Recommendations of the editorial team
Is the major music industry a bloodstant vampire? I asked myself that last night when I was finally sitting in the cinema to watch the new Ryan coogler film “Blood & Sinners” (“Sinners” in the original). I am actually much too tender for horror films, but a horror film of one of my favorite directors – about music, about emancipation in deep south, life, love, death and again: music? For that I even do bloody Blood sucker scenes. Of course I don’t want to spoil, but let’s say: If Lauter is put on vampires by a talented musician and then it is about pouring him out with money and promises to tear him out of his world and to put it on-you think of the behavior of many major companies, streaming providers and other actors in business: inside and in the interior and in the interior and other players not always make all their promises come true.
Of course, this is not the only pretty over -the -top metaphor of the poor film that is not exactly on metaphors. Above all, it is about racism and empowerment, how the Black Community in the southern United States tries to create independent structures in the Jim Crow years. And how these structures are constantly in danger – through structural oppression, exploitation, violence. The promises of freedom and equality, they not only come from the vampires, the price is your own blood. Real life does not have this to offer. Quite dark.
Uncertainty as a feeling of the hour
But maybe that’s why the vampire strip is the film of the hour: the present also feels pretty bleak – and the future doesn’t feel much better. First and foremost, “Sinners” has been made by a black filmmaker about African-American history for a black US community. But the feeling that we, as a society, agree that we want to tackle discrimination and inequality? This is also extremely unsettled here.
Let’s stay exclusively on the subject of (pop) culture and cultural policy: The designated Chancellor Friedrich Merz apparently perceived the broad criticism of the Berlin cultural senator Joe Chialo and the massive and poorly organized supposed austerity measures by the Senate. And then thought: Oh, the cultural world, it is not yet angry enough – we’ll show it now.
From the neighbor to the minister
The result of this course of thought: Now his neighbor from the beautiful Bavarian Tegernsee, Wolfram Weimer, should take over the office of Minister of Culture and Minister of Culture. He is a publisher of his sign, once founded the political magazine “Cicero”. Under the roof of the publishing house, which his wife and he founded and previously headed together, the website “The European”, but also other publications such as “Business Punk” and “Market and Medium -sized business” appear. The fact that he had a lot to do with culture in the sense of cultural business is new-rather he organizes network meetings such as the “Ludwig-Erhard summit” and so on and publishes thoughts on conservatism, or what he thinks that has caused a lot of criticism in the past few days. Terms such as “multi-cultural lie”, strange thoughts on queer coming outs, fear fantasies about the “continuation of your own blood”-which is unsightly scratched along blood-and-floor ideologies-and neocolonial dreams of “expansion strength” in Europe have been found in the spectrum of political positioning a little further than just Conservatism can be located. And of the conflict of interest that arises because his wife will continue the common media company.
It is difficult for pop culture without funding
All of this has been disputed in the media for days – social and classic – enough, with petitions, editorials and an exceptionally good takedown by the publisher of the conservative FAZ, Jürgen Kaube Höchstlabt (by the way The best dispatch of the year, now). Those who celebrate the appointment of Weimers are pleased that an allegedly conservative wind would blow through the federal cultural policy-even if the office was shaped more than the three years by Claudia Roth, especially by the CDU Minister of Culture Monika Grütters. But suddenly it no longer applies – maybe because she is a woman? Or because she actually knew what cultural business was? And they also forget that a large part of the budget for deeply classic cultural institutions such as the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Ownership, the literary archive in Marbach and of course operas are used land on land.
But why write about all of this in a pop culture column? Because pop culture is also affected- as a relatively tiny part of the area of responsibility of the Minister of Culture and Minister of Culture. What many forget: Without funding institutions such as the initiative Music, musicians can often hardly finance new albums from a wide variety of genres – even pop. Clubs, venues or festivals also owe their ability to offer a broad musical and pop -cultural offer, often state funding. You can see that critically, but the reality remains: our pop culture landscape would have even more difficult. But how should a Minister of Culture, who talks about the “Multi-Kulti lie”, with the reality of pop culture-with all its diversity, its contradictions and openness-can cope with?