Last week, the Prime Ministers of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia proposed to promote German-language music more – and in doing so warmed up a debate that has been boring since 1996.
Don’t we have any other problems? Last Monday, Mario Voigt (Thuringia, CDU) and Sven Schulze (Saxony-Anhalt, CDU) felt compelled to publish a guest article in the “Welt” under the title “We need more space for German voices” in which they complained that there was too little German-language music on the radio – three percent overall, ten percent on public broadcasters. In 2013 it was ten and 16 percent. And because they care so much about the debate, the article was probably at least largely generated by an AI. The journalist Jonathan Peaceman first pointed this out to Bluesky, then daily newspapers asked the two state chancelleries. The answer was profound: “Of course, we also use modern digital tools in our work, including AI applications. The article was created independently and edited several times in the editorial process.” Aha.
Not in the mood for “homelandness”
But it’s not about the AI slop text, but about the debate itself – because Schulze and Voigt warmed up a discussion that has been going on since 1996. At that time, Heinz-Rudolf Kunze called for a quota for music from Germany in “Spiegel”. He himself was disgusted by it, he said at the time, but otherwise young musicians in Germany wouldn’t have a chance. Herbert Grönemeyer supported the idea, but bands like Tocotronic, Element of Crime and Blumfeld rejected it. Sven Regener from Element of Crime was reminded of the GDR, which had a 60 percent quota for music from the GDR and the socialist economic area (also to save GEMA fees). According to Tocotronic, Blumfeld and Tocotronic were not in the mood for “Germanism and homeland-ness.”
The topic could no longer be killed; every few years someone would pull it out of the mothballs: in 2002, the CSU and the German Language Association (the one that is pretty unanimously rejected by linguistics and today stands out for its proximity to the AfD) demanded a radio quota. In 2004, the demand came from the other side of the political spectrum: the then governing parties SPD and Greens, who proposed a voluntary commitment for radio stations. It was supposed to be 35 percent German-language music – but no one on the stations was interested. In 2015, the Junge Union saw the vintage debate lying around abandoned and warmed it up again, because the then young politician Franz-Robert Liskow (today, like his father, a member of the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) was a Schlager fan and saw the genre as underrepresented on the radio. Maybe he wasn’t aware of the existence of pop stations. And now the CDU again – this time with Schulze and Voigt from the executive chair.
Bypassing the voters’ problems
They remain vague with their demands: They don’t want to affect the freedom of broadcasting, so they don’t demand fixed quotas like in France, Canada or Australia, but rather vaguely “funding and cooperation between broadcasting, the music industry and festivals”. Because, as they wrote – or had the AI write: “Especially in a time when many things are becoming more global, faster and more interchangeable, the need for orientation is growing. For something that lasts. Our language is such an anchor. Our culture is such an anchor.”
And so back to the initial question: Don’t we have any other problems? Even someone like me, who has dedicated his life to music, was very irritated by Schulze and Voigt’s choice of topic. Yes, it’s an election campaign and you have to draw attention to yourself – but Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt in particular currently have completely different problems: rural exodus, shortage of doctors and skilled workers, infrastructure problems. At the same time, rents are also rising in cities like Magdeburg, Jena and Halle. Elections will be held in Saxony-Anhalt at the beginning of September, and the AfD could even achieve an absolute majority. In this situation, Schulze and Voigt thought that culture war and identity politics would be a good idea. Does this reflect the needs, wishes and issues of the population? I highly doubt it.
Don’t be afraid of good music
Which doesn’t mean that I find the topic irrelevant – on the contrary, I’m annoyed that it was brought to the public in such an extremely stupid form instead of being addressed seriously. Because there really is a problem with music on the radio. Even public broadcasters believe that they have to adapt to “audibility” – whatever that means. The result is music that nobody really wants to hear, but which you think won’t really bother anyone, so listeners stick with it. The most recent example of this course: the switch of the station Cosmo to the new concept “1Live Street”, a hip-hop station. What’s worse – the racist name for a concept designed to displace the country’s best-known multicultural broadcaster, or the level of cringe that the name implies? Hard to say.
The controversy over Cosmo is just one aspect. In fact, local and subcultural scenes receive far too little space on German radio. A few years ago, the music journalists Melanie Gollin and Martin Hommel took up the topic and for their campaign “Where’s the noise?” spoke to radio stations like FM4 from Austria or BBC6 from the UK who do it better. And lo and behold: you just have to have the courage, the audience celebrates it. This is obviously lacking. Instead, the fear reigns that listeners will switch off – when in fact they are more likely to switch off because they have little use for a music program that relies on maximum irrelevance.
Local but multilingual
There are language quotas in France and the French-speaking Canadian region of Quebec, and quotas for local music in Australia and the rest of Canada. They seem to be working to some extent: French-speaking artists are very successful in France. But in Germany it’s not as if German-language music doesn’t find its way into the charts – it’s just not shown on the radio. It would be more important to find ways to represent local music bubbles and thus really promote young talent. Regardless of the language in which he sings. Because Germany is a multilingual country – and it always has been. From Danish, Sorbian and French speaking minorities to dialects to our current multilingualism where artists living here can sing in English, Turkish, French, Patois, Kurdish, Spanish, Arabic and every other language in the world.
Think of the Bavarian Fado by Kofelgschroa from Oberammergau and Derya Yıldırım with her international band Grup Şimşek from Hamburg, who are currently touring the USA with songs in Turkish.
Think of the documentary “Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm – Love, D-Mark and Death” about the music of guest workers in Germany, or the band Engin from Mannheim, which makes indie in Turkish, German and English – and so many more. Maybe someone should send Schulze and Voigt a playlist. Guaranteed to be created without AI.