Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how music consumption communities remember their past. Specifically, the paper reports on the role of heritage in constructing the cultural memory of a consumption community and on the implications for its identity and membership. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing upon insights from theories of cultural memory, heritage, and collective consumption, this interpretive inquiry makes use of interview, documentary, and artefactual analysis, as well as visual and observational data, to analyse an exhibition of the community’s popular music heritage entitled One Family – One Tribe: The Art & Artefacts of New Model Army. Findings – The analysis shows how the community creates a sense of its own past and reflects this in memories, imagination, and the creative work of the band. Research limitations/implications – This is a single case study, but one whose exploratory character provides fruitful insights into the relationship between cultural memory, imagination, heritage, and consumption communities. Practical implications – The paper shows how consumption communities can do the work of social remembering and re-imagining of their own past, thus strengthening their identity through time. Social implications – The study shows clearly how a consumption community can engage, through memory and imagination, with its own past, and indeed the past in general, and can draw upon material and other resources to heritagise its own particular sense of community and help to strengthen its identity and membership. Originality/value – The paper offers a theoretical framework for the process by which music consumption communities construct their own past, and shows how theories of cultural memory and heritage can help to understand this important process. It also illustrates the importance of imagination, as well as memory, in this process.

Discussion and conclusion

Our starting research question was:

RQ1. How do musical communities remember their past?

We framed our inquiry using cultural memory, heritage, and consumption community theory. This enabled us to generate findings about how the community remembers its past. On the basis of the theoretical approach and research design outlined above, we offer a conceptual framework (Figure 1) which attempts to answer this question. In this figure, we bring together and integrate the different themes into a conceptual framework of how consumption communities remember their pasts. The process of remembering involves the active construction of heritage, not simply a reflection on the past. Below this figure, responding to our second question, we outline the implications the move to heritage has for the identity and membership of a music consumption community. In particular, we draw attention to the important role of imagination, so far relatively neglected in the cultural memory literature. We explain this framework as follows. Consonant with cultural memory theory, it frames social remembering as being an interplay between past and present. Within a given, historically grounded, present, a social group, such as a consumption community (in this case, the NMA Family), constructs its own past heritage. This process constructs the community’s relationship to the past, which may be recent (the deaths of Family members, the Falklands War), or distant in time (the seventeenth century English Civil War, the Picts), or in space (those who have left the community “for the land of gold and poison”).