Making time stand still

Abstract

It’s hard to keep up with the Top 40. Popular songs quickly lose their contemporaneity, become ‘past hits’, and are replaced by the next thing … and them by the next. With its high-velocity temporality and multi-mediation, Top 40 culture is hard to ‘fix’: its content is always changing, and thus is difficult to capture for critique. Top 40 culture ‘disappears’ easily, with only selected elements being retained in cultural memory, or preserved in academic analytic discourse. Much of Top 40’s content is forgotten. This article argues that the constant supersession of the texts of Top 40 poses a challenge to academic inquiry, when such writing about them threatens to become obsolete (just like singles themselves) once the songs are no longer popular. It introduces the activities of some collectors of Top 40 data who collate and publish chart information in book form. Their practices seem to succeed in ‘fixing’ the Top 40’s transience by finding ways of keeping pace with the ever-changing charts. Their success in apprehending the momentum of Top 40 provides one way of thinking beyond the anxiety of disappearance, and suggests new possibilities for research methodology in this area of popular cultural studies.

Traditional jazz and the mainstreaming of authenticity

“…According to Jenkins, McPherson and Shattuc (2002), 'the manifesto for a new cultural studies' celebrates the fact that 'we are the first generation of cultural scholars to be able to take for granted that popular culture can be studied on its own terms'. Like Huber (2005), I am less than convinced. Popular music and cultural studies has yet to recognize the diversity of the field drawn together by the term 'popular' (Frow 1995: 82).…”

“…Thus far, only Huber has taken up the challenge. Huber (2008) reiterates the major point we have made about popular music studies, in general, effecting what she calls a 'sleight of hand' in regard to the mainstream. This 'sleight of hand' has a 'relatively long history in cultural studies' rooted, she argues, in the work of the Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, most notably in Hall and Jefferson 1976;Willis 1978;and Hebdige 1979.…”

“…Relatedly, Huber (2008) demonstrates, with particular reference to the extensive literature on Madonna and the Spice Girls, that when popular music studies does take an interest in mainstream performers it is almost always for the purpose of revealing a sub-text of 'resistance' to the mainstream, as opposed to considering the mainstream in its own terms (Davies 1999;Leach 2001).…”

“…Of particular value is the review of the relevant literature in Huber's unpublished PhD dissertation (Huber 2005). Thornton (1995), in her highly regarded case study of London dance club culture, argues, as Toynbee (2002: 149) puts it, that the 'mainstream' is a 'myth', the purpose of which is to serve an ideological function distinguishing the taste of those who use the term from their own taste.…”

“…There is a small published popular music studies literature which considers the mainstream as a major object of study (Thornton 1995;Toynbee 2002;Huber 2004Huber , 2008Huber , 2010, with both Toynbee (2002) and Huber (2004Huber ( , 2008 attempting to address processes of mainstreaming. Of particular value is the review of the relevant literature in Huber's unpublished PhD dissertation (Huber 2005).…”