Pop Music : Germany

Over the past ten years, the German pop music scene has enjoyed a tremendous surge in popularity. Up until then, Anglo-Saxon singers and groups had dominated the hit parade. The catchy German pop song which at one time had been wildly successful had come to appeal to only a very limited audience; homegrown pop stars such as Udo Lindenberg were the exception. But although they never hit the big time, bands such as “Tangerine Dream”, “Can” and “Kraft-werk” became pioneers in the field of electronic music, and the hard rock of “The Scorpions” even made the charts in the United States.

The trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, the organist Barbara Dennerlein and Klaus Doldinger’s band “Passport” put the German jazz scene on the international map.At the beginning of the 1980s, the “New German Wave” showed that German musicians could indeed achieve success with texts in their native language. Marius Muller-Westernhagen, Herbert Gronemeyer, Peter Maffay and the Cologne group “BAP” established themselves as the country’s top rock musicians. To this day, their fans - like those of the punk rock groups “Die toten Hosen” and “Die Artze” - continue to pack stadiums and concert halls. In the GDR, “Die Puhdys” and “Karat” enjoyed widespread popularity with songs that were moderately critical of the communist regime.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the German pop scene has become increasingly diversified. Every international music genre is represented here: “Selig” picks up on grunge, “H-Blockx” plays with a crossover between rock and hip-hop, and “Jazzkantine” fuses tradional jazz with German rap. “Fury in the Slaughterhouse” and “M. Walking on the Water” take up the thread of English-language folk rock, while “Fantasti-sche Vier” has been successful with German-language hip-hop. Germany’s spectrum ranges from cheery pop music by “Pur” and “Die Prinzen” to more thought-provoking texts by “Sterne” or “Element of Crime”.