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.

For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.

This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for “writing” national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.

Popular culture today manifests itself in a dense network of styles and genres, while the aesthetic preferences of the audience are highly differentiated. Besides, popular culture also implies a diversity of aesthetic strategies, discourses and value systems that traverse the symbolic demarcations between styles and genres and are effective across different artistic fields and individual media. Aesthetic concepts such as camp, retro or trash are expressions of a transgressive mode of production that facilitates a multitude of cross-connections between aesthetic spaces of experience. The volume brings together authors from different disciplines who approach aesthetic concepts in popular culture on a historical, theoretical and methodological level, analyze them on the basis of various aesthetic phenomena, or discuss aspects relevant to their theoretical contextualization, such as the emergence and establishment of artistic practices and aesthetic value systems.

Particularly since the 1950s, cars and popular music have been constantly associated. As complementary goods and intertwined technologies, their relationship has become part of a widely shared experience-one that connects individuals and society, private worlds and public spheres. Popular Music and Automobiles aims to unpack that relationship in more detail. It explores the ways in which cars and car journeys have shaped society, as well as how we have shaped them. Including both broad synergies and specific case studies, Popular Music and Automobiles explores how attention to an ongoing relationship can reveal insights about the assertion and negotiation of identity. Using methods of enquiry that are as diverse as the topics they tackle, its contributors closely consider specific genders, genres, places and texts.

While attention has been paid to various aspects of music education in China, to date no single publication has systematically addressed the complex interplay of sociopolitical transformations underlying the development of popular music and music education in the multilevel culture of China. Before the implementation of the new curriculum reforms in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was neither Chinese nor Western popular music in textbook materials. Popular culture had long been prohibited in school music education by China’s strong revolutionary orientation, which feared ‘spiritual pollution’ by Western cultures. However, since the early twenty-first century, education reform has attempted to help students deal with experiences in their daily lives and has officially included learning the canon of popular music in the music curriculum. In relation to this topic, this book analyses how social transformation and cultural politics have affected community relations and the transmission of popular music through school music education. Ho presents music and music education as sociopolitical constructions of nationalism and globalization. Moreover, how popular music is received in national and global contexts and how it affects the construction of social and musical meanings in school music education, as well as the reformation of music education in mainland China, is discussed. Based on the perspectives of school music teachers and students, the findings of the empirical studies in this book address the power and potential use of popular music in school music education as a producer and reproducer of cultural politics in the music curriculum in the mainland.

The development of German pop music represents a fascinating cultural mirror to the history of post-war Germany, reflecting sociological changes and political developments. While film studies is an already established discipline, German pop music is currently emerging as a new and exciting field of academic study. This pioneering companion is the first volume to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject, charting the development of German pop music from the post-war period 'Schlager' to the present 'Diskursrock'. Written by acknowledged experts from Germany, the UK and the US, the various chapters provide overviews of pertinent genres as well as focusing on major bands such as CAN, Kraftwerk or Rammstein. While these acts have shaped the international profile of German pop music, the volume also undertakes in-depth examinations of the specific German contributions to genres such as punk, industrial, rap and techno. The survey is concluded by an interview with the leading German pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen. The volume constitutes an indispensible companion for any student, teacher and scholar in the area of German studies interested in contemporary popular culture.

This book tells the story of the history of popular culture in Europe since 1800, providing a framework which challenges traditional associations that have formulated popular culture firmly in relation to the post-1945 period and the economic power of the USA. Focusing on key themes associated with modernity – secularisation, industrialisation, social cohesion and control, globalisation and technological change – this synthesis of research across a very wide field fills a gap that has long been felt by students and educators working in the field of popular culture. While it is organised as a history of cultural forms, it can also be used across a wide range of social science and humanities programmes, including media and cultural studies, literary studies, sociology and European studies. Covering the subject with a broad number of themes, this book discusses popular culture through visual culture and performance, games, music, film, television and video games. Popular Culture in Europe since 1800 will be of interest to anyone looking for an engaged but concise overview of how book production and reading practices, visual cultures, music, performance and sports and games developed across Europe in the modern period.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks' struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, this study reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.