Alternative Music Geographies: A Commentary

Abstract

Spaces have always had a central role in the formation and impact of youth cultures, beginning with the near spaces of everyday life – school, workplace, village, neighbourhood – where peers come together and cobble together their own styles out of the traditions of their elders and media information about the new. National space was an important element as well, as a container for traditions, but also as a communication space for negotiating the boundaries of the new. Finally, in the years after 1945, global space has gained enormous importance with national debates affected by events and trends from other world regions. That they did not displace national specificities, but that these rather perhaps came forward even more prominently than before, is particularly clear in those youth cultures in which transnational influences have been connected with national cultural preferences and formed into unique mixtures. In Germany there is also the fact that the country was divided, so that the already battered construct of a single national culture was dismantled even further while its heterogeneous components stood out, just like the disparate notions of an appropriate economic and political order. In this respect a focus on youth cultures in divided Germany after 1945 reveals unusually diverse manifestations of broader debates concerning the legitimacy of new styles among youth.