Melbourne popular music in the museum
Locating the academy in the sonic city
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v17i2.29540Keywords:
Melbourne, Popular Music, Mushroom Records, Gudinski, cultureAbstract
An exhibition at RMIT University in 2013–2014, ‘Music, Melbourne and Me: 40 Years of Mushroom and Melbourne’s Popular Music Culture’, suggested that art museums can offer new ways of engaging with the complex world of popular creativity and commerce in its urban location. In an effort to move beyond established tropes of popular music representations featuring static displays of posters, album covers, costumes and photography, an audio-visual invention designed and built at RMIT called Morphos combined music video and design to noisy combinatory effect. As such, Morphos suggested that the exhibition connected with the rise of an ideologically-informed museum studies that foregrounds the way knowledge is assembled and that museum innovations have a critical role to play against popular music’s consumerist excesses, identifying as ‘bullshit’ popular music that is uninformed by the history and political economy of the place in which it is located. Furthermore, as popular music history becomes a regular part of museum exhibitions, the article argues that academics have a unique opportunity to critically inform the relationship between popular music and urban life, to generate a praxis that delivers the truth of lived experience in the urban sonic landscape.
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Thrift, N. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Oxford: Routledge.
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Arnold, M. 1928 [1865]. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan.
Barber, B. 2007. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. New York: Norton.
Belfiore, E. 2009. ‘On Bullshit in Cultural Policy Practice and Research: Notes from the British Case’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 15/3 (August): 343–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630902806080
Bennett, A. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. London: Macmillan.
Bennett, A., and R. A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Bennett, T. 2013. Making Culture, Changing Society. London: Routledge.
Bouquet, M., ed. 2002. Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. New York: Berghahn.
Brandellero, A., S. Janssen, S. Cohen and L. Roberts. 2014. ‘Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20/3: 219–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.821624
Brandellero, A., and S. Janssen. 2014. ‘Popular Music as Cultural Heritage: Scoping out the Field of Practice’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20/3: 224–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.779294
Breen, M. 1999. Rock Dogs: Politics and the Australian Music Industry. Sydney: Pluto Press.
—2005. ‘Rock Music’. In The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, ed. A. Brown-May and S. Swain, 614–15. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
—2010. ‘Digital Determinism: Culture Industries in the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement’. New Media and Society 12/4: 657–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342774
Burgoyne, R. 2003. ‘From Contested to Consensual Memory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’. In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. K. Hodgkin and S. Ra stone, 208–20. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203391471_chapter_11
Carter, P. 1992. The Sound in Between: Voice, Space, Performance. Kensington: New South Wales University Press.
Chang, M., and E. Goodman. 2006. ‘Asphalt Games: Enacting Place through Locative Media’. Leonardo 14/3 (July). http://tinyurl.com/gu2f55e (accessed January 30, 2017).
Cohen, S. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Coupe, S. 2015. Gudinski: The Godfather of Australian Rock. Sydney: Ashgate.
Cox, K., ed. 1997. Spaces of Globalisation: Reasserting the Power of the Local. New York: Guilford Press.
Davies, S., and K. Horn. 2013. ‘Visceral Experiences: Popular Music in the Art Gallery’. In Music Melbourne and Me: 40 Years of Mushroom and Melbourne’s Popular Music Culture, 9–14. Melbourne: RMIT Gallery.
Farred, G. 2003. What’s My Name: Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. 1998. ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’. In M. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. Vol. 1, 253–80. New York: The New Press.
Frith, S. 1998. Performing Rites: On the Values of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gardner, M. 2013. Music Melbourne and Me: 40 Years of Mushroom and Melbourne’s Popular Music Culture. Melbourne: RMIT Gallery.
Gibson, C., and J. Connell. 2005. Music and Tourism: On the Road Again. Bristol: Channel View Publications.
Giroux, H. 2014. Neoliberalisms’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Given, L. M., and L. McTavish. 2010. ‘What’s Old is New Again: The Reconvergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Digital Age’. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 80/1: 7–32. http://doi.org.proxy.bc.edu/10.1086/648461 (accessed January 30, 2017).
Grossberg, L. 1997. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hancock, W. K. 1945. Australia. London: Ernest Benn Limited.
Handler, R., and E. Gable. 1997. The New History in an Old Museum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hartley, J. 2000. ‘Introduction. Cultural Exceptionalism: Freedom, Imperialism, Power’. In American Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. J. Hartley and R. E. Pearson, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hil, R. 2012. Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Horn, K. 2013. Notes 19 November. RMIT University music industry program director.
Johnson, R., D. Chambers, P. Raghuram and E. Tincknell. 2004. The Practice of Cultural Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Krouse, S. A. 2006. ‘Anthropology and the New Museology’. Reviews in Anthropology 35/2: 169–82.
Leonard, M. 2014. ‘Staging the Beatles: Ephemerality, Materiality and the Production of Authenticity in the Museum’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20/4: 357–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.754367
Lewis, J., and T. Miller. 2003. ‘Introduction’. In Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader, 1–9. Malden: Blackwell.
Mattelart, A., and M. Mattelart. 1989. Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
McClellan, A. 2003. ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’. In Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. A. McLellan, 1–50. Malden: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470775936.ch1
Moody, L. 2012. ‘The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Library and Archives’. Music Reference Services Quarterly 15/2: 99–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2012.675832
O’Hare, M. 2008. ‘Arts Policy Research for the Next 25 Years: A Trajectory after Patrons Despite Themselves’. Journal of Cultural Economics 32/4 (December): 281–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-008-9081-z
O’Neill, M. 2006. ‘Essentialism, Adaptation and Justice: Towards a New Epistemology of Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship 21/2: 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770600302102
Roberts, L., and S. Cohen. 2014. ‘Unauthorising Popular Music Heritage: Outline of a Critical Framework’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 20/3: 241–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.750619
Said, E. 2003. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W Said. Interviews with David Barsimian. Boston: South End Press.
Shaw, K. 2012. ‘Planning the “Creative City”: Reconciling Global Strategies with Local Subcultures’. Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2009–2012. Unpublished.
Thrift, N. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Oxford: Routledge.
Tonkiss, F. 2003. ‘The Ethics of Indifference: Community and Solitude in the City’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6/3: 297–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779030063004
Turner, G. 2012. What’s Become of Cultural Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Welsh, P. H. 2005. ‘Re-configuring Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship 20/2: 103–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770500302002
Published
2017-03-03
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Breen, M. (2017). Melbourne popular music in the museum: Locating the academy in the sonic city. Perfect Beat, 17(2), 124-143. https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v17i2.29540
