Replaying the Past: Belgian Pop Band dEUS’s Return to Early Work

Over the last ten years, full performances of classic albums have become increasingly prevalent in popular music. This chapter investigates the interest pop bands exhibit in their own past work. Is reverting to a classic album an exercise in nostalgia? Is it a form of self-organized heritage management? Or is this cultural practice a welcome attempt to bring a new form of involvement back into a pop culture that has become increasingly fragmented and distant through globalization and technology? In pop music, the practice of replaying old work is not without controversy. For bands and their audiences, there is a lot at stake in the decision to get involved in reperformances of classic albums. It presents them with a number of complex cultural dilemmas, especially around issues of value, identity, credibility, and legitimacy. Taking the reperformance of the album The Ideal Crash by Belgian band dEUS as a case study, this chapter explores these dilemmas by investigating the interests of bands and their audiences in the (re-) creation of (a contemporary version of) the past. This issue will be examined by conceptualizing performances of landmark albums as expressions of “late style” or “late work” in the careers of pop bands.