Populism and Music

Melanie Schiller investigates the links between populism and music. In particular, Schiller explains how popular music plays a role in the articulation of populist discourses and performative construction of the ‘people’/‘elite’ antagonism. She analyses the case of Andreas Gabalier, the self-declared Austrian ‘Volks Rock’n’Roller,’ and how he mobilised the populist notion of a ‘dictatorship of opinion’, which he, heroically, would resist as a lone fighter against the system. Moreover, Schiller explains how musician Peter Jezewski combines nostalgia for a particular white, masculine and working-class rebel culture with nationalism and a typically Swedish rural subculture known as ‘raggare’. Finally, she claims that populist radical-right discourses are often articulated with a nostalgic retro-culture and style in popular music culture that create a space of collective identification and a specific way of ‘making sense of the world’