This book’s roots goes back to when Oliver Seibt and I still were on the IASPM D-A-CH-board in 2014. Oli had been contacted by the series editors about a book project within the “Routledge Global Popular Music Series”. Two other edited books on German popular music had just been published and after we studied them we decided that our aim was to focus on popular music which is linked to Germany. This does not only include music having been produced in Germany by “Germans” (which in itself is a problematic and difficult term to define), but also linked to Germany as an idea through numerous ways. We also did not only want to include the genres most associate with German popular music (e.g. Neue Deutsche Welle, Krautrock and Heavy Metal), but challenge the cannon with lesser known musics which, however, are important to the scenes that listen to them. This includes not only my area of research, post-Soviet popular music, but also Turkish Hip Hop, which has one of its roots in Germany, or the reception of Visual-Kei.
Along the way Martin Ringsmut joined the editorial team. After two years preparing the call and finding the authors we formally got the go from Routledge and the series editors Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino in 2017. I sent out the official launch call from the airport in St. Petersburg having just returned from Georgia and thus officially started the project. Now, finally, after numerous twists and turns the project has come to an end and the book has been published:
Seibt, Oliver, Martin Ringsmut, and David-Emil Wickström, eds. 2021. Made in Germany – Studies in Popular Music. Routledge Global Popular Music Series. New York, Oxon: Routledge.
More info about the book can be found at Routledge: www.routledge.com/Made-in-Germany-Studies-in-Popular-Music/Seibt-Ringsmut-Wickstrom/p/book/9780815391784.
Enjoy! 🙂