Popular Music as Cultural Heritage: Memory of the Leningrad Rock Club in St. Petersburg

2021. No. 205.

Kolesnik A., Rusanov A.

Within heritage studies, popular music is considered not only as a significant part of cultural history of certain regions and countries, but also as urban and national cultural heritage (primarily in the UK and US). In Russia, a diverse popular musical past has only recently begun to be represented as cultural heritage, for the most part, through initiatives of musicians, music fans and citizens. The paper examines how the memory of the Leningrad Rock Club is presented in contemporary St. Petersburg as a significant part of the urban history of the 1980s (with examples of memorial sites, monuments to musicians, fan travel maps and tours). The research methods are in-depth interviews and observations that were made during a field-work (August 2020, July, August and October 2021, visiting various locations in 2013–2018). Basing on the concept of heritage as a process we analyze how popular musical heritage is constructed and how the memory and heritage of Leningrad Rock Club is represented in St. Petersburg. This example turns out to be part of the broader and, one might say, global processes of revising the concept of cultural heritage, which unfolded in the second half of the 20th century and as a result of which popular culture in all its diversity becomes a part of this process

Keywords: cultural heritage, rock music, Heritage studies, critical heritage studies, popular music heritage, Leningrad Rock Club

Publication based on the results of: (Не)официальное культурное наследие в современной России (2021)