Introduction
‘Du schaffst das schon!’, a male voice belts, seemingly directly at us. It is a spring afternoon in April 2019 and we are standing in the middle of one of Vienna's largest shopping malls, watching a live pop-rock band consisting of four middle-aged men playing electric guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. The refrain translates as ‘You can do it!’ – but who can ‘do’ it? And what is ‘it’? A large backdrop featuring a familiar colour scheme of blue and the colours of the Austrian flag (red-white-red), together with anti-European slogans clearly identify this as a campaign event hosted by the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria), the country's biggest far-right populist party. At the time of this event, the FPÖ was still part of a coalition government with the conservative ÖVP (Austrian People's Party), but the alliance wouldn't last much longer: within a few weeks, the infamous ‘Ibiza video’ was released, featuring FPÖ vice-chancellor H.C. Strache discussing payoffs and control of the national media with a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch. On this afternoon, however, there was no sign of the coming crisis; the government's popularity ratings were still intact, and the party was drumming up support in advance of the European Parliament elections. ‘You can do it’ – could this be a nod to candidate Harald Vilimsky, the star of the event, or a message of encouragement to potential FPÖ voters? Is it political music after all? Then again, the song seems the most innocent of choices, being ‘just’ a popular love song by the international schlager-pop trio Klubbb3 – could it be simply popular entertainment, without any political intention? But something else is happening here: the song's performance in this space seems to fit the occasion, and the song appears to galvanise parts of the audience, with some participants dancing and singing along. Of all possible cultural forms, the party has chosen popular music for events like these to portray their agenda in public. Are we missing a theoretical concept that can help explain what is going on here? The concepts we are familiar with cannot explain the case at hand.
Scholars have addressed far-right music before, in its underground music incarnations (Shekhovtsov Reference Shekhovtsov, Wodak and Richardson2013) and in terms of the characteristics of reappropriation and recontextualisation in fascist music (Richardson Reference Richardson, Way and McKerrell2017). Research on the connection between far-right populism and seemingly innocuous types of music, however, has been sparse at best (cf. Dunkel et al. Reference Dunkel, Barna, Caiani, Doehring, Niederauer and Schiller2018). Since 2019, we have first attended party campaign eventsFootnote 1 and, subsequently, concerts and funfairs with music and artists similar to those who performed and were heard at the rallies we visited initially. Some songs in our field overtly feature ideas like homeland, ‘heartland’ (Taggart Reference Taggart2000) and nativism in their lyrics and performances; there is use of national anthems or battle songs, or the visual presentation of artists’ material may raise suspicions of political ideas or agendas (cf. Lehner and Rheindorf Reference Lehner, Rheindorf, de Cillia, Wodak, Rheindorf and Lehner2020). However, we have found that songs with no obvious political message play a central role as they represent the predominant share of songs at these events. We need to approach these musics in a way that stresses both their ambiguity and their power within political contexts.
Our work deals with far-right populism in Austria as exemplified by the FPÖ, a populist party in the sense of ‘an anti-establishment movement, with a right-wing ideology, and an exclusive understanding of “the people” directed against élites and “the other” (immigrants and ethnic minorities)’ (Pelinka Reference Pelinka, Caramani and Mény2005, p. 17). FPÖ politicians have been known to ‘[take] academics and journalists to court for describing them as “fascists”’ (Mudde Reference Mudde2019, p. 5). Their policies are indisputably right-wing; still, there is an obvious desire within the party to preserve a clean image, which – we argue – is also apparent in their selections of popular music. Although we do assume that musical selections at FPÖ events are not arbitrary but are chosen and performed in a distinctive manner for the occasion,Footnote 2 the suspected agency of political ‘puppet masters’ is not our central focus. Our research approach follows the performative focus of populism studies, which understands populism as a political style based on embodiment, performance and symbols (Moffitt Reference Moffitt2020, p. 22).Footnote 3
In this article we address the mainstreaming and normalising (cf. Mudde Reference Mudde2019; Brown et al. Reference Brown, Mondon and Winter2021) potential of popular music for far-right populist politics by means of songs that do not carry a clear political message. Rather than being an obstacle to the music's political use, this very ambivalence is the main feature of popular music's role within far-right populist practices in Austria. Even in cases where popular Austrian musicians publicly oppose right-wing populist politics, their music may still be heard at FPÖ events.Footnote 4 These ambivalent, sometimes even contradictory musical performances take on a life of their own within a specific arrangement. We argue that popular music studies can and should address such arrangements, and that there is a need for an adequate methodology highlighting the role of sound and the materiality of music as situated performance and bodily practice.
Following Simon Frith (Reference Frith1996, p. 274), ‘music making and music listening’ are ‘bodily matters; they involve what one might call social movements’. Performance, of course, is always spatially situated. At events like these populist rallies – that is, within a relational network of human and non-human actors –, bodies are engaged and included (or excluded). To a certain degree, one could even say that idealised bodies are constituted in these situated practices. Using two examples from our fieldwork, our research addresses such socio-material and socio-musical assemblages (Born Reference Born2011) as a specific conjunction of music, spatial locations, situations, and human and non-human actors that, taken together, fosters identities and aggregates the human actors involved in these practices (cf. Born Reference Born2011, pp. 378–80).
Political music, politicised music and the missing third term
In his discussion of popular music released in the wake of 9/11, Rösing (Reference Rösing and Helms2004, p. 161) defines political music as music created with a clear political motivation on the part of the originator. More precisely, this motivation must be visible through all stages of the musical process, from the concrete realisation of the musical product through the various intermediate steps, and on to its reception. Certain songs in our research do fit this definition of political music: songs by Andreas Gabalier, one of Austria's most popular musicians – such as ‘A Meinung haben’ (Gabalier Reference Gabalier2015), ‘Having an Opinion’ – come to mind (cf. Dunkel et al. Reference Dunkel, Schiller, Schwenck and Kärki2021). The song's lyrics, sung in local Austrian dialect, unmistakably establish an antagonism between the ‘people’ and the ‘elite’ that is reminiscent of populist politics (Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser2017): ‘Wos is des bloß/Wo kummt des her/Neue Zeit, neues Land/Wo führt des hin?/Wie kann des sein/Dass a poar Leut/Glauben zu wissen/Wos a Land so wü’ (‘What is this/Where does it come from?/A new era, a new land/Where will it lead?/How can it be/That a couple of people/Think they know/What a country wants?’). At the same time, the minor key, the slow tempo and Gabalier's gravelly, deadly serious vocal delivery of a redundant melody (confined, for the most part, to the range of a minor third), give the impression that he does not intend to have an open dialogue with us about these matters: the music makes a statement on integrity and condemnation that is hard to misunderstand.
Consequently, ‘A Meinung haben’ was widely debated as political music, and Gabalier was seen as an actor in the political field. Wietschorke, for example, has suggested that Gabalier's persona helped to establish spaces for right-wing political ideas (Schütz Reference Schütz2020). In their account of ‘heroes of popular culture’, Lehner and Rheindorf (Reference Lehner, Rheindorf, de Cillia, Wodak, Rheindorf and Lehner2020, pp. 260–70) have addressed how the FPÖ expressed solidarity with Gabalier when some of his statements were openly criticised by the media; the authors have also pointed out how lyrics and cover art have fostered certain images of masculinity and homeland that are easy to associate with far-right ideologies. In light of these discourses, it is no surprise that one is likely to hear a Gabalier song at FPÖ campaign events. Interestingly, instead of ‘A Meinung haben’, we hear ‘Hulapalu’ at several party events – an upbeat song with mildly suggestive lyrics and no clear political implications whatsoever.Footnote 5
At FPÖ campaign events that usually last for several hours, we have heard only one song fitting Rösing's definition of political music: the party anthem ‘Immer wieder Österreich’ (‘Austria Again and Again’) (Otti Reference Otti2016). Lehner and Wodak (Reference Lehner, Wodak, de Cillia, Wodak, Rheindorf and Lehner2020) have pointed to its connections to far-right body politics (Lehner and Wodak Reference Lehner, Wodak, de Cillia, Wodak, Rheindorf and Lehner2020, p. 190) and explained that it lends itself to sing-along practices (Lehner and Wodak Reference Lehner, Wodak, de Cillia, Wodak, Rheindorf and Lehner2020, p. 187). While ‘Immer wieder Österreich’ therefore qualifies as political music, as does every anthem, ‘Hulapalu’ cannot possibly be viewed as such.
In addition, Rösing's work contains the idea of politicised music – cases in which subversive action on the part of the distributing or receiving actors gives rise to new political understandings after the composition. A prominent historical example is ‘Dancing in the Street’ by Martha & The Vandellas (1964): in the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s, it acquired a political function that was actually contrary to the original intention (cf. Friedlander Reference Friedlander1996). In our field of study, politicised music accurately describes cases such as Rainhard Fendrich's (Reference Fendrich1989) ‘I Am from Austria’, a widely popular song often played as a sentimental high point at sporting events; the song was also played at FPÖ rallies until the singer legally prohibited its use in this context (Der Standard 2005). Overall, however, the number of such cases in our field remains small.
Political music in Rösing's sense requires a clearly structured context that ensures the unambiguous delivery of the song's original political aims through all stages of the musical process. Politicised music is a slightly looser concept, viewing politics as something embedded in action, in the performance or reception of a hitherto ‘unpolitical’ song. Still, the concept of politicised music demands that popular music must be clearly understood by all observers as having become the carrier for a specific political message. According to our fieldwork, this is not the case for the vast majority of songs at campaign events.
Out of our field collection of about 150 songs, we identified selections that appear to fulfill an important role at campaign events, owing to their dramaturgic placement or the stimulating effect they have on participants. It is impossible to pin down a clear political message in any of these examples by analysing their lyrics, as if they were a poem printed on paper. In connection with the sound, however, and sung by a persona within a personic environment (cf. Moore Reference Moore2012), the analysis of lyrics as music opens a wider field of inquiry. Lyrics do not simply function as a definite communicative action; they are not representational in this sense. Instead, their tonal, harmonic, rhythmic and sound structure, and the bodily effort of a singer to portray a persona, suggest meanings beyond those which the lyrics, as written text, appear to convey by themselves.
We are, then, dealing with a situation in which neither of the concepts above – political or politicised music – apply. Nevertheless, we assume that this music is not chosen by chance. Hypothetically, one could ask why the FPÖ does not apply other cultural practices as the central means of assembling people, such as dining or sports. While all these activities might potentially be part of a rally, music was present, and played a crucial role, at every event we visited. We need methods that take sound in its many dimensions seriously, as a situated performance, with the aim of establishing a third term beyond political and politicised music.
Methodology
The basic idea of our methodological approach is to establish empirical research that connects participant observations with collectively conducted musical analyses. We argue that this approach is particularly well suited to analysing the music–populism connection, as it addresses performative aspects of actual situations of reception (fieldwork)Footnote 6 and in-depth analyses of the music and its affordances (DeNora Reference DeNora2003) (group analyses). In this multi-step research process, data generation and coding are constantly intertwined. The ethnographic material tells us something about popular music as an element of a specific situation of performance and reception. In accordance with the coding of our ethnographic data (fieldnotes, photographs and videos filmed by ourselves and found on media platforms), we selected songs for our analysis sessions.
The method of musicological group analysis (MGA; Appen et al. Reference Appen, Doehring, Helms, Moore, von Appen, Doehring, Helms and Moore2015; Doehring et al. Reference Doehring, Ginkel, Krisper, von Appen and Dunkel2019) has been developed to introduce multiperspectivity into the common musicological practice of musical analysis, which is usually carried out by an individual researcher. By inviting four to six participants into the analysis, MGAs are concerned with the identification of a range of musical affordances. While not representative of ‘all’ possible meanings (no analysis of an art object could ever grasp these), MGA is the practice of several listeners engaging with popular music as a group. In this way, analysis becomes a social practice involving members of a shared culture who, in a reflexive discourse, elaborate their specific positions on – and thus, their experiences of – the music under analysis. These may differ from those in the field; MGA carves out a wide range of possible affordances, only a few of which can be observed in the field as a situated practice–performance nexus. The combination of fieldwork and MGA allows us to understand what role music plays in this nexus, a situation where popular music, in public, dramaturgically frames populist actors and political issues.
The aim of MGA is to elaborate how, based on the exposure to sound, discursive articulations come about among a group of listeners; these articulations can then be attributed to the sound's structure. Like all interpretative procedures, MGA is an ex situ reception, different from the in situ field experience. Here, we create a situation in which we analyse parts of a highly complex and occasionally overwhelming field experience of a situated performance nexus in a focused way. Therefore, the procedure of group analysis sessionsFootnote 7 generally begins with the playback of the song in question, without initially giving the participants contextual knowledge from the fieldwork. The primary task is to analyse a song's musical form, its harmonic, melodic and (micro-)rhythmic organisation, as well as its instrumentation, the performance of lyrics by a singer (or rather their persona, cf. Moore Reference Moore2012, pp. 179–214), and the sound design of the recording – in other words, to prioritise sound structure. However, this does not mean that we neglect other aspects: in the course of analysis, additional information (videos, pictures, names, etc.) enriches the process bit by bit. Such discursive attributions to sound by group members are inevitable whenever people discuss music (Wicke Reference Wicke, Grasskamp, Krützen and Schmitt2004), for example, when participants reflect on performative aspects and the bodily engagement of singers and listeners or imagine certain spaces where this music might be played. From such articulations, we can gather information about how meanings come to be constructed based on exposure to sound, instead of the common mode of reception where (for example) visual materials, however important, tend to overwhelm the interpretation of sound.
For our group analysis sessions, we recruited participants from our own academic workplace environment. The group consisted of five individuals from three European countries with backgrounds in musicology, jazz studies, popular music studies, sociology and music studies. At the time of the analysis sessions, participants were all employed at the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Discussions lasted between two and four hours, with the authors of this article taking active part but according their colleagues most of the speaking time during the first hour.
The process of negotiation – how participants introduce their ideas, react to others’ contributions, ask, debate, discuss and draft possible results ‘in coalitions and competitions’Footnote 8 (Reichertz and Bettmann Reference Reichertz, Bettmann, Poferl and Keller2018, p. 289) – is just as important as the ideas themselves. Ideally, MGA sessions are recorded for later transcription and interpretation of both the analytical aspects and group dynamics. In the concluding interpretation of the recordings, potential meanings can be discussed in a more balanced and nuanced way; voices that have initially been neglected owing to situational dynamics – e.g. internal hierarchies, ‘battles for the best reading’Footnote 9 (Reichertz Reference Reichertz2013, p. 12), etc. – are allowed to come to the fore. All perspectives are welcome, since each may tell us something important about the music's range of affordances.
In both fieldwork and analyses, it is crucial to reflect our personal stances towards the examined songs, events and participants. While the selections at FPÖ events hardly mirror our personal tastes in popular music, we have found many of the songs fairly inoffensive and – surprisingly often – even pleasant. In our analyses, as well as in the field, we have learned and experienced why listening to this music can be fun, even if we have no particular fondness for folksy schlager music. We conducted our research as native Germans who have been living in Austria for up to 10 years, which allows us to have both an internal and external perspective. This view from within has sometimes been challenged – interestingly, from inside academia, where issues of nationality had been mostly irrelevant in our previous international research. We consider this external attribution of ‘Germanness’ significant regarding constructions of identity, in the light of Austria and Germany's cultural relationship. Our upbringings in rural or semi-rural areas of Germany (the authors) and Austria (most of the other group analysts) made us familiar with funfairs and ‘beer tent’ festivals at an early age, although we are hardly inclined to visit such places in our spare time. All MGA participants expressed a clear rejection of FPÖ politics. The age range of the participants spanned from the early 30s to the mid-40s. In the group constellation relevant here, three men and one woman were present.
Case studies
We came across a stylistic variety of musics in the course of our fieldwork at FPÖ events and on other occasions, but folksy schlager music (Volkstümlicher Schlager) – a hybrid genre, vastly popular in German-speaking countries – is without a doubt the most dominant genre we have encountered. The style has experienced a renaissance in recent years, in the form of TV shows, sold-out concerts and many chart-topping hits that combine the sentimentality and innuendo of conventional schlager music with more contemporary electronic, rock and folk sounds. Schlager music fosters constructions and imaginations of ‘Heimat’ (cf. Jacke and Mendívil Reference Jacke, Mendívil, Brinkmann and Hammann2019), as does traditional folk music (Volksmusik). Both are tied to the soundscape of the Alpine region.
For this article we selected two hit songs from FPÖ campaign events, owing to their significant activating role and their current popularity with Austrian audiences. ‘Du schaffst das schon’ (Klubbb3 2016) initially caught our attention owing to its catchiness and its slogan-like refrain line. Klubbb3 is an international project consisting of three singers from Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, with the German singer Florian Silbereisen having a long history in schlager and Volksmusik. He is a well-known TV personality in German-speaking countries such as Austria, including as the host of the popular show event ‘Schlagerboom’. As of January 2022, ‘Du schaffst das schon’ had reached 7.5 million streams on Spotify, and the video had been played 33.8 million times on YouTube. Klubbb3's lyrics are in standard German, not in a regional dialect.
Our second case study, ‘15er Steyr’ (Rauch Reference Rauch2019), stood out because of its sing-along quality and the highly engaging way in which it addresses rural identities. Singer Stefan Rauch's father runs a very successful tent rental business in rural Austria, catering for popular events and festivals; his co-singer, Petutschnig Hons, is a Styrian farmer and comedian, and maintains a popular YouTube channel where he addresses a range of topics from everyday life and politics. ‘15er Steyr’ is sung in a pronounced Austrian dialect, difficult for non-Austrians to understand, but its 4.9 million streams on Spotify and 11.4 million clicks on YouTube (as of January 2022) suggest that it is a huge hit in Austria, a country of just 8.9 million people.
Neither of these two songs match the criteria of being political or politicised music in the ways ‘A Meinung haben’ or ‘I Am from Austria’ do. Our fieldwork and subsequent MGA sessions address how both songs are nonetheless, or perhaps even more, powerful selections in the context of FPÖ events and their political agenda.
‘Du schaffst das schon’ (You can do it)
Ethnography
As already mentioned, we first encountered ‘Du schaffst das schon’ at the Freedom Party's kick-off campaign event for the European Parliament elections in May 2019, which took place in a large Vienna shopping mall; further research revealed the song to be a staple at FPÖ events. In addition to a crowd of about 200 FPÖ sympathisers and passers-by, several high-level FPÖ politicians were present. Between speeches by political candidates, the FPÖ's ‘house band’, the John Otti Band, performed a musical programme consisting primarily of covers, many in the folksy schlager genre, but also including country and rock numbers. We quote from our field notes:
The band's lead singer announces the afternoon's first song, ‘Du schaffst das schon’. At the time of the campaign event, I am not familiar with it. Its refrain line ‘Du schaffst das schon’ seems tailor-made as a motivational affirmation for the FPÖ's EU election campaign. The lyrics, however, are not overtly political. Instead, I would describe ‘Du schaffst das schon’ as a somewhat quirky love song. I find it upbeat, while the lyrics appear remarkably submissive from the singers’ (male) perspective: ‘Mach mit mir, was du willst/Zeig mir alles, was du fühlst/Du schaffst das schon/Schalt mich ein, schalt mich aus/Und hol alles aus mir raus/Du schaffst das schon!’. (‘Do what you want to me/Show me everything you feel/You can do it/Turn me on, turn me off/And get everything out of me/You can do it!’). They continue with a particularly catchy melody: ‘Wie eine Königin/Die über mich bestimmt/So regierst du mein Herz/Und auch meinen Schmerz/Du schaffst das schon!’ (‘Just like a queen/Who controls me/You rule my heart/And also my pain/You can do it!’).
The song has an animating effect on some audience members gathered right in front of the stage (most wearing vests in Austrian colours with an anti-EU slogan, distributed by the FPÖ and reminiscent of the French gilets jaunes). Beer stands are set up around the periphery on this early Friday afternoon, so the setting reminds me of the carnival atmosphere at Austrian funfairs. An older couple attracts my attention: the man is about 60 and a bit heavyset, with a mullet haircut and moustache. His partner, about the same age, has long, dark hair and a somewhat hippie-like style of dress. They seem to be in an elevated mood, dancing and spinning to the music. These two stick out, as they do not represent what I would expect a typical right-wing couple at an FPÖ campaign event to look like.
Our ethnographic data offers initial ideas on how the song makes sense in the situation we witnessed and participated in. The field notes already give us important hints pointing to specific affordances; we also get an idea of the material surroundings of the musical performance situation. Following our fieldwork, the song becomes the subject of an MGA to clarify our open questions about its political potential.
MGA – musicological group analysis
We begin our 125 minute session by playing and discussing the original studio version of ‘Du schaffst das schon’. Later, we also play a live recording of the song by John Otti Band from the FPÖ's official YouTube channel (FPÖ TV 2019) to find out how the live performance differs from the original recording. To us, the lyrics are ambiguous: we interpret them as romantic, but the more submissive lines subtly suggest a devotional attitude and even sadomasochism to most (but not all) of the group members. In this sense, the song bears the sentimentality and innuendo characteristic of the genre. At the same time, it affords listeners the feeling that they are in on a ‘secret’ meaning, a familiar strategy in popular music – songs that are suggestive without ever openly resolving their ambiguity.
The delivery of the line ‘You can do it!’ by Klubbb3's three singers is interpreted by some participants as motivational; at the same time, its march-like, emphatic delivery seems patronising. The four-word refrain line is sung in quarter notes on each downbeat, which makes the title stand out from the rest of the lyrics and underlines its commanding tone: “‘Du! Schaffst! Das! Schon!’ [our punctuation].” In the personic environment (Moore Reference Moore2005), the synthesiser's call-and-response pattern (reminiscent of musical practices in folksy schlager) functions as a confirmation of the title, the perceived urgency of which is enforced by the chorus. The effect feels repetitive to the participants of our analysis; as one participant puts it: ‘it doesn't let up’.Footnote 10 In fact, 60% of the song consists of material from the chorus, although it is only repeated three times in full. The voices of the singers have the sonorous sound of radio or television hosts, suggesting the use of similar compressors and reverb. They are mixed to sound close – nearly intrusive – as if to get their message through to the audience, yet they seem separated from the rest of the mix, as the song generally sounds transparent and spatially deep to us. Within this personic environment, the singers’ authoritative personae – coming, godlike, out of nowhere and yet directly at the listener – seem to emanate power, even dominance.
Correspondingly, our group struggles to imagine what the personae – some of us do not immediately realise that there are three lead singers – might look like, which establishes a fruitful moment of multiperspectivity: we discuss a spectrum of personae archetypes from the schlager genre, from middle-aged men in dapper suits to the ‘party schlager-hippie’ persona, like singer Jürgen Drews. This initially appears to foment disagreement among participants. However, there is no need to fully resolve this issue: in the end, it shows us that the song offers a broad – but distinct – spectrum of possible interpretations, demonstrating a high compatibility range between the schlager genre and its listeners.
The song has neither interlude nor bridge, but there is a pre-chorus, over a dominant chord characteristic of schlager and Volksmusik. We ascribe the melodic appeal of the chorus to its form, first described by Walter Everett (Reference Everett1999) as the ‘SRDC formula’ (statement – restatement – departure – conclusion). Especially the ‘departure’ section, ‘Wie eine Königin’ (‘Just like a queen’), is experienced as the ‘best’ and most engaging part. Here, the ‘you’ in the lyrics is gendered as female, for the first and only time. Additionally, the first syllable of the word ‘Königin’ marks the highest note of the song, emphasising the importance of the persona's female addressee in the heteronormative world of schlager – and neatly avoiding any questions about the nature of this ‘clubbb’ and its three male members. This section, with its move to the IV chord and the downward, harmonised D-major arpeggio reminiscent of folksy schlager, pleasantly interrupts the repetitive (some participants call it ‘militant’) delivery of the I–V–I progression that dominates the rest of the SRDC form, rendering the song catchier and more memorable. Moreover, its strong off-beat emphasis in the chorus invites an upward bodily movement, while we feel pulled down by the four-on-the-floor rhythm – it seems like a fun song to dance to.
Encouraging but patronising, relentless yet engaging and fun: the song affords contradictory understandings and, as such, might well appeal to a wide range of people. It can be listened to as a lyrically ambiguous, even tongue-in-cheek schlager song (engaging ‘insiders’ through its hints), as an entertaining, upbeat dance song (engaging the body) or – especially in the context of an FPÖ event – a motivational campaign song (engaging the party's electorate). While the music affords empowerment, it also, simultaneously, addresses the relinquishing of power in a pleasurable way: the song, by means of its constructed persona – a schlager John Doe (in fact composed of three singers, with a broad range of possible identifications) who, within the specific personic environment, invites listeners to experience the wish to be dominated as desirable.
Here, the differences between the studio and live versions become relevant: the live performance accentuates the song's catchiness, while other affordances (for example, the intrusive feeling created by the apparent proximity of the vocals) are neglected. In the public performance space – a large shopping mall in Austria's capital in the afternoon, with a central stage where both the John Otti Band and the FPÖ politicians perform – studio sound engineering methods usually used to catch the audience's attention (which, in other media situations, is often distracted) are simply not required. The animating elements that we attribute to the song during our MGA remain largely intact, both with the pounding delivery of ‘Du! Schaffst! Das! Schon!’ and the engaging melody of the ‘Wie eine Königin’ part, sung in folksy schlager-style harmony. While the MGA group agrees that the FPÖ makes use of the song's potentially wide appeal, the vocal performance by the John Otti Band's singer, Werner Otti, seems less inviting to us. His powerful, relentless belting lacks the subtle sound processing of the original. In effect, Otti's singing has a far more commanding tone: where the patronisation and concomitant establishment of power relations are only implicit in the lyrics and sound design, they are musically spelled out in the performance.
Our MGA yields a range of interpretations. While we identify a commanding tone, the situated performance of ‘Du schaffst das schon’ bypasses our limited, dichotomous understanding of power relations; the people at the FPÖ event appear to be ‘simply’ enjoying the song. In this setting, however, it makes us feel uneasy. Given our positionality as participants not sympathising with FPÖ politics, we identify a potential for the normalisation of dominating others as pleasure – in broad daylight, in a large shopping mall, attended by high-ranking FPÖ politicians, and by using a song from the folksy schlager genre immensely popular in Austria.
‘15er Steyr’ (‘15 hp Steyr’)
Ethnography
We encountered our second example at another FPÖ event, this one taking place in August 2019 at a folk festival in Krems an der Donau, a small city in rural Lower Austria. Here, the FPÖ rented a large tent, where visitors were served food (mostly meat) and drinks (mostly beer) by a local caterer. This time, slightly unusually for FPÖ events, the musical programme was provided not by John Otti Band but by a local cover band and a DJ, both of whom played a diverse but specific selection of oldies and more recent popular songs, as our field notes describe:
I keep seeing party staff hugging each other, shaking hands, and rushing from table to table to hand out paraphernalia such as cigarette lighters or flags. I put a lighter in my pocket but stay away from the flags. Most of the staff are wearing blue polo shirts with the party logo and the slogan ‘Wir leben Heimat’ (roughly: ‘Homeland is our life’) – this slogan is also projected onstage, under the party logo. I hear ‘Cordula Grün’ (Josh. 2018), a recent hit song in Austria. The song, however, is hastily interrupted by the DJ, who announces that by special request he is now going to play ‘I steh auf Bergbauernbuam’ by Melissa Naschenweng (Reference Naschenweng2019). He announces the song title dramatically, word for word, almost syllable for syllable: ‘I! Like! Mountain! Farmer! Boys!’ After this comes a song that may be aimed at older audience members: ‘Let's Twist Again’ by Chubby Checker (Reference Checker1961), announced as a song ‘from 1961, when they still made really great rock and roll’. After this, ‘15er Steyr’ is announced as a song ‘by our Stefan Rauch’. It is unknown to me in this situation, but it's apparently well-known to the participants here. The lyrics are set to a new arrangement of Johnny Cash's (Reference Cash1963) ‘Ring of Fire’, with the mariachi horns replaced by a Styrian accordion. The sound of the chorus is – as indicated by the lushly produced (male) voices – designed for singing along in large, crowded spaces.
The song described here is a duet recorded with Styrian comedian Petutschnig Hons, who plays a grumpy farmer on social media channels. I find out the following day that a ‘15er Steyr’ is an old 15-horsepower tractor model, discontinued around 1960. This ethnographic description gives us some context about the specific location and situation: not only do we find ourselves in a catering tent at a folk festival with around 250 participants, we also identify how the singalong aspect of the song – emphasised by its arrangement and production – seems to fit this spatial environment; the field notes specify large, crowded spaces as the ideal venue. The DJ's announcements create a sense of local community. Implicitly, the notes also point to a sense of nostalgia that seems to permeate the music and its use: not only is ‘15er Steyr’ based on a country song from the 1960s, its subject is a vintage tractor model discontinued years before ‘Ring of Fire’ even appeared on record. The DJ's subsequent announcement of Checker's ‘Let's Twist Again’ underlines this nostalgic element: both in terms of popular culture and the agricultural sector, it seems to express a longing for the world as it was – or is perceived to have been – many years ago.
Group analysis
Our MGA concerns the song's potential connections with body politics (Schmincke Reference Schmincke2019) and spaces. As Eric Clarke (Reference Clarke and Born2013, p. 94) puts it, ‘[e]cho and reverberation are […] important cues for the size of the space within which listeners perceive themselves to be’. Within these imagined musical spaces, music affords bodily engagement in specific ways; one could say that these bodies are ‘co-created’ by music. During our group analysis session of ‘15er Steyr’, the song's sound design makes us picture ourselves at a capacious disco hall in the Austrian hinterland, an après-ski party in the Alps, or in a beer tent. These imagined rural public spaces are also an effect of the song's genre markers, which characterise it as a conglomerate of country, rock and schlager, all styles of music popular in rural areas of Austria (cf. Huber Reference Huber2017, pp. 170–1).
Addressing the music's affordances, we identify it as having an ideal tempo for couples’ dances (like ‘disco fox’) that are still popular in rural areas, as we have observed. At the same time, the tempo allows for an onomatopoetic analogy to the subject of the song, the merits of a vintage tractor compared with modern machines. In the first moments, the sound of the tractor's engine starting up transitions into the ‘pumping’ of a four-on-the-floor bass drum that we identify as being reminiscent of techno. Some group members suggest that the song is too slow to ‘really’ be techno – but then again, dancers can move to this gentler tempo without much physical effort. In this sense, it appears to be music for every body type: you do not have to be young and athletic to move to it. As we have repeatedly observed during our fieldwork, drunkenness is also no obstacle.
In the MGA, we detect the song's potential to animate bodies to dance, sway (Schunkeln), and participate musically. The singalong (or shout-along, a better description of the gang vocals of the chorus) quality of this cover of Johnny Cash's classic brings people of different age groups together – as long as they can speak and understand Austrian dialect. Our ethnography yields this analysis: at an FPÖ event in a catering tent in the countryside, the song suggests a ‘we’ that sets itself apart from other body regimes and linguistic areas, allowing for articulations of populist tropes such as nativism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 72), or agrarianism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 19), exploiting the historical Austrian urban–rural divide (Wallnöfer Reference Wallnöfer2019, p. 65f.). In our reading, the joint musicking in the context of a novelty song based on an old country song, now pleasurably celebrated in heavy dialect, allows participants to experience a shared sense of community, separated from more musically experimental forms and from today's fast-paced, neoliberal economic order, where ‘new’ always means ‘better’. Other, urban spaces where the latter characteristics are the norm are implicitly devalued, while the local and the traditional are revalued and celebrated (cf. also Dunkel Reference Dunkel2021).
Discussion
One could describe ‘15er Steyr’ as a fun song with humorous elements and ‘Du schaffst das schon’ as a catchy, upbeat (if slightly odd) love song with a strong vocal component in the mix. The songs convey no clear political message, and it would be easy to see them merely as providing light entertainment offsetting the ‘real’ politics, the speeches by FPÖ politicians – and they may indeed fulfill this role of ‘“serving” politics’ (Born Reference Born, Adlington and Buch2021, p. 183). But there is clearly more going on. At FPÖ events, far-right populism and popular music are intertwined in a way that makes it necessary to acknowledge music as sound and situated performance.
For detecting the powerful and complex affordances of music presented here, MGA is a helpful and promising methodological tool. As with any method, it does have pitfalls and shortcomings that should be addressed. While we invite every participant to express their spontaneous reactions to songs, beyond the confines of ‘legitimate’ taste, we are aware that the variety of positions we encounter is limited by the composition of our analysis groups. Even the best intentions cannot prevent bias in our research, be it in terms of class, hierarchy, nationality, gender, sexuality or race. We see it as our responsibility to acknowledge this bias and to reflect on it in the refining of the method. The further development of MGA may benefit from introducing voices previously neglected in our rather homogeneous group constellations. Nonetheless, we are convinced that MGA, owing to its collaborative nature, can address sound as structure and discourse (cf. Wicke Reference Wicke, Grasskamp, Krützen and Schmitt2004) in a way that is more fruitful than ethnography or musical analysis conducted by a single researcher.
Most of the music at FPÖ events is far from being aggressive or propagandising. Instead, the music allows many different interpretations and appeals to many people. Participants can simply enjoy themselves. Our research points to the political power of the pleasurable experience of music, as ‘musical pleasure […] is experienced directly: music gives us a real experience of what the ideal could be’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 274). Participants are aggregated, as the music affords them just such an ideal state, beyond everyday life: the music creates a space that reassures us that here, in the ideal state exemplified by this situational context, the world is still all right (‘Hier ist die Welt noch in Ordnung’) – so ‘right’, in fact, that even dancing to a song that affords an interpretation, in this context, as expressing the desire for national devotion or consensual dominance (‘Du schaffst das schon’), is communal and fun, not threatening.
The songs in our field pleasantly promote an idealised experience of musical spaces, evoking the superiority of tradition (‘15er Steyr’), of heteronormativity and the Austrian homeland (for their discursive constructions, cf. Rheindorf and Wodak Reference Rheindorf and Wodak2019), or, as we have shown elsewhere, of the unity and autarchy of the Austrian nation as symbolised by the nuclear family (‘Wir sind eine große Familie’, cf. Ginkel et al. Reference Ginkel, Schwenck, Schiller, Doehring, Dunkel, Spiritova and Trummer2022). In today's world, according to a central argument in the populist discourse (cf. Wodak Reference Wodak2020, pp. 113–26), values such as these are experienced as threatened or extinct. Political scientist Gideon Botsch (Reference Botsch, von Appen and Hindrichs2020, p. 24) addresses Andreas Gabalier's music as an example of portraying the nostalgic sentiments characteristic of a ‘reverted’ postnational nationalism that, in Austria, goes hand in hand with populism in the sense of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser's (2017, p. 14) ideational approach, where nationalism can merge completely with populism.
While neither overtly political nor even politicised according to Rösing's definitions, the popular music heard at FPÖ events develops an assembled politicity, our proposition for the missing third term mentioned above. This term refers to a situational arrangement that affords political meanings integral to works of art through social inscription (cf. Rockhill Reference Rockhill2011, p. 47), by which we mean not the communication of clear political ideas, but the specific assemblage of sounds, bodies, materialities and spatial environments. Thus, it is more than just the verbal ‘message’ of the lyrics that matters here: the entire socio-musical and socio-material assemblage addresses the body, with the sitting and ‘dancing’ on picnic tables (Bierbänke), the swaying, the protester vests in the Austrian colours, the sing-along parts (‘we the people’) and the mellow tempos to which, seemingly, ‘every body’ can move. Traditional food (Hausmannskost) and beer render the body satisfied, slow and lazy; the alcohol has a disinhibitory effect. This assemblage has the potential to aggregate and unite a far-right populist audience: in the right setting, it is possible to literally move people in a political sense without having to say anything explicitly political (cf. Butler Reference Butler2016, p. 204). Researching this ‘audiencing’ (Born Reference Born, Adlington and Buch2021, p. 186) is a recent task of music studies, and it is worthwhile for the study of articulations of music and politics.
Of course, the situational constellations of these musics and practices are not exclusive to right-wing political contexts. On the contrary, a beer tent with cover band music spanning popular genres such as schlager, rock and country is a very common phenomenon in Austria, especially in rural areas. We find similar arrangements at regular funfairs, firemen's balls, après-ski cabins, beer gardens, wedding parties, village clubs, etc. Does this render the material arrangement of FPÖ events random or devoid of specificity? Not at all. The created spaces are familiar spaces for people living in Austria, many of whom will associate them with a festive atmosphere and fun. They are friendly, inviting spaces that enable certain modes of bodily movement, participation and emotion. This sort of ‘audiencing’ strongly enables social relations – as opposed to, for example, a concert hall, a setting that tends to inhibit such relations (cf. Born Reference Born, Adlington and Buch2021). While not necessarily right-wing in their political affordances (beer tents have been used by left-wing political actors in other countries as well), these spaces create an environment where the pleasurable experience of the ideal becomes part of a political assemblage with and through music.
The FPÖ, despite its far-right positions, has strived to maintain a clean, upstanding image, which we see as aiding the party's mainstreaming aspirations, in an understanding of mainstreaming as a ‘process by which parties and actors, discourses and/or attitudes move from marginal positions on the political spectrum or public sphere to more central ones, shifting what is deemed to be acceptable or legitimate in political, media and public circles and contexts’ (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Mondon and Winter2021, p. 9). We argue that music, precisely in its apparent harmlessness, can evoke powerful notions and images of the ideal of a characteristically Austrian populist Weltanschauung that are helpful in these mainstreaming practices. This is what makes music such a broadly useful tool beyond purposeful political statements embedded in song lyrics, album covers, or media appearances. Even passers-by who reject far-right politics may stop for a couple of minutes and find themselves tapping their feet along to the music. We, the authors, found ourselves affected by the music, too, nodding our heads to the beat or returning home with some of the songs’ hooks stuck in our heads. Based on our MGA and field experience, we can understand how the assembled politicity unfolds its aggregating potential. In music, the idealised world that is ‘still all right’ can be experienced collectively and thus perpetuated. In comparison with their political competitors in Austria, the FPÖ shows exceptional musical expertise in choosing such music, rather than overtly political music, to accompany its campaign events. It is up to us to develop similar expertise in dealing with such cases in the future.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for funding our research, as part of the international project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’ (2019–2022). We also thank Lawrence Davies, Eva Krisper and Lukas Proyer for participating in our group analysis sessions. Their active involvement and analytical work have been an invaluable contribution to our research.
