SOUNDS OF OUR TOWN

For a small country with a population of approximately 350,000 people, Iceland has a significant popular music presence, including producing globally known artists such as Björk, Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men. Over the last thirty years Iceland has also experienced an increased focus on the heritagisation of its popular music history. This is evident in the production of popular music documentaries such as Screaming Masterpiece (2005) and Tónlist: Icelandic Music Documentary (2014); the publication of books including Blue Eyed Pop: The History of Popular Music in Iceland (2013); reissues of ‘classic’ albums from the SENA record label; and travelling exhibitions including Lobster or Fame (2003), which was a celebration of the Bad Taste label. An increase in the memorialisation of Iceland’s popular music past can also be observed in museums like Rokkheimur Rúnars Júlíussonar (est. 2009), Pönksafn Íslands (est. 2016), Rokksafnið (est. 2014) and Tónlistarsafn Íslands (est. 2009). There are also a number of national institutions that collect artefacts related to popular music.

A travel fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities enabled Sarah to visit Reykjavík in late 2010, with a return visit in late 2011 funded by an Australian Research Council grant. During those visits she conducted 40 interviews with people engaged in a range of music activities including musicians from a range of genres, label and studio owners and managers, industry consultants, artist managers, music journalists and broadcasters, audio technicians and sound engineers, music producers, festival organisers, politicians and union officials, and people working in the heritage sector. In these interviews, Sarah explored perceptions and subjective experiences of popular music heritage sites (e.g. museums and exhibitions) and productions (e.g. documentaries and books) in Iceland with a view to understanding how the nation’s popular music history has come to be remembered, engaged with, interpreted and mobilised as heritage. 

Once the interviews were analysed by the research team – Sarah, Zel and Bob – we discovered that despite the country’s rich history, there are many issues and challenges with how popular music has and is being preserved and displayed in Iceland. At the time of the interviews, the heritage practitioners we spoke with were struggling to document, preserve and exhibit popular music histories in ways they felt would most fully capture Iceland’s popular music past. Our interviewees described how popular music has often not been recognised as worthy of preservation by the country’s national institutions due to its ephemerality and recency. Even for those interviewees who had taken on the task of elevating popular music’s position as a legitimate heritage object, challenges were faced at every turn. What was considered worthy of heritagisation was contested and issues of access, copyright and preservation strategies impacted the ways in which Iceland’s popular music history could be represented – in exhibitions, in books, in documentaries.