Rethinking Popular Music Censorship: Jazz in European Dictatorships (1925-1948)

Abstract

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.