Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Popular Culture Essay

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According to the November 2000 issue of the German weekly Focus, it was diagnosed that the German Popular culture was highly obsessed with American cultural imports. In this article, Americanization was even criticized as a malicious form of cultural imperialism, contaminating and colonizing German culture. One such example is MTV shows in which monolingual strategy was imposed, even in the contemporary world of globalization. However, this dominancy was challenged by Viva established in Germany in 1993, which also served to revitalize German rock, pop and hip-hop music. When talking about the US-European relationship, Ron Kroes and others have contended that this intercontinental transfer of popular culture can be theorized as ‘creolization’ or ‘hybridization’. Rather, the assortment in German hip-hop culture was quite evident; still there were three distinct forms of adapting the U.S. model that was the Old School, the New School and the second & third-generation immigrants. The Old School was developed by the pioneers of the current hip-hop since the early 1980s and was meant for post-national identity in the age of global hip-hop. In the Old school descriptions, hip-hop included its own representation of conserving its practitioners and German youth by keeping them away from criminal behavior. The most commonly cited work for such type of hip-hop was Cora E.’s Latchkey kid, which was a compliment on transitional structure of hip-hop culture, stating clearly its stereochemistry. The Old School also reflected its own imagery in hip-hop culture, rather than adopting the impression of the US theology. That was why; many raps of the Old School differentiated between the concepts of realness and the synthetic simulations of the US pop culture. To explain this phenomenon, MC Rene hummed:

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‘I can not relate to street violence, so it would be fake to have a gun go off, many love the topics that are trendy, the themes that fly by on MTV, but where is your personality collective clichĂ©s, will claim victory over facts, no’,cause rap is communication, expression, modern conversation. A rapper who copies others is a copy for whom I will never have respect’ (1995, n.p).

In every form of rap, language played a significant role in designing rap music. It was also observed that when hip-hop was practiced in Germany, the Old School of the US that was going to be taken over, was the message rap of Grandmaster Flash and the Glorious Five and the theory of Zulu nation proposed by Afrika Bambaata. In other words, this school highly criticized the conventional America, regarding pop culture. Since the period of its inception, German hip-hop has served to highlight the societal divergence among the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States. The New School was conceptualized as an arena of commercialization and nationalization. However, this phase was the most critical moment for both Germany and the U.S. to remain in the same status of equality. The famous music critic GĂŒnther Jacob argued that black musicians had issues of racial discrimination as compared to European artists. Jacob further maintained:

‘They [white hip-hops] engage in posturing only if they imitate contents and attitudes that have no relationship to their own life-world or are only aesthetically mediated’ (1993, p. 206).

The New School was the imagery of middle-class hip-hops who adopted the US hip-hop culture by modifying their own style. It was also considered that the New School and Old School were at variance in their music composition. Afterward, the ethnic lines of hip-hop were labeled as ‘Oriental Hip-Hop’ in order to filter multinational or multiethnic gangs who mostly used Turkish language. In 1990s, the young immigrants again started to adopt the US hip-hop which was not unexpected. The most prominent resemblance between the U.S gangsta rap and German hip-hop was the reacquisition of ethnic stains, such as Kanake or Kummel heaved upon immigrants by Germans, that is why, many young Turks who grew elder in Germany, took themselves as Kanakstas. In the preface of his book ‘Kanak Sprak’, Feridun Zaimoglu (1995) has enunciated the parallel between the United States and Germany for the Kanaksta concept in these words:

‘The foundation of this community is still a negative self-confidence as it articulates itself superficially in the seeming self-recrimination: Kanaka! This derogatory term becomes a word of recognition and for identification that blinds these “Lumpenethnier” together. Analogous to the black-consciousness movement in the United States, the various sub-identities of immigrants recognize the broader thematic contexts and connections’.

On evaluation of this adoption of Kanaksta concept, it seems to be fervent to dissolve the media’s enchantment on one side and on the other side, it takes up the jargon and pomposity of the US gangsta rap, that is, the ghetto image, as an incitement of conventional society, comprising of the contemporary German multicultural approbations. According to Dirke,

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‘Yet, instead of reading the Kanaksta phenomenon as a form of un-reflected Americanization, I contend that it is a deliberately marked adaptation in direct response to mainstream culture’s paranoid invocation of US race relations, for which the inner city has become a negative symbol of social decay and of the failure of the multicultural society (2004, p. 104-105).

Deniz GöktĂŒrk (2002) and Rob Burns (2007) have also identified the intensity of difference in pre-and post-Wende Turkish-German cinema, articulating a considerable shift in the movement of trans-cultural perspectives, as Burns (2007, p. 375) has argued it as a shift from a “cinema of the affected” to a “cinema of hybridity”’. It was further investigated by Guido Rings in the same perspective that some drastic changes were seen in cultural films that were produced before and after the period of unification. He has started his study with the analysis of multiculturalism and interculturalism by dividing both of them as distinct perspectives of transculturalism before going to explain the relation of these concepts with Turkish-German culture at the conventional mediation of film-making. On the other hand, Cheesman (2006, p. 472) has argued that ‘ways of being a Turkish-identified, Germany-based writer have naturally changed over time. Cheesman has further added that this potential difference has caused to rule out among the post-migrant writers, labeling them as ‘exilic’ and ‘ethnic’ and ‘diasporic’ (2006, p. 473f). In short, it can be attributed that the American capitalism was the first adventure to capture German popular culture.

Bibliography

Burns, R. 2007 The politics of cultural representation: Turkish-German encounters. German Politics 16, pp. 358-78.

Cheesman, T. 2006 Juggling the burdens of representation: black, red, gold and turquoise. German Life and Letters, vol. 59, pp. 471-87.

Dirke, Sabine von, Hip Hop made in Germany; From old school to the Kanaksta movement, In:Mueller, Agnes C. 2004 German Pop Culture. How American is it? pp. 96-112.

GöktĂŒrk, D. 2002 Beyond paternalism: Turkish traffic in German cinema. In: Tim Bergfelder; Erica Carter; Deniz GöktĂŒrk (eds) The German Cinema Book. London: BFI, pp. 248-56.

Horrocks, D. and Eva K. 1996 Turkish Culture in German Society Today.

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Trumpeter, Katie, On the Road. Labor, Ethnicity and the “New German Cinema” in the Age of the Multinational, In:Ginsberg, Terri and Kirsten Moana Thompson 1996 Perspectives on German Cinema, pp733-743.

Zaimoglu, F. 1995 Kanak Sprak.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Popular Culture." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-is-multiculturalism-manifested-in-contemporary-german-popular-culture/.

1. IvyPanda. "Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Popular Culture." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-is-multiculturalism-manifested-in-contemporary-german-popular-culture/.


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IvyPanda. "Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Popular Culture." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-is-multiculturalism-manifested-in-contemporary-german-popular-culture/.

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