Recommendations of the Editorial team
There would be a lot of pages of paper to clarify what pop music is actually. Music journalist Wolfgang Zechner already makes this in his introduction “Completely weightless: shine and misery of German -speaking pop music in 99 songs” clear. However, the author can explain why Pop is not entirely uncomplicated in Germany: “Pop is multicultural, pop is revolutionary, pop is appropriation, pop is mixing, pop is confusion. Pop is one thing above all: not German.”
But before Zechner embarks on a predominantly personal and therefore pleasantly unakademized search for 99 songs that wrote popular music history in Germany – from Freddy Quinn’s “Homesicken” to “You do not wear love in you” by real and some bonus songs – he makes a detour to America. Elvis Presley’s first appearance in the Ed Sullivan Show is interpreted as something like the big bang of pop music. He released huge energies. Like an earthquake, whose vibrations can still be felt today. This singer not only has “Hound Dog” in his luggage, said the author. No, it is more: “Elvis is the first public person who has a abdomen.”
Sure, without sex and the appearance of Revolution, pop was not available, and that has remained so. But of course pop music can do much more. She also sells over her, as it were, and then puzzling artists. The question of her authenticity becomes an erotic game. Not always with libidious added value, because sometimes they are just a fraud or a gimmick.
Pop wants to be fun
Zechner dedicates a lot of attention to the hit alleys of the 50s and 60s. He explains the phenomena behind it (nostalgia, exoticism, longing for home and liability), but never stirs up as a cultural scientist with final -looking hypotheses.
If you like, this is also the strength and weakness of the book. For once, an unclouded, ideological bombast, is simply ruled by a music, the smallest common denominator of which is to be fun. And that applies, you suspect, as well as for “amplifiers” from Blumbeld as Hape Kerkeling “The whole life is a quiz”.
Then you miss the intellectual magnifying glass about the irony, which is quite appropriate to the subject. Zechner’s analytical dissenter, which unfortunately hardly cuts into the balloons of the GDR music, has roughly the following sound: “The art figure Blümchen was the perfect incarnation of the omnipresent celebration (the 1990s). The content and musical were nothing. The main thing was that the electronic beat popped.”
The fact that the collection of the songs only lasts until 1999 could suggest a second volume. But it is also reinsurance to deal with those pop epiphanies, confusion, bombasteries and bowls of joke songs that are actually already interpreted. So the author has more space for his private view. He suggests a never -tired listener who is also not too good to clearly name the frequent failure of German musicians in lightness and elegance.
For gold graves, however, there are also all sorts of forgotten (re) discover, such as the “sung hypnotic” by Bambis from Austria with the Popferne title “Melancholy”.