Perspectives on German Popular Music

Michael Ahlers, Christoph Jacke, Michael Ahlers, Christoph Jacke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In this book, native popular musicologists focus on their own popular music cultures from Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the first time: from subcultural to mainstream phenomena; from the 1950s to contemporary acts. Starting with an introduction and two chapters on the histories of German popular music and its study, the volume then concentrates on focused, detailed and yet concise close readings from different perspectives (including particular historical East and West German perspectives), mostly focusing on the music and its protagonists. Moreover, these analyses deal with very original specific genres such as Schlager and Krautrock as well as transcultural genres such as Punk or Hip Hop. There are additional chapters on characteristically German developments within music media, journalism and the music industry. The book will contribute to a better understanding of German, Austrian and Swiss popular music, and will interconnect international and especially Anglo-American studies with German approaches. The book, as a consequence, will show close connections between global and local popular music cultures and diverse traditions of study.

Part I

Histories and foundations

1 A fragile kaleidoscope

Institutions, methodologies and outlooks on German popular music (studies)

Michael Ahlers and Christoph Jacke

The present volume attempts to assemble the full range of methodological and disciplinary approaches to popular music within the Germanophone countries. In co-ordinating such a project, however, it quickly becomes clear how fragmented and fragile such a kaleidoscope of assorted perspectives has to remain if one does not wish it to become a multi-volume compendium, and if one wants to complete the project successfully and by an agreed-upon deadline. Just as rapidly as pop keeps reinventing itself and re-citing itself, German-speaking Europe presently continues to experience a rapid emergence of new publications, studies, organizations and journalistic or academic discourses about it.

The present work could not have been realized in its current form if it were not for the essential motivation and persistence of Derek Scott, the long-standing editor of this series. For several years, we have been pursuing the notion that Germanophone scholars conducting research on the pop music produced in Switzerland, Austria and Germany might one day achieve greater visibility for their work by publishing it in a prestigious English-language compilation. This ambitious project has gained crucial support most notably from the very same Derek Scott. At a 2012 meeting in Basel, he first told us that he had been wondering for some time why it always seemed that it was scholars in Canada, Wales or elsewhere who were doing the research on German pop music – and why we Germanophones were not doing it ourselves. That conference likewise elicited a great deal of discussion about inter- and transdisciplinary historiographies as well as methods for the scientific observation of pop music cultures (cf. Scott, 2014; Rösing, 2014; Wald, 2014). There the same three points were repeatedly made: Firstly, it is apparently not such an easy matter for Germanophone researchers to examine their own pop music(s). Secondly, there is an apparent tendency among these observers to address and analyze the ‘cool subcultures’ instead of attending to the more broadly-based mainstream ones. And lastly, both the observing subjects as well as the pop music figures under investigation are mostly males. We vowed to Derek Scott that we would remedy these impressions, and here we are at least making the effort to do so.

We are also genuinely indebted to Stan Hawkins and Lori Burns, the ‘new team’ at the present book series. To begin a book with such expressions of gratitude determines the path we intend to tread with this introductory essay. For as interested as the aforementioned colleagues were in a book like this one, they were equally sceptical of the rather unusual – perhaps even immodest – format in which these more than thirty contributions were collected. In the following, then, it will be our objective to render transparent the internal logic and consistency of our approach and the resulting contents. We will endeavour to provide a common thread for readers while also reflecting critically on possible blind spots in the collection. Finally, in a closing prospectus, we will encourage the next stages of research in the field in the near future. And all this will be done against the backdrop of Germanophone research on popular music, which has largely been – and continues to be – quite institutionalized. At the same time, we are under no illusions that the ‘German’ descriptions Scott (and others) have called for are capable of replacing ‘non-German’ ones. After all, in principle, it is really only through transnational/cross-cultural interaction that a clearer, more complex picture of pop cultures can be presented. Moreover, as is well known, the cultures of pop music and research on them can only truly be examined from the perspective of the present day, describing those cultures ‘thus far’ and suggesting how they might develop ‘from now on’ (see Mitterer, 1999; Schmidt, 2007). Nonetheless, to assess the one without the other is doomed to failure – an especially pivotal aspect when regarding pop in these times of ‘glocal’ dynamics, major migration flows, novel and confusing crises, fundamentalistic simplifications and all-embracing digitalizations. A broad understanding of pop music culture therefore appears valuable for framing our research domain, thereby enabling us to overcome elitist boundaries between enlightenment and entertainment – as well as pop-elitist ones between trivial and more demanding pop music – and to take popular music (in the most genuine sense of the term) more seriously (see Frith, 2007). It should similarly be possible to illustrate the predominant contexts of pop music (media) cultures. For in our understanding, pop(ular) culture designates a commercialized social domain that produces subject matter in an industrial, mass-mediated fashion. This subject matter is then utilized for pleasure and processed further by numerically significant populations, who in turn produce new music, and media offerings. The agents of pop culture are under particular (time) pressures to innovate. This understanding applies to multiple levels of the mass-mediated communication process: from production and distribution to reception and (further/post) processing. Participants in pop culture are especially resourceful in the ‘economy of attention’, driven by the mainstream and the dissent which it requires (see Jacke, 2013b: p. 272).¹

In pop music cultures in particular, the aforementioned dynamics – and their statics – can be read in close proximity to the material, virtually in seismographic fashion. This phenomenon has been described quite aptly by the prominent British music journalist Mark Fisher in terms of the current pop music ‘retromania’ (see Reynolds, 2011) and ‘hauntology’:

If Kraftwerk’s music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.

(Fisher, 2014: p. 9)

Current status

As demonstrated in Helmut Rösing’s and Peter Wicke’s contributions to the present volume, researchers in musicology have long found it challenging to accommodate ‘pop-specific’ subjects and phenomena. Nor was this a specifically East/West German issue after World War II or before and after reunification (die Wende). Austria, Switzerland and other Germanophone countries have also found it difficult to include the appropriate contents or practices in academic discourses. One can maintain even today that tendentious (sometimes even vehement) reservations are observable within the communities of the individual disciplines. It is mostly thanks to Rösing, Wicke and other contributors to the present volume that ‘popular music studies’, in its complete methodological and theoretical breadth, has been able to achieve its current status in today’s German-speaking world.

In that world, as well as elsewhere, a no less important role has been played by the media, by economic and political framing conditions and by professional and fan-based journalism – at least in terms of social and economic acclamation for their cultural contents. Hence, it is no wonder that scientific analyses of popular music, seen as a nucleus of pop culture, were always already inflected by intellectual perspectives deriving from media, business, political science or advanced journalism. Nor is it surprising that musicology (under the influence of cultural science) only gradually opened itself up to an expanded analysis of pop music. It is quite strange to admit that to date there are only a very few German musicological researchers who adapted to the British critical musicology approach as it was introduced by Joseph Kerman in the 1980s, and specified by people like Susan McClary (1991), Derek Scott (2003), Lawrence Kramer (2006) and Stan Hawkins (2012). But some researchers of the younger generation calling themselves ‘popular musicologists’ do integrate these theoretical and methodological approaches in their own work, having read not only Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Wicke, but also Sara Cohen, Franco Fabbri, Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, Lawrence Grossberg, Dick Hebdige, Ann E. Kaplan, Richard Middleton, John Shepherd, Philip Tagg, Jason Toynbee, Sheila Whiteley and all the other influential key scholars who paved the way for research on popular music. Besides, there still seems to be a great divide (not only intergenerationally, but more as a sort of ‘belief’, ‘school’ or, at least, ‘bias’) inside musicologists’ understanding of ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. German ‘historical’ musicology still is focused mostly on highbrow music, such as Eurocentric classical, modernist and avant-garde music from the mid-twentieth century, as well as on jazz music. And they pretty much stick to notational approaches, or biographical and editorial work on ‘Kunstwerke’. On the one hand there is a kind of ‘systematical’ musicology that integrates empirical methodologies, sociological and psychological topics, still sometimes not very common with the complexity of popular music’s cultures and characteristics. Their protagonists tend to be more open-minded toward cultural and media studies or critical musicology. On the other hand, there are a growing number of ethnomusicological researchers focusing on popular (world) music and inter/transcultural, inter/transnational, and inter/transdisciplinary contexts, too. Moreover, in these countries – like the UK and USA (Robert Christgau, Mark Fisher, Simon Frith, Greil Marcus, Ann Powers, Simon Reynolds, Jon Savage) – a very important influence on academic research on popular music has been intellectual criticism and journalism. Journalists like Roger Behrens, Martin Büsser, Diedrich Diederichsen, Clara Drechsler, Olaf Karnik, Hans Nieswandt, Tine Plesch, Mark Terkessidis and many others have been dealing with popular music and its contexts long before this topic has been established at academic institutions.

Therefore, as the editors of this book, we do not focus on a single discipline or angle of vision but instead on the entire field of study and the specific challenges it poses. Following Douglas Kellner’s concept of a multiperspectival cultural studies (Kellner, 1995), focusing on “the three main music industries: recording, music publishing and live performance” (Jones, 2012: p. 10), its multiple texts and contexts, and realizing that in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, so many research from nearly all established disciplines have recently been done and constitute something like a field of research called popular music, media and culture studies, we have tried to collect authors from disciplines as different as musicology, media, cultural and gender studies, ethnology, philosophy, historical and literary studies, sociology and intellectual journalism to present their perspectives on ‘German’ popular music. We have thus asked the authors to approach their materials and the phenomena as closely as possible by applying a broad understanding of pop music culture, along with their respective disciplinary, interdisciplinary and (increasingly) transdisciplinary toolbox of theories and methods.

In what follows – in this introduction as well as in the rest of the book – the editors understand German popular music to be that music being produced in Germanophone countries, even if the artists or producers were not born there and even if their productions are not in German. Here we are influenced by the analysis of global and local repertoires presented by Andreas Gebesmair (2008, 2009), among others.

The current state of research on popular music at the institutional level presents itself thus: In Switzerland, Austria and Germany there are only a few university professorships that make direct reference to popular music in their names, and there are a few professorships at colleges of art and music academies. In this context, we will not be addressing the numerous options for private, commercial pop music training in the areas of production, performance or the music business, since such offerings do not commonly have a comprehensive research mission.

In the meantime, one can find in the German-speaking countries a broad assortment of active researchers, all of them with diverse perspectives and competencies but also a commitment to researching various aspects of the global and local practice of pop music. Among their ranks are literary scholars and linguists, sociologists and psychologists, media and communication scholars, ethnologists, gender researchers, experts in education, cultural studies practitioners, theologians and (ever more) economists. The contributing authors in this publication were chosen to represent these approaches and perspectives, even though not every methodological detail or theoretical discourse might be found on a limited number of pages per article. As a result, there are presently a number of professional societies involved in the study of popular music. And new divisions, sections and working groups are constantly being established. As Peter Wicke put it quite aptly and enthusiastically at the founding workshop of one of these sub-disciplines just a few years back (and in the presence of both editors of this volume): ‘Pop music can easily put up with more than one scholarly organization’. In accordance with the panoply of disciplines just named, one also finds in these groupings cultural-scientific approaches alongside musicological, media studies or ethnomusicological ones. Yet unfortunately what is observed is too frequently little more than a juxtaposing of research activities. ‘Genuinely’ interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary projects are still comparatively rare (cf. Burkhalter, Jacke & Passaro, 2012; Jacke & Passaro, 2014), as are comprehensive publication series which are transdisciplinary and transnational and in which diverging standpoints are discussed on equal footing. In the process, the still inherent-sounding distinction between musicology (in its systematic and historical forms), ethnomusicology, music pedagogy and ‘the rest of them’ is beginning to break down. In the end, pop music must be examined from multiple vantage points if it is to be understood in its full complexity. Put differently: we have to be conscious of the ‘gaps’ we are exposing ourselves to when we assume we are merely ‘observing’ music, sounds, images, performances, media coverage or lyrics of a band (cf. Middleton, 1993; Diederichsen, 2014). Clearly we do not expect that ‘popular music studies’ will become its own mainstream discipline, despite having become established at a certain level in Switzerland, Austria and Germany (in both research and teaching), and despite having launched larger international networks. It is to be concluded, nonetheless, that academic, cultural-political and educational institutions have opened themselves up to and displayed mounting interest in pop music and its contexts. In addition, this is clearly occurring because the interested parties themselves have grown up in pop: they are popular music and media-cultural natives. That may also explain why increasingly sympathetic encounters are taking place between academics with some practical experience and music practitioners with some academic background, thereby making possible findings that researchers and educators find compelling – and not only readers or students.

The established Germanophone publication series have in recent years reflected some of the trends and priorities that we will now survey briefly without any pretence of objectivity or completeness. For starters, we have seen an intensified focus on the object of analysis at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a development that takes on a variety of expressions. In the Germanophone academy, it alters between research primarily focused on musicology (e.g. Appen et al., 2015), intertextual analyses (e.g. Altrogge, 2000; Jost, 2012), ethnomusicological studies (e.g. Burkhalter, 2013; Mendívil, 2008), postcolonial and other critical reflections and interventions (e.g. Adam et al., 2010; Behrens, 2003; Büsser, 1998; Holert & Terkessidis, 1996; Ismaiel-Wendt, 2011), research on stars and celebrities (e.g. Borgstedt, 2008; Jacke, 2004; Keller, 2008; Robertson-von Trotha, 2013) as well as analysis of the visualization of pop music in videos and on television (e.g. Keazor & Wübbena, 2005 and 2009; Neumann-Braun, 1999; Neumann-Braun & Mikos, 2006; Neumann-Braun, Schmidt & Mai, 2003; Schmidt, Neumann-Braun & Autenrieth, 2009). This publishing landscape is in turn enriched by an array of studies on scenes, styles, genres or individual phenomena. Furthermore, there have arisen several large and important sub-communities aligned with certain phenomena or theoretical approaches. In the German-speaking countries, the major emphases, indeed constants, within the discourses include metal studies (e.g. Bartosch, 2011; Elflein, 2010; Heesch & Scott, 2016), hip-hop studies (e.g. Bock, Meier & Süß, 2007; Güler Saied, 2013a; Rappe, 2010), sound studies (e.g. Bonz, 2015; Kleiner & Szepanski, 2003; Schulze, 2008) and gender issues (e.g. Brüstle, 2015; Eismann, 2007; Mania et al., 2013; Strube, 2009; Villa et al., 2012). As might be expected, a larger role is being played by theories of meaning (e.g. Friedrich, 2010; Petras, 2011), the aesthetics of popular music (e.g. Appen, 2007; Fuhr, 2007), theories of pop culture (e.g. Bielefeldt, Dahmen & Großmann, 2008; Bonz, 2001 and 2002; Diederichsen, 2014; Hecken, 2007; Heidingsfelder, 2012; Huck & Zorn, 2007; Jacke, Ruchatz & Zierold, 2011; Kleiner, 2006; Maase, 1997) or issues such as authenticity and performativity (e.g. Düllo, 2011; Helms & Phleps, 2013; Kleiner & Wilke, 2013). In addition, new emphases have emerged in recent years surrounding voice, history and globalization. While the studies on voice are specifically focused on early vocal recordings and singing styles (cf. Pfleiderer et al., 2015), or, for instance, on the voice in hip-hop (e.g. Hörner & Kautny, 2009; Rappe, 2010), a second emphasis has been on processes of canonization and writing history, along with historiographical problems (e.g. Geisthövel & Mrozek, 2014; Helms & Phleps, 2008 and 2014a; Mrozek, Geisthövel & Danyel, 2014). With respect to globalization, there is an abundance of works grounded in theories of postcoloniality, political power and the economy (e.g. Binas-Preisendörfer, 2010; Friedrichsen et al., 2004; Lange et al., 2013; Paulus & Winter, 2014; Reitsamer & Weinzierl, 2006).

As a consequence of the institutionalizing of research in popular music, German-language introductions, manuals and methodological aids have also appeared. Some of the introductory works have been written for students in a particular university programme (Jacke, 2013a); others are more oriented toward the discipline as a whole (e.g. Appen, Grosch & Pfleiderer, 2014). The manuals that have appeared summarize theories of popular culture (e.g. Goer, Greif & Jacke, 2013; Hecken, 2009; Hügel, 2003; Schramm, 2009; Wicke, Ziegenrücker & Ziegenrücker, 2007) or combine methodological approaches (e.g. Heesch & Höpflinger, 2014; Hemming, 2016; Kleiner & Rappe, 2012; Warneken, 2006). Consequently, there are increasingly discussions on how to disseminate one’s multifaceted professional knowledge, as documented in symposia and publications (e.g. Ahlers, 2015; Binas-Preisendörfer, Bonz & Butler, 2014; Binas-Preisendörfer & Unseld, 2012).

Genres, scenes and (academic) styles

Just as in a kaleidoscope light is polarized and consequently refracted, so too are there (productive) polarizations to be found in the chapters of this volume. Along with the possibilities conveyed for a diversity of genres and styles – of writing and thinking styles, for instance – this book sets out to emphasize features, make selections and convey impressions that may initially be fragmentary but nonetheless hopefully form a completed mosaic. However, it would not be honest if we failed to mention some of the significant cultural aspects of German popular music, which are clearly missing from this volume. Germany, Austria and Switzerland each have a varied landscape of multimillion-euro festivals, each of them associated with specific youth or musical cultures and their practices. The spectrum ranges from big reggae festivals (the ‘Summer Jam’) and hip-hop ones (the ‘Splash Festival’) to electronic festivals (‘Farbgefühle’, ‘Nature One’, ‘Open Air Frauenfeld’), major multigenre events (‘Rock am Ring’) and metal weekends (‘Wacken Open Air’). Unfortunately, the present volume does not analyze festival cultures, either sociologically or economically. All the same, there has been extensive work done on them in Germanophone scholarship examining sociological and economic aspects of the (live) music industry and advertising and public relations (e.g. Clement & Schusser, 2005; Flath & Klein, 2014; Gensch, Stöckler & Tschmuck, 2008; Tschmuck, 2003; Wang, 2013).

Equally regrettable is that no part of any chapter is devoted to German reggae and dancehall culture, a music scene that is highly dynamic and has a large audience that crosses generational lines as well as its own parties, fes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Histories and foundations
• Part II Arts and experiments
• Part III Mainstreams and masses
• Part IV Niches and subcultures
• Part V Politics and gender
• Part VI Germanness and otherness
• Part VII Electronic sounds and cities
• Part VIII Media and industries
• References and further reading
• Index