Music, sound and cultural memory – how sonic culture shapes identity, politics and history

From Tropicalia to techno, from OpenLab.fm to political hip-hop – how sound carries memory, builds community and challenges power

Music does something that other forms of cultural expression cannot quite do. It is simultaneous and it reaches everyone in the room at the same moment, producing a shared experience that is both intensely private and irreducibly collective. It is embodied – it works through the body, not just the mind, bypassing the conscious defences that allow us to resist other forms of communication. And it is temporal as it exists in time, and it carries time within it.

These qualities make music one of the most powerful instruments of cultural memory and political identity. Songs carry the history of the communities that sing them. They encode the experience of oppression and the aspirations of liberation in forms that can be transmitted across generations. They create the sense of collective identity that makes solidarity possible.

Music, Sound & Cultural Memory gathers Pen vs Sword’s writing on all of these dimensions of sonic culture: the politics of music and who controls it, the history of musical traditions that have grown up in resistance to dominant culture, the relationship between sound and identity, and the ways in which music carries and creates cultural memory.

It is also, necessarily, a hub for our partnership with OpenLab.fm, the innovative radio station that provides the sonic backdrop to Pen vs Sword and for the re-OpenLab series that archives and celebrates that partnership. Music is not merely something we write about here. It is part of what we are.

Radio, mixes and sonic journeys

Music here is not treated as background or decoration, but as a form of transmission. The radio sessions, long-form mixes and curated selections gathered in this space trace lines of connection between cities, scenes and historical moments, creating a cartography of listening that moves across time as much as geography. What emerges is a cultural record written in rhythm and atmosphere and a way of documenting how particular periods felt, not just how they were described.

From the intimate, globally shared rooms of the Radio Guesthouse Pandemic Sessions to the reactivated memory-fields of Radio Guesthouse Revisited, broadcasting becomes a practice of holding space. These works carry the texture of specific encounters – friendships, influences, late-night discoveries, dancefloors and solitary listening – and preserve them as living environments that can be re-entered. They are not simply archives of music; they are archives of presence.

Within re-OpenLab, the scope widens into sonic world-building. Landmark journeys by Robert Miles, Mark Farina and Bedouin sit alongside the Architextures and Exit Planet Earth series, where sound operates as research, architecture and speculative thought. Across these works, the mix becomes an story in another form: a structure through which memory, technology, emotion and movement are composed into a continuous cultural argument that can be heard as much as understood.

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Music as political resistance – from slave songs to hip-hop

The tradition of music as political resistance is one of the oldest in human culture. Slave spirituals in the antebellum United States encoded both religious faith and practical information about escape routes in forms that their owners could not decode. Work songs imposed a human rhythm on the inhuman pace of forced labour. The blues carried within it the entire history of Black suffering and Black survival, a history that mainstream American culture preferred not to acknowledge.

Lowkey the British-Iraqi rapper whose work addresses Palestine, racism, the arms trade and imperial violence and represents a lineage that runs directly from the blues through soul through Public Enemy to the present: music that refuses the commodification of Black cultural expression and insists on using sonic form for political ends. His work raises all the important questions about music and resistance: how to maintain political integrity within an industry designed to extract commercial value from cultural production.

The poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah who refused an OBE and spent his life making verse that challenged racism, prisons and injustice, traverses between music and literature with the same ease that distinguishes the best of the Jamaican dub poetry tradition from which he drew. His work is both musically alive and politically committed without sacrificing either quality.

Tropicalia and the politics of musical form

Tropicalia emerged in the late-1960s Brazilian movement that fused bossa nova, rock, samba and visual art under the conditions of military dictatorship and is one of the most important and most instructive examples of music as political resistance. Its leaders, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Tom Ze understood that the form of their music was itself political: that the mixing of Brazilian popular tradition with international rock, the embrace of electric instrumentation that conservative nationalists considered a form of cultural imperialism, were acts of political defiance as direct as any protest slogan.

Veloso and Gil were arrested by the military government in 1968 and later forced into exile in London. The regime recognised, correctly, that their music was dangerous, not because of any specific message it contained but because of what it modelled: a freedom of imagination, a refusal of cultural policing, a demonstration that Brazilian identity could be plural, hybrid and irreverent rather than the monumental, nationalist thing that the dictatorship required.

Tropicalia’s legacy has been enormous. It demonstrated that musical form itself – the mixing of traditions, the embrace of contradiction, the refusal of purity – can be a form of political statement. It showed that the politics of music is not confined to the politics of its lyrics.

Electronic music, community and the underground

Electronic music, whether house, techno, jungle, drum and bass and their many descendants has a distinctive relationship to cultural memory and political identity. House music emerged in Chicago in the early 1980s, in the clubs that served the Black and Latino gay communities excluded from mainstream culture. Ralph Lawson’s Back to Basics legacy and the Leeds scene he helped build represents the British strand of this tradition: music that created community outside and against the logic of the mainstream industry.

The re-OpenLab series, Pen vs Sword’s partnership with OpenLab.fm, through which we archive and celebrate the history of underground electronic music reflects our understanding that this music is not separate from the political and cultural questions that animate everything else we publish. It is part of the same project: the attempt to understand how culture and power relate, how communities build themselves through shared experience, and how sound can carry meanings that words alone cannot reach.

Music and memory – how songs carry history

Songs outlast the moments that produced them. A Garland for May Day, Walter Crane’s 1895 image for the socialist newspaper The Clarion, represents the visual equivalent of what the best political songs do: art that carries the history of a movement within it, that makes that history present for those who encounter it, that creates the emotional bond that holds a community together across years of difficulty.

The Solidarity movement in Poland drew on music (the songs of the resistance), the chants of the shipyard workers, the cultural memory embedded in Polish folk tradition as a form of solidarity as important as the political and legal strategy. Understanding how music and cultural memory function within political movements requires taking this dimension as seriously as the institutional analysis.

The digital revolution has transformed the conditions of cultural memory in ways that are still being worked out. The Pirate Bay’s history from Napster to the present is, in part, the history of this transformation: the long, unresolved battle over whether music should be a commodity to be enclosed or a cultural resource to be shared.

Sound and identity – music as a way of knowing who we are

Music is one of the primary ways in which people know who they are, not in the sense of biographical or demographic identity, but in the deeper sense of the values, the histories, the emotional orientations and the communal affiliations that constitute a self. Tiokasin Ghosthorse, the Lakota teacher and broadcaster whose work on First Voices Radio carries Indigenous sonic traditions to global audiences, represents a tradition of using sound to assert cultural survival and resist cultural erasure. His work is a reminder that the politics of music is not only about the content of songs but about who has the microphone, who has the platform, whose sounds are heard and whose are silenced.

Zaffar Kunial’s poem G is a meditation on language, identity and the echoes between England and Gaza which demonstrates how the sonic properties of language itself can carry political meaning. The poem works by compression and the weight that a single letter can carry: a reminder that the boundary between music, poetry and political speech has always been permeable.

The politics of sound, silence and who gets to make noise in public space also runs through our account of Darcus Howe the broadcaster, journalist and activist, who is one of the most important Black British voices of the late twentieth century. His insistence on speaking, on being heard, on refusing the silence that British institutions preferred, is as much about sonic culture as it is about political argument.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Sound carries what words leave out and images cannot hold. It is no accident that every movement explored on this site has had a soundtrack, that resistance and solidarity have always found their emotional core in music before they found it in argument, that art as a challenge to power has always had a sonic dimension alongside the visual one, that the communities built around Culture and Capital – in the underground clubs, in the pirate radio stations, in the streaming debates, are communities held together as much by shared sound as by shared politics.

The narratives examined in Language, Media and Truth include the narratives that music tells us about who we are, where we come from, what we have survived, what we are still reaching for. And the futures imagined in Future Imaginaries would be poorer without the sonic ones: the songs that make a different world feelable, before it becomes thinkable. Listen harder. That is also a form of political education.

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WANT MORE?

Browse the full music and sound archive, including radio sessions, long-form mixes, artist encounters and sonic explorations that extend beyond the featured journeys above.

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  You might also be interested in these neighbouring territories, where culture is encountered through image, language, systems and future imaginaries – moving between them reveals how sound and music carry memory, shape perception and resonate within wider structures of power.

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