Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions)

Schiller, Melanie

ISBN 10: 1786606224 / ISBN 13: 9781786606228

Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2018

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 379861998

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions)
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786606224
• ISBN 13: 9781786606228
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Melanie Schiller is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.