ABSTRACT
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, situated on the Cleveland waterfront of Lake Erie, stands next to a naval reserve facility and a coast guard mooring station. As if to defend or lay claim to certain national meanings that might be seen as under attack from the Rock Hall next door, the naval reserve and coast guard have mounted an impressive outdoor museum of their own, consisting of fighter planes, missiles, antiaircraft guns and ships. A visitor to the Rock Hall might easily notice the unlikely juxtaposition of these two projects dedicated to the shaping of public memory, and be struck by the contradictions that immediately present themselves. Although both museums feature an ensemble of artefacts and monuments centred on appeals to memory, they present an initially startling contrast in their iconography and in their appeals to different imagined communities. The Naval Museum, with its outdoor displays of F1 and Blue Angel fighter planes, missiles, a submarine, a patrol boat, landing craft, and various antiaircraft guns and cannons, summons concepts of history and nation that seem to be diametrically opposed to the messages communicated by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, with its array of talismanic objects, including the guitars used by Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Holly, the sunglasses worn by Roy Orbison, and the sixth-grade report card of Jim Morrison. Despite their seeming opposition and incommensurability, however, these two sites are deeply linked in the US national imaginary, a connection that is made explicit in one of the first objects that greets the visitor to the Rock Hall: the enormous American flag that served as the backdrop for Bruce Springsteen's ‘Born in the USA conceit tour. In the juxtaposition of weapons and the imagery of rebellion and protest, the two museums offer a strikingly dialogical iteration of the significance of public memory—and its contested character—in defining concepts of nation, history, and more abstract concepts such as ‘freedom’, a word which has very different meanings in the two settings I describe.
