Austrian Rap Music and Sonic Reproducibility by Edward
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations The Poetic Loop: Austrian Rap Music and Sonic Reproducibility By Edward C. Dawson Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in German May 11, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Christoph M. Zeller, Ph.D. Lutz P. Koepnick, Ph.D. Philip J. McFarland, Ph.D. Joy H. Calico, Ph.D. Copyright © 2018 by Edward Clark Dawson All Rights Reserved ii For Abby, who has loved “the old boom bap” from birth, and whose favorite song is discussed on pages 109-121, and For Margaret, who will surely express a similar appreciation once she learns to speak. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without an Ernst Mach Fellowship from the Austrian Exchange Service (OeAD), which allowed me to spend the 2015-16 year conducting research in Vienna. I would like to thank Annagret Pelz for her support, as well as all the participants in the 2015-2016 Franz Werfel Seminar, whose feedback and suggestions were invaluable, especially Caroline Kita and organizers Michael Rohrwasser and Constanze Fliedl. During my time in Vienna, I had the opportunity to learn about Austrian rap from a number of artists and practitioners, and would like to thank Flip and Huckey of Texta, Millionen Keys, and DJ Taekwondo. A special thank you to Tibor Valyi-Nagy for attending shows with me and drawing my attention to connections I otherwise would have missed. In addition to the Werfel Seminar participants mentioned above, I would like to thank other academic interlocutors I met during my stint in Vienna, who have been extremely helpful for this work, including Farid Hafetz and especially Frederik Dörfler, who was extremely generous with his unpublished material, and who totally stole the show in our Chicago panel! Thanks to all for helping me understand Austrian rap. All mistakes are, of course, my own. I have had the opportunity to present versions of a number of sections of this dissertation, and want to thank in particular audiences from panels at two conventions of the Austrian Studies Association, a panel at the German Studies Association convention in 2016, and a presentation at the Tenn. Foreign Language Teachers’ Association conference in 2017. I am especially thankful to the students and German Studies faculty at Davidson College—Burkhard Henke, Robin Ellis, Scott Denham, and Margaret McCarthy—for giving me the opportunity to explore these ideas in considerable depth, and providing some of the most valuable feedback I’ve received. iv Nearly all of my colleagues in the German Studies program at Vanderbilt have contributed in some degree to this project, and I owe special debts of gratitude to several who have either lent incredible personal support, sat down with me for extended conversations about academic subjects, or both—you know who you are. You have sown a fallow field with your intellectual energy; I thank you all, and I envy you the new landscape you have cultivated. I also gained numerous helpful insights from the extended second-language studies and digital humanities families at Vanderbilt—to name you individually would be impossible. A Mellon Graduate Digital Humanities Fellowship gave me the opportunity to come into contact with many of you, and it was as HASTAC scholar at the DH Center that I began developing the ideas sketched in the conclusion, ideas which will surely be central to any book project. Thanks especially to Madeleine Casad for all of her insight and support. The members of my dissertation committee have provided innumerable insights, provocations, and reading suggestions. Thank you to Christoph Zeller, Lutz Koepnick, Jim McFarland, and Joy Calico. I am especially thankful to Lutz for patiently reading and giving detailed feedback on multiple versions of individual chapters, and above all to Christoph, for his feedback, his emotional support, and his friendship. I could never have completed this work without the incredible support of family. All four of our daughters’ grandparents and their wonderful Aunt Rie have provided every kind of help imaginable. There are no words that can express my gratitude to Emily. You have helped me through the most emotionally arduous years of my life, given advice and support in writing, and reminded me continually of what actually matters. I could never have finished this—or even begun it—without you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………….. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………..iv LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………….. viii Introduction: Old Poetry, New Media…………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1. Genius in the .com Age: Austrian Rap and a New Way of Knowing…………………... 12 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….. 12 The Aesthetics of Recirculation: Remixing the Rebellion..……………………….….…14 Scholarship on Sampling and Appropriation……………………………………………18 Origins of Recirculation: The Loop and its Deployment in “Rebel without a Pause”…. 21 Aesthetics, Material Conditions, and Technology……………………………………… 25 Recirculation and “Live” Instruments………………………………………………….. 30 Textual Recirculation and Correspondence in “Pause für Rebellen”…………………... 33 Distributed Knowledge and the Hermeneutic Invitation……………………………….. 37 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 42 2. From Austrian Flavor to Alpenraps: A Historical Overview of Austrian Rap Music…...44 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...44 Part 1. What is Austrian Rap?………………………………………………………….. 47 Rap and Hip-Hop………………………………………………………………………47 Why Austria?………………………………………………………………………….. 53 Part 2. A Historical Sketch………………………………………………………………61 P1. Rap Comes to Austria……………………………………………………………...62 P2. The Origins of Austrorap and the Three-Band Period (1993-2000)……………….69 P3. Opposition to the Political Local, Rise of the Aesthetic Local (2000-Present)……72 3. Rap Poetry and Recorded Time………………………………………………………… 82 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….. 82 Part 1. Fiva’s “Alles Leuchtet” and the Importance of Sound…………………………. 84 A Visual Reading of “Alles Leuchtet”………………………………………………… 87 An Acoustic Reading of “Alles Leuchtet”……………………………………………..96 vi Part 2. Kayo & Phekt’s “Erzählt” and the Importance of Recording…………………... 109 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 121 4. Axes of Divergence……………………………………………………………………...125 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...125 Part 1. Mieze Medusa’s Freischnorcheln: Rap Style in Prose Fiction…………………. 126 Freischnorcheln as Jelinek Update…………………………………………………….129 Freischnorcheln as Rap Prose………………………………………………………….134 Two Artistic Responses to the Same Phenomena……………………………………... 142 Part 2. Gangstas, Tschuschn, Buam: The Languages of Austrian Rap………………….146 English, the Language of Imitation…………………………………………………… 146 Migrant Languages and Expression, German and Communication…………………... 151 Dialect and a Return to Expression…………………………………………………… 155 Of Gangstas and Tractors………………………………………………………………160 Conclusion: Rapping in the Cloud(s)—A Transduction…………………………………...168 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………... 183 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Networks of Collaboration for Texta and Nazar………………………………………...56 2. Network of Recirculation in “Walkmania”……………………………………………...58 3. Austrian Rap Networks………………………………………………………………….79 viii INTRODUCTION OLD POETRY, NEW MEDIA The music journalist Jule Wasabi first became interested in German rap because studying Goethe and Schiller had lost its luster. Speaking with her co-host Falk Schacht in the first episode of their German rap podcast Schacht und Wasabi, Wasabi explains: Ich bin ja eher so von klassicher deutscher Lyrik dann irgendwann auf Rap gekommen, weil es einfach wirklich die moderne geile Lyrik ist. […] Wenn du dich jahrelang so mit Goethe und Schiller beschäftigst, ist es echt geil aber es ist halt echt nicht zeitgemäß. Und es fällt einem manchmal schwierig Goethe zu fühlen, auch wenn ich ihn, ich glaube ich fühle ihn, aber es ist dann schon schön wenn mal jemand irgendwie auch über WLAN oder sonst irgendwelche Dinge die jetzt in der heutigen Zeit einfach nur existieren rappt, und man es irgendwie fühlen kann. That Wasabi’s desire for lyric poetry which she could “feel” and which spoke to the contemporary moment led her to rap is hardly surprising at a time when even academic observers have asserted the form’s pride of place as the major poetic movement of our time, writing of rappers as “our greatest public poets” (Bradley) or “the most daring, inventive, and conspicuous contemporary rhymers” (Caplan).1 The already superlative status of rap as public poetry is 1 Returning these quotations to their contexts makes these claims still stronger: “Rap is public art, and rappers are perhaps our greatest public poets, extending a tradition of lyricism that spans continents and stretches back thousands of years. Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world” (Bradley xiii). “The most daring, inventive, and conspicuous contemporary rhymers […] hip-hop artists dominate the contemporary art of rhyme; they remain most alert to the resources that the culture and the language provide” (Caplan 3). 1 amplified in the German context, where rap stands out not only as public poetry in a prosaic time, but also as German-language pop music in an age dominated by global English pop. It was this status as foremost locus of