arXiv · 2609.39460
Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild
Abstract
Rechtsrock is a subgenre of rock music that spreads right-wing ideology, often instrumentalized to recruit adolescents into the radical scene. Monitoring institutions counteract this by manually examining and, in some cases, banning extremist content; however, there are border cases that evade regulation. We present a study aimed at determining whether such a case, the band Frei$.$Wild, should be classified as politically right-leaning or as part of the general German rock genre. We sampled a German rock dataset and created a corpus for right-wing rock to use as reference in this analysis and found that we can confirm the intuitions from previous investigations that Frei$.$Wild successfully maintains an ambiguity with regard to their political affiliation. However, the tendency is towards the right-wing spectrum. Lexical analyses reveal nationalistic narratives and two high-performing classifiers (up to 97% ROC-AUC score) label more than half of their songs as right-wing extremist. Our analysis provides insight into how computational methods can improve the process of identifying right-wing extremist tendencies in music, especially in borderline cases like Frei$.$Wild. The code and data are made available for future research.
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Carlotta Schneeberger, Kevin Tang. 2026-09-30. Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild. https://doi.org/10.18653/2026.nlp4pi-1.32
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