The Social Lives of Reissues: Rethinking Object Biography in Popular Music Studies

Abstract

This paper will make a case for rethinking object biography in popular music studies. By object biography, I am referring to a particular methodological and analytic approach to material culture that begins from the premise that objects—that is, commodities, goods, artefacts, and so on—have social lives that follow their own unique trajectories across time and space. Object biography has been influential in popular music studies since Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s foundational essays in the The Social Life of Things (1986), but I propose that its potential as a methodological and analytic tool has not yet been fully realized to date. This paper sets out to make the case for rethinking object biography in the context of recent trends in scholarship, particularly with regard to the so-called “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences. While object biographical scholarship in popular music studies has tended to focus on questions of value and the commodification process (as per Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s foundational essays), I argue that the object biographical approach offers insights into a broader range of issues, including matters of aesthetics, genre, and media ecology. Drawing on the example of the influential Nuggets reissue compilation album, I ask, how might we understand the reissue album as a unique media form, with its own distinct cultural and aesthetic logics? More generally, I propose that object biography presents a useful set of conceptual tools in how we think about popular music’s material culture, especially with regard to audio media.