Popular music prohibition and silencing had received little academic attention
until three decades ago, coinciding with a change of paradigm in studies about
censorship. This chapter evaluates this New Censorship Theory, now dominant in
popular music studies, and applies it to jazz in European dictatorships of the second quarter
of the 20th century, assessing its strengths and shortcomings. It aims to go beyond current
models of studying popular music censorship in autocratic regimes, focused on legality and
official banning, and the too inclusive conception of New Censorship Theory, which can
trivialize state violence. I propose an ethnographic approach to popular music censorship
that conceives it as the effect of complex assemblages linked to the states but not restricted
to their apparatuses, and as a process of contingent effects that did not always leave traces
in the official archives. Ultimately, I seek to frame popular music censorship in the transnational history of Europe from 1925, when totalitarian regimes began to be interested in jazz, to the start of the Cold War.
