Discussions of the increasing pervasiveness of popular music heritage seem in sharp contrast to the notion that pop music, specifically, is an ephemeral phenomenon. In the first half of the 1990s, Take That fans took thousands of photos of the band offstage and traded them with each other by letter, forming a living social network of music enthusiasts. To what extent can we describe the photos and their social use as forms of self-produced music heritage? A number of researchers have begun to think through the issue of popular music heritage culture in terms of a more or less clearly defined distinction between official and ‘DIY’ forms. Using a study of Take That pop fandom, this chapter suggests that the distinction is sometimes not quite so clear. It begins by reviewing some recent contributions to the debate on about music heritage, considers the place of a specific example of Take That heritage culture: the 2011 photo exhibition in Manchester curated by Anja Lobert. We argue that emphasis on the concept of ‘DIY’ heritage may be danger of neglecting moments when fans can collude with ‘official’ institutional structures in order to legitimate their memories.

Analysing the television documentary Rick Stein Tastes the Blues for common perceptions of the Delta, this book chapter explores ethical dilemmas associated with a particular music tourism. White visitors celebrate the black music heritage of what is still one of the poorest regions of the USA, but to what extent are they fetishizing poverty? The chapter argues that we can position blues pilgrimages as a form of cross-racial dark tourism. As a way to share concern for racialized creativity in the face of social neglect, blues pilgrimage has become a matter of empathetically hearing of black woe expressed and white guilt displaced by music from a different time, place and culture.

As researchers, when we study media fandom, are we all studying the same thing? If we have a shared object now, does that mean our traditional disciplines no longer matter? Twenty years ago, Clifford Geertz published an academic memoir called After the Fact. Its subtitle said, “Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist.” Geertz’s (1995) book discussed his insights from forty years as a professional scholar. At the time his memoir appeared, I embarked on a PhD exploring the cultures and meanings made by Elvis Presley fans. In the two decades since, my career has taken me to a place where I wrote a book introducing the field of fan research, called Understanding Fandom (Duffett 2013a). Following Geertz, this chapter aims to map my academic journey and offer some pointers about how fan scholarship could develop. As part of that mapping, I will be citing my own work and reactions to it.

On August 15, 1965, the Beatles played to a crowd of over 55,000 of their fans at the Shea Stadium in New York City. Five decades later, the history-making show is remembered less for the band’s thirty minute music set than for how it was drowned out by the crowd’s deafening din (Millard 2012, 25). In actuality, however, there are, however, two Shea Stadia events: one a long past reality, the other a shared memory. This chapter examines how the second of these – Shea Stadium as a discursive construct – both drew on stereotypes of pop fandom and perpetuated them in public discussions about the Beatles. Specifically, the Shea event came to symbolize the way that popular music fandom had entered the public sphere as a collective and emotional phenomenon. It was framed by notions of parasocial interaction to suggest that young fans did not care about music and instead ‘worshipped’ band members as hero figures. In deconstructing the discursive Shea Stadium, my aim is to rescue the event from its own history. The concert enabled the Beatles to secure their place in the emergent rock revolution and position themselves as a more serious, ‘adult’ and ‘music’ orientated band. Yet it has also become a cornerstone of stereotypical perceptions of music fandom in the public imagination.