Raymond Williams once remarked that ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983). He never said what the other ones were but had he been writing today, one of these might well have been ‘heritage’. Indeed, the imbrications of ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’, and the vexed nature of their relationship, particularly with regard to popular music, are such that each has come to serve as a synonym for the other in the wider sociocultural imaginary. This paper casts a critical spotlight on discourses of cultural heritage in the UK by questioning what makes popular music culture ‘heritage’ and considering the extent to which the UK popular music has become increasingly heritagised. Relating the specific example of popular music to wider debates on cultural heritage and heritagisation, the paper calls for greater problematising of discourses of popular music as cultural heritage, and considers, by way of conclusion, how a critical focus on the lived, performative and ‘hauntological’ dynamics of music heritage practices can illuminate understandings of the way cultures of music and memory are negotiated and transacted in the present.
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