There Is Only One Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

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BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

There is only one Top 2000

Nostalgia and pop music

Figure 0. The logo of the Top 2000. Retrieved from: https://numrush.nl/datavisualisatie-top-2000/

BA Thesis Name of author: Madelief M. J. M. Tresonie Student number: 2011855 Online Culture: Art, Media and Society - Digital Media Department of Culture Studies School of Humanities and Digital Sciences July 2020 Supervisor: Martin J. M. Hoondert Second reader: Mingyi Hou

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3 Outline of this thesis 4

2. Theoretical framework 5 Nostalgia is the best feeling, but what is it? 5 Identity and Identi-me 8 Community is key 9 Collective memory and media 10 Short summary of the theoretical framework 12

3. Methodology 13

4. Results 14 What happens online 15 The media outlets 15 The newspapers 16 What happened in the survey(s) 17 Nostalgia, old friend? 17 Identity: music 18 Community and the Top 2000 19 Canonization of music 20

5. Conclusion and Discussion 21 Conclusion 21 Discussion, limitations and further research 23 Acknowledgements 24

6. Appendix A: Survey Questions 25

7. References 26

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

1. Introduction

The Top 2000 has been a Dutch tradition of a pop music-marathon for over 20 years now. At the last edition (December 2019), the popularity of it went through the roof. People not only follow the Top 2000 by listening to the radio, but also go to Hilversum to attend the Top 2000 Café. Last December, a new record was set for the waiting line to enter the Top 2000 Café (Mascini, 2019): more than 10 hours between the buying of the ticket and the entering of the Café. People have different reasons to come to Hilversum for this Café; for some it is a tradition to go there every year, others want to see the Café in real life, since it is also used for the tv- programmes Top 2000 A Gogo, Top 2000 Quiz and Top 2000: the Untold Stories. For me, the reason was to do research about the people who come to visit the Top 2000. The Top (as I will call it from now on) has been first broadcast in 1999 on the radio station NPO Radio 2. This radio marathon is held from the 25th of December up until one minute before the new year and consists of 2000 (what is in a name) songs that have been voted for by the whole of the Netherlands. There is no need to be an active listener of NPO Radio 2 to be allowed to vote. During the voting week at the start of December, a voter is allowed to choose for 35 songs; they can range from the top 10 of most popular songs to guilty pleasures and niche songs that have never been in the Top. There is a possibility to write a motivation why a person voted for this particular song and this can be featured in the actual Top when the radio DJ starts the song. Next to the voting, there is a survey attached to it which looks for fun tendencies to show on tv; an example is “For the previous hour, the most people lived in a small village”(figure 1). The Top 2000 is broadcast on both radio and screens; there is a livestream on NPO 1 Extra or on the website of Radio 2 that goes on day and night and allows the people who are not able to attend in the Café to see the atmosphere and reactions to the songs (Kriek, 2019). As this short description implies, no one can escape the Top 2000; for many people in the Netherlands it has become part of the end of year rituals. The Top has turned into a multimodal marathon of songs that finds its way through the traditional medium that is radio, but also via tv, a livestream and social media, as the voter gets an option to share their list online. On top of these media, there is also a physical ‘StemBus’ (translation: Voting Bus) where people can go to to vote for their favourite songs and maybe get a selfie with one of the radio DJs or a minute of fame on the radio (NPO Radio 2, 2019). Back in 1999, the inventor of the Top 2000 was sure that this list would only last one edition (Toering in Van Sadelhoff, 2019), but the success was beyond his imagination.

Figure 1. A screenshot of the live stream’s fun facts. Retrieved from: https://www.nporadio2.nl/gemist/video/6362/top-2000-25-december-10-00-11-00-uur

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

It intrigued me that the Top is talked about across generations (De Wit, 2018); grandparents like it, but teenagers and young adults do as well. Even though the range of age is quite big at the side of the voters, the age of the song does not change that much. The time between the release of the song and the time that it entered the Top 2000 remains on average 28 years. This means: the average age of a song is 28 years. A good example is the German Eurodance group Snap! with ‘Rhythm is a dancer’, because it was released in 1992 and it still has a spot in the Top (number 1857). An explanation of why it is stable in the Top 2000 may be that the majority of the people who voted for this song, were in their puberty (so between 11- 18 years old) and reminisce about the old days through this song. Strangely enough, not the songs but the voters of the songs become younger. A prominent example is Queen; even though it is a band since the seventies, it is still the number one of the List for both the younger voters as their parents (NPO Radio 2, n.d.). For this, a possible explanation is that music is handed down from generation to generation and that opposing your parents is something from the sixties, not now. Although the Top 2000 is quite popular in the Netherlands, there is also some critique. Because most people vote for the same song every year, the Top is more or less the same every year and maybe a bit dull. This is explained by three things; (1) it is a list of evergreens, songs that are always nice, (2) it is a list of songs that brings back a (Top 2000) memory and (3) people ask themselves, what sounds like a Top 2000 song, since other songs probably will not make it in the List (Belgers in Molenaar, 2018). In my opinion, the three reasons mentioned above to explain why the Top is more or less the same every year are a bit superficial. Combined with the fact that although the voters become younger, the songs chosen still have an average age of 28 years, this demands for a more in-depth research regarding this remarkable phenomenon. A concept that might help is ‘nostalgia’: voters seem to long for songs from the past, even though it is not their past. This leads to the following research question: “How does the Top 2000 exemplify and maintain nostalgia? Nostalgia is a complex and multi-layered concept. To clarify its meaning, I will make use of several ‘sub-concepts’, namely identity, community and collective memory. These three ‘sub-concepts’ help to exemplify and operationalize the concept of nostalgia. So, to answer the main research questions, three sub-questions will structure the research:

1. How do voters of the Top 2000 show affinity with their (music) identity during the Top 2000? 2. To what extent is community building necessary in relation to the Top 2000? 3. How has the Top 2000 become a medium of cultural memory and thus a part of collective memory?

Outline of this thesis

To answer my research question and sub-questions, the next chapter will be my theoretical framework. This chapter gives a clear view of which definitions of the concepts ‘nostalgia’, ‘identity’, ‘community’ and ‘collective memory’ I will use and some more background information of the fields of identity studies, community studies and memory studies. After that, chapter 3 will be concerned with the methodology of my thesis. In chapter 4, the results of my fieldwork are presented and in chapter 5, the discussion, limitations and conclusion will be described. Chapter 6 displays my survey-questions (in Dutch). This thesis is concluded with a list of references. Underneath every header, you will find a song that was in the Top 2000 of 2019 and the number it was ranked on. The title of this thesis is a play on NPO Radio 2’s slogan: there is only one NPO Radio 2.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

2. Theoretical Framework

For this research I have four main pillars that need justification. As my research question is about nostalgia, this concept needs some clarification. From different fields, researchers were interested in this concept and still people cannot put their finger on what it actually is. After that I will look into the concepts of identity, community and collective memory because these three notions are all tied to the main concept of nostalgia. Identity and identification are almost as vague and hard to define as nostalgia, because these are also a mixture of what is felt from within and what is perceived from without. Community in relation to the Top 2000 is interesting to look at: because The Top seems to have a temporal character, it is hard to say if the Top 2000 even has a community, but more will be explained below. Lastly, collective memory will be examined. A list of classic songs have the possibility to become part of the collective memory of a nation (or at least a great part of the nation) and that idea will be discussed. Furthermore, the multi-modal construction of the Top 2000 gives way to infiltrate in popular culture and this too will be explained in the light of collective memory.

Nostalgia is the best feeling, but what is it? 572. Holding Back The Years – Simply Red

Nostalgia has a long history. First coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688, nostalgia was seen as a disease that made soldiers feel sick when they were away from home for too long (Wildschut and Seehusen, 2011:15). Around that time, in The Netherlands and France, doctors saw the same thing. They called it ‘nostalgie permanente’, because it often resulted in illness and psychological harm (Draaisma, 2013:134). In either case, the term originated from the two Greek words nostos, which means homecoming, and algia, which means pain (Draaisma, 2013:135), now this feeling would be described as Heimweh (German) or homesickness. Starting from this medical background, there were also scientists from other fields who were highly interested in this concept. For my thesis I will compare the views of anthropology and communication studies with the view of (music) psychology. This is because there are two main views on nostalgia that can fit on a continuum; one says it is a feeling of longing and the other says it is a feeling of coming home. Now, I will start with the feeling of longing. Coming from the field of anthropology, Angé and Berliner (2014:2) use nostalgia as a feeling of “longing for what is lacking in a changed present […] a yearning for what is now unattainable, simply because of the irreversibility of time.” Lizardi (2014A:2), from the communication studies department, emphasizes that nostalgia is a “yearning for the past which results in the focussing on the past to assuage this yearning.” As shown in these two definitions, nostalgia can be seen as a feeling of longing to a time that has passed, but to which people eagerly hold on in order to ease the pain. From these perspectives, there is a serious critique on how the media deal with nostalgia. Since the 1960s onwards there has been a commercialization and trend of thinking about the past in a fond manner (Angé and Berliner, 2014:3; Draaisma, 2013:94). What this ‘fond’ recalling of memories does, is showing what is worth remembering and commodifying. The media, on their part, accelerate and overdose the people with things they should reminisce about (Angé and Berliner, 2014:2). Lizardi (2014A:8, 2014A:16) adds that the media simplifies and condenses only positive content of a time period, Bissell (2014:218) called that glossing over history.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

If we take this unified perspective and look at the Top 2000, we can see this as well. The Top is present everywhere, just as Stewart (in Angé and Berliner, 2014:5) thinks of nostalgia being everywhere; “it is a cultural practice, not a given content; its forms, meanings and effects shift with the context – it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present.” In the week of the Top, on tv there is a show called ‘Top 2000 A Gogo’ which takes aside a few songs that were played that day and this exemplifies the fact that nostalgia is framed and mostly the positive sides of the release era are shown. In the middle of the continuum from longing to reminiscing, we have the fan studies author Booth (2018) and from social psychology Wildschut and Seehusen (2011). Booth starts with stating that the feeling of nostalgia is a “longing […], but that that feeling can also be comfortable and familiar […]”. This is also reflected by Wildschut and Seehusen (2011:17), who simply state that there are positive and negative feelings attached to nostalgia. There are songs that make you look back at a happy memory, a funeral you went to which makes you sad or a bittersweet taste when thinking about the first time you went on holiday with the friends you do not see anymore. Then we move to the psychological side of the story. Draaisma (2013:91) takes into account that it can also be great fun to recall memories because seniors like to reminiscence about the good old days in the way of anecdotes. This corresponds to what I call ‘coming home’. Butler (in Draaisma, 2013:93) says these reminiscences serve as a return to past events or experience which can be negative as well. Reminiscing is not the same as nostalgia because nostalgia is not just looking back but also reviewing your younger days. Reviewing is here used in the sense of re-examining the past and making your definitive verdict about that time (Draaisma, 2013:92). From this perspective, Draaisma (2013:75) argues that there is an overrepresentation of young memories in a person’s mind. This can be explained by two things; the reminiscent bump and flashbulb memories. A flashbulb memory is a “pivotal event in their student years where it all started or a turning point, like first times” (Draaisma, 2013:71, 2013:72, 2013:75). These big happenings stay with you for the rest of your life and mostly happen between 15 and 30 years. This can be on different levels and in different contexts; the first time you kissed is different from the first time you heard Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ (number 153). Draaisma (2013:69) argues for this sake that “what people regard as the music of ‘my generation’ begins at around the time they are 14/15 and ends in their late 20s.” and that their appreciation of that music remains almost constant for the rest of their lives. The reminiscent bump comes down to a bulge of memories from your time as a 20-something (Draaisma, 2013:60). What is interesting to see is that the bump only gets bigger when a person gets older (Draaisma, 2011:188). A 30-something remembers less details from their lives ten years ago than a centenarian whose adolescence is about 70 or 80 years ago. The last thing I just mentioned from Draaisma is interesting to look at in the light of the Top. The older you get, the more nostalgic you are, it seems. But in terms of the Top 2000 this is different. In the statistics ‘Voor alle leeftijden’ (translation: For all ages; NPO Radio 2, n.d.) we can see that voters between 86 and 90 years old tend to vote for songs that have been in the List since it existed. The song they mostly voted for was ‘Het Dorp’ by Wim Sonneveld (number 25), which was released in 1974 so in their mid-30s. Voters between 46 and 50 years old mostly voted for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen (number 1), which was released in 1975 so when they were around five to ten years old. Even more out of range is the group of voters 0 to 15 because their most voted song is also ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which was released when they were minus 40 years old (figure 2).

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Figure 2. Screenshot of the cohort zero to fifteen-year-old voters of the Top 2000. The only song that was released when they were alive, is Imagine Dragons with ‘Believer’. Retrieved from: https://www.nporadio2.nl/top2000/statistieken/leeftijden

What does this say about nostalgia? Not very much. According to Draaisma, the 80- year-olds should have picked songs from the sixties, 46-year-olds from the eighties and the 10- year-olds from the tens. This says something about popular nostalgia, a concept made for this thesis. What I describe as popular nostalgia is reminiscing over a time where a person was not born yet, but feels a connection with. Popular nostalgia is influenced by at least two sources. On the one hand popular culture, by means of radio and online media, and on the other hand the parents’ music taste, which is a part of a process called musical socialization, where music is handed down from parent to kid. This fits perfectly in the rerun mentality of media (Lizardi, 2014B:1) where a trend is seen that the media construct the consumer as a past-focused subject and almost forces us to look back, apparently even to a time we did not even live in. The difference between a nostalgic mood (emotions) and a nostalgic mode (consumable past) starts to blur and media touches upon memories to make money (Angé and Berliner, 2014:6). Due to the possibility to collect nostalgic items, two types of people emerge. Lizardi (2014B:12) uses this with regard to film remakes, but his idea is also applicable to songs, namely the first person is the ‘ideal spectator’, a person who was there when the film/song was released, and the second is the naïve, first viewer, a person who first saw a remake and then did own research and started collecting from then on. For the Top 2000, the ideal spectator, or listener, would be a person who remembers the release of A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ (number 331) in 1985 and voting for it because it reminds them of the good ol’ days. A first viewer in this case could be a teenager who loves The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ (not in the Top - yet), finds out it has a sample of ‘Take On Me’ in it, becomes familiar with A-Ha and votes for them that way. This is popular nostalgia in action because it shows that the popular media refers back to the 80s, creating a new interest for that age for a new target group. Another thing that helps for popular nostalgia regarding the rerun mentality is that there are credentialized experts (Lizardi, 2014B:14) who tell what is classic and what you should know if you like this or that song. For the Top, Leo Blokhuis is often seen as the most important person regarding pop music. He does research about songs during Top 2000 A Gogo, Top 2000: Untold Stories and has a standard moment of the day as radio DJ during the Top where he starts the songs of that hour. Sometimes he is even called the Pop Professor because he knows about the context of the songs and this gives him the credibility to become a credentialized expert.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Identity and Identi-me 131. Come As You Are – Nirvana

Identity does, like nostalgia, not have a standard definition. From the philosophical perspective there are two main views. The first is the Simple View, which comes down to saying that identity is an “ultimate unanalysable fact, which resists definition in any other terms” (Noonan, 2004:93). So whatever a scientist can state about an identity, it is never correct because (s)he cannot analyse it. The Complex View, on the other hand, sees identity as nothing more or less than “the observable and introspectable facts of physical and psychological continuity which provides the only evidence for it” (Noonan, 2004:93). Here only the things that can be seen or experienced count as part of an identity. These two views have a lot to do with temporality, but both reject the fact that memory presupposes personal identity (Noonan, 2004:141). This vicious circularity objection shows that an identity is composed of everything else than memory. Then what is identity? From the perspective of sociology, Hall gives an answer. Identity (Hall, 1996:5-6) is a meeting point, intersection

“between on the one hand the discourse and practices which attempt to interpellate, speak to us/hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subject with can be spoken.”

To put it more easily understandable, identity is something that can mould people and the way we talk about people. And in the case of the Top, music moulds the listeners. By wearing a shirt of your favourite band, you show a part of your identity and in that way people can talk about you as ‘the person with the Prince-shirt’. Songs can also become a part of your identity. Gillispie (2018) explains that puberty is the crucial time to form your identity and that also happens through songs. As mentioned before, this is the part of your life your identity is mostly formed. When you are looking for yourself and you find a song that speaks to you, your emotions get more intense (Vingerhoets, 2011:131). These short examples show that identity is not one thing, but that it is a patchwork of everything you know and do. In this day and age, identity becomes even more fragmented (Hall, 1996:4) and multidimensional (Connell and Gibson, 2008:281) because there are now more resources than ever, both offline and online, to compose the ‘one and only you’. When Frith (1996:109) talks about the experience of music, he has two premises that supports his view. The first one is that an identity, like music, is a mobile process or a becoming instead of a being. The second premise is that the experience of music should be seen as a self- in-process. The different genres that are represented in the Top are all different experiences to every individual. ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ by Pink Floyd (number 69) was a protest song that shook society and now it is a classic rock song that older people think is great and young kids think is wailing – how people experience and give meaning to a song is not a ‘being’ that is fixed but a ‘becoming’. The self-in-process premise has to do with the identification with what Pink Floyd sings and how that resonates with the youths of the late 70s: people get attached to it, become fans of the band and start to embody what Pink Floyd stands for. In the book ‘Ageing and Youth Culture’, Haenfler (2012:17) reinforces the self-in-process premise by doing research of aged punkers and how they feel about the good old days. The Straight Edgers he studied confirm that the individuality that was professed in their youth is still lived in adulthood (Haenfler, 2012:23) and that “wearing an old bandshirt felt ‘comfortable’ and evoked a sense of identity […]” (Haenfler, 2012:17).

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

To come to a solid definition of identity is a paper on its own. For now I will use the term identity as a patchwork of things you do, say and wear in order to show ‘who you really are’ and by which you feel comfortable to show the world. Identity is a fluid process due to contextual changes over time.

Community is key 112. Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

Community and identity are heavily intertwined since “fixed identities [serve] as clichés for (music) communities” (Connell and Gibson, 2008:117). I know I just stated that identities are fluid, but Connell and Gibson use fixed identities as a synonym for clichés. A fixed identity or cliché in this context is for example heavy black make-up and an all-black outfit to represent the goth community, but this cliché is not someone’s identity since their appearance is only one aspect of it. What is interesting to note in case of the Top 2000, is that the community related to the Top is not a fixed community. Only one month of the year, December, people are embodying this music-marathon and the rest of the year, the voters just listen to their preferred radio stations or streaming services like Spotify. This is quite the opposite of what has been written about communities like fandoms or other subgroups. What also makes the Top 2000 ‘community’ unique is that it explicitly shows how “[…] music and space are actively and dialectically related. Music shapes spaces and spaces shape music.” (Connell and Gibson, 2008:192). The people who go to the Top 2000 Café are surrounded by the music, radio DJs, posters, records and so on to submerge in the ‘magic’ of the List of all Lists. The space also shapes the music because the special Café, that is built on stilts in the middle of the Beeld en Geluid Museum, gives a sense of exclusivity to the people who are in the Café when a certain song is played. It will become a memory that will stick with the voters, like ‘I was there when there was a small earthquake during “Killing In The Name” by Rage Against The Machine.’ (number 60). Another distinct feature of the Top is what Smith (in Hodkinson, 2012:133) calls a continuing scene where the body consists of continuing participants. To a certain extent, the participants remain the same because the radio DJs have barely changed in the past 20 years. What also remains the same is the cross-media body of the Top. Online you can submit your list and share it with friends, the beforementioned tv programmes have also been around for about 10 years and the StemBus (translation: Voting Bus) has also been around for quite some years now. What does change are the voters; they become older, pass on what they know of music to their kids and sometimes do not feel like voting or simply forget it. This discontinuity of participants or voters make it possible for the Top to be unique year after year, disregarding the seemingly never changing top 10. Deducing from this, we can say that the Top 2000 voters are not a community, but the radio DJs and tv presenters are. You normally know that you belong to a group through cultural activity (Frith, 1996:111), here the Top 2000, but this activity has such a short time span that no community can be formed. I am not only talking about the week of the marathon, but also about the fact that the tickets ‘to be in the Top 2000 Café’ only have an hour-long duration. An hour is an impossible time to really build a community, unless you are trapped in an escape room. That is why I opt for an imagined community to describe the Top 2000 voters. Anderson (in Connell and Gibson, 2008:118) used the term to talk about nation states as

“an ‘imagined community’, which operated over geographical space, with a sense of unity created through national institutions (legal structures, police, bureaucracy) and through a variety of cultural means, which attempted to entrench the sense of unity within its borders and maintain the logic of its separate existence from neighbouring territorial units.”

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

What is important in this definition is that it is not an actual community, but that it gives a sense of community. The feeling that everybody who voted for the Top 2000 is listening to it as well is warming and the music that is played is an oath to everybody’s youth. The only geographical space needed for the Top is the Café with the radio station built into it and the rest of the community is for the voters to figure out. Still, Van Dijck (2011:137) sees community being built around the Top. She talks about the way the Facebook and Hyves are way for voters to talk about the Top in their own time, but nowadays Hyves does not exist anymore and Facebook is not as important in the online world as when she wrote it. In the online world, Instagram and mostly Twitter1 took over the aspect of talking about the Top. Something that is unmentioned but still alive are the forum websites. There people interact the most regarding the Top 20002.

Collective memory and media 872. Our House – Madness

Now, we move on to the last pillar of this thesis: collective memory. If we follow Erll (2008:389) to find a definition of this concept, we should know that it is derived from cultural memory, which is based on communication through media. In accordance to that, she points out that “a lot of processes have the potential to become media of cultural memory, but they need to be realized” (Erll, 2008:395), so a medium should be viewed as a something of cultural media to become media of cultural memory. Now if we look at the Top 2000, the potential of becoming a canon for pop music in The Netherlands was there in 1999: it was never done before to have a list that people directly voted for, instead of the charts of most selling records like the Top 40, which is an indirect list. The Top became an emblem of Dutch society because people (apparently) longed for a list that they composed themselves. Like said in the introduction, the success was never expected (Toering in Van Sadelhoff, 2019). Erll makes a final distinction in her text on how cultural memory influences lives. On the individual level, it provides scripts that help people to form images of the past and that can possibly shape autobiographical memories (Erll, 2008:396). These scripts can be brought back to how identities can be shaped through different contexts. On the collective level, Erll (2008:397) states that “fictional texts and movies can become powerful media, whose versions of the past in large parts of society [are adapted]”. She talks about fictional texts and movies because she looked at cultural memory from the perspective of war novels and film adaptations of those novels, but her statements are also applicable on the Top 2000. Especially with the tv programmes about the background of the songs, a canon is given to the listeners and watchers of the Top and they will learn that way about the context of that song and thus the past in general. The only difference is that Erll talked about books of fiction and the stories that are told in Top 2000’s tv programmes are not fictional. Halbwachs (in Garde-Hansen, 2011:19) combines these levels in describing collective memory as something that “confines and binds our most intimate remembrances (individual level) and ensures our memories are made and remade from the perspective of those on the outside (collective level).” This way, the Top 2000 serves as a “vehicle for memory” (Van Dijck, 2006:359) that is made of contributions of individual memories and distributes collective memory that shapes the experience of memory of the other (Anastasio et al, 2012:51). Van Dijck (2006:369) extends this idea and states that the way that people construct this “collective reservoir of recorded music […] become[s] our cultural heritage.”

1 https://twitter.com/hashtag/top2000 2 https://forum.fok.nl/topic/2462347/1/25

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Abbing (2011:164/165) rightfully dubs the Top as a canon, because like an identity, a canon is always in motion; there is a continuous talk about what should and should not be remembered by next generations. Time to move to the media-side of collective memory. Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg (2011:971), in the context of the Holocaust commemorations in Israel, state that “popular radio [plays a central role] in the process of nation building and as emblematic of collective recollection” because the radio broadcasts the commemoration and the whole of Israel pays respect to that. That is also why they dub the radio as a soundtrack of memory (Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg, 2011:975), referring to remembering the families that did not survive the Holocaust. For the Top, this soundtrack of memory can be seen as a positive thing, because the list is a composition of everybody’s favourite songs, triggering their nostalgic mood. What can also be used in the perspective of the Top is the fact that it is an emblem of collective recollection in terms of music, like a certain radio station is an emblem of the commemoration. In contrast with what Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg state about the role of the radio during the commemoration, is nation building not a thing the Top is concerned with. Still, ‘the List of all Lists’ can be seen as a part of the (national) cultural heritage, as explained above. What is interesting to see, and what Bijsterveld and Van Dijck (in Garde-Hansen, 2011:64) pointed out, is that “people make use of audio technologies to elicit, reconstruct, celebrate and manage memories, or even a past in which they did not participate.” This then builds on media as an extension of memory (McLuhan in Garde-Hansen, 2011:7) because media helps shaping memory but also serves as an archive of memory (Garde-Hansen, 2011:72). For this, there are three dynamics that show how (digital) media, and also the Top 2000, ‘help’ memory both online and offline.

1. Media as backbone of recordings in the form of institutions 2. Media forms as memory aids 3. Media as memorial, cueing memory practices (Garde-Hansen, 2011:52/53)

For the Top 2000, the institution that is most important is the Beeld en Geluid Archive in Hilversum, which stores every broadcast that has ever been on Dutch Television. The building of Beeld en Geluid is also a museum and it is that building where the Café is built every year, so a memorial as well. The media forms are any device from which The Top can be listened to, this ranges from radio, tv, laptop, smartphone, and so on. The cross-medial (Müller, 2011:9) opportunities for the Top 2000 brings different features per device. A radio you can just listen to, but via your phone you can write messages that can be shown on the tv- livestream and via your laptop you can digitally visit the Top 2000 Café, where the Top 2000 is yearly broadcasted from (figure 3). Lastly, the Top 2000 can be seen as a memorial, which comes with Figure 3. Screenshot of the livestream during the song ‘Per Spoor’ by traditions regarding the event. People Guus Meeuwis on number 1909. In the grey area, a text message was sent make a habit of it to listen to it every by Jesse saying “Just being couch potatoes with the whole family in Vasse year and reminiscence over the past with the Top 2000 – Mart and Jesse”. Retrieved from: https://www.nporadio2.nl/nieuws/26964/top-2000-liveblog-dag-1- (together or alone). publiek-pakt-camera-in-het-cafe

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Short summary of the theoretical framework 127. Gotta Catch ‘M All (Pokémon Theme Song) – Jason Page

Because nostalgia used to be seen as a disease, the negative connotation of the concept prevailed in this theoretical framework. This ‘longing for’-feeling appeared to be one of the ends of a continuum. The other end has a more positive connotation with a feeling of ‘coming home’. In the middle of the continuum, we have a mix of positive and negative feelings attached to nostalgia. The idea of a reminiscent bump sparks the idea that people tend to remember more about their youth than what they did a month ago. Still, this was partly refuted above. We also saw that the media tend to frame, simplify and condense what we should remember and be nostalgic about, this is called glossing over. On top of that, the media have a rerun mentality which almost forces the consumer to look back. This forced looking back makes the difference between a nostalgic mood (emotions) and a nostalgic mode (consumable past) blurry. The last way the media frame the past is by using credentialized experts. These people have a credibility and authority to show the audience what they should know about the past or their youth. In the next sub-section, identity was defined as a patchwork of things you do, say and wear in order to show ‘who you really are’ and by which you feel comfortable to show the world. It is a fluid process due to the contextual changes over time. We saw how former punkers still felt a connection with their subculture by wearing old band shirts for example. This showed that identity is indeed fluid and a self-in-process, so a becoming rather than a being. With the internet, we have never had so many resources to find new pieces for our patchworks. Music is just a mere example of how people construct their identity. Community is often used as an umbrella-term for any kind of group, but here we distinguished two different communities. On the one hand, we have an actual community in which people are tied together on various levels and on the other hand, we have an imagined community which gives people the sense of a community. In the latter community there is an overarching and shared interest, but not everyone knows one another. Still, people can feel that they are in a community because they are surrounded by like-minded people. Lastly, we looked into the concept of collective memory. We saw that processes have the potential to become media of cultural memory, but only if they are already viewed as such. On both a personal and a collective level, collective memory can have an impact on you and your surroundings. The term ‘vehicle of memory’ exemplified that the Top 2000 is made of contributions of individual memories and distributes collective memory that shapes the experience of memory of the other. Often the Top is seen as the soundtrack of memory and the Beeld and Geluid Museum as the institution which makes memory practices possible.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

3. Methodology

As mentioned in the introduction, this thesis has a foundation of qualitative research due to its explorative character. Forsyth (2010:34) described a qualitative study as “A research procedure used to collect and analyse non-numeric, unquantified types of data, such as text, images, or objects”. I look into the way that people think about the Top 2000 and my four pillars; nostalgia, identity, community and collective memory. What intrigues me most are the opinions and motivations of why the Top 2000 is such a special music list for so many people. On the 27th of December, so in the middle of the Top 2000, I went to the Top 2000 Café with a friend of mine to gather information. It was vital to do that at that specific moment because the Top 2000 has a temporal character; December is the hay day of this spectacle, after that people do not really think about it anymore. The survey we handed out consisted of ten open-ended questions which were very general, since this was my first exploration of the public of the Top 2000 and what they had to say about it. For this part, we had 49 people answering the questions, of whom 26 were women and 23 were men. The last question of that survey was: “Can I contact you via email if I have any further questions?” and sixteen people agreed. This is the second part of my research; the follow-up interviews, to which twelve people responded. I did not make a distinction between male, female or age. Via email I contacted these people to answer ten follow-up questions on nostalgia and five follow-up questions regarding the other three topics I mentioned above; so a total of 25 questions. These were statements to which people could ‘definitely agree’ or ‘definitely disagree’ with according to a five-point Likert-scale. Next to that, I gave six options to leave a comment; one for each section and one at the end of the whole survey. The programme I used to distribute my survey and analyse it in was Qualtrics. The results that I gathered in the December-period will be used as source of general information about the participants and their engagement with the Top. Both surveys together will serve as an answer to what I explained in the theoretical frame; Will my concepts be in line with what my participants think of the Top 2000? And maybe more importantly, is there a correlation between my concepts like I explained above? I do not only base my research on my surveys, but also on what has been said about the Top 2000 in the media, so I will use a mixed method of data analysis and close reading. For this part, I will look into news articles that were posted both offline and online, and I will always link them for further reference. On top of that, I will investigate the hashtag #Top2000- Tweets, the Radio 2-account and the Top2000AGogo-account on Twitter and on Facebook I will put my interest in what the Top 2000-page itself posts to see if there is overlap.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

4. Results

My results will be separated in two parts. In both parts I will discuss the four concepts from my theoretical framework; nostalgia, identity, community and collective memory. I will start with my online investigation of the Top 2000’s media outlets and news articles that deal with the Top 2000. After that I will look into my survey. At the end of every section, there is a short summary to quickly see my results. Something that jeopardized my research was the fact that Corona happened. People were in a similar state of mind as the hazy days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Not knowing what day it is and not doing anything during those weird days only reinforces the longing for something to look back on and the Top 2000 filled that gap according to my Twitter-search. On top of that, had Radio 2 done something similar to the Top to prevent people from losing their senses. De Grote Bonanza (translation: The Big Bonanza – 20 to 27 of April; figure 4) was a week of radio where people were allowed to request songs they would like to hear instead of the prefabricated playlists of the radio DJs or programme makers. Still what the DJs requested was that these songs fit in their original format. For example, in the programme Soul Sensations, only soul and funk music that was requested would be played. The Big Bonanza (figure 4) gave me an incentive to look further than the Top 2000. NPO Radio 2 has another yearly event, which is not as big as the Top 2000, that also dives into people’s nostalgic waters. At Easter (this year 12/13 April), The Album Duo-Days listeners can send in their favourite album and then from that album the top song will be played and a hidden gem. An example is the record ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon, the top song is ‘You Can Call Me Al’ (number 762) and the hidden gem is ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ (not in the Top), which is the first song on the record. This way people are nudged to dig deep in their memory to figure out which album is their favourite and more importantly maybe, what their favourite gem is of that album. This is again a way for NPO Radio 2 to give an account of how music was made and the hidden gem gives the listeners a way to discover ‘new’ music. Together with the Big Bonanza and the Album Duo Days, we can see a pattern occur. It appears that NPO Radio 2 is the ‘cool’ version of looking back on your life and look for the songs that mattered most in your life. On the Dutch radio, there are various stations that only play golden oldies of every decade, like Radio 10 Gold, Radio 5 and Veronica. Still, NPO Radio 2 stands out in this, why? Participation from the public to make their own radio is a plausible answer. The beforementioned other radio stations also have a few lists that are similar of the Top 2000, but these do not get a lot of media attention. Because NPO Radio 2 was the first to let listeners make their own list(s), the media always kept a keen eye on this station. Another thing that makes the media look at NPO Radio 2, is the fact that this station has the biggest market share of listeners at the moment (NLO, 2020). Let us take a look at the media, namely the media outlets of NPO Radio 2 and the Top 2000 itself on the one hand and the (online) news articles on the other hand.

Figure 4. Screenshot of the Big Bonanza livestream. When looking at the first figure and this one, they are quite similar. Retrieved from: https://www.nporadio2.nl/nieuws/27946/meezingen-met-per-spoor-kedeng-kedeng- vanuit-de-trekker

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

What happens online 163. Radio Ga Ga – Queen

The media outlets I conducted my online research on the 26th of April and when searching the #Top2000, I came across three types of interactions. The first one were the official pages of NPO Radio 23 and Top 2000 A Gogo4 talking about birthdays, death days and fun facts about artists that are in the Top 2000. Of course does the NPO Radio 2 Twitter page post more than just Top 2000, but they always indicate that they talk about the Top 2000 with a watermark on the photo they post with it (figure 5, top photo) The second interaction are retweets or own tweets by the credentialized expert Leo Blokhuis. In figure 5, he nudges people to discover the YouTube page of the Top 2000 A Gogo “if you have finished all Netflix-series” (middle photo). The third interaction are the reactions of the audience. Because of Corona, this ranges from the tweets from the period of the actual Top 2000 to the time of the Big Bonanza. In the bottom photo of figure 5, an anonymized Tweeter asks NPO Radio 2 if they can make a Summer-edition of the Top, since “music brings people together.” The Facebook-page5 is not that different from the Twitter-page because a consistent image on every platform is key for an institution of memory as was said by Garde-Hansen in the theoretical framework. The tweets and Facebook-posts often contain links that go to either the NPO Radio 2 website or YouTube channel. This shows that a multimodal institution can give an account of (pop) music history at any time of the day and on any platform. This can be seen as the rerun mentality at its finest since the listeners are almost ‘forced’ to look back because the past is brought to life. The past is evoked, and with that the ‘longing’ to the past as well. Figure 5. An example of all three the interactions. At What can be said about the online presence of the Top the top, NPO Radio 2 itself posting something on the 2000, is that these accounts nudge the listener to think about the Top 2000, then below Leo Blokhuis talking about the Top 2000 YouTube channel and at the bottom an past. If it is not from the official sites, a credentialized expert anonimized member of the audience talking about a helps reminding them. Still, the audience does not need such a Corona-version of the Top 2000. Retrieved from: nudge because it also thinks on its own about nostalgia and https://twitter.com/hashtag/top2000 what fits in their definition of nostalgia; the Top 2000. (Imagined) Community on the other hand is quite distinctively shown; all the people that tweeted about the Top 2000 in Corona- time can be seen as an imagined community, because they all have the opportunity to interact with each other via Twitter, but do not have to and other than the hashtag #Top2000, they do not have a connection. This is the same for the commenters on Facebook-posts. Now for collective memory, we cannot really see a distinctive pattern, but we can see what these online outlets emphasize. This way we could also see what the institution of memory ‘thinks’ is important to know and what it wants to share with its audience. This is a more subtle way to imply a canon - or frame even - on the voters of coming edition.

3 https://twitter.com/NPORadio2 4 https://twitter.com/Top2000agogoNTR 5 https://www.facebook.com/TOP2000

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

The newspapers Before we turn to the survey results, we will take a look at some news articles and how they present the Top 2000. This way we can see if the consistent image these accounts depict are interpreted by the media in a just as positive way as the depiction. As said before, the Top 2000 is an establishment in Dutch society, it will get both positive and negative attention. Because the Top celebrated its 20th birthday in 2019, the daily newspaper AD (Algemeen Dagblad) had some radio DJs, that presented the Top, share their Top 2000-memory in the week of the Top (figure 6). Note that the AD is also distributed as a regional paper and has the same content in that paper as well, examples are BN De Stem or De Haagsche Courant. Every day the readers of these papers would get in touch on a positive note about the Top 2000 and could be nudged to turn on the radio or put the tv on to watch the livestream. Somewhere in the middle of positive and negative reporting, we have reports, interviews and opinion pieces in the papers that also direct the attention to the Top. These can be positive, like the interview with Danny Vera about his victory of being in fourth place even though he had never been in the Top before (Den Blanken, 2019), or negative/filled with critique, like the opinion piece by Nynke de Jong (2019) about what is so special (or not) about the Top 2000. On the negative side, there are mostly short online news flashes by the AD or RTL Boulevard, which are more concerned with what happens around the Top than what is actually in the Top. For example, Rob Stenders (one of the DJs) had talked for too long and that resulted in an abrupt end of a song. Because the song was only played for one minute, people were enraged that ‘he could just do that’ (Quekel, 2019A). Another thing that put a bad light on the Top was the fact that people in the app at the bottom of the livestream Figure 6. Screenshot of the impersonated two criminals that shook Dutch society in 2019 (RTL Boulevard, article header in the paper. 2019; Quekel, 2019B). The link opens the digital version of this article. The way that the Top is portrayed in the media shows that not everyone Retrieved from: is as fond of the Top 2000. The critique on the Top 2000 is often bittersweet; you https://www.ad.nl/show/20- hate it, but you cannot escape it and will probably listen to it. Because I only jaar-top-2000-een-meisje- looked into the news articles of 2019, the negative articles on the lack of stortte-in-tijdens-born-to- run~ab718769/ diversity in the Top were disregarded. The issues on the impersonators were more prominent in this edition of the Top 2000, but still there needs to be a battle fought for more women in the Top. This short subsection showed that nostalgia and community is easily imposed on the readers of the paper. Because the Top is so established, looking back on it is often with a nostalgic touch. With figure 6, you can see that the Top 2000 is part of media and culture and is at the top of the page (the page number is at the upper left side) so it is hard to miss – it has a prominent place on the page. In the red paragraph it is explained that a DJ talks about his or her Top 2000-moment, this way people can identify with the DJs. This identification can then be linked to a sense of community because people are touched by the same music and the context of the music can change because you read figure 6’s story about a girl who had a breakdown because a song by Bruce Springsteen reminded her of her father, who had just passed. For collective memory, we can see that the Top is important enough to be reported on and this way it can also be stored in archives for generations to come.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

What happened in the survey(s) 1050. Listen To The Music – The Doobie Brothers

Nostalgia, old friend? In the theoretical framework, the concept of nostalgia resulted in being a continuum ranging from a longing to a coming home. It made sense to make two statements that would be both ends of the spectrum – in that way I could find to which side people lean more.

Figure 7. Results of the statement: Nostalgia is a feeling of longing. Figure 8. Results of the statement: Nostalgia is a feeling of coming home. Screenshot from Qualtrics. Screenshot from Qualtrics.

From figures 7 and 8, we can see that the difference between the feeling is not that big. To the longing-statement, seven people agreed (eens) and to the coming home-statement, eight people agreed. What is interesting to see is that no one extremely disagrees (zeer oneens) with both of the statements. This and the fact that these statement results are close could indicate that a continuum between longing and coming home is actually the case. It could also indicate that people are indifferent about how they define nostalgia and maybe have no distinct feeling about ‘looking back’. Then I moved to nostalgia and the Top 2000 together in a statement. Ten people (strongly) agreed with the statement ‘The Top 2000 gives me a nostalgic feeling’, and two people were neutral. People seemed to love the Top 2000-feeling, but when asking whether the Top 2000-week should last longer, only three people agreed, two were neutral and thus seven people (strongly) disagreed. There appears to be the opposite of the previous question. People like the feeling of nostalgia, but not for too long. The tv programmes of the Top 2000 do not enlarge the feeling of nostalgia, since six people were neutral, two (strongly) disagreed and three (strongly) agreed. Still, people are positive about the programmes because two people were neutral about Leo Blokhuis giving the best account of a song, and the rest of the participants all (strongly) agreed. To see if the online image of NPO Radio 2 is appreciated by the Top 2000-audience, another statement was ‘I follow the social media accounts of the Top 2000 during that period’. What came back as response was an equal division of six people (strongly) disagreeing and six people (strongly) agreeing. Apparently for some it is like a Music Bible and others do not want to know about it at all and just want to listen to music. The consistent image of the media outlets appear to have different effects for different people. What is interesting to see with regard to the reading of Draaisma about the reminiscent bump, is that is does not seem to be the case with my participants. To the statement ‘the music of my generation (so what was popular when I was in my puberty) is the best’ only two people agreed and the rest of the participants were neutral or (strongly) disagreed. Still, Draaisma researched the reminiscent bump with centenarians and from my explorative study it appears I only interviewed people who were between 17 and 66 years old. Either the reminiscent bump is not that visible or it is still to come for my participants.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Another thing that can be seen in the light of the reminiscent bump is the last statement ‘I always write a memory with the songs I vote for’, to which only two people agreed. The other ten people were either neutral or (strongly) disagreed. Even though the option of writing a memory could trigger the reminiscent bump, it only had effect on two of my twelve participants. To see if these findings were similar to my explorative research in December, I will discuss one of these questions here. When I asked ‘How would you define nostalgia?’ people only once used the term longing, unlike the reading in the theoretical framework suggested. Most of the time, people described it as a happy feeling when reminiscing over the past. In a way we can link that to the feeling of coming home. The follow-up on that question was whether these participants thought the Top 2000 embodies nostalgia, fifteen out of the 49 participants either eloped the question or did not think of the Top as nostalgic. In sharp contrast with that is the fact that the majority who does see the Top as nostalgic, almost immediately mark the Top as a tradition due to the temporal character and to the fact that it has been around for over 20 years. This section exemplifies that the Top 2000 does not need to change in terms of nostalgia. It does not need to last longer and the programmes are fine as they are. The social media of the Top are in the middle whether or not they maintain nostalgia. What is striking about this section is that the reminiscent bump is not as prominent as Draaisma made it look. Still, this statement should be taken with a grain of salt since I had only twelve participants. Most importantly, this section showed that the concept nostalgia is best seen as a continuum between longing and coming home or as nothing at all. My explorative research confirms this.

Identity: music There were five statements for this section and only one of those statements was directed at the Top 2000 because music is more likely to influence identity than one intense week of music. As said in the theoretical framework, identity is a patchwork of what people do, say and wear in order to show ‘who they really are’ and by which you feel comfortable to show the world. To see if my definition has a sound base I had three statements. The first was ‘My music taste says a lot about who I am’, to which only one person disagreed, nine people (strongly) agreed and two were neutral. The follow-up statement was if their music taste shifted with who they were as a person. Three people disagreed with this statement and the other nine people (strongly) agreed. The patchwork people have as their music taste also shows in the third statement ‘My diverse music taste correlates with me being a versatile person’, to which three people were neutral and the other nine (strongly) agreed (figure 9). It is fair to say that the music taste of people is part of the patchwork they all are. For some music is not a prominent feature, but for all the versatility of music is reminiscent of their own versatility. The two remaining statements were on merchandise – ‘I wear merchandise to show what artists I like’ – and on the Top 2000 – ‘The Top 2000 is part of my identity’. For the former the participants were indifferent; six people strongly disagreed and the remaining six were either neutral Figure 9. Results of the statement: I love a variety of music, this fits or (strongly) agreed. with my character, because I have a lot of different faces. Screenshot from Qualtrics.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

So it is more likely that merchandise is not part of the identity-patchwork than having an important role. The latter statement showed real diversity in answers; Four (strongly) disagreed, four were neutral and four (strongly) agreed. What does this say? That the Top 2000 is not a market for identity per se, but it can be a springboard for people to encounter ‘new’ music that they can adopt in their patchwork. This section shows that identity and music are intertwined, but not in visible ways like merchandise. Next to that, it appears that the Top 2000 is not seen as a part of an identity. Whether this is due to the temporal character or due to the fact that this is not the music itself, but merely the canon of the music, could be researched in another paper.

Community and the Top 2000 Now we turn to the concept of community. From the reading, we ended on the definition of an imagined community, which gives the people a sense of community. Still, Van Dijck saw community building happening online – let us see how the twelve participants thought of community and community building. The first question immediately taps into the sense of community. ‘I feel a real connection with other people/strangers who also like the Top 2000’ gives us insight in how people think about the sense of community. Six people agreed to this statement, two were neutral and the remaining four (strongly) disagreed. For this matter, we see that there is a sense of community, even with people someone has never met. The second statement exemplifies how people go around this imagined community and the Top 2000 Café. ‘After I talked to people in the Top 2000 Café, we kept in touch’ showed that there is no actual community or friendship building happening in this Café since no one (strongly) agreed with this statement and to which ten people (strongly) disagreed, one person was neutral and one person stated this statement did not apply on their experience. The last statement that explicitly dealt with community was ‘The Top 2000 gives me a sense of community’ (figure 10), to which eight people (strongly) agreed, one person was neutral and three people (strongly) disagreed. It is admirable to see that people are so invested in the Top 2000, even though this survey was distributed Figure 10. Results of the statement: The Top 2000 gives me a sense of community. Screenshot from Qualtrics. in May 2020, so not even close to the Top. Moving on to the continuing scene of participants, I asked my participants’ opinion on the statement ‘Leo Blokhuis is inseparable from the Top 2000’, to which one person was neutral and the remaining eleven (strongly) agreed. This shows that the consistency on the end of the Top 2000 is highly valued. This is a very stark contrast with the three previous questions. For the last statement of this concept, I asked whether my participants ever wrote something on a forum, like Van Dijck suggested. Eleven of my participants (strongly) disagreed and one person was neutral. I think this is not a conclusive answer to the question whether people write about the Top 2000, but this is more an indication that the days of the old fora are over (Van Dijck wrote her opinion on community building in 2011). Nowadays people express themselves more on Twitter instead of making entire blogposts. Also the platform of Reddit has most similarities with fora and appears to be more ‘of the now’. Interestingly enough, I found a Reddit-page6 on the Top, which was already established in 2013, so people do talk on fora about the Top 2000, just not my participants.

6 https://www.reddit.com/r/Top2000/

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

This section showed that community is still difficult to define in terms of the temporal Top 2000. Even though people feel a connection with people who like the Top 2000, no one keeps in touch with the people they met in the Café. This difference in thinking there is a sense of community and trying to establish a community is clear in these two statements. It is summarized in the third statement that the majority does and the minority does not feel a sense of community in terms of the Top 2000. Still, the credentialized expert and familiar faces of the radio DJs are much appreciated. Lastly, even though fora are old school, people still come together online via Reddit, just not my participants.

Canonization of memory For this final section, we look into collective memory and the canonization of pop music, as the Top has been called. The first statement on this topic is ‘The Top 2000 is a part of the collective memory’, to which all (strongly) agreed except one. This is contrasted by the statement ‘The Top 2000 is a canon of pop music’ (figure 11), of which the answers are far more diverse. Eight people (strongly) agreed, one person was neutral and the remaining three (strongly) disagreed. So even though a collective memory and a canon have the same purpose, namely passing down crucial moments and music, my participants have very different opinions on this. I think the difference lies in the fact that collective memory appears like a bigger thing than a definitive canon of a certain type of music. Turning to personal memory then, nine people stated that they had personal memories of the Top 2000, one person was neutral and two people disagreed. This shows that the Top can both make collective and personal memories. Then we still have to distinguish if the Top 2000 is a soundtrack of memories in general or that the Top 2000 keeps the memories of their personal past alive. For the former, eleven people (strongly) agreed and one person strongly disagreed, so we see that the memory-soundtrack and collective memory are almost synonymous. For the latter, only eight people (strongly) agreed, three were neutral and one person disagreed. This is in line with the statement at the start of this paragraph. In short, we see that collective memory and a soundtrack of memory can be seen as synonymous. How a personal memory is stored and seen in context with the Top has a much weaker link, but the link is still there.

Figure 11. Results of the statement: The Top 2000 is a canon of pop music. Screenshot from Qualtrics.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

5. Conclusion and Discussion

For this last chapter, it is time to actually answer the research question I posed in the beginning of this thesis. In the conclusion, I will first answer my sub-questions in order to make sure we are all on the same page. We will finally have an answer on the question: ‘How does the Top 2000 exemplify and maintain nostalgia?’ After that, I will take apart my research and look for things that could have gone better or for some things that I have overlooked when investigating in the discussion, limitations and further research-section.

Conclusion 1. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen

To give a well-rounded answer, I will use my findings from the theoretical framework and compare this to the findings from my online research and the surveys. This way, I do not let a stone unturned with regard to my (sub-)questions. As said before, I will start with the sub- questions and then answer my main research question.

How do voters of the Top 2000 show affinity with their (music) identity during the Top 2000?

From the reading in the theoretical framework, I concluded that identity is a patchwork. In this patchwork music can be a vital part, but every person is different. In general the music that is played when you are in your puberty will have the most influence on you in your later life. With this in mind, it should be evident that my participants, being voters of the Top 2000, would wear something that shows their (music) identity. Even though I saw a lot of people from my explorative research in merchandise of their favourite artist, it does not seem a ‘standard’ look for them as was found in my explorative research and survey. In my survey it became apparent that my patchwork-metaphor is true because the majority reacted positively on my statements regarding their (shifting) music taste. To touch upon Frith’s experience of music, identity and music are a becoming rather than a being, this is reflected in the way people vote for the Top 2000 as well. These things are never the same, shift over time and gets renewed. This is a possible reason that the Top 2000 is not often seen as a part of identity. In a nutshell, people showed affinity with their (music) identity in the way of merchandise during the Top 2000, but after that they use more subtle ways to present themselves.

To what extent is community building necessary in relation to the Top 2000?

In the theoretical framework, it appeared that the common definition of community would not do in the context of the Top. That is why an imagined community would be more in place. The Top gives a sense of community, but this community is not all-year round. Apart from the imagined community of fans/listeners, we have the continuing scene of participants that Smith talked about. This scene are the presenters of the Top, because they rarely change and so become the ‘faces’ of this event. From the online research, we can see that this imagined community with its continuing scene of presenters is more and more established in the media, with a peak in the week of the Top and ever lingering in the back all year round. In the surveys it came to the light that people indeed feel a sense of community, but do not actively try to establish one. Even though there are plenty of opportunities on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, people are fine with one week of intense listening to music. On the Reddit- page this is most explicitly done, because only around the time of the Top people post things.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

An answer to this sub-question is that people do not have the urge to make a Top 2000- community, so in that way they do not need community building because there is no community to build. This does not take away that there are plenty of opportunities to establish a community, like keeping in touch with people you met in the Top 2000 Café or reaching out on Reddit or Twitter. For the sake of its temporal character, it is best to call the listeners of the Top an imagined community.

How has the Top 2000 become a medium of cultural memory and thus a part of collective memory?

A medium of cultural memory is based on the communication through media: it always has the potential to become a part of the cultural memory, but then it needs to be perceived as if it is already a part of it. The Top 2000 was very nifty in this and has established itself already in 1999. Because it was repeated over the years it has become a medium of cultural memory. From my online research we see that the Top is incredibly important when the music marathon is actually broadcast – almost every newspaper discusses it. This adds to the foundation of this medium of cultural memory. In my theoretical framework I rightfully used McLuhan’s statement about the media being an extension of memory, because we have seen throughout this thesis that the Top is on every platform with a consistent image of memory. Also Van Dijck’s vehicle of memory is applicable to the Top and its way to becoming part of collective memory. The Top-car is made of individual contributions (the votes) and distributes collective memory (the Top itself) that shapes every other person. In sum, we see in the surveys that the Top is seen as a part of the collective memory, but is not a canon of music per se. Still, it had the potential of becoming a medium of cultural memory and with my participants saying that the Top is a soundtrack of memory, the Top met that potential and is now part of the Dutch collective memory.

How does the Top 2000 exemplify and maintain nostalgia?

When reading the sub-questions, we already see a lot of examples of nostalgia that is brought to us by the Top 2000. For the identity sub-question, we see that merchandise, whether from the Top itself or from an artist, is an example of showing your identity and what you look back on and feel nostalgic about. Still, this merchandise appearance does not need to be one of the standard outfits to show who you are. For the community sub-question, there are online platforms like Reddit and Twitter where people can reach out to their fellow Top 2000 enthusiasts, but people rarely do that. This ties in with the fact that the community of the Top is an imagined one (in the sense of Anderson’s definition, not an imaginary community), which only gives a sense of community. For the collective memory sub-question, we get help from the media to find out what we ‘should’ be nostalgic about. Also the credentialized expert Leo Blokhuis helps us pick a song to vote for while he educates us about music. Maintenance of nostalgia has everything to do with the status of medium of cultural memory. The Top is an established institution that comes back every year and reminds people of songs they had long forgotten. The Top is an institution with all the necessary tools to make people look back, but whether that is in a fond way like coming home or in a more sad, longing way is somewhere in the middle. Either way, we do not want to get rid of the Top. This ties in with Bell’s definition of a calendrical ritual (2009:102), since the Top has marked the end of the year for over twenty years and shows Post’s ritual-sacral fields of leisure in action (2012:181; more will be explained below in the limitations). In these fields, we can recognize basic ritual elements, but we often do not see the event as a ritual per se and the Top is a prime example of that.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Furthermore, we ignite our nostalgic flame when old songs that we have long forgotten suddenly show up in the Top. Together with the heightened nostalgic atmosphere in winter (Wildschut and Seehusen, 2011:25) and the comfortable feeling of Christmas holiday, the Top has achieved a marvellous position in our collective memory. Additionally, nostalgic mood (emotion) and nostalgic mode (consumable past) blur more and more with the Top 2000. This maintenance gives way to a new concept: popular nostalgia. The Top glosses over (in Bissell’s definition) so many decades that listeners want to go back to a time they were not even born yet. Still, this popular nostalgia and the ‘traditional’ nostalgia bring us together to sing ‘anywhere the wind blows’7 just a few moments before the new year.

Discussion, limitations and further research 4. Roller Coaster – Danny Vera

I opened this thesis with the idea that the Top 2000 is seen as a tradition or a ritual, but I never really went into the definition of tradition or ritual and neither did I investigate these concepts. What could be a cornerstone of this, is Bell’s definition of calendrical rituals which turn “the events of a historical narrative into a type of cyclical sacred myth, repeated annually, generating powerful images and activities of corporate identity.” (2009:105). Here the event is the time when the songs were recorded, the cycle of hype-voting-listening is repeated annually, the powerful images is the online and offline visibility of the Top and finally the songs that were voted for are connected to people’s identity. Also Post’s ritual-sacral fields were left out of the picture. One of these zones in particular: the field of leisure culture, where the basic qualities of rituals are recognized, but that the event is not explicitly seen as a ritual (2012:181). Tradition and ritual seem to linger in between words, because tradition, ritual and nostalgia are often times used in the same sentence. I should have picked up on it in my explorative research in December, since people already then referred to the Top 2000 as something they yearly watch and visit. Still, in my conclusion we see this feeling reflected in the fact that the Top is an established institution that comes back every year and reminds people of songs they had long forgotten. Another limitation is the elephant in the room: Corona. The pandemic has been a double edged sword for me, because on the one hand I was not able to do interviews with my participants offline, but on the other hand it helped me see that NPO Radio 2 has a model for nostalgia on which they fall back if they do not know what to do (Album Duo-Days and The Big Bonanza). Also this similar state of mind people had at the start of quarantine let people be reflective on their past and posed themselves the question what they were missing in these hazy days: the Top 2000 apparently. There is a certain irony, a paradox if you will, in the answering of my questions. Even though the Top 2000 is seen as part of the collective memory of The Netherlands, the songs in the list are not particularly seen as such. These long forgotten songs that are still in the List are barely on the radio anymore but still have a nostalgic feel to it, like Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (number 1934 in the Top). In this regard, we should divide collective memory into two parts; common collective memory, which entails events that had an impact on society like 9/11 in America, and nostalgic collective memory, which entails people looking back on things that had impact on them personally like where you were when 9/11 happened. Here nostalgia can be both positive and negative.

7 The last words of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, the number one of the Top 2000 for over fifteen years.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

Then for my research itself, I may have accidentally primed my participants. Priming is subconsciously influencing people on what to think or do. Because I asked my participants about something they were happy about or have fond memories of, it is more likely that the other questions were also answered more positively than they would have normally be answered if it was for something my participants did not have much interest in. Another discussion point with regard to the research itself is the few participants – with twelve people it is hard to get a conclusive answer that I could generalize, unless we live in the film ‘Twelve Angry Men’ (1957). Lastly, I would like to give an incentive for further research on the topic of the Top 2000. Since I just looked into how music is related to nostalgia, identity, community and collective memory, it could also be interesting to look into the (lack of) diversity of songs in the Top itself and what that does to people and collective memory. Over the past few years there have been manifests about the lack of female voices in the Top and this appears to be a problem, but how can you nudge people to vote for more women in the Top? Are these female singers not part of collective memory? Another question for further research could be about the genres of the Top 2000. It is always said that this is about pop music, but what about the other genres? Of course there are Nirvana and Metallica, but what would happen if there would be an Alternative Top 2000 with anything but pop music? Or more concretely, is this List of evergreens merging into one genre, ruling out others?

Acknowledgements 416. Thank you for the music – ABBA

I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Mr Hoondert and my friends for keeping up with my excessive talking about the Top 2000 and for keeping me sane.

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

6. Appendix A: Survey Questions

Onderzoeksvraag: Hoe is de Top 2000 een voorbeeld van nostalgie en hoe onderhoudt de Top de nostalgie?

1. Hoe laten de stemmers/het publiek van de Top 2000 affiniteit zien met hun (muziek) identiteit? (5 vragen)  Muziek laat mij beter mezelf zijn  Ik draag merchandise van artiesten om te laten zien wie ik ben  Mijn identiteit schuift mee met mijn muzieksmaak  Mijn identiteit is een lappendeken omdat mijn muzieksmaak breed is  De Top 2000 is onderdeel van mijn identiteit 2. Tot op welke hoogte is het bouwen van een gemeenschap nodig in de (imaginaire) gemeenschap van de Top 2000? (5 vragen)  Ik voel een echte connectie met andere mensen/onbekenden die ook de Top 2000 leuk vinden  Nadat ik met mensen in het Top 2000 Café had gepraat, heb ik nog contact met ze gehad  Leo Blokhuis en de Top 2000 zijn onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden  Ik heb wel eens wat geschreven op een forum over de Top 2000  De Top 2000 geeft mij een gevoel van gemeenschap (van meerdere muziekliefhebbers) 3. Hoe is de Top 2000 een medium van cultureel geheugen, en dus onderdeel van het collectief geheugen, geworden? (5 vragen)  De Top 2000 is onderdeel van het Nederlandse collectieve geheugen  Ik heb persoonlijke herinneringen gemaakt door/met de Top 2000  De Top 2000 is een canon van pop muziek  De Top 2000 is een soundtrack van herinneringen (in het algemeen)  Media en de Top 2000 zijn een verlenging van mijn geheugen en herinneren 4. Nostalgie: het concept, het gevoel (10 vragen)  Nostalgie is een gevoel van verlangen  Nostalgie is een gevoel van thuiskomen  De Top 2000 laat mij nostalgisch voelen  De week van de Top 2000 is te kort, ik zou graag meer willen zien van vroeger  De muziek van mijn generatie (wat hip was toen ik in mijn puberteit zat) is het beste  De tv-programma’s rondom de Top 2000 laten mij nostalgisch voelen  Mijn muzieksmaak is een mix van mijn smaak en die van mijn ouders  Leo Blokhuis geeft het beste weer hoe een liedje tot stand is gekomen  Ik volg Radio 2 via social media ten tijde van de Top 2000  Ik schrijf bijna altijd wel een herinnering bij de liedjes die ik opstuur als ik stem

BA – Online Culture – Thesis: There is only one Top 2000 – Version 1 July 2020

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