[PMH 1.

1 (2004) 1936]

Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646

Morten Michelsen

Histories and Complexities:

Popular Music History Writing and Danish Rock
Morten Michelsen (b. 1958) is Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD thesis concerned language and sound in the analysis of popular music and he is co-author of a forthcoming book on the cultural field of rock criticism in England and the United States. Department of Musicology University of Copenhagen Klerkegade 2 DK-1308 Denmark. momich@hum.ku.dk

Abstract
The article deals with the few existing contributions to popular music historiography and discusses ways to develop these on the basis of contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology. Michelsen calls for a deconstruction of culturally homogenizing notions of history by sketching out a theoretical framework for investigating the actual cultural complexity lying behind historical representations. A complexification (which includes working with several concepts of music, regarding music cultures as continuously floating, and with an eye for the constant othering processes taking place) is necessary in order to avoid the traditional traps and canonizations of history writing's teleological narratives. The last part of the article is a preliminary discussion of how the rockpop split affected Danish rock culture, questioning whether the split articulated by a hegemonic rock discourse actually had much influence on musicians and audiences' daily music lives, and pointing to the complexity of actual lived music culture.

Histories of rock have been written ever since the later part of the 1960s when the term rock came to designate a particular music and a specic cultural formation. Since this time the historical narrative has been one important way to understand what rock is. Rock histories have introduced an incipient self-reexivity unknown to most other popular musics and have been used as central arguments for legitimizing rock within a high cultural framework, even as rock took part in the partial dismounting of high/low cultural distinctions. Although a host of rock histories now exist, few are academically grounded and there is even less work on the theoretical background for producing such histories. In the time in which popular music studies has developed into a theoretically rich eld, the historiography of popular music has lagged behind. Yet as histories of rock have been developed into high-prole visual media accounts and have become reied through permanent museums and exhibi Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.

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tion spaces, the need for a critical reappraisal of historical representations has become even more important. A pressing reason for addressing issues of historiography in the Danish context arose when the Danish Research Agency recently granted nearly 600,000 to a research project concerning Danish rock culture from the 1950s to the 1980s. The aim of the project is not to produce the denitive historical account of rock music in Denmark but to deliver some initial pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that makes up Danish rock culture. There is no intention to cover the whole eld of Danish rock culture in a systematic way as we do not know what the whole is.1 Consisting of 14 individual studies, the project raises a wealth of questions not only specic to Danish rock culture but also to popular music historiography more generally. Even the basic categories on which the project rests (rich categories such as genre, culture, Danishness, and history) are rightly contested. A wide variety of historical approaches are present within the project, some microhistorical, some macrohistorical, some focusing on short time-spans, others on the whole period included with its remit. Indeed, such a diverse approach is clearly necessary as the different research results cannot possibly be collected into a single linear account of the history of Danish rock.2 More fundamentally, the writing of history is problematic to
1. Further information about the projects subject matter, its main topics, and the theoretical and empirical background can be obtained from the English project description at www.rockhistorie.dk/default.asp?side=48. The research project is part of a larger project that underlines the general acceptance and institutionalization, or cultural accreditation (Gendron 2002: 161), of rock in Denmark. It includes the building of a rock experimentarium in the burrough of Roskilde (home of one the biggest festivals in Northern Europe), a local musicon valley trade development project, and the national broadcasting companys weekly radio programme devoted to Danish rock from the 1950s to the 1980s. I might add that the opinions stated in this article are mine and do not necessarily represent the opinions of other project collaborators. 2. It is always problematic to delimit an object of study by nationality or geography. Here it is done rather pragmatically. The project title might have been Rock Culture in Denmark, but by naming it Danish Rock Culture it is intended to stress that it is an international tradition as negotiated, appropriated and performed by specic people living in a specic place, that is, Danes and foreigners living in Denmark. Danish rock culture is not only a local version of US rock culture, but a meeting of several cultures taking place in specic places delimited as the area within the old nation state. Notions of Danishness come in the plural and exist in a constant ux: it is not one way of living, not one single notion, and notions of national identity have not been important to Danish rock culture at any time. In times of growing internationalization, and maybe even globalization, the national we (which is never a fact but an abstract ideal that serves a specic interest) and the national others (be it Swedes, Germans, British or Americans) have been negotiated once again and new notions have developed. One of the research projects main intentions is to historicize and complexify simple accounts of nationality by seeing Danishness as a series of notions. This can be done by pointing to contradictions (as the international perspective became more important, quite a few singers began to sing in Danish, for instance); by investigating contemporary written sources (were questions of nationality and internationality an issue at all?); and by asking interviewees if Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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the project because it tries to interpret changes through time while dealing with a dynamic and contested culture (perhaps even cultures) that slowly coalesces and acquires distinct features that change over time. The following discussion addresses some of the historiographical problems that surface when working with popular music. It calls for a deconstruction of culturally homogenizing notions of history by sketching out a theoretical framework for investigating the actual cultural complexity lying behind historical representations. The article begins by critiquing journalistic accounts and academic textbooks as adhering to an outdated art history model before discussing the limited amount of existing work on historiography within popular music studies. The desire to make the object of study still more complex within such work is then developed through a discussion of similar tendencies within modern musicology and ethnomusicology. Redenitions of concepts of music are touched upon and I argue for historically thick descriptions that focus on contextualism and for constructions of the object of study as ever oating and dynamic in order to avoid teleological narratives. In order to approach a dynamic and complex object of study, the ubiquitous concept of otherness is introduced. It is argued that otherness can be a useful concept in approaching the small differences in everyday life that matter in non-canonical and local histories and in highlighting the differences between pasts and presents. In the last part of the article these reections are used in a preliminary discussion of how the rockpop split affected Danish rock culture, drawing into doubt whether the split articulated by a hegemonic rock discourse actually had much inuence on musicians and audiences daily musical lives, and pointing to the complexity of actual lived music culture.

Rock histories
One of rock journalisms central functions has been to produce historically based explanations and legitimations of rock. Since the early days of Crawdaddy! and Rolling Stone in the US and the repositioning of UK publications such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express towards a rock aesthetic in the early 1970s, journalists have contributed to the construction of history on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis (cf. Lindberg et al. 2000). At a similar time journalists began to produce book-length accounts of the history of rock and rock encyclopedias, Nik Cohns Pop from the Beginning (1969) and Lillian Roxons Rock Encyclopedia (1969) being among the rst.
some sort of Danishness actually meant anything to them (the contrast between province and metropolitan area might have been a complementary notion and may be even more important to some [cf. Andresen 1986]). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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Since then a steady ow of rock histories and encyclopedias have appeared, contributing to the rapidly forming canon of great men, recordings, songs and in some cases record companies. It is a canon (and a set of canonization rules) that continues to be at the heart of rock discourse. The historical narratives set up by these rock histories have tended to be very simplistic and traditional, often using classic organic metaphors (such as growth-blossoming-decay) as basic structuring devices for describing the development of rock. They have tended to be organized chronologically in order to underscore an evolutionary narrative that takes in a number of golden ages or have focused on biographical facts and evaluations of albums and careers. Furthermore, their outlook with regard to genres, gender, nationalities and historical horizons has been narrow. Finally, rock music has been set within a loose sociological context without any explanations as to the workings between the two. In essence, rock histories tend to read like most other art histories written for a general audience during the last century or so.3 As such, they not only lack reection upon the relationship between concrete musical practices and musical cultures but also bypass the general complexity of musical cultures and the changing relations between participants within them. These unaddressed questions are actually highly pertinent and, by attempting to address them, research-based popular music history writing ought to be able to transcend simple legitimation models and reect a picture of musical and cultural complexity. Academics were initially quick to offer their take on the story by positioning their narratives of rocks history within specic scholarly debates. In The Sound of Our Time, for instance, Laing (1969) argued for a media and audience perspective while Belz (1969) discussed rock as folk art and popular art. At the beginning of the 1970s Gillett (1970) published his reworked sociology thesis as The Sound of the City and Middleton (1972) published his as Pop Music and the Blues. Despite this early ourish the following years saw little academic work on the subject and in the 80s and 90s only a few theoretically informed accounts were published (Chambers 1985; Hatch and Millward 1987; Wicke 1998b; Lilliestam 1998; Regev, forthcoming). Chambers, Wicke and Regev, in particular, have challenged traditional models of popular music
3. This is not to say that the standard of history writing is acceptable in other areas. In an invitation to a round table at the 1997 International Musicological Society conference, Portuguese musicologist Manuel Carlos de Brito lamented the state of affairs within general art music histories: The gathering of all kinds of biographical information on composers or trivia on their works are still the basic ingredients of music histories intended for the larger public, while specialised studies have often limited themselves to a more or less organic accumulation of historical data whose broader explanatory and critical purpose is difcult to perceive. Probably as a result of this, and contrary to what happens with general history, or even with art history, specialised writing on music history is still of little interest to the public at large and to most professional musicians as well (1997: 22). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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history, the rst two by introducing a corporeal and sensual perspective, the last by applying a Bourdieuian framework. Nevertheless, although popular music studies has grown enormously, historiographical aspects have been far from central, even if many studies have been informed by history. In addition, the last decade and a half has seen several US histories intended as textbooks for undergraduates, most of whom do not stray from the orthodoxies of rock discourse laid down by journalists and critics in the late 60s.4 Within popular music studies there has been a limited amount of work (principally drawing on a Marxist tradition) that has discussed the historiography of popular music. Middleton (1990), for instance, draws upon Gramsci (1971) and Hall (1981) to sketch out a general framework for the study of music in culture. He argues that music is fundamentally historical and that concrete studies must take place within the continuously moving whole music-historical eld (Middleton 1990: 11). He warns against rigid denitions and dichotomies which tend to lead the mind away from the elds dynamic aspects while admitting that such dichotomies are central to the understanding of the workings of the eld. Wicke (1998a) develops Middletons framework by questioning the very concept of music that lies behind most historical studies. He argues that it is necessary to move away from a concept of music which focuses primarily on work and structure, pointing to the concurrent existence of several concepts of music that are produced within an internally contradictory society. Genre names, for instance, tend to be highly contradictory categories in that several different agents contribute toward their denition, each investing in, and pointing to, different aspects of the genre in question leading to the impossibility of a general denition. For Wicke, the object of study is the very construction of such categories within social and cultural processes in themselves. Similarly, Negus (1996) critiques traditional rock historiography, preferring to view history as a wide range of continuous processes rather than a succession of central points. He calls for a critical questioning of the history of musical sounds as narratives with distinct breaks involving beginnings and endings or births and
4. An extreme example of this type of approach is Paul Friedlanders (1996) valorization of 1960s rock in which he refers to the music of 196772 as the golden era (1996: 8). In his book, which covers the mid-50s until the mid-80s, the 60s take up more than half of the total pages while the other half includes an introduction, a roots chapter, and chapters on the 50s, the 70s and the 80s. Other examples are Charlton (1989/2003) and Stuessy (1990/2003), who discuss the stylistic development of rock, and Starr and Waterman (2003) who, among other things, focus on the stylistic development of American popular music in general (including rock). Garofalo (1997/2002) and Szatmary (1991/2004) have a sociologically informed take on things. The quality and the intention of the books are quite different, but they all adhere to the same basic framework. The many editions of the books by Charlton, Stuessy and Szatmary suggest that they are widely used in classrooms. Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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deaths, continuing that as music making occurs through multiple ongoing historical processes and human relationships, so the writing of history should be approached with an awareness that this involves a process of re-presentation (1996: 137). For example, he sees the birth of rock not as a series of events in 1956 but as a slow evolution since the 1930s and a continuous development after 1956. In this perspective the events of that particular year are of little importance. Middleton, Wicke and Negus all argue for what one might call a complexication of popular music history which does away with simplistic chronological divisions, legitimative accounts, canons of great male musicians and a concept of music that focuses on works/songs and the artist/musician. Instead musics are to be historicized within their cultural and societal contexts leaving room for the multiple meanings produced by musicians and audiences. Furthermore, the eld of study is in constant change, driven on by the partial and ever-changing dichotomies inherent within it. Such complexications are necessary in order to destabilize existing historical accounts and offer different models and different results. Local and national studies are one important way to do this in that the comparatively small eld of study makes it possible to do thick descriptions of individual parts of music cultures. Such descriptions might not turn out to be highly signicant in the future but they are important in order to nd alternatives on which to base historical narratives. Because of the paucity of work on popular music historiography the historiographical discussions that have taken place within musicology and ethnomusicology might provide a useful framework in which to address the problems of rock history and begin to work towards such alternatives.

Historiography, musicology, ethnomusicology

The Encyclopedia Britannica Online provides three basic denitions of historiography: (a) the writing of history; (b) the history of historical writing; and (c) the theory of historical writing (Anon 2003, Introduction). In the remainder of this article I will discuss historiography principally in the third sense referring to the other two when necessary. According to the most recent and largest English language dictionary of music, the New Grove, music and other art historiographies share many elements with general historiography but because
works of art are their central subject matter, the histories of the arts differ crucially from other historical disciplines. Apart from philological topics such as dating, transmission, attributions and editions, the approach to general historiographical problems is inevitably conditioned by the aesthetic views of the art historian (Stanley 2003).

This introductory denition is precise when read within the context of western art music and the overriding importance given to the musical work within its histori Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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cization. The concept of the musical work and its accompanying ideas of aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic judgement have dominated both histories of art music and popular music, the latter by imitating the former. While such notions are an integrated part of the reception history of art music and thus cannot be completely abandoned, aside from their obvious currency amongst critics they seem to be foreign to most other individuals involved with popular music and thus ought to hold only very limited sway. Indeed, the Grove denition might provide a contrast that encourages a consideration of how a popular music historiography might be distinct. Works of art are not the central subject matter for a popular music historiography. First, popular music is rarely art.5 Secondly, tunes, numbers or tracks are only works in a qualied sense. That is, they consist of musical sounds and have a beginning, a middle and an end but rather than being monadic objects they are intensely intertextual. Thirdly, questions of the historians specically aesthetic views, for example her aesthetic judgements or contribution to canon building, are not an inevitable condition. This is because most major theoretical approaches common to popular music studies do not build on such a priori positions, but upon other interests of knowledge. It is thus clear that concepts such as aesthetics, work and even music need rethinking if we are to make any sensible use of them. Take the concept of music, for example. Peter Wicke has repeatedly called for a re-denition of the concept of music as a medium in sound, a position which could lead on to new historical perspectives (1998a). In Von Mozart zu Madonna (1998b), for instance, he examines the bodys relation to popular music through 200 years, arguing that the sensory pleasure of music lies in its sounds. Wicke gives the example of female piano students who often feared and loathed their teachers while at the same time gaining a sensuous pleasure from performing in front of guests at social gatherings in their homes. An important point is that the sensuous pleasure was gained from the actual sounds as an expression of both the body and feeling rather than the musics structure (1998b: 42). Redening music as an object is one road to a different conception of how music works in culture, and Wickes change of focus from structure to sound is important. Another way is to acknowledge that there are many different concepts, notions and practices of music circulating in culture at any one time. In his discussion of Ontolo5. To me it seems wrong to bestow the tag of art to most popular music in the name of legitimating it or democratizing notions of art because it hides the difference between the two, a difference which I think is necessary to uphold if nothing else than to point to a diversity in the face of a general homogenizing in Western culture. Further, nowadays popular music hardly seems in need of legitimation, and, if it does, it should be based on its own values, not those foreign to it. Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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gies of Music (note the plural), Bohlman opens by postulating that music may be what we think it is, it may not be and points out that what music is remains open to questions at all time and in all places (1999: 17). Just as several, not necessarily consistent, histories exist at personal and intra-personal levels, notions about what music is can be just as entangled. One single person may have several notions concerning music just as differing cultures may have multiple musical practices. This insight that histories and notions of music are multifarious can break open everyday practices related to rock culture. The experience of Wickes piano pupil points to a conceptualization of popular music aesthetics that does not stem from Kantian ideas such as the beautiful, the sublime, or judgements of taste, but from Baumgartens (1735/1983) original denition of aesthetics as sensory experience. On the one hand music can be understood as functioning as aesthetic objects in an emphatic sense. That is as nonphysical and separate entities such as parts of songs, songs, albums, genres etc., that unfold in time and can be experienced by listeners who can name them through language. Music also refers to objectied goods that can be bought and sold, be it directly as computer les, CDs and sheet music or indirectly as merchandise, music press stories etc. On the other hand, music can be understood processually as the making, use and enjoyment of musical objects. Music in such a way is ephemeral, is always on the verge on becoming something else, and thus loses its object character due to historically changing practices. This object/non-object duality (music as artefacts and music as part of everyday life) gives the study of popular music history some methodological problems, problems which may be solved with help from ethnomusicological views on music and music history. Despite the New Grove quotation perhaps giving the impression of musicology as a rather conservative discipline, the concepts and notions of the work of art, of autonomy, and of aesthetic views have all been challenged by the poststructural turn. Since the late 1980s, debates surrounding music other than Western art music and the deconstructionist tendency of theory have raised severe doubts about the whole musicological project (currents which despite their differences became known under the blanket term New Musicology). What is ultimately at stake within such work is the place, the identity, and even the existence of the musical work and the aesthetic experience within historical narratives (Treitler 1999: 358). Establishing a new paradigm has proven difcult and in practice most New Musicologists still adhere to old conceptions of the autonomous work while the new can be understood as referring to their radical hermeneutic interpretations. Only few have tried to argue for another way of applying poststructuralist theory to the historical study of music. One is music historian Gary Tomlinson who argues that close readings of music invariably lead into old paradigms and should therefore be avoided. Instead, he
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advocates a resolute historicizing of musical utterances by turning to a contextualism that explodes outwards through an imaginative building of contexts out of as wealthy a concatenation of the past traces as the historian can manage (1993: 22). I take this exploding contextualism to mean that in principle there are an unlimited amount of meanings connected with the musical utterances that inuence each other, partly overlap and contrast. This immense wealth of meanings makes it possible to do a sort of thick contextualism in which musical utterances can be embedded. The complex net of meanings will never be fully accessible to the historian who will always only discuss parts of them in order to construct an interpretation. Nevertheless, the historian should aim at collecting as many traces as possible in order to produce not a more truthful but a more complex narrative. Tomlinsons strategy aims at the local instead of the universal and at the construction of history instead of the uncovering of the original situation. This makes historys claims to grand history (in which everything is explained) obsolete and suggests instead small histories that know full well that they are discussing their subject from certain angles. To Tomlinson the object of historical study becomes the metasubjective level of cultural formation (1993: 22), a dialogical space (in a Bakhtinian sense) where subjects contribute to the formation but cannot control it. Finally, he points out that we need to localize the great ideas behind Western music when studying other music and remember its strangeness in relation to those ideas (and to musicologists reared in that tradition) by accepting a we/they scenario where strangeness is not familiarized (1993: 23). I think that such a contextualizing historical approach can deal with musical objects and shy away from reifying them as autonomous. It can also account for the way in which individuals relate to music in terms of, for instance, fun or everyday transcendence in multiple ways. Tomlinsons work is one result of a process throughout the 1980s and 1990s which saw ethnomusicology and historical musicology entering into a dialogue, with anthropology at home becoming increasingly common. Instead of seeing the ethnomusicological study purely as a presentation of a present (that is, while the research is taking place), some ethnomusicologists, following Bruno Nettl, have begun to focus on the histories behind that present. The study of local cultures through eldwork is one of ethnomusicologys distinctive traits and a modern and reexive ethnomusicology has pointed out that there exists a diversity of pasts even within one single culture. Bohlman (1997) is among those who have reected most intensively on historiography and ethnomusicology, arguing for a set of paradoxes in historical eldwork: everyday vs. other, practice vs. culture, and present vs. past. These paradoxes allow for an historical space which can be understood as a discursive space of boundaries within which cultures locate themselves. He continues:
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Culture within these [boundary] spaces no longer forms into systems, but rather becomes uid, ephemeral, and contested. History can no longer be recuperated into teleological narratives that once happened and now can be told again and again in their inscribed versions. History, too, forms in a temporal space, contested because fragments of the past remain in the everyday of the present (1997: 140).

This means that cultures are always in between, relating now to one boundary, now to another in a dynamic movement which is hard to grasp. As representations of such events and everydays, histories come to work the same way, by necessity giving up homogenic and chronologically linear structures. Furthermore, histories not only represent the past or the present, but also the time in between. This becomes important when studying past rock cultures. The music and the everyday that constitute the empirical object are of course historical (that is, in the past) but the actors are still alive and they remember days past through time. Potentially, even the process of remembrance of things past becomes part of the object of study. This makes it impossible to nd out how the past really was and neither should it be the intention of histories. In order to grasp at least some of the reasons for the ephemerality of past music cultures and the play between past, the in-between and the present it is relevant to turn to the concept of otherness. The praxis denoted by the concept might account partially for the dynamics of culture. Furthermore, the concept can highlight the past as other, as basically different to the present even though the lines between the two are blurred because an element of identication between the two is often present (i.e. history is still part of the present). Othering takes place at all levels from the inter-subjective my music/your music to the our music/their music of whole nations or generations. The intention is to establish individual or group identity by pointing out what is different. Its opposite (oursing) can take place within the next minute, after several hundred years or never, indicating the stark dichotomy between self and other is not absolute. Each individual might partake in several our musics simultaneously or in succession according to the specic use of the music. Otherness is easily thought of in connection with geographically or temporally distant cultures. More recently, however, constructions of otherness within contemporary Western culture along lines of gender, race etc. have become objects of study for Western scholars (Walser 1993; Born 1995; Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Radano and Bohlman 2000). Doing historical work on Danish rock culture in the 1960s and 1970s includes aspects of otherness which are hard to pinpoint and slippery to reect upon within the research. It is important to acknowledge this intricacy in order not to reduce the cultural complexity of the past to something which ts in with our present conceptions of that period. While the present is obviously our point of departure and

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history is only interesting if it can be used for some ends in the present, it is still important not to reduce history to a tool for the present. Of course one cannot present things and happenings as they really were to a specic group of people, but it is possible to acknowledge the difference. The research period in question is positioned at a curious temporal distance in relation to the present as a sort of in-between between past and present. First, it is present in the heads of still-living participants in Danish rock culture and researchers as private memories. These memories are often important in the present as the basis of individual identities given that music contributes to the formation of identity during adolescence, and that this formation remains as important to many as they get older. In this sense these memories are integrated and thus not other. However, as soon as these memories are brought out in the open and put into words they become memories in an emphatic sense. They change from being an integral part of an identity, where the border between past and present is blurred, to being public words referring to things past and thus a past other. Secondly, while written and aural sources are undeniably of the past, they are confronted with the present of the interviewees and the researchers, thus producing a play between contemporary accounts of what happened, recollections of events and the everyday in which the events were embedded. Thirdly, researching Danish rock culture places the researcher in a curious position with regard to being an insider or outsider. To me, for example, 60s rock culture was seen from a childs perspective, while 70s rock culture was to some extent experienced as a participant. Later, years of academic training leading to a specialization in popular music studies have left me standing with one leg in each camp. In this way the researcher has personal experiences of being a participant in culture (and thus insider status). The process of academic research serves to convey outsider status both because of the reexivity involved in research and because of the viewpoint of interviewees.

The rockpop split

Aside from the othering at work in the research process, the research objects under examination construct and are constructed along lines of otherness. Danish rock culture, for instance, has had an ongoing dialectical relationship to ofcial culture. The creation of rock culture as other involved setting up norms of behaviour, appearance and music which were different to those of the parental culture. In choosing to identify with parallel youth cultures in the US and UK, Danish rock culture also turned against traditional notions of Danishness thus forming a sense of an international common culture as other to the local parental and ofcial culture. Only slowly did rock culture lose its otherness and become an integrated part of ofcial culture, one formal indicator being that groups and soloists became
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eligible for state grants and that popular groups made music belonging to all generations. Another othering took place as rock ostracized pop, principally by ignoring it and positioning itself against jazz and art music instead (cf. Michelsen 2001: 7078). The split between pop and rock is one of the most basic organizational principles of the rock eld. By institutionalizing pop as the silent other, the rockpop split became one of the central narratives of rock history, informing rock cultures from the mid1960s onwards. However, as Middleton has argued (1990: xx), such dichotomies should not be treated as rigidly as they might appear as analysis of these forms can reveal contradictions in the apparent polarities and instances where the maintenance of such a split is irrelevant. In this way rock culture might prove much more complex than most historians would have us believe. To investigate how the rockpop split worked in Danish rock culture of the 1960s and 1970s using an exploding contextualism in order to demonstrate the historical complexity of the issue is a major theme in my own part of the research. There is no doubt that the rockpop split existed as rhetoric and was frequently expressed in print. Indeed, one intention of the research process is to show how the split was socially constructed in music and in discourse. However, it is doubtful whether this ideology was as all-pervasive as later history would have us think. Among the questions to be asked are: to whom did the split matter, in what way did it matter, and how did it affect daily life. Informal conversations with friends who entered their teenage years at the beginning of the 1970s indicate that the ideology was at work and formed individual and collective tastes but that it was possible to change sides if you wanted to socialize with another group. At least to some, musical tastes depended more on your peers than on individual choice. Others stuck to a particular taste formation (hard rock, for example) but did not mind socializing at events where the music played was distinctly not to their tastes. Here socializing was more important and meetings with the opposite sex within the regulated social space of the dance or disco seemed preferable to standing up for ones musical taste. The point is that what is conceived of as one of rock cultures basic organizing principles only regulated the daily lives of even dedicated music fans to a certain degree. Individuals might spend hours discussing the merits of certain groups but their interest in other social activities placed them in other musical situations where their fandom did not matter. This leads on to speculations about how musicians reacted to the dichotomy. It seems that as public gures they may have advocated a particular position but as private people they might as well have behaved like other music fans crossing the boundaries whenever necessary or when they wanted to participate in social activities where music was not the most important aspect. In addition, personal friend Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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ships and professional relationships might have survived since the pre-rock barbedwire era despite the differing career trajectories of individual musicians in the wake of the rockpop split. Barbed-wire music (pigtrdsmusik) was the Danish expression for what the British knew as beat and the term is used to denote Danish beat from around 196366.6 The term beat entered the Danish vocabulary only after the mid-60s to denote the contemporary sounds coming from abroad. Rock as a term only became widespread in Denmark from the early 70s onwards. As barbedwire musicians settled in the industry they came to work together with new groups on both sides of the rockpop split. In some cases an individuals career has encompassed both sides of the dichotomy, such as Johnny Reimar, who went on from being a barbed-wire singer/guitarist to a career as schlager singer and record producer, but also signed the rst Danish super group Savage Rose and produced their rst three albums between 1968 and 1969. Looking back at Danish rock culture it is now hard to tell when the split was rst articulated and how it worked in the culture. Barbed-wire music was different from other pop music (schlagers and light music) but seemed to be treated little differently by the industry, critics or audiences. Difference only slowly came to matter in parallel with English-speaking countries. Slowly lyrics became more regarded as important as protest and barbed-wire singers began to sing in Danish. Paradoxically, a more familiar language began to mark a young we that dened themselves and were dened by others as different. In 1965 Danish protest singer Csar had a hit, while the young barbed-wire singer Peter Belli recorded translations of some of The Kinks satirical songs. Looking back it is possible to interpret such songs as the rst indications of a split because they introduced a measure of political criticism in pop. The question remains, however: in what ways did difference matter at the time? As The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who all visited Denmark in 1965, Danish rock criticism began to mark out these groups as representing something different to previous forms of popular music.7 In a review of a Rolling Stones concert, the rst Danish rock critic Carsten Grolin commented that:
It was nearly impossible to hear them properly because of the audiences enthusiastic, but not at all hysterical ecstasy, which was rmly and professionally controlled by Mick Jagger. It has nothing to do with pop. The Stones are about to strangle the sentimental and sloppy parts of the entertainment business There is a lot of good, healthy revolt against conventionality in the earth-warm music, the brash and sexy performance, the wispy hair and the casual wear (Grolin 1965: 8).

6. The origins of the expression are unclear. It might be that barbed-wire tted the double association of the guitars metal strings and the piercing sounds emanating from them. 7. For a historical account of Danish rock criticism, see Lindberg et al. (2000: 30743). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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Here pop is used as something the Rolling Stones are not. But again, the meaning of pop in discourse is hard to dene. Is it pop (as in popular music) or is it POP (as in pop art) or something else again? A few years later Grolin wrote the liner notes for an album which with hindsight has been acclaimed as the rst original Danish rock album. In these notes he described Steppeulvene as a pop group rst and foremost. Not an ordinary pop group of course (Grolin 1967). The point is not that Grolin does not use categories consistently, but that categories are oating and that pop can be used both negatively and positively by the same social actor to describe similar phenomena. The split was probably only clearly articulated in 1968. One indicator was that the change of genre name from barbed-wire music to beat was complete. A second was that contemporary schlagers in Danish from 1968 on became institutionalized genrewise as dansktop musik (Danish Top Music) because of a radio programme with that title.8 A third signal was that the underground music paper Superlove conducted a petition against the radio pop programme host, Jrgen Mylius, because of his programming policy. A year later another critic published a piece in the Danish intellectual daily, Information, called On the Occasion of a Divorce. He described the rockpop split as a fact, and argued that, like jazz, beat music had become art music and had been stolen from broader youth groups by young middle-class intellectuals (Nielsen 1969). It is this argument that has since become consistently represented as historical fact. However, judging from accounts of rock culture in the provinces, such a split meant little at this time with the ideological separation of rock and pop occurring slowly and at different times in different regions (cf. Andresen 1986). Furthermore, the split was only institutionalized when beat and jazz met in practice (jazzrock fusion) and discursively (in the concept of rhythmic music) in the early 70s (cf. Michelsen 2001). The rockpop split could be one example of how ideology and everyday practice does not t. The split worked as ideology and shaped the market (different audiences, consumers, magazines) and histories, ostracized pop from rocks discourse and created taste hierarchies. But the high could visit the low whenever the need for social activities demanded it. In this way the othering worked at different levels and it does not seem as complete as rock histories would have it, forcing us to reconceptualize rock culture as a more complex conguration.

8. The weekly programme was rst broadcast on September 1, 1968 and was only dropped in 1977. At its most popular the programme had about 1.5 million listeners (Laursen 1999: 14). Barbedwire groups had recorded some of that repertoire since 1964 (e.g. Johnny Reimar: Lille fregnede Louise [1964] and Keld og the Donkeys: Ved landsbyens gadekr [1966]). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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Conclusion
Nowadays, Danish rock culture from the 1950s to the 1980s is perceived along the lines of sameness or homogeneity, as one cultural unit. Of course struggles have taken place within this sameness but the predominance of homogenizing narratives has served to provide a stable past on which identities are built within contemporary Danish rock culture. Present media-generated histories have no room for otherness in the historical past and tend to produce narratives in which the wrinkles of history have been ironed out. In this sameness the participants were white, middleclass, male Danes who played music, used drugs, experimented with lifestyles, and had fun (even though mixed gender and womens groups did have some success from the early 1970s).9 In the process of mapping Danish rock histories, it is my intention to destabilize this past, to uncover the many different histories and the complexities within daily life, to trace the many boundary spaces that the participants experienced and acted within. I am looking for everyday practices beyond the reied albums and the mythological constructions (among which rock culture itself is one). Albums might have been experienced as markers of time in their day, but in the historical present the constructions were only foetal; they worked as nascent narratives of the everyday, often constructed by the electronic and print media. A few of these narratives took root and came to constitute the grand historical narratives about the culture. Histories are everywhere in our everyday life. They are a part of our identities, a way of reasoning who we are and who we are not at both an individual and social level. They point to where I or we come from and offer future directions. As much as histories can belong to a we, they are often contested among the we and in relation to other wes. At given moments specic histories seem to be in dialogue with the present giving rise to new histories. Bands, audiences, media and the music industry constantly reference and take into consideration histories of what has happened before. Such histories are produced, reproduced and circulated in everyday life among individuals, but they are also produced, reproduced and circulated in written form. These written histories are often central in identifying the constituency and values of who we are. Thus, written history always has a
9. In general, women performers of the 1960s have been relegated to the distant memory of those who lived at that time. In later historical accounts womens roles have been reduced to that of peripheral characters such as audience members. This underlines the master narrative of rock culture as boys culture. The only Danish woman to survive history is singer Anisette who is still active in her original group, Savage Rose (see Arvidsson [1997] for a discussion of the situation in Sweden). The fact that women were actually recording artists within a barbed-wire style has recently been documented by Thomas Gjurups CD compilation Piger, pop & pigtrd 19631968 (Girls, Pop, & Barbed Wire 19631968). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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hegemonic thrust, an I that speaks on behalf of the we. If this thrust is laid open it can become less hegemonic, but can never fully escape the power dynamics inherent within history writing. A history book will always be a construction that (at its best) helps its readers construct their own histories. To produce written histories of popular music is to choose between everyday histories in the construction of solid written historical narratives. In the process, written history loses much of the relation to and the situatedness of the initial histories. Hardly anyone would suggest stopping writing histories because of the hegemonic thrust. They seem necessary to our culture for the above-mentioned reasons. Nevertheless, there is the clear necessity to tell histories anew, both to get rid of the hegemonic thrusts of the older ones, to explain why things are the way they are, and in order to point in new directions. A main point is to study what was going on in the everyday practices between highlights or canonical moments (that is, records and concerts) in order to complexify the overall picture and to puncture the canon.

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Discography
Keld og the Donkeys. 1966. Ved landsbyens gadekr (single) [By the Village Pond]. HMV. Reimar, Johnny. 1964. Lille fregnede Louise (single) [Little Freckled Louise]. Philips. Steppeulvene. 1967. Hip (LP). Metronome. Various. 2002. Piger, pop & pigtrd 19631968 (CD) [Girls, Pop, & Barbed Wire 19631968]. Frost Records.

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