Why does Germany love Antifolk*?

I'm going to think about this more but here are my first reactions:

I believe Germany is one of the richer, larger, countries in Europe. So, more people have more disposable incomes for culture. From my experience, I find a lot of Germans speak very good English. So, I'm sure this helps since Antifolk is typically pretty wordy. To me, Germany's infrastructure resembles the US the most of any of the European countries I've been to. A lot of the roads and landscaping remind me of The States (especially around the midwest). Post WW2 US relations and the ever growing East German immersion into "The West" probably has a lot to do with that too. Maybe it's just a coincidence but some of our best German gigs are in the East.

On a personal side Schwervon has been touring Germany since 2003. Every headlining tour we do is better than the last. There is a lot of diversity in Germany with many different towns and different scenes. It's great for touring, very much like the UK in this way. The roads are typically well kept with no tolls. Dating back as far as the Beatles, and I'm sure before, Germany seems to have had a unique relationship with Rock and Roll and Western Pop music as well.

There is of course the huge popularity of Adam Green in Germany which probably has as much to do with this as anything. And sometimes it's just chance. Someone told me once that the Adam Green song "Emily" very much resembled a classic German pop hit from many years before, you might want to look into that?

This is controversial territory but, perhaps, (maybe due to their history as a country?) Germany is less likely to stereotype and more willing to embrace the unique qualities of "American Culture" (Which, I'm sure many Europeans would argue is an oxymoron), of which I think Antifolk is very much a part of? I guess that could lead into a discussion about how, inherently, "American" Antifolk is? Okay, I'm speculating quite a bit here... and I'm not totally comfortable generalizing the consciousnesses of entire countries but it's interesting stuff to think about. What I can tell you is not many people know or care much about Antifolk in Kansas. But there's still some good stuff going on here.

(This is great Deenah. Thanks for posting this. Obviously, I could talk a lot more. I'm down for a Skype! We're heading out for a little 3 day tour but I'll try to write more later. Hope you're doing well. XO, MMM)

Considering there have been at least 20 acts to come through the Sidewalk during my tenure alone who have come through the festivals and established themselves as regular members of the scene, I'll take the "lack of new blood" theory as a sign of my personal failure to excite the old guard into getting out of their house and attending anything that doesn't involve someone they know. I was never much of a carnival barker.

The Wire is definitely antifolk, Jeff.

That guy would be able to tell you better than me since he's been around long enough.

"Ways of Seeing Antifolk" by Jon Berger!

Since I wrote my thesis about Antifolk, I feel like I have to chip in here a little bit, too. I agree with Jeff that the PR campaigns that Rough Trade/Sanctuary invested in definitely lead to Antifolk being present in the German mainstream media.

But another point has been overlooked - the more "academic" reception of the Antifolk scene by music journalists and cultural studies acadamics, mainly by the late Martin Büsser and the team of the Mainz-based publishing house 'Ventil Verlag' and their cultural studies magazine "testcard".

After 9/11 and the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a major wave of Anti-Americanism (even within Leftist movements and political parties) sweeping all over Europe, while at the same time, the German mainstream pop music scene openly embraced a new "patriotism," re-branding Germany as a "hip and cool" nation that - in the light of the wars and the Bush administration - should distance itself from English-language, American pop culture.

Büsser and the Ventil Verlag tried to counter this nationalistic narrative by providing examples of the "other America," which at the same time, was exemplified by the resurgence of New York indie rock (The Strokes etc.), free/freak folk (CocoRosie etc.), underground hip hop (Anticon), Canadian avant-garde post-rock (Constellation Records, etc.) - and the Antifolk scene. Büsser and his friends praised most of the Antifolk scene's music because it represented exactly the opposite of the "new" German patriotic pop scene - it wasn't interested in the nation, the romantic, or any other "traditional" narratives but instead valorized DIY aesthetics, failure, sloppiness, a certain naiveté and (to a certain extent) instances of queerness.

Büsser was also able to spread the word about the scene in bigger mainstream publications like the free widely distributet music magazine 'Intro' but I think that the biggest "mark" he left was on the readership of testcard and other Ventil Verlag publications: independent promoters and music fans who then decided to book Antifolk musicians who decided to come to Germany to tour. Most of these promoters (myself included) come from an academic background and see their jobs as promoters or bookers as unpaid "community work" - a big difference to the UK, where the job as "promoter" is seen more like a "regular" job like being an accountant or a mailman.

Since most of the promoters invested their private funds into setting up shows, they could/can pick whatever they like and don't really have to worry about the size of the audience. The Antifolk scene can - to this day - rely on a big network of niche independent promoters and venues. But I don't think that this network is limited to Germany, France for example also has a great network of non-for-profit 'associations' that also continue to put on shows. France also has a similar theoretical groundwork for an academic reception of US underground scenes, e.g. the weekly magazine Les Inrockutibles.

At the same time the first Antifolk acts were touring in Germany, journalists and critics writing for the 'feuilleton' (culture) sections of big newspapers (FAZ, etc.) also reviewed Antifolk shows very positively, even using critical theory (Adorno!) to praise the scene's aesthetics, routinely comparing and contextualizing the scene in a bigger American folk music context. This high culture reception also led to an instant "musealization" of some Antifolk musicians - while they were of course still active. I remember Martin Büsser finding it quite hilarious that a reading of his book on the scene in Berlin was immediately followed by a show of the musicians he had just theorized a few minutes earlier. Even the very high culture government-funded venue Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of Cultures of the World) in Berlin invited Jeff to co-curate a musical program dedicated to New York folk scenes that also involved a couple of Antifolk musicians. This development is something quite European (but not limited to Germany) - certain American scenes and subcultures that don't get a lot of praise in the US get picked up, re-interpreted and, like a "toolbox," are used to comment on the "host's" own national popular culture.

While in the UK, a specific "British" Antifolk tradition emerged, I would say that Germany never really saw its own "German" Antifolk tradition. On the one hand, this is of course due to the Nazi's co-optation of anything 'folkloristic' during WWII (for Büsser, Antifolk wasn't only anti-folk, but could also be read as anti-Volk, against old and new nationalisms), basically making it impossible to create a progressive folk music culture. Germany never had a comparable leftist folk music scene like the US experienced pre-WWII with Woody Guthrie etc. On the other hand, lots of artists in the German 'indie' scene have been employing very similar methods and approaches like the Antifolk scene, e.g. the 1980s West Berlin subcultural scenes revolving around Wolfang Müller's band 'Die Tödliche Doris' (his manifesto, 'Geniale Dilletanten,' written in 1982, praises the amateur, the dilettante, and any kind of 'musical failure'). Another precursor is the so-called "Hamburger Schule," a loose term to describe a scene of indie rock musicians defining German indie music from the 1990's on, largely drawing on the ethics and sound aesthetics of the US indie rock scene of the 1980s while at the same time writing very specific and local German-language lyrics that drew partly on poststructuralist and queer theory of the 1980s/90s. A lot of the smaller indie bands somehow loosely connected and influenced by the Hamburger Schule scene (Woog Riots, Locas in Love,...) later also became friends with touring Antifolk musicians.

Thanks Sibsi,
for all of that really interesting and insightful commentary, that really "shades in" the picture in a great way.
Among a lot of other things that it makes me think about, the first thing that comes to my mind is to wonder what the German reception was to the new-folk artists who were more embraced by USA/UK cultures at that same time? Will Oldham I wonder about primarily. And then perhaps Smog, Songs: Ohia, Devendra Banhart, or any of the "New Weird America" stuff that got VERY big in indie scenes in the USA and UK (Neutral Milk Hotel, Sufjan Stevens, these guys had HUGE-selling indie albums in the west). Was any of this modern-folk-oriented stuff somehow LESS popular in Germany (than the Moldy Peaches/Adam Green)? Did Antifolk really get as much (or more?) German press attention than those other acts?

Sibsi!!

"Germany never had a comparable leftist folk music scene like the US experienced pre-WWII with Woody Guthrie etc."

Maybe not, if you narrowly define "folk" in terms of the American trademark instrumentation of guitars or banjos, etc.

But...but....what of the German cabaret scene of the 1920's??? I can't think of a single historical music community that is more in line attitudinally/politically/ethically with the New York antifolk scene, as it orbited the Sidewalk Cafe/the Fort/etc, than that scene.

I know very little of that music, to be sure. and sadly, I do think much of it was actually destroyed by the Nazis. But a friend once played me an album of these songs. I read translated lyrics as I listened, and it blew my mind. The stuff was so good, so truly poetic, so outrageous, so angry, and so funny. Out of coincidence, or out of a human hunger coming back from hibernation, I think we are their unconscious offspring and they are our ancestors, and homies. I wish I could remember the name of that album.

I recommend the albums of the late, great Agnes Bernelle:

"Fathers Lying Dead On The Ironing Board" and the more modern and fun "Mother, The Wardrobe Is Full Of Infantrymen." Her father, Rudolph/Rudy Bernauer, with his business partner (co-writer?) Carl Meinhard, was one of the great leaders of the German cabaret movement of the first few decades of the 20th century (as both a songwriter and a theater owner). Much of Bernelle's late-life creative blossoming was a successful attempt to preserve the feeling, and sometimes the actuality, of this awesome old stuff.

As "Wardrobe" is criminally out of print, find it and more info here:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/steve-espinola/agnes-bernelle-mother-the-...

or, if you have no facebook access:

http://www.steveespinola.com/music/agnes.zip

"...Ironing Board" is mostly re-settings of lyrics by Joachim_Ringelnatz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Ringelnatz

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Dear Sibsi,

Nice! Thanks!!! Wow.