Cultural imperialism or where did the German music go?

I went to hear live music the other night at a real working class German bar in Gmünd. The place was packed and festooned with World Cup marketing materials. There was a long row of empty Jack Daniel bottles on a shelf in the back of the bar and there were hundreds of model train cars on display, each one with the name of a beer or alcohol on it.

There were three German guys playing rock and roll, all English language cover songs, and the crowd was loving it, singing along with each song. What amazed me was that they played only cover songs, everything was in English, and 99.9% of the songs were American. Whatever happened to German music and German songs? It's not as if I don't appreciate a band so versatile as to play everything from Marley's "No Women No Cry" to Leonard Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," but I was left a little amazed that not a single German song was played. What happened to the Neue Deutsche Welle sound in Germany? Is it not around anymore?

Being outside the United States always makes me hyper-aware of American culture. It is no wonder that the French want to make certain that a certain percentage of all films distributed each year in France are French productions. Culture is America's biggest export. And American culture greatly influences how many people around the world understand themselves and their world. Even German opposition to the American war in Iraq did not change the preponderance of American culture in Germany.