Performing Austria: Protesting the Musical Nation

Abstract

The Austrian national elections of 1999 and the subsequent government formation in 2000 sparked a wave of protests, both at home and abroad, due to the inclusion of the extreme-right populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) into the coalition. This article examines a body of protest music (ranging from heavy metal, rock and punk, to mock-choral and microtonal) that came about between 1999 and 2004 as a direct response to the turn in Austrian politics towards the extreme right. In interrogating this protest music I discern an important and hitherto underresearched facet of identity-(de)construction in Austria's artistic self-expression. It suggests a highly politicized counter-image to the usual, musically inspired representations of Austria, the land more readily associated abroad with Mozart and Haydn, the Vienna boys' choir, waltzing and yodelling. The music here is interrogated for the textual and musical strategies it deploys, and the spaces and icons of protest performance are probed for their efficacy and for the political interventions that they engender.

Social distance and the multimodal construction of the Other in sectarian song

“…I would argue therefore that understanding the Other culturally is becoming ever more important in increasingly deterritorialised and polarising societies. As psychologists have noted, there is a well-observed bias for people to evaluate their own social group more favourably than others, and trials have even shown that even simply dividing a group of people into random smaller groups can generate a bias against others (Eveland et al 1999;Brewer 1991). This is important for cultural studies of prejudice and sectarianism because the psychological evidence supports the notion that we are able to recognise prejudice and bigotry more readily in the performances of cultural groups closer to our own, than we are to those of a distant Other.…”

“…However, amongst the broader sweep of research on music and cultural conflict, there has been more specifically been some significant work done on the lyrics of songs and their effect on people's perception of social distance (Eveland et al 1999), the relationships between music and conflict (O'Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010), the relationship between social distance and music social media sharing (Tran et al 2011), anti-black racism in popular music (Mullen 2012), fascist music (Machin and Richardson 2012;Shaffer 2013), music and its use in contexts of war and torture (Pettan 1998;Grant et al 2010;Grant 2012) and in the UK and Irish contexts, work on religio-ethnic discrimination and prejudice in music (Fiddler 2014;Casserly 2013;Cooper 2010;Vallely 2014). In the Scottish context, which is the focus of this article, there has been a growth of research into sectarianism between Scottish Protestants and Catholics in recent times, 1 both in terms of the meta-statistical sociological analyses (Hinchliffe et al 2015;Justice Analytical Services 2013) and in terms of more focused ethnographic research (Goodall et al 2015).…”

80,000,000 Hooligans

“…The Scorpions' Winds of Change (1990) can be regarded the popular music hymn on the fall of the Iron Curtain. Fiddler (2014) looks at the protest expressed by musicians against the formation of a coalition government in Austria in 1999 which included the far-right Freedom Party of Austria; not only expressed in lyrics, but also in their treatment of music as a theme that is central to Austrian identity. The present article has a similar interest in punk bands' reactions to a specific political issue at a certain time, but is limited to an analysis of lyrics and contrasts these with hegemonic discourse.…”