| The first
issue in 2004 of the new publication platform for popular music historiography,
Popular Music History (Equinox Publishing Ltd., London), marks the acknowledgment
of the urgent need in popular music scholarship to restart dealing with
storytelling as a craft and a trade, in the new global world of the 21th
century. A craft presupposes acquired knowledge and a degree of creativity,
and requires the motivation to get something new (or perceived as new)
across; a trade presupposes a shop (or environment) to work from, tools,
an audience to sell the product, the new (hi)stories, to, paired with
the will and means to reach this decisive party in the soundness of the
trade. Crafts and their trades develop tricks in an ongoing process of adapting to changing times and agendas. I’d like to offer this as my working paraphrase of what Morten Michelsen stresses in his timesaving article “Histories and Complexities: Popular Music History Writing and Danish Rock” in the Journal mentioned above. It is about some of these tricks of the trade that I would like to speak, from the perspective of someone who was trained as a historical musicologist but immediately afterwards raised herself for real on an inspiring diet of work by the pioneers of IASPM and the fast expanding network that followed in their footsteps. From Charles Hamm’s work in particular there is an echo that has not lost its meaning and relevance over the years: he stressed the importance of behaving responsibly and carefully while on the job; respect yourself. So when I simply speak of tricks, it is not in the sense of what a trickster does to con the public, but in the sense of the (selection and explication of) tools and methods of creating believable, trustworthy, well-informed new stories that in principle have nothing to hide about the often chaotic sources on which they are built. The point of intense complexity of a historian’s building blocks, and Peter Wicke’s wellknown “context is everything” axiom, have, in my view, been central to the most engaging historical work in our field. The cynical and deliberately misleading I do not consider to be part of the Hamm- nor the overall IASPM-legacy. During my presentation I will highlight a shortlist of viable tricks in producing histories about popular music cultures bound by legal borders that constitute a nation at a given time. Main focus will be on sources: where are they, what are they, whose are they, how can they be read, etcetera. Informing my theoretical point of view is my insider/outsider (see Michelsen 2004) pre-academic and academic work as a popular music historian of the Netherlands. As a case in point and a comparative one at that, I will briefly take up Michelsen’s focus on the rock-pop split, that has likewise deeply divided Dutch players in the field of rock journalism, historiography and cultural politics. |