We are pleased to host the Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group (IAPMS) Online Workshop vol.10. This event is free and open to public, but we ask you to register for participation. Please register by filling out the form with your name and email address. The event information (with Zoom link) will be sent to your email two day before and a reminder will be sent to you one hour before the event.
Date: 11th November (Thu)
Time: 20:00-22:00 (Korea/Japan) / 19:00-21:00 pm (China) / 12:00-14:00 pm (Germany/Austria)
Venue: ZOOM
(Please use the time zone converter to calculate the event time in your location: https://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/)
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To register for the event, please visit the link and sign up:
https://forms.gle/yHbp56kBRjg6u7539
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Negotiating spaces: Mid-1990s queer, female fan culture and the popularization of Japanese popular music in German-speaking European countries
Anita Drexler (Nichibunken)
Since the last half of the 20th century, there have been numerous attempts to establish Japanese artists within the music market of German speaking European countries. However, none of them were even remotely as successful as the visual kei-led J-music boom that defined much of the German music industry in the years around the turn of the millennium.
If we want to understand the reasons for this success, we cannot ignore the fan culture that revolved around the wide popularization of anime and manga during the 1990s. In my presentation I’m going to analyse German anime magazines from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, which served as a main vehicle for the formation of a new – that is young, female and disproportionally queer – fanbase.
I argue that not only was this stratum of fans crucial for the success of Japanese popular music in German-speaking European countries for the years to come, but that from their negotiation of a cultural space within a pre-existing fanscape, we can deepen our understanding of what it is that makes an imported musical genre an important one.
In my opinion, knowing more about the mechanism of how cultural spaces are (re)-negotiated by fans can help to further understanding of how specific trends – like City Pop – are able to gain global traction.
BIO
Anita Drexler received her BA and MA in Japanese studies (with minors in Media studies and Musicology) from the University of Vienna. Her research interests include Japanese popular music from the 1970s – 1990s, music journalism and transcultural musical transfers. She is currently a research student at the Nichibunken in Kyōto, Japan.
Respondent: Oliver Seibt (University of Amsterdam)
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