ABSTRACT
While the left-alternative counterculture of the Federal Republic, like its counterparts in Europe and overseas, strongly rejected and fought against everything supposedly cold, be it capitalism, technological progress, or industrialization, at the end of the 1970s, a cultural movement emerged from its ranks that, in a 180-degree turn, glorified these cold elements. In contrast to how left-alternative groups praised warm forms of behaviour, nature and naturalness, artists from the developing cold pop scenes spoke out for concrete and steel, industry and metropolitan alienation, technology and self-discipline, artificiality and inauthenticity, and for consumption and commerciality. This chapter explores the counter-concept of cold aesthetics and conduct in West German pop music and discusses whether the protagonists of cold pop threw the countercultural critique of capitalism completely overboard and mutated into cold capitalists.
