Abstract
Using the examples of three recent songs (and the discourses surrounding them) from Germany and the UK – DJ Robin & Schürze’s „Layla“, Frank White and Bass Sultan Hengzt’s „Cancel Culture Nightmare“ and FKA Twigs’s „Don’t Judge Me“ – this chapter investigates how pop musicians comment upon and contribute to discussions of today’s cultural and sociopolitical „cleavages“ with implicit or explicit statements about the role that morality should play in popular entertainment and politics. It argues that contemporary pop culture is characterized by a tension between the habitual anti-moralism of informal life and a critical politicization of the seemingly private and mundane. Situating these matters within a neo-Gramscian „war of position,“ this chapter shows that the often-described opposition between anti-moralists and moralizers is too simplistic. Rather, we find different types of pop-cultural anti-moralism implying different ethical and political positions with radically different consequences: The traditionalist (often hedonistic, sometimes sociological and self-described „realist“) variant opposes critique and interventions based on „universalistic“ morality, ethics or politics, whereas the anti-traditionalist (antiracist, feminist) version detects and scandalizes sedimented moral normativity. Both forms of anti-moralism share traits and have specific ambiguities, as this analysis shows, but they contribute to different hegemonic projects and draw different „frontier“ lines (Laclau). On a conceptual level, this chapter shows that the notion of the popular (in its different German translations as popular and populär) is indispensable because it contains the tensions that come to the fore in conflictual cultural negotiations like these.
Ege, Moritz