Caught Between the Spectacular and the Vernacular: The Illusory Demos of the Popular Music Museum

Abstract

Popular music museums seek to produce a particular version of an ideal demos by explicitly constructing and articulating a collective understanding of popular music made material through rich, cross-media, sensory environments. In recent years, the pursuit of these goals has been carried out through the construction of extensive collections of high-tech displays set in high-profile buildings in the presumed OEmusical capitals¹ of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, and Nashville. However, while some research has begun to consider the politics that fills the displays and exhibitions of these institutions, none has yet looked at the politics that built the museums themselves. This article shows that most major popular music museums are part of larger entertainment districts whose development has coursed along the exclusionary lines of neoliberal politics and economics. As such they produce a foundational disjuncture between the strategic deployment of the vernacular elements of popular music practice and experience as codified within a demonstratively spectacular logic of visual, aural, and material display. These institutions demand the translation of the demotic experience of musical sociality into spectacular environments in ways that must be compelling enough to obscure the tensions produced their material foundations and development.