Sonderausgabe

Textpraxis special issue #5, cover: People with music instruments in bavarian costume

Sonderausgabe # 5 (2.2021)

Wie politisch ist der deutsche Pop?
Immanuel Nover and Kerstin Wilhelms

How is Pop music political? The genre’s diverse audience, its reach and creativity make Pop music an equally well-fitted medium for critique and subversion as well as for propaganda and populism. The lines, however, are often blurry. This issue seeks to investigate this spectrum Pop music offers to take a look at the ›political poetics‹ of the genre. Primarily, the articles collected adress issues of style, rhetorics and poetics of ›the‹ political in Pop music. In particular, the articles focus on Pop music’s ability to create identities and political entities, Nationality, ›Heimat‹, Gender, ›Gemeinschaft‹ to name a few. Pop music has indeed a ›natural‹ inclination towards discussing and constructing ›identities‹, the articles of this issue mainly revolve around a specific set of questions: How does Pop music draw from and engage with feminist concepts, with deconstruction and critique? How does it deal with, benefit from, or portray topics such as antisemitism, sexism and racism?