Schlager

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For the Schlager duelling sword, see Academic fencing.

Schlager (German Schlager, literally "something that hits" or, more loosely translated, "a hit") is a style of popular music that is prevalent in northern Europe, in particular Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also to a lesser extent in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Typical schlager tracks are either sweet, highly sentimental ballads with a simple, catchy melody or light, pleasant, throwaway pop tunes. Its lyrics are typically centred around love and relationships, and feelings. The northern variant of schlager, most notably in Finland, has taken elements from Nordic and Slavic folk songs, with texts tending towards melancholia and elegiac themes.

The style has been frequently represented at the Eurovision Song Contest, and has been popular since it started in 1956, even though it is increasingly replaced by other pop music styles. While at one time music of this style was also fairly popular in the UK and USA, due to the constant change of fashion in popular culture, since the 1970s schlager has fallen out of favour. Most young people today consider Schlagermusik to be camp.

During the mid-to-late 1990s and into the early 2000s, however, German-language schlager saw an extensive revival in Germany, with mostly young people digging up their parents' old records from the '70s. Even reputable dance clubs would put in a stretch of schlager titles during the course of an evening, and numerous new bands specialising in covering original '70s schlager tunes as well as performing "new" '70s-ish material were formed. In Hamburg, schlager fans still (as of 2006) gather annually by the tens of thousands and dress up in freakish '70s wear for a street parade called Schlager Move. This revival has always been associated with irony and, to a certain extent, gay culture.

Stylistically, schlager continues to influence the German "party pop" genre to this day, i.e. the music most often heard in après-ski bars and Majorcan mass discos. Partly due to this and due to the older, more downscale audiences of schlager-based television shows and radio networks, the schlager genre is increasingly, though subtly, associated with the lower strata of the population.

Contemporary schlager is often mingled with Volksmusik.