals performing on 23 December 1962 in Nashville. Hendrix went to Nashville after his deployment in the 101st Airborne had ended. He gigged with a number of outfits, most notably as Ike and Tina Turner’s sideman. The image is an old black and white snapshot, also printed directly onto the exhibit’s temporary wall. The original has a handwritten date on it and someone has written the first name of each member of the band over each of their heads. Five musicians appear in the front while a drummer toils away in an alcove behind them, barely visible behind a row of guitar amps. Hendrix again stands on the left of the frame, his guitar jutting off in its own direction. Next to him stands another guitarist, a bass player and a saxophonist standing more or less in a line. The singer is in front of them doing a dance move, his legs splayed out on the stage James Brown-style. All of them wear suits and ties, each of a slightly different shade and style. The stage is cramped and someone has strung a small paper decoration along the top saying simply ‘Merry Christmas’. The guitarist and singer seem to know they are being photographed and look directly at the camera. The guitarist has sharp, easy smile while the singer is caught mid-descent and looks slightly pained. Hendrix looks down at the neck of his guitar as he plays. His face has changed, looking longer and somehow smoother. His tie is impossibly skinny and his black jacket is adorned with seven big buttons, both suggesting a personal style absent from the earlier image. These images place Hendrix on the Chitlin’ Circuit and at the heart of radical expansion of soul and rhythm and blues in the American South in the 1960s. Yet they also show a man who, while working

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 201 as a reliable professional musician, was in the thick of a music scene that, despite all of its manifest innovations and influence, would not be able to accommodate him. Within the narrative bounds set by the EMP, we see the jackets and ties that merely precede the billowing tie dyes and headbands to come, touching us through the stark specificity and seeming intimacy of those small photographic images. The photographs and images that track the emergence of Nirvana work in a similar way, especially those focused on Kurt Cobain. The EMP’s exhibit ‘Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’ has two brief sets of images that point us to the narrative origins of Cobain’s eventual greatness. The first set chronicles several illustrations he made in high school art class. In addition to the Entry Identification Form and several drawings from the 1984 to 1985 art show at his school, there are two photographs that are particularly notable. One shows us the Cobain sitting in art class drawing. He is wearing a hooded jacket and appears focused on his work, not betraying any hint of awareness or interest in the photographer. The second shows us Cobain from the chest up against a dark background. His right index finger is inserted in his right nostril. He has a subtle smile and is clearly clowning for the camera. Both photographs capture that momentary ‘magic’ that ‘emanates’ from photographs as noted earlier. We see one of the most visible artists of his era around whom an extraordinary mythology has grown before any of that happened. These two photographs, exhibited here as originals, feel as if they can cut through the years of pathos and ritual surrounding Cobain’s suicide and somehow hint at some form of contact with something that appears almost innocent, somehow untouched by all the angst and spectacle that followed. The second pair of photographs of interest here surround Cobain’s early music. Among the cassettes, tape machines and old musical instruments that can materially account for his first stabs at being a songwriter, there are two photographs of Cobain recording his first demo as Organized Confusion in 1982. Both are as exhibited as originals. He recorded the songs at his aunt’s house in suburban Seattle. She also took both photographs. In one, Cobain is seated in a desk chair wearing headphones. He is playing the battered Sears guitar that also sat in a nearby case in the exhibit. He is playing left-handed and the guitar is upside down. He is staring at the camera as if he has just noticed the photographer, his dark blue eyes just catching the light. The room seems cramped with music gear and furniture. A microphone on a stand looms to the left. A calendar reading ‘December’ adorns the wall behind him. The second photo, displayed just below the first, catches Cobain as he records, looking intently at the fret board of his guitar. These two moments are clearly close to one another in time. He wears the same clothes, plays the same guitar, it is still December. Like the other images examined here, they speak to an ordinary day in an ordinary suburb in what was once regarded as a slightly out of the way place. As with the hand lettered demo tapes with Cobain’s drawing of steaming piles of shit on them, or the department store guitars he used as a teenager, or even the satirical drawing of Ronald Reagan holding the hand of a monkey he entered in his high school art show, these photographs are all displayed in order to evoke something that did not exist when they were taken, but which has been with us now for decades. Everything Cobain made, from songs to drawings to sculptures to poetry, is neatly sewn into the multitude of stories that

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have been told about him afterwards. His dark satires, his apparent alienation and his continually expressive responses to a popular culture he would briefly shape are all here, trying to touch us. By far, the most surreal portrait of any popular musician is Graceland, the sprawling, multi-sited evocation of the greatness of Elvis Presley that straddles Elvis Presley Boulevard south of Memphis. The many buildings now called ‘Graceland’ adorn a grim five-lane ribbon on road dotted with the original house, an exhibition centre, a guest house, a chapel, gift shops and the typical mess of chain restaurants, strip malls and mid-range hotels familiar to anyone who has ever driven on a American highway. The house itself acts as a personal expression of Elvis, both comically ostentatious and deeply felt. When you get off the tour bus with your iPad and its celebrity narration, you first see a carpeted staircase with mirrored panels and a painted portrait of the young Elvis. The gold frame of the painting matches the railing posts and adornments around the stairs while the pale blue/grey background of the image matches the colour of the carpet almost perfectly. To your left are two living rooms, the first divided from the second by a partial wall of windows with two enormous stained glass peacocks set into them, each glinting in the light from the gold light fitting on the ceiling in the room behind them. After making your way through the kitchen and downstairs, you are confronted by more dubious aesthetic choices, the TV room and the Jungle Room, the colour schemes and design ethos of each battering you into at least an appreciation of their total commitment to the cause. My point here is not to make fairly obvious interpretations of the place, but to point out the direct appeal the place makes to the kinds of intimate contact portraiture seeks with the spectator. Graceland makes exactly such claims as it moves you through the great man’s home, past what seem like acres of capes and gold records to his final resting place in his own Meditation Garden. A rear wall encloses visitors with sand-coloured bricks and what the explanatory plaque explains are ‘primitive stained-glass’ images which were ‘handmade in Spain in the mid-1800s’. It would take a hard heart not to at least feel a twinge when looking at the smallest object of remembrance in the Garden, a gravestone for Elvis’ stillborn twin which reads simply ‘In Memory of Jessie Garon Presley, January 8, 1935’. In one of the special exhibition spaces over the road from the house, an exhibit called ‘Elvis’ Tupelo’ was on view from 2012 to 2015 (Figure 8.6; Figure 8.7). Designed as a tourist tease for the town in which Elvis was born a mere 115 miles away, the exhibit compiled objects, documents and images of the Presley family’s life in the 1930s and 1940s. Included are receipts for loans to buy furniture, report cards from Elvis’ schools, pay stubs produced by Elvis’ father’s many occupations and a remarkably detailed chronological list of the family’s many moves from town to town, home to home, job to job. And of course, there are reproductions of family photographs. While it would seem that very few pictures of Elvis and his family are unknown to the wider public, there are several images striking in their distinctiveness. One is a formal portrait of Elvis and his parents. They are all unbearably young. Elvis appears to be maybe two years old. He stands in the middle of the frame while his parents sit behind him. He barely reaches their noses. He is wearing overalls and a collared shirt underneath. Gladys sits to the left wearing a floral print top while Vernon sits



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Figure 8.6  ‘Elvis’ Tupelo’, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

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Figure 8.7  ‘Elvis’ Tupelo’, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Portraiture and the Currency of Musical Repute 205 to the right wearing a cotton work shirt. Both Elvis and his father wear fedoras. All three are looking just slightly off to their left, each wearing the same slightly pensive expression. It seems to be the sort of inexpensive portraitnearly anyone of their social standing could have taken at their local drug store. A second photo sits in a nearby cabinet with several pay stubs made out to ‘Vernon Pressley’. It is a picture of Elvis standing outside the family home in Tupelo, its one-day famous pine boards and brick foundations framing him in the background. Elvis is wearing white shoes, striped pants with suspenders and a white shirt. He has one hand in his pocket and the other holding the handle of a small toy wagon. It is a distinctly adult pose. Elvis looks directly at the camera, seemingly wary, but patient. The third picture is one of the most well-known of the singer. It is spread across the entire temporary wall that marks the end of the exhibition. It is a picture of Elvis performing in Tupelo in 1956. He was performing at the Mississippi-Alabama Farm and Dairy Show. The day was declared Elvis Presley Day and the governor of his home state was in attendance. The photo shows us Elvis looming over his crowd front of the stage, bent over at the waist, gripping the microphone with his right hand as his left leg and right hand perform one of his signature moves. The expectant crush of young people, mostly but not exclusively women, reach out for him, some wearing ecstatic looks, other with mouths wide open. He is dressed almost entirely in black with the exception of his extremely white shoes.

Conclusion: Imaginary touching All of the performers whose images are described in this chapter have long been designated as ‘great’. These exhibitions seek only to deepen our sense of their greatness and enhance our experience of it. We are never asked to consider why they might be great or why these forms of greatness might be in front of us. We are not presented with many arguments, claims or evidence to convince us of its validity. We don’t need to be. It is a foregone conclusion. But it is not really the purpose of this chapter to point this out. My point is to note how wider forms of power touch us through the work made of the attention we pay to these images. We are the necessary conduit that completes the circuit of the ideological master narrative of greatness. It is our feelings of contact, connection and closeness that are the necessary fulfilment of this narrative displayed in its many forms and iterations. These feelings are stoked and satisfied through the closeness and contact we feel with these portraits. They are unremarkable feelings in their complete naturalness. Their primary store of value lies in this perfectly normal and seeming steady state. More specifically, the forms of power that shape our encounter with these forms of greatness are filtered through the medium of photography. As noted, this medium still possesses a claim on reality that remains potent. These exhibits play on this claim relentlessly. The images they use to dot their exhibitions act as so many links in their narrative chains. Many feel like real, material moments inside stable and familiar narratives. The historical realities to which they refer and materially represent hold

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down a real world referent to the characters and attributes of their subjects. Just as the photo of Elvis standing outside his family’s shack in Tupelo was real, so too are the origins which were responsible for the greatness that followed and so too are the lessons learned that helped produce it. The authentic image becomes the authentic character. In performing this narrative twist, these museums use the ‘event of the photograph’, an event that has its roots in the circumstances of our world, to gradually wear those circumstances down to make those images more compliant with their aims which, in the cases noted here, means telling the same story over and over and over again. The sustenance of these stories is a form of governmentality, part of a systemic equilibrium that depends on ideological master narratives as the means through which power can touch us and ‘validate and celebrate its own power’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:34). The last chapter of this book will explore another dominant mode of this form of systemic validation, ‘the popular’.

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Displaying ‘the popular’

The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. (Fisher, 2009: 12–13) [T]he spectacle relies on the impression of coherence and consistency across all of its domains, from its philosophy of history to its immersion in the minutiae of everyday life. (Cooper, 2012:n.p.)

Few ideas have been as strung up and flayed as often as ‘the spectacle’. Guy Debord’s rhetorically imprudent lovechild and its heirs have been derided by many a scholar as a monolithic, cynical and ‘nihilistic myth’ that is riven with a deeply anti-social, anti-modern ‘snobbery’ (Roberts, 2014:9–10; Kellner, 2016:25; Mitchell, 2015:211– 17). It seems a remarkable misreading to suggest that a theory based in a vision of class struggle as robust as Debord’s was motivated by cynical self-interest, nihilistic abandonment of all ethical principle, and a haughty desire to force the proletariat to relinquish the present and retreat to some imaginary world defined by premodern social relations. While the debates about the line of critique that produced these ideas have been diverse and multifarious and as such are well beyond the scope of this book, there is one aspect of it that I do need to address. One of the many reasons for this particular misreading of the idea of the spectacle lies in the refusal by some to accept that reification can be an operative and consequential force in contemporary life. Simply put, critics claim that the very idea of ‘the spectacle’ is moot because ‘we’ are too smart and too free to ever be fooled into believing something that contributes to our own oppression. The ever widening world of meaning and signification is a perpetually contested terrain housing the collective agency of the public that will always outweigh that of the elites. The spectacle and its producers will always stand before ‘us’ with their nefarious schemes in tatters around them, eventually. Reification is a slippery and convoluted idea, seeming to suggest that any fear or anxiety evoked by the perceived loss of intimacy with life as it is marks an ineluctably backward-looking conservatism. But the absence of such anxieties may also tell us that the process of reification is so complete that is has become imperceptible (see Gandesha and Hartle, 2017; Bewes, 2002). Thus, the empowering, optimistic misreading of the spectacle hinges for its coherence on a similarly elusive assumption that the terrain being contested has some manner of conceptual consistency to it. After

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all, we need to know what we are contesting. This line of thought further presumes that there is some tangible way of universally determining when ‘we’ are being lied to or knowing when ‘we’ have successfully exerted enough of our power to stop whatever horrible plans that have been put in motion against the will of ‘the people’. This further presumes the existence of identifiable ideological lines between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and some form of relatively stable animating ideology that provides some kind of clear structure of belief that forms the ‘terrain’. But the system of representation that produces contemporary spectacles is not one that simply manufactures truths or lies or obvious misrepresentations as such. As Fisher has cogently argued, contemporary capitalism ‘is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and re-defined) pragmatically and improvisationally’ (Fisher, 2009:6). Ours is a system of representation whose main purpose is to continually seek autonomy from that which it is presumed to be representing. As Burris has explained, some degree of autonomy between a system of representation and what it is purported to be representing is ‘essential to the maintenance of a stable and effective legitimating ideology’. Any such degree of autonomy ‘confers upon the dominant ideology an appearance of neutrality and objectivity without which it would be neither effective as a means of mobilizing and vindicating ruling-class action, nor resistant to delegitimation through the unmasking of its underlying instrumental basis’ (Burris, 1988:11). This is because the spectacle is not defined and legitimated by its content but by its social relations. The unpleasant fact is that a system of representation defined by spectacular relations has no necessary, sustained or even periodic connection to the real. It may or may not reference or relate to the real depending on the circumstances. Whether or not we are directly lied to or ideologically manipulated is not dependent on systemic demands that are invariably fulfilled by some interminable or inexorable logic or ideology. Instead, the operations of the system of representation defined by spectacular relations are dependent on circumstantial and strategic demands that can be fulfilled in any number of ways using a whole range of techniques. Their fulfilment depends on whether the demands of the moment require a truth, a lie, a fact, a falsehood, an obfuscation, a misdirection or merely a gentle tug on the marionette’s emotive strings. Critics of the spectacle have presumed that the main claim of that theory is that we are constantly being fooled by what amounts to a vast system of bland untruthfulness and inauthenticity. This line of argument suggests that if some manner of truth or genuine and organic connection can be demonstrated to be endemic to that system of representation, then the whole concept of the spectacle is proven to be false. Instead, when we are genuinely connected through the carriers of capitalism and its commodities, we are told that the richer and more socially connected we become: Consider, for example, contemporary individuals’ relationship with religion constituted through branded megachurches and burgeoning industries such as yoga; the revitalization of urban cities as branded, creative spaces for people to ‘authentically’ express themselves; the amplifying mandate to develop a ‘self-brand’

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 209 as a way to strategically market oneself personally and professionally. Appending ‘brand’ to ‘culture,’ then, indicates not only the revaluation of culture but also a mapping out of the affective and authentic relationships that are formed within brand cultures. (Klingmann, 2007:14)

Others agree, boldly declaring that they ‘resist the (traditional Marxist) idea that material brand culture necessarily mystifies and obscures real relationships between people, arguing instead that relationships between people are often made possible by our relationship with branded commodities’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012:226). Banet-Weiser appeals to Daniel Miller, the anthropologist of ‘stuff ’, for whom the authentic social relations produced by the bearers of capitalism mean that the ‘closer our relationships with objects, the closer our relationships with people’ (Miller, 2008:1). This particular vision of consumerism rests on the implied legitimacy that grows from a base of mass popularity. There is, they say, little danger in a genuinely popular system from which people can draw authentic emotion and social connection. Thus, we can only presume from this that an object as highly valued, as ‘popular’, as the Yeezy Boost shoe, for example, endorsed by Kanye West, can’t help but indelibly ‘connect’ the hiphop superstar, and presumably his fans, with the people who work in the sweatshops who make them. There is no doubt that we can trace such connections, but it is the character and nature of those connections that is at issue (TFL, 2017). It is precisely because our system of representation can produce such deeply felt and honestly achieved emotional reactions and social connections in spectators that it can produce all manner of mystification. In fact, this system of representation could not function without evoking and producing exactly such earnest reactions, and a lot of them. They are the core of its legitimacy. They represent this system’s ability to sustain itself. The forms of emotional sustenance and social connection produced through spectacular relations erase the underlying social relations and material conditions that produce them. This allows these forms of emotional sustenance and social connection to be vested instead in the objects of popular attention, investing these with social lives they would not otherwise have. It is here that we find that the economic purpose of the spectacle as a form of ‘rent’, extracting value and meaning from the necessary expressions of social life that take the form of those honest emotions, those feelings we have earned through our own experience. This is what allows this system of spectacular relations and representation to produce what Cooper calls ‘the impression of coherence and consistency across all of its domains’ (Cooper, 2012). In contesting this coherence and consistency, I will avoid familiar instrumentalist conceptions of ideology that suggest any kind of mechanical production or reproduction of demonstrably false beliefs and values. Instead, I will turn to a pragmatic rendering of reification which, as Burris explains, is useful and insightful in many ways. Such a rendering accounts for the illusory quality of social consciousness in a way which does not depend solely upon the deliberate actions of certain individuals to manipulate the ideas and beliefs of others. It locates the existence of specific forms of ideological consciousness in terms of their organic relationship to the social order which

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they represent and from which they derive. It preserves a dialectical conception of human individuals as simultaneously the subjects and objects of ideological mystification. And finally it illuminates the hidden structural dimensions of ideology formation which generate illusory representations of social reality while presenting an appearance of neutrality and objectivity. (Burris, 1988:11)

The coherence and consistency of our system of representation and its repeated expression of the ideologies of the wider social order appears in every popular music museum I have examined in this book. One of the more obvious forms in which it does so is the pervasive theme I will simply call ‘the popular’.

Popular reification Popular music museums are populated with an enormous number of displays consisting of objects and photographic images that collectively and individually attest to that music’s universal popular credentials. We are constantly shown how traditions of music have been embraced and validated by ‘the people’, people who are free to participate in the sublime vistas of glorious human expression defined by moments of greatness and lives of distinction. These museums don’t so much tell us this or argue for the veracity of such interpretations of popular culture nor do they stake any explicit claims to their truthfulness. Instead, as noted in Chapter 2, these museums simplify and typify the history of popular music. They present us with lives worth emulating through the greatness of the musicians they present to us. They create pleasant images that reveal and endorse key features of society and they help us assimilate to them. In short, these places flatter us. They act as a mirror rather than a window. They show us ourselves as we wish to be seen, as part of universal sphere of benevolent connection and continuing celebration. These reflections are often particularly bright when an exhibition seeks to establish the popular foundations of a specific tradition of music. At the start to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s main exhibit, for example, there are two images that set a very particular scene. One is of an older white man sitting on a porch playing an acoustic guitar. He stares directly at the camera with his head slightly tilted down, his eyes framed from above by a straw hat. The wall he is sitting in front of almost takes up the entire background of the image with a flat expanse of wood. At the right edge of the image, a young boy’s face looks quizzically at the camera. The image is the central part of the very large title panel for the exhibition as a whole. It is an important and telling choice. The introductory text tells us that country music ‘has always been about real people and real lives’. It also ‘communicates shared truth and common experiences’. It is a music that ‘speaks directly and eloquently to the human heart’. It concludes: ‘From its origins in folk traditions to its vibrant life in the twenty-first century, country’s essential spirit remains unchanged, even as its sound evolves with the times.’ The second image is similarly grand in size and ambition. It is of a uniformed African American solider posing for the camera. His left foot is placed up on a camp

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 211 stool, a guitar rests on his bent leg with a very thin strap run over his shoulder. His uniform is crisp, his hat slightly tilted, his face perfectly at rest. A reproduction of the entire photograph only a few cases away shows us that he was posing with another man, also in uniform, also African American, in a similar posture. The identifying text explains that these two men were soldiers sent to fight in the Spanish American War. The image is used to attest to the diverse origins of country music. Surrounding these images are cases full of rare and evocative artefacts and images that flesh out the meaning of these photographs. They include reproductions of lithographs showing barn dances and vaudeville shows, the violin on which was played the first recording of ‘Cumberland Gap’ which is described as ‘a traditional Appalachian tune’, sheet music from Minstrel shows and worn books of gospel hymns. These punctuate the narrative of a music that developed from the folk traditions of the British Isles, but whose ‘roots became entangled with the ethnic musics of other immigrants and African slaves’. Those who made this tradition called ‘country’ made it out of ‘a wealth of fiddle tunes and folksongs’ they brought with them to their new settlements, but ‘also created new music that would pass down through the generations at barn raisings, house parties, and local dances’. Perhaps not too surprisingly, we find a similar use of specific imagery at start to the main exhibit at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol. The initial display consists of a primary block of text entitled ‘What is a hillbilly?’ (see Plate 6). The text surrounds the reproduction of a photograph from the White Top Folk Festival from 1933. Four musicians sit in the front smiling and playing two guitars, a mandolin and a fiddle. Prominent in the crowd gathered behind them is Eleanor Roosevelt, then the First Lady of the United States. The text explains that the term ‘hillbilly’ has a ‘complex’ history, acting both as a slur casting workingclass southerners as ‘ignorant or backwards in thought and values’, but also used to describe ‘adventurous pioneers, self-sufficient and unaccepting of modern industrialization’. Surrounding this text is a large reproduction of a photograph of three brothers from West Virginia. They are sitting in front of a rough-hewn wall made of large logs and rocks. One holds a fiddle, another a rifle and the third a portable phonograph machine. The display casts the phonograph in particular as both modern and traditional. The display case in front of the image also includes a fiddle and a phonograph similar to the ones pictured. The entire display is framed by a faux wooden slat board wall. This initiating blast of populism draws the spectator into the world that produced the famed ‘Bristol Sessions’. Again perhaps not too remarkably, the same populist gesture inculcated spectators into the EMP’s ‘Taking Punk to the Masses’ exhibit. As noted in Chapter 5, before you enter the exhibit, you are greeted with a massive image of Kurt Cobain being held aloft by his fans. Notable here is the way in which this image is followed up in the guts of the narrative of the exhibit itself. We are told that ‘punk rock was less a consistent musical style and more a Do-It-Yourself attitude and desire to create unique musical visions in the face of a calcified world of contemporary corporate rock’. We are then informed that during the 1980s, ‘the underground music scene was largely left to its own devices, allowing for an unfettered flow of creativity despite the lack of resources afforded by

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the major labels’. The imagined world painted for us posits a ‘cramped van’ acting as punk’s front porch, the metaphor that birthed a music: [S]cores of underground bands toured the country in cramped vans, spreading the gospel of punk. Fans launched independent record labels to put out music by their favorite bands, opened venues that were friendly to the new music, published fanzines to communicate with other devotees, and started radio shows to broadcast the music. Over time, a vibrant independent music infrastructure developed, outside the traditional music industry, free of the corporate ogre, and driven solely by fellow travelers whose primary impetus was music rather than cash.

Taking the form of an instructional guide, the exhibit explains the resources necessary to all such local scenes that produced this apparently unique upsurge in creative activity. These included key individuals and bands driving the development of venues, media and an audience. Among an array of images, sounds, films and objects attesting to the reality of this story, we find that as the surface turgidity of the decade wore through, bands that ‘defied easy categorization . . . broadened their sound while maintaining their punk roots. Year by year, song by song, they each made advances into the mainstream consciousness, priming the public for their underground aesthetic.’ In all three exhibits, spectators are treated to the same story and are left untroubled by the same absences. What we are not told is that the musical traditions now called ‘country music’ and ‘punk’ existed as complex, mixed spheres of social relations many years before the events chronicled in these exhibits. Within these both spheres, people made music commercially and non-commercially, for small labels and big, as well as independently. They performed in formal venues and informal ones, toured extensively or sometimes not at all. The daily labours that produced these spheres of social and aesthetic action happened in a variety of forms and at varied scales and types of recompense. People hauled gear, sold tickets, sewed clothing and fixed instruments. The music produced by these distinct forms of sociality were distributed through extensive touring networks and forms of communicative mediation based on local and regional dynamics that made the music meaningful in specific ways. The creation, use and experience of both country music and punk were part of much broader collections of social, cultural, economic and expressive resources people used in a variety of ways. And in each case there were songs and performers who we could easily recognize as ‘country’ or ‘punk’ well before those actual terms were in use. The absences in both exhibits surround the terms under which the ‘creation’ of country music and the bringing of punk ‘to the masses’ were undertaken. Both were marked by extensive processes of the extraction and appropriation of the most valuable resources produced by those involved by these traditions and spheres of musical practice: the artists and their songs. In both cases, representatives of radically different ways of using these same mundane, everyday musical materials brought to bear on them a very different collection of social resources. They created new kinds of legal contracts, imposed new forms of authorship, used distinct methods of distribution,

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 213 tried new modes of communication and employed types of logistical organization that were simply not part of the social spheres that had been producing this music in the years beforehand. The combination of these methods of production and distribution made these forms of music meaningful in very different ways than they had been before. Both moved through the world differently after they were ‘discovered’. What became known as ‘country’ songs that had been passed around for decades in medicine shows, church halls, community gatherings and through intimate familial relations. Songs whose life histories only existed in the very circuits that produced and maintained them were, in a very short period of time, transformed into modern intellectual property. They very quickly took on new material forms. They suddenly had new forms of authorship attributed to them, and thus new forms of value and meaning. Punk bands that had formed the core of the social connections and world shaping methods of personal and community expression were offered new forms of material and economic support. Those that accepted them were compelled to sell their work to their new employers and absent themselves from the scenes that had got them going (see Hannerz, 2015; Suisman, 2009; Thompson, 2004; Cross, 1997; ‘Hype’, 1996). My purpose is not to try to imagine some facile utopia prior to the era chronicled by these museums. Instead, it is to argue that the processes I am so briefly describing here led to the wholesale capture and redefinition of the very categories used to describe and define these forms of music: ‘punk’ and ‘country’. This meant that the very definition of both terms was ceded to those who had the power to make the most use of them in the most widespread and consequential ways. This did not prevent anyone from using them as they wished, but the very names given to these forms of music could no longer be claimed or shaped by those who had contributed so much to creating the music and the work that had sustained it. The idea of ‘country’ only coalesced after the 1920s as a result of the extensive work undertaken to create a formal, commercial archive of what had previously been communally constructed or individually tended forms of music. People such as Ralph Peer and A. P. Carter did the extracting. Corporations such as Victor and Okeh made the archive formal. Perhaps even more drastically, ‘punk’ became a lifestyle and fashion attitude whose dominant forms were definitively detached from the economic and social relations that had first produced the music that eventually became ‘punk’. Both became grist for the familiar milling of community resources into forms amenable to the uses of capital. The images that greet us at the start to three these exhibits, the two porches and the singular artist held aloft, show us most directly the reification of country and punk that has been effected by these museums. The reification of these forms of music does not ‘depend solely upon the deliberate actions of certain individuals to manipulate the ideas and beliefs of others’ (Burris, 1988:11). They are clearly part of a larger system of representation in which we can ‘locate the existence of specific forms of ideological consciousness’ through their links to ‘the social order which they represent and from which they derive’. Further, we can see the musicians and audiences for each form of music ‘simultaneously [as] the subjects and objects of ideological mystification’. And we can see ‘the hidden structural dimensions of ideology formation’ as it produces ‘illusory representations of social reality while presenting an appearance of neutrality

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and objectivity’ (Burris, 1988:11). The representations of country and punk produced by these museums maintain a persistent autonomy from the things they claim to be representing. They do so by exalting the distant origins of each tradition of music and creating an unbroken line of descent from each moment of origination to the present. Yet, the defining dynamic of extraction and capture that made this connection to our present possible is erased, replaced with the singularities of great art and artists supported by their loyal fans, ‘the people’. How do ‘the people’ themselves appear in these museums? They appear as the material and symbolic consequences of their affective labour. They appear as photographic reproductions of beguiled audiences, awestruck and hysterical. They appear as walls of gold and vinyl records and as cases full of old merchandise, cute, cheap and carefully preserved. They appear as careful reconstructions of record stores and radio stations. They take the form of the mediating objects and institutions they made prominent, powerful and rich. When we survey the presence of ‘the people’ across a range of popular music museums, we see their purpose and their reasons for being here. What emerges is what we can clearly recognize as a museum discourse of fandom. Fans scream. They swoon. They are entranced. They exude passion and meaning, all the time. This particular discourse of fandom brooks very little nuance. This is by necessity as representations of fan expressivity are one of the central means through which these museums produce their primary commodity, ‘us’, the spectators. The ‘we’ produced by these museums acts as both the consummation and commemoration of the commodity of fandom. As with the many memoirs and journalistic explorations of the symbiosis of music consumption, fans are to be exalted and defended (Leonard, 2014; Kinney, 2014). They, and by extension we, are to be credited with their part on the world-making accomplishments of their idols. They, and by extension we, must be told that we too are on stage. By far the most typical representations of popular music fandom are presented by the Beatles’ Story and Graceland. At the Beatles’ Story there is one wall and one case that capture the force of culture that was Beatlemania. The case is populated with Beatles merchandise, retrospectively referred to as ‘memorabilia’. It acts as the unalloyed proof of a living, breathing culture of consumption summarily referenced by this small collection of objects. The collection includes a small plate, a tea towel and paper cut outs of a photograph of each Beatle. There are a few fan club cards and a small case for storing 45s. The smiling faces of the band dot this miniature landscape of reverence. The objects seem at once trifling and historically weighty. They are evidence of what was, materially, a passing fancy and, symbolically, something significant enough to make a museum out of. A few feet away is a wall-sized cut out image of five women screaming and gesticulating. Their black boots and shiny coats are insufficient to contain their feelings. Their faces are contorted in the joy and melodrama of the moment. The posture of one juts back into her seat as her hands grasp the side of her head, while another’s upper body shoots forward, arms stiff at her side as she vocally expresses whatever it is she is expressing. The image feels like a coiled spring. Several feet from this are seven television screens, each about half a metre across with a row of three on top and four on the bottom. The images and sound are not synced. The

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 215 sounds are piped in and provide the constant, undulating sound of a mass of young people screaming. The images show children frantically waving, some in slow motion, some jumping up and down in place, others being dragged off by the arms by police, one being carried away on a stretcher. All seven screens show the same looped, edited scenes in the same order, perpetually. The display is unintentionally violent. After a while, it becomes unnerving. The Trophy Room and the Hall of Gold at Graceland provide us with a similarly direct expression of the relationship between Presley and his fans. While wholly inadequate to the task, in fairness it is impossible to imagine an exhibit that could capture the surreal global phenomenon that is Elvis love. The Trophy Room is devoted to Elvis’ relationship with his fans in the first stage of his career, that extended blush of ardour before he was drafted in the US Army. The walls are completely covered with floor-to-ceiling collages of show posters, newspaper articles, publicity photos and images of crowds inside and outside the many venues where Presley performed. These form a timeline that stretches around the room, noted in text that explains significant Elvis-related events in the late 1950s. Cases containing records, merchandise, clothing and plaques of various honours Presley received are built into the walls. Along the ceiling hang several televisions all of which show several of his more prominent performances from television shows. The lighting is very low and what light there is comes from the television screens, the backlit cases and recessed lighting behind the signs telling you what room you are in. The effect is consuming. Two cases in particular are richly populated with imagery and objects produced to facilitate Elvis’ relations with his fans. One is backed by a sizeable photographic reproduction of Elvis arriving at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas to perform at the State Fair of Texas in 1956. The moment was notable simply for the sheer size of the venue, a football stadium, far more expansive than even the biggest theatres he was used to playing. The case contains a pair of perfectly white bucks, shoes that appear to be the ones he wore for what local journalists joked was literally an earth shaking show (see Fairchild, 2019:276). The second case is chock-full of merchandise produced through the auspices of the shady and innovative Colonel Tom Parker. The case includes picture frames, charm bracelets, a toy guitar, a pair of blue sneakers and a pair of red high heels. There is a doll, a statuette and the Elvis Presley Game. There is a badge that when tilted shows the viewer Presley’s signature hip swivel and a number of other badges and buttons, one that reads ‘Oy Gevalt Elvis’. The Hall of Gold adjoins the Trophy Room at the back and you are led down a 20 metre row of gold records and platinum discs and golden boots. It turns out that this was just a prelude to the annex of awards displayed in Presley’s former squash court. These are a form of proof and payoff, as if either were needed by then (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). As noted in previous chapters, there are a large number of reconstructed sites in popular music museums. The range includes newspaper offices, recording studios and music venues, as well as scenes from song and albums such as Eleanor Rigby’s grave and the Yellow Submarine. Of particular interest here are the iterations of the Casbah and Cavern Clubs at the Beatles’ Story and the mock-ups of radio stations in Bristol and Memphis; there is a reconstruction of the WCYB radio studios at

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Figure 9.1  Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 9.2  Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 217 the Birthplace of Country Music Museum and at Sun Studios there is a recreation of WHBQ’s studio. These displays look like something left over from a theatrical production. They are all crowded with objects intended to make them look authentic, almost as if they had been recently used. But of course none of these objects are anything other than symbolic, their only use being to evoke an imagined type of moment from the past. In each case, what were places of commercial mediation have become presented only as citadels of communal connection, these exhibits offering only a narrow understanding of their complex histories. The Casbah and Cavern Clubs are both represented through what amounts to theatrical tableaux. The former is fairly small and the latter is an actual life-sized reproduction. The Casbah Club, we are told by the museum, was set in the basement of a large Victorian House in a suburb of Liverpool. Owned by the family of the Beatles former drummer, Pete Best, the band were resident there as the Quarrymen for most of the twenty-two months it operated. A small corner of the Beatles’ Story is mocked up to resemble one side of the original narrow space. On the floor is a table with a cup and saucer as well as a packet of cigarettes and a makeshift ash tray sitting on a small stained table. Next to this is a bass drum and small tom, sitting on the floor in disarray. One the wall behind them is a thin shelf on which are resting several opened packets of cigarettes and a container of drink stirrers. Bolted to the wall is a coffee machine which perhaps gave the club its full name, the Casbah Coffee Club. Cups and saucers sit on a high shelf next to small clock. On an adjacent wall are a series of images mounted to small picture boards. The images include two small tables that mirror in shape and size the one nearby on the floor. There are also pictures of small sections of the original murals painted by the band. This impressionistic display is supplemented with an image of a membership card for the club. The rules are spelled out to include the withdrawal of membership from ‘anyone found to be tampering with the electrical fittings or damaging the club property in any way or bringing in a non club member’ (Figures 9.3 and 9.4). Closed in 1973, the Cavern Club was buried during subway work and plans to excavate the original site proved impossible. A replica was opened a few basements away in 1984 where it remains today. The iteration of the Cavern Club that was built into a basement at the Beatles Story seems to be what amounts to a full scale reproduction of the main room of the original venue. There is a tremendous attention to detail in the place. The long narrow space is contained by a row arches on each side, mimicking the original space shown to us in an old photo of the place set on a side wall. The image is of an empty club, taken from the back, neat rows of wooden straight-backed chairs reaching up to the small stage. The ceiling in the photo reveals discoloured bricks as they arch across from one side to the other. On the original stage one can just make out a few microphone stands, a large amplifier and two speakers hung from the ceiling. The bricks of the reproduction are similar in appearance and have a distinct sheen to them, described in the museum’s words as the product of the ‘heat from the condensation of the bodies crowded together’. The museum also tells us that the ‘walls were painted, but peeling badly and the floor was a rough concrete surface’, both elements clearly alluded to here. The reconstruction has even produced the characteristic semi-darkness into which the old place was said to be always sunk.

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Figure 9.3  The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015. Photo by the author.

Figure 9.4  Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.

 Displaying ‘the Popular’ 219 The array of objects presented to us reaches for the eerie. The snack bar area in particular has been lavished with attention. On one wall is a pin board with posters and notices, several of which are curiously aged. To the right of this is a vintage drink machine, the interior of which has been painted orange up to a mooted liquid level and next to this is a coffee machine. The back wall features two sinks with upturned cups and saucers sitting as if they were recently left drying. Next to this sits a plastic display case with sandwiches, pasties and meat pies inside. For reference, above the sandwiches is a reproduction of a photograph of a patron standing at the same counter, smiling at the camera, her coffee cup at the ready. The fake stage is home to fake Beatles instruments, immediately recognizable from the characteristic font on the drum head to the familiar shape of the three guitars. One is continually asked to imagine these instruments in use as a soundtrack of Beatles’ songs plays periodically throughout the day. The experience of sitting is what amounts to an exact replica of the original performance space listening to old songs produces a ghostly absence. One can sit in an approximate chair, look at an approximate stage and hear the approximate music, but it seems to only accentuate our distance from the past, not bridge it. The radio broadcast booths in Memphis and Bristol take this gesture a step further. In the main exhibit area upstairs at Sun Studios, a floor-to-ceiling glass case encloses what used to be Control Room C, one of the original broadcast booths of WHBQ. This station hosted Daddy-O Dewey Phillips, the DJ who is said to have ‘shattered the mold with his “Red, Hot, and Blue” radio shows from 1953–59’. Once housed in what is now a prestige building full of luxury apartments, the booth was ‘excavated from inside the abandoned Hotel Chisca in the summer of 2013’. The text panel explains that the ‘acoustic tiles on the walls, Riverbank type studio door, wooden trim thermostat and two main glass studio windows were carefully removed from the hotel and reconstructed at Sun in January 2014’. The display attempts to construct for us an imagined moment in time in the life of this radio booth. The swivel chair is pushed back from the still-glowing console as if the DJ has just run to grab another record. A shattered vinyl record on the floor suggests that either a technical misfortune or a moment of aesthetic dissatisfaction of some kind has befallen the place. Through the back window we can see a large photographic image of another DJ plying his trade, perhaps in Control Room B. The clutter of records and magazines is defining, the clock reads 12:56 and 10 seconds, and even the trash can is full. It is hard to imagine any sort of detail has been left out or to the imagination. In Bristol, the Birthplace of Country Music Museum hasn’t simply recreated an old radio station, they have created a new one from equipment that ‘has been sourced from historic radio stations in Bristol’. There is a Raytheon RC-10 console and several RCA 44 ribbon microphones. The room itself is a spare, but exacting reproduction of what such a radio station would have been like, with vintage light fittings, faux antique sound tiles, and even a wooden stool at the back for the banjo player or slap bass player to sit on. The empty space of this studio, like the encased radio booth in Memphis or the empty Cavern Club in Liverpool, are meant to excite the imagination of what may have taken place in these, or at least very, very similar spaces. But there is

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one exception. In Bristol, the reproduced radio station is actually a real radio station. As the museum tells us, this radio station ‘is a fully functional studio built to meet the demands of modern broadcasting’; it is simply built to look like an old time radio studio. WCYB, as it is called, is a low-power community radio station that has revived programmes such as ‘Farm and Fun Time’, which they explain was ‘a show widely popular in the 1940s and 50s – putting it back on the air for a new generation of listeners’. The exhibits described here are symbolic representations of the places and products of the affective labour of fans, musicians and intermediaries that take the form of stilled material expressions of that labour. While it is difficult to see any of these spaces as anything other than tangible manifestations of the long lost social relations, they are attempting to recreate and represent, they aren’t simply that. They also produce a vivid and layered kind of fetishism about the music, the places that housed it, the social relations that produced it, and the mundane materiality of the social worlds within which it flourished. The almost spectral resemblances these places try to evoke offer spectators a speculative and imaginative stretch towards the past that materially grounds it in objects and spaces from that past, but untethers us from any necessary understanding beyond the immediate presence of these strangely auratic objects and their associated sounds. The conjectural reaching back of these constructed spaces is not simply trying to tell us we can know something about the past by seeing a version of it. It is also trying to inculcate a feeling for these places, asking spectators to inhabit what they imagine these places must have been like and to invent some sense of its reality for ourselves by trying to evoke a barrage of feelings about them. It does so through a painstakingly invented materiality, a confection of remnant coffee tables and turntables, of invented cigarette packs and coffee cups. Yet, despite their efforts at a certain type of fidelity, they all remain firmly anchored in the present, more defined by our rules and protocols than those of the past. They remain part of our representational systems, our social relations, working under its protocols and priorities, and in spaces created for our purposes. They reproduce its ideological demands and reinforce the present social order far more than they can offer an alternative to it. As I have explained in previous chapters, these displays are part of much larger systems of representation and explanation. They are not express or purposeful manipulations of ideology so much as they are reflections and expressions of more widely held presumptions of what music is, what it is for, how it is made meaningful and who exactly is made great by it. These displays do not simply invent such ideas, but draw them from myriad sources in the larger social order with which they have demonstrably organic relationships. These relationships place these institutions exactly where they seek to be as credible carriers of the narratives they present. These relationships, with spectators and artists, the music industry and its history and historiographies, also allow them to ‘generate illusory representations of social reality while presenting an appearance of neutrality and objectivity’. One consequence of this is that artists and fans alike become both the ‘subjects and objects of ideological mystification’ (Burris). But this is not the only condition to which artists and spectators can aspire.

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Conclusion: A Crooked Road to the present The conclusion to this chapter will be slightly different than the others that appear in this book, introducing a slight change of direction. It will tend towards suggesting a type of social relations that might point us to a potentially different way of understanding the musical pasts we encounter more and more often. If you wish to see far more extensive examinations of similar forms of social organization through music, see my previous work on the subject (Fairchild, 2012a). I will present a very brief discussion of what is called the Crooked Road, the name given to a logistical, communicative and organizational entity created to manage and brand a sprawling collection of music venues, museums, historic sites, towns, events, artists and artisans located across Southwestern Virginia from Lee County in the west to Franklin County in the east. The branding centres around traditions of so-called ‘folk’ and ‘roots’ music from the Appalachian region. The endeavour has been funded mostly as a marketing scheme to promote tourism in a region long pressed economically into extractive and destructive industries such as mining and tobacco farming. In his detailed and insightful work on the topic, Chaney explains that the Crooked Road imposes many of the same contradictory myths of popular music heritage examined in this book on the practices and lives of those he studied, heavily freighted with same ideologies. It sells a vision of the pure, unadulterated musical traditions of a geographical and social other to largely mobile, wealthy tourists who are, by definition, at their cosmopolitan leisure when visiting the region. This has produced a not-too-surprising amount of scepticism and mistrust among the intended recipients of the scheme’s largess, a form of cynicism that Chaney persuasively explains ‘might more accurately be understood as arising from a tension embedded in the premise of this brand of heritage tourism, in the requisite imagining of Appalachia’s musical heritage as commodity’ (Chaney, 2012:403; see also Chaney, 2017). Other such heritage trails abound broadly displaying similar forms and characteristics (Wilson, 2006; Fussell, 2003). However, while the Crooked Road displays many of the same sorts of ideological expressions of musical value and purpose as the museums examined in this book, it departs from the practices of these institutions in interesting ways. That it does so unintentionally and in contrast to its own clear agendas is, for now, beside the point. For example, unlike many of the institutions examined here, the Crooked Road does not appear to have effected the transfer of formerly public space, resources or infrastructure for the uses of the private real estate or development markets. Unlike the circumstances I have relayed from Liverpool, Memphis, Nashville, Seattle and Los Angeles, the towns along the Crooked Road have not been burdened with the same kinds of ‘prosperity’ as many of the former residents of those cities have. Interestingly, a good deal of money used to sustain the project has come from a programme that was an outgrowth of the national tobacco settlement. In order to provide recompense to communities once utterly dependent on the tobacco industry, economic development money has flowed to a small degree back to those communities. Symbolically, the fact that an industry once formerly preoccupied with extracting wealth from the region has more or less been forced to put something back is at least worthy of note.

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Unlike the spectators of the museums examined here, those who have decided to embark on the Crooked Road have far more autonomy and are subject to far less direction or prescription than those at Graceland or the Grammy Museum. For example, the parts of the trail I travelled, such as the roads near Whitetop or Mount Rogers, allowed me to drive through an astoundingly beautiful landscape. I did so at my own pace, in my own way and for my own purposes. The formal infrastructure of the Crooked Road more often than not consists only of a few signs and looped audio only accessible by radio. As I found out, these are easily ignored. The ‘experience economy’ of this heritage trail leaned much more heavily on the experience than the economy for me. Despite the framing of the musical traditions of the region as commodities, my experience of the trail very nearly dissipated completely, leaving me to explore the region far more freely than any of the exhibits at any of the museums I visited. Further, despite my singular lack of personal gregariousness, I was greeted in a friendly and easy manner on the several occasions I got lost, misdirected or landed in the wrong spot on the wrong day. When I did turn up to the right place at the right time, the informal performances, jam sessions and open mic nights I saw were as ‘authentic’ as they get, meaning they were sometimes poorly organized, often late in starting, and performances sometimes fell apart completely, or occasionally soared into beauty, and provided both excellent and awful music to listen to. I am trying to set out a particular understanding of what might be possible from such occasions. As Hardt and Negri argue, ‘what affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:293). They note that the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations; in this case, however, the communication has not been impoverished, but production has been enriched to the level of complexity of human interaction. (Hardt and Negri, 2000:293)

I would argue, tentatively, that of all of the examples I’ve found during my work on this book, the instrumental and the communicative aspects of affective labour, have the least rigid and least necessary connections to each other on the Crooked Road, at least the way I experienced it. To rely on Hardt and Negri again, affective labour ‘is not imposed or organized from the outside’. Instead, ‘cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring itself ’. While ‘brains and bodies’ are still needed to produce value, ‘the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:294). This admittedly slim basis for my optimism here grows from the fact that the spectacular relations found in so many institutional expressions of musical heritage I have found in so many places in so many markedly similar forms, rarely felt more grafted on, and less necessary, to the sustenance of musical practice and understanding than they did there.

Conclusion The compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual or particular it may be stylistically, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says ‘we’. (Adorno, 1999: 9)

When I started working on this book in 2011, neoliberalism seemed to have deteriorated from its status as an impregnable and perennial system of power to that of a merely dominant one. This was largely due to the economic crisis and collapse of 2008 which seemed for many to point to the end of one political economy and the potential emergence of another. Nevertheless, the system endured even though it had been challenged in foundational ways. Of course, all of this depends on how one defines neoliberalism. Those who regard it primarily as a politically specific system of ideology and economic production see it writhing in its death throes, its credibility shattered. Those who think of it as a larger and more broadly diffuse system of governmentality recognize the fact of its persistence (Fraser, 2019; Dardot and Laval, 2013; Mirowski, 2013). As Davies has argued, far from dissipating, the evolution of neoliberalism since the financial crisis has only seen its practitioners and ideologues only become more powerful and, importantly, more punitive (Davies, 2015). While the idea of a punitive form of neoliberalism would be anathema to its self-styled freedom-seeking founders and exponents, the decades of attacks on the fragmented remains of social welfare, social housing, stability in work, provision of public services, immigration, ethnic minorities and most substantial forms of social protest or labour organizing in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia clearly mark a political formation that was only emboldened by the failure of its governing ideology. Beyond this, despite its manifest failures, neoliberalism remained embedded in our collective lives. Neoliberalism’s main precept has always been that profit and financial success are their own reward. Little else has mattered to its most ardent advocates and implementers. As I complete this book, large portions of the world have been seized by the coronavirus pandemic. In many places, social life and economic activity has been forcibly halted or has at least been greatly diminished. As a great many commentators have observed, such crises don’t simply damage the structural supports of a society, they brutally expose where those supports are weakest. Neoliberalism has proved itself to be weakest at those places that prove the most effective bulwarks against exactly this kind of catastrophe: community solidarity, societal coordination and institutional preparedness. As a result, many of the very people who championed the economic and political order of the last fifty years have abandoned the very ‘beliefs’ and ‘values’ of that order in an effort to prevent its collapse. Murderous ironies abound. It the midst of this terrifying crisis, it seems that almost anything is possible. By the time this book is

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published, neoliberalism could be on its way to oblivion, or not. Given this, I can only conclude this book by trying to look backwards at neoliberalism and how it has shaped the material and symbolic coordinates of popular music. Anything beyond that is folly. For the contemporary music and entertainment industries, aesthetic success is primarily a subsidiary mode of commercial legitimacy. It’s nice if you can get it, but it is not strictly-speaking necessary. This is where popular music museums come in. As I have argued throughout this book, these institutions are part of a larger historical formation in which the construction and commemoration of particular forms of ‘greatness’ have been definitively shaped by a larger system of politics and economics that preceded them. These museums are part of a system that has usurped vast amounts public resources to use entire districts of cities to serve the highly specific, private interests of the real estate and tourism industries. Within these privatized enclaves, spectators are guided through environments designed to carefully prescribe their experience of the objects, images and sounds these museums use to narrate our collective histories of popular music. The ideology of greatness these exhibits serve up tells us that the innate genius of the most superlative artists can never fail to be recognized and celebrated by the people, the implied ‘us’. The role of these museums is to organize this ideology into compelling and affective narratives punctuated by tangible material and experiential markers of that greatness. This ideology appears more or less uniformly throughout the full range of exhibits and institutions I have examined. They all elide the more practical forces that have produced the greatness they champion, telling us only that it is the artist who has made the music and ‘the people’ who have validated it, no one else. These museums are not alone in this. This is because they are the product of a decades-long encounter between popular music and neoliberalism. This encounter has shaped the economic and communicative systems that let vast numbers of people make, find, experience and share music. It has shaped the forms of cultural intermediation that influence what music gets made, what music circulates most widely and most influentially, how it gets sold, and what makes it become ‘great’. It has the produced the forms of media and shaped the discourses through which we are told the stories of famous musicians. Beyond this, the ideology of artistic greatness and ideology of neoliberalism share the same soil; both grow from interconnected aspects of the dominant strains of romantic individualism that have increasingly defined much of the world in which we live. Yet, none of this has traditionally been of much interest to most people writing on popular music in the neoliberal era. Most such writing has instead celebrated the power of music to stoke various forms of resistance and subversion, or facilitate the delights of personal empowerment that are always said to be latent within and expressed through popular music. And yet, throughout the neoliberal era, seemingly resistant forms of music making have proved themselves to be all too compatible with the systems of power they appeared to oppose or resist. Nearly all of the potential forms of the ‘we’ or ‘us’ that popular music might produce have been continually directed towards forms of expression most reflective of and consonant with the aims and consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Why have so many of these apparently potent mass expressions of power not provided any persistent resistance

 Conclusion 225 to the rise to dominance of the most commanding political and economic system of this era? This simple fact should at least suggest that there is some level of comfort and compatibility between them. The dominant narratives of popular music of the neoliberal era simply do not take into account the power and influence of the political and economic system that shaped so much of what we can very broadly call ‘musical practice’. Neither do these museums. So we have to ask: What are we missing? The purpose of this book has been to find definitive and tangible links between one way of experiencing of popular music and the system of economic and political power that has made that kind of experience possible. That experience is underpinned by a world view that continually demands the construction and reiteration of myriad forms of greatness to maintain its often shaky forms of coherence. Its coherence comes from the ways in which these exhibits are built upon already-existing systems of representation, materially and conceptually, that can be relied upon to have already told us much of what spectators came to these museums to learn. In doing so, it enfolds us into a collective sigh of recognition, a recognition that we can and do belong to something larger than ourselves and a recognition that the larger ‘us’ to which we can and do aspire is based on a wholly admirable commitment to the social good called ‘music’. This is where the qualities of ‘the music’ push aside and stand in for the qualities of the world. The world’s music reflects and the social relations it embodies are ‘us’. Music that is of ‘us’ and for ‘us’ and by ‘us’ is formed by our connections with each other as the ideal musical subjects we are, as activated subjectivities within capitalism, with those other ideal musical subjects that give all of this meaning, great musicians. But our subjectivity is produced elsewhere. These museums only seek to activate and confirm it in specific ways. And this confirmation runs deep. We can see this in one final examination of a few museum displays, these from the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville. There are two displays set right next to one another that together reveal far more than most. The first commemorates Cash’s performance at Folsom Prison in 1968, while the latter recalls the song ‘Ragged Old Flag’ from 1974 (Figures C.1 and C.2). Cash’s visit to Folsom Prison was always something of a set up. He went to record an album there and as such, the prison was, at least in part, an evocative backdrop to help sell this project. This is clearly reflected in the Cash Museum’s display which explains the less than overwhelmingly enthusiastic response of his record company for the project and shows us the extensive and stagey publicity photos the trip produced. Aside from the foundational narrative describing the ‘kinship’ Cash felt for ‘the men locked behind those cold steel bars’, the exhibit also includes part of an actual set of doors from the prison, tin cups presented to Cash by the warden, and a blue prison work uniform. It is tempting to imagine, as the museum does, that the performance was one iteration of Cash’s lifelong social conscience and possibly even a nascent radical politics. But it actually reflects something else. Cash’s performance was part of a longer engagement with prisons that saw the artist testify to Congress about reforming the federal and state prison systems to reflect more of a focus on rehabilitation and social care. Far from acknowledging the obvious truths of such institutions either in his life or his work, that American prisons are populated with the consequences of entrenched class-based, racial supremacist systems of power

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that have an inevitable relationship to capitalism, Cash sought only an improvement of their function. The second display, presenting Cash’s ‘Ragged Old Flag’ bears some interesting similarities to the Folsom Prison display. The song was written in direct response to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon. Cash had been close to Nixon, having performed for the president at the White House in 1970 and 1972, and having informally consulted with him on social issues. Cash wrote the song to affirm his patriotism and his only slightly shaken belief in the innate goodness of the United States. The display consists of three panels onto which are projected collages of the song’s lyrics hand written by Cash overlaid with stars, images of cheering crowds, and a film of a performance of the song by Cash which is overlaid with red and white stripes. The performance was from the 1993 television show ‘A Capitol Fourth’ and included images of Washington crossing the Delaware River and Francis Scott Key in Baltimore Harbor, events referred to in the song. Late in life, Cash updated the piece to incorporate equally anodyne references the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The original version of the song was even set to a new video and used to open the 2017 Super Bowl. These displays don’t simply confirm a dominant model of politics and view of the world prevalent in the United States for decades. They do that, but they do so much more. They activate a moment of politics from a decade of significant crisis that began in the 1960s and ended in the 1970s and act to symbolically resolve that crisis without actually articulating any of its content or expressing any of its tensions. Cash’s Folsom performance just happened to take place during a period of unprecedented unrest in many of America’s prisons, most often sparked by the sheer brutality and cruelty of the conditions for most inmates. Cash’s music and social commentary, however, sought only to confirm and perfect the ideal disciplinary functions of incarceration, not question the basis on which these were effected and carried out. The song itself is a nihilistic ballad detailing an act for which the lack of concern with justice is presented as reasonable and self-evident (‘I know I had it comin’’). The museum display even erases this core theme in favour of a narrative of uplift and social integration. ‘Ragged Old Flag’ appeared at the end of what Gerald Ford called the ‘long national nightmare’ that culminated in the disgrace of Richard Nixon. Cash’s song is a narration of a few of the more prominent moments in America’s centuries-old doctrine of expansive militarism, from the American Revolution to the Alamo to multiple conflagrations across Europe and Asia. It is meant to demonstrate the resilience of American pride in the form of a flag whose condition his narrator described as ‘ragged’, but worthy. The song’s long and vivid social life after its initial release was one small expressive part of the long restoration of American global power after the defeat of the Vietnam War. In fact, in the years after its release, the song became something of Rorschach test for a mindless and maudlin jingoism. The restoration of the exact kinds of pride Cash details so lovingly was an important part of the process of making America great again. He was not alone in this. In both cases, these displays are activating a deeply powerful aspect of a particularly contemporary kind of subjectivity about popular music. Cash’s music has work to do, just like all of the music whose creators and performers were presented across all of the



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Figure C.1  ‘Ragged Old Flag’ Exhibit, Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

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Figure C.2 ‘Folsom Prison’ Exhibit, Johnny Cash Museum, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by Rachel Campbell.

 Conclusion 229 exhibits and museums I have studied for this book. They are tasked with explaining ‘us’ to ourselves and reflecting back those parts of ourselves that confirm what we already knew or at least suspected. In their telling of the stories of our music, we are simply who we are, not who we were made to be. There is an absence at the core of these places, a lack of acknowledged politics, a lack of denoted ideology. This absence is the only thing that allows their stories to cohere. This coherence forms by a continual evasion of the ideological and historical specificity of the claims they are making. ‘We’ are patriotic, but cannot be destructive. ‘We’ want justice, but only demand it within prescribed limits. ‘We’ seek transcendence, but only through a few specified means that we choose for ourselves. ‘We’ are encouraged to seek the many varieties of righteousness we are regaled with in these places, but never asked to wonder at the ways in which, in so many spheres of life, so many are denied these very things. These museums seek to create an ‘us’ that is free to symbolically imagine its own power, but not free to examine the constraints on or consequences of that power. Beyond the exhortations to transcendence and the communion in produces, in those darker places where what we embrace has unexpected or unexamined consequences, we are simply left on our own. Those shadows, those moments of darkness, are the conditions of possibility for these museums and for the larger culture from which they are derived.

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Index affective labour  4, 7, 34, 39, 77, 82, 85, 157, 214, 220, 222 audience  7, 10, 13, 20, 26–7, 29, 34, 39, 83–4, 86, 107, 161–3, 172, 175, 180, 213–14 active audience theory  26, 107 Bach, J.S.  110–15 Bachhaus  14, 16, 110–15, 129 Beatles, the  3, 119, 142, 166, 171, 176, 182, 185 Beatles’ Story, the  16, 74, 105–6, 109, 127–9, 131, 136, 214, 217, 219 Beethovenhaus  14, 16, 112, 131, 146, 167 Birthplace of Country Music Museum  15–16, 109, 192, 211, 217, 219 capitalism  4–5, 7, 9–13, 22, 24–5, 32, 34, 37–9, 41, 43–4, 81, 85–6, 147, 162–3, 173–7, 208–9, 224–6 capitalist realism  12, 32–4, 43 Carter, Maybelle  136, 138 Carter Family  15, 93, 100, 213 Carter Family Fold  15–16, 109, 154–6, 185 Casbah Club  215–17 Cash, Johnny  57, 102, 104, 136, 139, 142–6, 155, 195, 225–9 Cavern Club  106, 215–19 celebrity  25, 35, 81–2, 129, 139, 157, 163–4, 168–9, 175, 178, 182, 198, 202 Cobain, Kurt  8, 102–3, 117, 119–20, 133, 198–9, 201, 211 Cold War  109, 170, 173 consumerism  5, 7–8, 10, 21–7, 35, 37, 43, 49–50, 53, 62 corporate museums  87, 89, 91, 106–7 corporate power  4–5, 8–9, 12, 23–4, 34–5, 40, 45, 77, 81, 89 counterculture  41–3, 119, 170, 173–5, 177 country music  137–9, 143, 145, 155, 193, 210–11, 213–14

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum  15–16, 48, 50, 60–2, 64, 92–9, 127, 137–9, 185 Crooked Road  15, 155, 221–2 democracy  12, 21–30, 36–7, 39, 48, 173–5 and popular culture  21–30 ‘democratic personality’  173 demos  2, 3, 7, 25, 83, 85–7, 104, 116–17, 120 Dylan, Bob  3, 142, 166, 176 effigy  133 exhibitionary complex  7–8, 81, 90–1 experience economy  81–3 Experience Music Project (EMP)  4–7, 16, 49, 53, 55–6, 58, 64, 103, 110, 113, 118, 121, 211 fetish  11, 81, 133, 220 folk music  99, 141, 155–6, 166, 170, 172, 176, 210–11, 221 Graceland  15–16, 57, 60, 109, 172, 185, 202–4, 214–15 greatness  3–4, 29, 30, 43, 82, 129, 134, 142, 154, 156, 161–9, 177, 179–86, 192, 195, 197, 199, 201–2, 205–6, 210, 224–5 Guitar Gallery  102–3, 141 Hendrix, Jimi  8, 47, 56, 103, 133–4, 139–42, 145–6, 198–200 highbrow vs. lowbrow  166 human capital  4, 35, 39 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICJI)  1–2 jazz  99, 141, 166, 169–73, 179, 193 criticism  166, 169–73, 179

 Index 255 Johnny Cash Museum  15–16, 109–10, 139, 142–5, 185, 225–8 King, B.B.  189–92 Lennon, John  8, 102, 105–6, 126, 131, 133, 136, 198–9 Liverpool  6, 14–16, 48, 52, 68, 70, 73–6, 105, 129, 132, 136, 217–19, 221 London  14, 16, 31, 48, 52, 68–9, 71–2, 141 Los Angeles  6, 14, 16, 48, 52, 65–8, 221 Memphis, Tennessee  6, 15, 16, 48, 52, 57–64, 98–101, 109, 122–4, 126–9, 192, 202, 215, 219, 221 Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum  15, 16, 58, 59, 98–9, 101, 109, 127–8, 137, 189 music journalism  168–9, 178 Nashville, Tennessee  6, 15, 16, 48, 52, 60–5, 93–5, 98, 110, 128, 139, 142, 156, 200, 221, 226 neoliberalism  4–5, 12–13, 24, 35–43 history  35–9 philosophy  35–9 ‘new museum’  84–90 Nirvana  103, 116–17, 119–20, 122, 199, 201 non-places  50–3, 57, 70, 73, 77 Panama Papers  1–2 Paradise Papers  1–2 ‘people’s capitalism’  173–7 photography  186–8, 192, 195, 197–8, 205 photographic relations  198–9 poptimism  179 popular entertainments  8, 82, 88, 91 populism  5, 23, 28, 30, 35, 36, 90, 116, 119, 211

portraiture  81, 98–100, 139, 161, 181–3, 185–6, 189, 193, 197–8, 202, 205 Presley, Elvis  57, 136, 171–2, 195, 198, 202–6, 215 punk  115–17, 119–20, 201, 211–14 reification  208–13 relational aesthetics  82–4 rock  4, 20, 30, 56, 103, 116, 120, 137, 139, 161, 165–6, 168–9, 171, 173, 177, 179–80 rock imaginary  82, 163–6, 168–70, 173, 175–7, 184, 198 rock ’n’ roll  30, 99, 110, 119, 139–41, 170–3, 175 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame  15, 30, 50, 115 romanticism  9, 41–3, 224 Seattle  6, 14, 16, 46–8, 52–8, 60, 102, 115, 118, 121, 140–2, 200–201, 221 Sinatra, Frank  185, 198–9 social imaginary  4, 14, 28, 164 socialist realism  32–3 spectacle  29, 48, 50, 62, 83, 89, 201, 207–9 spectators  4, 11, 13, 26, 29–30, 48, 50–1, 81–2, 84, 86–7, 92, 96, 98, 105, 107, 109–10, 112–13, 115–17, 119, 120, 125, 127–31, 133–8, 140, 142–3, 153, 157, 185, 188, 192, 197–9 Stax Museum  15, 16, 57, 104, 109, 122–7, 195 Sun Studios  15, 16, 57, 109–10, 189, 191, 195–6, 217–19 Swift, Taylor  19, 21, 44 tax avoidance  2 Tina Turner Museum  16, 109, 147–54 Turner, Tina  1, 136, 147–9, 153, 186, 200 wax museums  8, 88, 91, 104–6, 133

256

Plate 1  Bachhaus, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, 2011. Photo by the author.



Plate 2  The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015. Photo by the author.



Plate 3  ‘Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound’, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, 2011. Photo by the author.



Plate 4  Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by author.



Plate 5  The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool, UK, 2015. Photo by the author.



Plate 6  Birthplace of Country Music Museum, Bristol, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by author.



Plate 7  Sun Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.



Plate 8  Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School, Brownsville, Tennessee, 2015. Photo by the author.