The really important music trivia question

EVER been cornered by a bunch of musical hipsters and caught shamefaced not knowing that Ritchie Valens's La Bamba reached No2 on the charts in 1958?

EVER been cornered by a bunch of musical hipsters and caught shamefaced not knowing that Ritchie Valens's La Bamba reached No2 on the charts in 1958?

It's the kind of musical knowledge that gets a real workout on television. Spicks and Specks attracts viewers to the ABC, RocKwiz revels in its cool credibility on SBS, and somewhat more obnoxious musical game shows such as Don't Forget the Lyrics and The Singing Bee are distending all over the commercial stations.

Music fans may feel that they're making out like Liberace, but all this TV trivia leads to some serious questions about the nature of music in popular culture and how we value this most personal and evocative of art forms. Is any of this TV good for musical culture or is it just elevating insignificant details above content and creating a canon of forgettable tunes that slip into popular culture under some nostalgic veil? Isn't it all just context with no core?

Immersing oneself in popular culture almost guarantees a mental cache of trivia, but it can be tough to know what kind of value to place on it.

We may feel a connection with someone like Rob Gordon from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, whose connection to trivia suggests a warm and vibrant emotional history. But there's only a small leap to Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, whose fascination with Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News results only in cold and self-indulgent rants that are empty of experience, empathy and emotion.

So it's not necessarily safe to assume musical trivia enriches us when, just as likely, it dissociates us from the music at its core. Are these musical quiz shows giving us less reason to take the time to listen to what we're talking about? Whether enjoyably hokey, like Spicks and Specks, or persuasively hip, like RocKwiz, there's always a sense they are appealing to a predefined nostalgic clique more interested in a factoid checklist than cultural expansion.

There's no doubt Spicks and Specks is one of the best showcases for Australian talent. I don't care that it shamelessly rips off British show Never Mind the Buzzcocks more than the Beatles ripped off Chuck Berry, and I curse the departure of co-host Myf Warhurst from musically reputable Triple J to commercial radio like an angry folkie shouting "Judas!" at Bob Dylan (which happened at the Manchester Free Trade Hall concert, not London's Royal Albert Hall as generally believed, trivia buffs).

But, however enjoyable it may be, its popularity draws on a superficial and commercial attachment to music: musically, it's no more revealing or provocative than a random episode of Name That Tune or the Richard Wilkins extravaganza, Keynotes.

Let's not forget that bluntly factual knowledge is always the easiest thing to pass off as actual intelligence. And it's increasingly easy to get the impression that higher education in popular areas such as music or film is a crash course in collecting factoids rather than extended and focused study. Greil Marcus's books on Dylan, for example, such as the exhaustive Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, may seem to be filled with endlessly detailed minutiae, but they also wrestle with more abstract ideas of what the music is about, where it comes from and what it means. It's portentous and pretentious, but it captures more than the knowledge that the house Dylan's band lived in at the time was called Big Pink.

A culture of trivia is a neat way to reduce shared experiences into an easily marketed checklist of nostalgia, so pity the fool who can't draw on the appropriate miscellany. Similarly, the reliance on commercial evaluation, collective memory and sales and marketing details highlights the short, simple and often unremarkable hits and stars, while anything that falls outside the narrow boundaries of top 40-style success is relegated to the sidelines.

There may be reverent nods reserved for every mention of unquestionable rock royalty such as Dylan, but other interesting and highly influential figures such as Tom Waits, Ed Kuepper or the Eels, who should be the leading figures in today's musical canon, just end up as incomprehensible oddities next to yet another question about The Final Countdown by Swedish glam metal band Europe.

So if this prevalence of trivia in music appreciation is a result of baby boomers' collector mindset, are we stuck with it for good?

Simple nostalgia will always play a part in any generation's pool of knowledge. But with music's status as a commercial commodity changing all the time, it's entirely possible that this kind of communal memory or marketing details such as record sleeves and sales positions will diminish, even if they don't disappear entirely (what do most people know about the last Radiohead album aside from the fact that it was free?).

After all, a report by Jupiter Research a couple of years ago suggested that young people had very little concept of "music as a paid commodity" which, while it suggests no shortage of problems, is bound to have some benefit if it stops musical intelligence being defined by a knowledge of superficial commercial triggers, cheaply traded back and forth like a new accessory for a Bratz doll. ("Thank God! There is still hope!" wrote Copenhagen musicologist Eyolf Ostrem in response to the Jupiter report.)

In fact, it might just sound the death knell for shows such as Spicks and Specks if disposable music actually becomes, well, disposable.

Oh, and by the way, Valens's La Bamba didn't make No2 in 1958. Donna did. La Bamba was only the B-side. Ten points.