Starting with the surprising role the soul assumed in the West
German music essay from the early 1980s, this article interrogates a peculiar,
misunderstood middle passage in dominant historiographies of German pop
literature—the new wave music essay—that transformed itself at the dawn of the
1990s—shortly before the literary phenomenon labeled Popliteratur emerged—
by embracing then emergent Anglo-American Cultural Studies. The importance
of new wave music for the essay’s regard for soul were lost on both pop
literature and its attendant literary histories. The “studies model” has, at least
in this one instance, smoothed over historical ruptures with unfortunate repercussions
for our understanding of the precarious writerly mediation of life and
music shortly before the value of poetics for life vanished altogether.