Perspectives on German Popular Music (Studies)

Researching popular music in Germany started off with comparable problems and a lack of institutional and general academic appreciation as it did elsewhere. But, since music itself is now being considered a complex economic, aesthetic and cultural system and practice, a variety of disciplines have engaged in the field of popular music studies over the past decades. The English scientific community could now absorb some of these findings.
The project that is going to be discussed in this panel, aims to range widely, moving from literature and sociology to media studies, journalism and, especially, musicology. Using case studies of German acts from the past 50 years or so, the project’s contributions illustrate specifics of the artists and country, and stress individual models of analysis and theory. These will undoubtedly prove useful for the English-speaking scholarly community around the globe.
For the first time native popular music researchers, artists and music business professionals from Germany, Austria and Switzerland focus on “their own” popular music in the widest sense (from subcultural to mainstream phenomena, from the 1950s to today’s latest acts). The project 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, theses analyses deal with very original specific genres like schlager and krautrock as well as transcultural genres such as punk or hiphop. There are additional contributions on characteristically German developments, such as music media, journalism, and economical or music industry aspects.
In this panel we would like to present, most of all, some of the project’s fascinating results, which are selected contributions out of the 34 papers of the project. The presentations have been selected to cover of a wide range of the historical and systematical approaches, disciplines, gender and generational aspects. A paper about the challenges and problems of such an ambitious project will frame the panel.