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 1 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 2 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 multi- modal 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 3 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. 4 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.