ABSTRACT
A dialogue between radical scholarship, political change and critical history was forged. The Popular Memory Group, which met between October 1979 and June 1980, drew attention to the limits of academic history. Significant songs are the grammar and fodder for our troubles, pleasures, joy and pain. Popular culture is a conduit for popular memory, moving words, ideas, ideologies and narratives through time. It is distinct from both collective memory and history. Popular culture, as a memory conduit, has two functions: to translate and transform. Finding a radical or resistive popular memory is difficult, perhaps impossible. It is a consensual and mainstream formation, knocking the sharp corners off hard-edged differences and forceful critiques. The tracing of popular memory through the conduit of popular culture is a promiscuous intellectual business, refusing to obey disciplinary boundaries. Popular culture slops clumsily into the cup of memory.
