Blunting the Cutting Edge? Analogue Memorabilia and Digitised Memory

Abstract

What happens to disintermediated, flattened, plural and resistive popular culture when classic rock is corporatized and the audience is middle aged white men? This article is provoked by Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge, the expensive reissuing of his albums from 1965 and 1966 in 2015, to offer a theorization of digital recording and sharing of analogue unboxing cultures. My interest particularly focuses on the audience of this affluent product and the odd cultural responses from the male audience. How do scholars of popular culture understand this shared enthusiasm for unpackaging consumerist items? The solution posed in this article is the deployment of Jean Baudrillard’s theories to understand and manage the cascading simulacrum.