On October 11th, Professor Kira Thurman from the University of Michigan delivered a guest lecture at Morrison Hall on the rise of Euro-Disco in post-World War II and Cold War Europe. Thurmann, a professor of history, German, and musicology, focuses her research on how music shapes racial ideologies and national identity. Her first book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, explores the role of Black performers in 20th-century Europe and critically analyzes the concept of “Germanness” as an identity that can be learned and performed. Her lecture, which was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Department of Music and the Institute of European Studies, had about 50 people in attendance.
Thurman began the lecture with Technotronic’s 1989 hit, “Pump up the Jam,” a popular disco song often mistakenly attributed to an African American group. Despite being performed in English, Technotronic was actually a Belgian band, which highlights the absence of discourse surrounding disco music recorded and produced by Europeans. Thurman explained that post-World War II, European music industries relied on former colonies and their people for the propagation of new music without acknowledging their identity. She argued that the European music industry was rebuilt with the largely anonymous efforts of formerly colonized people, particularly African Europeans.
Thurman discussed how the remnants of imperialism continued to shape European music history, despite the decolonization of European empires. While decolonization led to greater liberalization, it also prompted a surge of migration from former colonies in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies back to Europe. After setting a historical time frame, Thurman shifted her attention to the evolution of European music culture. She referenced Adorno’s concept of “the machine of production,” where mass culture is created through mass production, to argue that African Europeans produced popular music that directly competed with American imports. She ended this segment by questioning where the idea of irresistible empires, though decolonization had ensued, could be seen in both migration patterns and cultural production in Europe.
Thurman then shifted to discussing the “Munich Machine”—a real-life conceptualization of the “machine of production”—and Germany’s role as a center for Black musical production, which was integral to the history of disco in Europe and beyond. She underscored the explosion of Eurodisco in the 1970s, which coincided with the rise of disco worldwide. Eurodisco, defined as disco music produced by European producers, was dominated by African Europeans. Thurman provided an extensive list of African European disco groups she uncovered in her research, including Snoopy, Mystic, Zack Ferguson, and others, illustrating the overwhelming presence of people of color in Eurodisco. Many of these performers were of mixed ethnicity and nationality. She emphasized that during the Cold War, West Germany’s music industry was established in Munich, hence the name “Munich Machine”. Disco, Thurman argued, became a refuge for those without a home, with Munich’s disco clubs becoming a haven for many people of color in a rebuilding nation. Munich’s music industry agents discovered many new musicians through the city’s thriving disco scene, and the “Sound of Munich” became deeply influenced by African European artists, who helped shape the genre. It was also in Munich that the rise of the producer as the creator of music became a standard in the industry.
According to Thurman, the rise of the producer as the true “music maker” led to the discovery of African Europeans who were recruited for their looks and dance skills. Instead of being musicians, they were hired for their performative abilities. As with the portrayal of African Americans in American disco, it became an expectation that Eurodisco too would be performed by Black people. The industry norm became one where white European producers worked with African European performers, who were required to master the arts of mimicry and lip syncing. Thurman then introduced Boney M, a product of the Munich Machine, known for their hit “Rasputin”. Producer Frank Farian created and produced the tracks, but he himself did not want to be the face of the band. As a result, Boney M consisted of attractive African European performers; it was, in other words, a group of Black performers lip-syncing to a white producer’s music. This setup commodified Blackness, with Farian receiving majority of the profits and owning the rights to the group’s name. When Farian abruptly ended Boney M’s career, the performers were unable to continue producing their own music under the name.
Thurman concluded her lecture by summarizing her research on Eurodisco. Her work challenges the myth that one cannot be both Black and European, pointing out that in many cases, being African European was celebrated by Eurodisco lovers. She presented two key theories: first, that African European presence in music history has largely been overlooked due to the global dominance of African American music culture. Second, she referenced Ann Stoler’s concept of “Colonial Aphasia” to argue that the history of African European disco has been made unmemorable and unknowable through a lack of vocabulary to describe it and the failure to recognize its significance. Thurman ended the lecture with a final thought-provoking question: whether this “Aphasia” surrounding Eurodisco is a lingering remnant of European imperialism.