Beyond Retromania: Reimagining Historical Consciousness in British, Italian, and Argentinian Popular Music

This thesis explores the forms and workings of “historical consciousness” – that is, the ways that the past is addressed, made or perceived – in contemporary popular music. An ambitious, multicultural array of case studies, focussed on the UK, Italy and Argentina, examines a wide range of popular music practices, making use of historical study and qualitative research methods including interviews and ethnography. Through these case studies, the thesis argues that contemporary forms of pop historical consciousness are much more productive and more dynamic than is suggested by an extant literature on pop’s pastness, which is dominated by concepts of “cultural nostalgia”, “retromania” and “heritage”; the thesis comes to demonstrate how historically conscious pop music practices in the 21st century constitute and further a sophisticated dialogue with local and international histories and memories. The thesis develops an under-investigated topic in popular music studies and addresses a broader range of contemporary creative and interpretive practices than has been
considered in any single work on pop's historicity, exploring together pop's production, historical curation and critical reception. The study of pop practices in three very different national cultures demonstrates the ways in which contemporary pop’s historical consciousness commonly functions across the world, and the geographic and cultural limitations of those aforementioned (European and North-American) dominant theories.