‘Catalanism Only Will Win by the Force of Songs’, Revisited 100 Years After. The Role of Catalan(ist) Pop-Rock Music in Socially Sanitizing Working-Class Neighborhoods of Barcelona (1976–2000)

During the last years of the Spanish fascist regime, two politically contrary music scenes emerged in Barcelona. While Catalanist folk music emerged for political freedom, Spanished rock’n’roll, punk, and heavy scenes emerged in the working-class suburbs of Barcelona, denouncing bad conditions of everyday urban life. The great success of this last music scene in Barcelona in the 1980s led to the then nationalist, conservative government of Catalonia to promote a new socially and politically sanitized music scene in response to such class-based contestation. This study aims to explore how a new Catalan(ist) pop-rock scene was created to socially and culturally sanitize the working-class suburbs of Barcelona along the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.