Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm 9781137592729, 9781137592736, 2016948833, 1137592729

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Pop Music, Culture and Identity Series Editors Steve Clark Graduate School Humanities and Sociology University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tristanne Connolly Department of English, St Jerome’s University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Jason Whittaker School of English & Journalism, University of Lincoln Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom

Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class, gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14537

Ewa Mazierska Editor

Popular Music in Eastern Europe Breaking the Cold War Paradigm

Editor Ewa Mazierska School of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

Pop Music, Culture and Identity ISBN 978-1-137-59272-9 ISBN 978-1-137-59273-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948833 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © Split disc jockey Domagoj Veršić at work in Disco Club Gusar, 1969 © Sloven Mosettig 2016 Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not be possible without the help of many colleagues and friends, to whom I wish to express my gratitude. One of them is my previous research assistant, Lars Kristensen, who encouraged me to conduct research on popular music. I am also grateful to Elżbieta Ostrowska, Zsolt Gyori, Laszlo Strauss and Aimar Ventsel for their insightful comments on the introduction and some of the chapters included in this collection. I am also grateful to various individuals and institutions who granted us interviews and allowed us to use the photos in specific chapters, and to Felicity Plester and Sophie Auld at Palgrave for making working on this book as pleasant and efficient process as it can be.

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CONTENTS

1 Introduction Ewa Mazierska

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Part I State Policies and its Interpretation by Grassroots 2 Propagated, Permitted or Prohibited? State Strategies to Control Musical Entertainment in the First Two Decades of Socialist Hungary Ádám Ignácz 3 Pop-Rock and Propaganda During the Ceaușescu Regime in Communist Romania Doru Pop 4 Estonian Invasion as Western Ersatz-pop Aimar Ventsel 5 The Eagle Rocks: Isolation and Cosmopolitanism in Albania’s Pop-Rock Scene Bruce Williams

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Part II The Function of ‘Gatekeepers’ 6 Censorship, Dissent and the Metaphorical Language of GDR Rock David Robb

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7 Folk Music as a Folk Enemy: Music Censorship in Socialist Yugoslavia Ana Hofman

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8 ‘The Second Golden Age’: Popular Music Journalism during the Late Socialist Era of Hungary Zsófia Réti

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9 Youth Under Construction: The Generational Shifts in Popular Music Journalism in the Poland of the 1980s Klaudia Rachubińska and Xawery Stańczyk

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10 The Birth of Socialist Disc Jockey: Between Music Guru, DIY Ethos and Market Socialism Marko Zubak

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Part III Eastern European Stars 11 Karel Gott: The Ultimate Star of Czechoslovak Pop Music Petr A. Bílek

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12 Czesław Niemen: Between Enigma and Political Pragmatism Ewa Mazierska

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13 Omega: Red Star from Hungary Bence Csatári and Béla Szilárd Jávorszky

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14 Perverse Imperialism: Republika’s Phenomenon in the 1980s Piotr Fortuna

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Index

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LIST

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 14.1

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Fix in Vanemuise theatre, Tartu, Estonia, 1983 Matura 72 Aleksandër Gjoka in concert Silly in the 1980s The total number of popular music-related articles in the Hungarian youth press, 1964–1974 Popular music content in Ifjúsági Magazin, 1973–1989 Pioneer disc jockey Domagoj Veršić at work in 1969 in Split’s Gusar club A 1975 self-made promotional poster for Zoran Modli’s travelling disco show Gottmania explodes in Prague: Karel Gott faces the crowd of people who welcome him after his return from Las Vegas at the Prague airport Karel Gott posing as a star before his departure for Rio de Janiero festival in 1968 Karel Gott receives the title of National Artist from president Husák in 1985 Flamboyant Niemen at the peak of his career Niemen performing Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem Omega in its heyday in the mid-1970s Band members celebrating the 25th anniversary of Omega in 1987 Grzegorz Ciechowski performing during Rockowisko festival in 1981

82 98 102 125 154 156 201 208

227 231 236 246 256 275 278 287

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Introduction Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the ‘Cold War Paradigm’ Ewa Mazierska

The purpose of this collection is to examine popular music in Eastern Europe during the period of state socialism. Its roots lie in frustration at the limited amount of scholarly work available in English concerning popular music in Eastern Europe and the perspective applied in the majority of them. The number of volumes devoted to popular music originating from, and consumed in countries such as Poland, Hungary or East Germany is low, not only in comparison with books about music in the Anglo-American centre but also with what is known as ‘world music’. It also rarely happens that music from this part of the world is used to illustrate phenomena pertaining to popular music at large, such as stars, genres, music videos, live music, subcultures or local identity. The only exception is when authors discuss the relationship between music and politics (for example, Szemere 1992; Wicke 1992; Wicke and Shepherd 1993; Mitchell 1996: 95-136; Bennett 2000: 49; Connell and Gibson 2003: 120–21), due to the fact that rock E. Mazierska (*) School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_1

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from Eastern Europe is seen as more political than its western counterpart; an opinion which is problematic. Moreover, existing studies focused on Eastern European popular music, most importantly Timothy Ryback’s Rock Around the Bloc (1990) and the collection Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (1994), edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet, are based on problematic assumptions which, broadly speaking, reflect a way of thinking pertaining to the Cold War, even if they were already written and published after the fall of state socialism. This collection has the ambition to interrogate and challenge these assumptions.

FROM SELF-COLONISATION TO PARTICIPATION IN COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE One of the assumptions made in existing studies concerns the allegedly marginal status of Eastern European popular music not only globally, but also within the Eastern bloc. Ryback and Ramet argue that, whenever permitted, consumers of popular music from Hungary, Poland or Romania tuned into the media broadcasting western music rather than choosing performers addressing them in their own language. In the introduction to Rock Around the Bloc Ryback evokes a meeting of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev with the widow of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, in which the then Soviet leader and his spouse present themselves as Lennon’s fans. Ryback also mentions the Beatlemania in Poland, East Germany and the Czech Republic, concluding that: Western rock culture has debunked Marxist-Leninist assumptions about the state’s ability to control its citizens. Across more than eight thousand miles of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, from the cusp of the Berlin Wall to the dockyards of Vladivostok, three generations of young socialists, who should have been bonded by the liturgy of Marx and Lenin, have instead found common ground in the music of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. (Ryback 1990: 5)

Ramet muses: ‘A Yugoslav poll taken in late 1988 found that Eric Clapton, a rock guitarist, was one of the people most admired by young people and that he was more popular among the young than was Serbian party boss Slobodan Milošević.’ Later she adds, ‘There is one figure who casts a long shadow over the entire East European (and Russian) rock

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scene and who served as an inspiration to an entire generation: former Beatle John Lennon’ (Ramet 1994: 6). Such claims, although they might be factually correct, lead to questionable conclusions, such as that Lennon and Clapton were more popular in the East than local stars and that throughout its history the state socialist East remained under the spell of a limited number of iconic western stars, hence being doubly backward, by being unable to develop its own rock culture and having limited access to western rock. Instead, the Gorbachevs’ tender recollection of Lennon might reflect more their generation (being born in the 1930s), their limited knowledge of pop-rock, and their politeness towards their visitor than the true standing of Lennon in the Soviet bloc at the time of Yoko Ono’s visit. Clapton’s greater popularity among young Serbians than Milošević, in my opinion, merely points to the well-known fact that young people (especially after the end of the 1960s) have shown little interest in politics and hence politicians cannot compete with pop stars as role models. If the West provided the East with the only acceptable cultural model, as above-mentioned authors argue, then popular music of any value originating from this region was a product of imitation. Given that during the Cold War the socialist East and the capitalist West were in conflict, the character of such music was oppositional. Rock stars were heroes and martyrs, ‘rocking the state’, as the title of Ramet’s collection announces, fighting with the Leninist ideologues and politicians. In the most extreme version of this view, as proposed by Ramet, ‘the archetypal rock star became, symbolically, the muse of revolution. The decaying communist regimes (in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania especially) seemed to fear the electric guitar more than bombs and rifles’ (Ramet 1994: 2).1 According to this narrative, if such stars stayed in their own countries, rather than escaping to the West, this was either because they were locked behind the Iron Curtain or felt responsible for revolutionising the masses, rather than because working for the eastern culture industry brought them some benefits, outstripping the potential advantages of working in the West. By the same token, listeners tuned into their stars to capture the sounds of revolution or at least political subversion. This also means that if a given state was seen as particularly totalitarian, there was no pop-rock worthy of its name, as Ramet argues in relation to Albania and Romania (Ramet 1994: ix). These assumptions have been labelled as ‘self-colonisation’ and ‘political subversion versus state propaganda’. The argument in this book is not that they are false, but that they are simplistic and prevent us from appreciating

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Eastern European popular music in its richness and complexity, including its artistry. At the same time as projecting the Eastern European rocker as an anti-communist fighter, they render the consumer of such music as a machine for capturing political (sub)text, rather than boys and girls searching for entertainment, for whom catchy melody is more important than the message of a song. In this context it is worth mentioning Simon Firth referring to a survey of high school students that was carried out in Michigan in the 1970s which concluded that ‘the vast majority of teenage listeners are unaware of what the lyrics of hit protest songs are about’ (Robinson and Hirsch, quoted in Frith 2007: 95). If listeners in Eastern Europe were similar in this respect to their American peers, then the researchers’ excessive preoccupation with the political content of pop music from this region by-passes the most important part of their experience. To move away from the ‘self-colonisation’ paradigm, a different framework is proposed by considering Eastern European popular music as an articulation of local culture and an act of participation in the global phenomenon of popular music, and especially in what Motti Regev describes as pop-rock. In relation to the first point authors such as Martin Stokes (2003a, 2003b), Tony Mitchell (1996), Andy Bennett (2000), and the author’s own work (2015) are followed. These authors propose to divert from the colonial discourse or even its specific form, ‘cultural imperialism’, according to which Anglo-American pop-rock ‘displace and appropriate authentic representations of local and indigenous music into packed commercial music commodified for ethnically indeterminate, but predominantly Anglocentric and Eurocentric’ markets (Mitchell 1996: 1). Instead, they suggest that the ‘imperial’ influences are always reworked at a local level, leading to producing music which reflects and addresses local needs and sensibilities, as well as global trends. It is worth mentioning that in the context of popular music in Eastern Europe the term ‘cultural imperialism’ is especially problematic, because, to the vast majority of those listening to western stations broadcasting Anglo-American music, it was not a vehicle of malevolent western powers, but a gentle instrument of enlightenment which was accepted with gratitude, as the term ‘self-colonisation’ reflects. However, what the proponents of the ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis and the advocates of ‘self-colonisation’ have in common is the emphasis on what is taken from the West, rather than how it is relocated and reworked in a new context. By contrast, in this collection, the local context will be foregrounded. Regev is more interested in the global, rather than a local facet of popular music, seeing pop-rock as pertaining to late modernity and consisting of a

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process of intensified aesthetic proximity, overlap, and connectivity between nations and ethnicities or, at the very least, between prominent large sectors within them. It is a process in which the expressive forms of cultural practices used by nations at large (and by groupings within them), to signify and perform their sense of uniqueness, come to share large proportions of aesthetic common ground, to a point where the cultural uniqueness of each nation or ethnicity cannot but be understood as a unit within one complex entity, one variant in a set of quite similar (although never identical) cases. Aesthetic cosmopolitanisation is a term that is best suited to depict this process in world culture [and it] refers to the ongoing formation, in late modernity, of world culture as one complexly interconnected entity, in which social groupings of all types around the globe growingly share wide common grounds in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms, and cultural practices. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism refers, then, to the already existing singular world culture (Regev 2013: 3). There are several advantages to applying the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to the phenomena of pop-rock culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism. First, automatically condemning it to the position of a poor relation of music produced in the Anglo-Saxon world is avoided, even if it is widely acknowledged that it has played a privileged role in the global culture of pop-rock (Bennett 2000: 53). Second, it allows one to draw on research about other forms of popular culture produced in Eastern Europe, most importantly cinema, which is typically seen not as an imitator of western culture, but as an autonomous product developing according to its own logic and contributing to global culture along the lines proposed by Regev. Third, by seeing Eastern European popular music as a form of global pop-rock, rather than an imitation, various similarities between popular music can be accounted for within the whole Eastern bloc, and problems with assessing the meaning of the (relatively rare) cases when western artists borrow music from the East can be avoided, as recently happened when Kanye West sampled Omega’s hit Pearls In Her Hair on his track New Slaves.2 Such instances show, as Regev claims, that pop-rock is an interconnected entity and, as argued elsewhere, music is always in the process of relocation and translation (Mazierska 2015). It is also worth mentioning that socialism, both in its Marxist incarnation and that practised in the Soviet Union, did not reject western culture tout court, trying to build a superior one from scratch, as some authors suggest (Risch 2015: 6–7). Rather socialist culture and art were meant to accommodate and build on progressive elements from all previous styles,

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being a logical culmination of history. As Boris Groys put it, ‘The attitude of the Bolshevik leaders towards the bourgeois heritage and world culture in general can be summarised as follows: take from the heritage that which is “best” and “useful to the proletariat” and use it in the socialist revolution and construction of the new world’ (Groys 1988: 37). For this reason, Marx praised Balzac, and Lenin appreciated Tolstoy. Following this logic, there was nothing inappropriate or dangerous in drawing on western music created either in the past or in contemporary times if this culture could be seen as progressive in the same way as Balzac’s novels. Its bland rejection by some regimes in some periods rather points to a betrayal of socialist ideals by selfish and insecure political leaders who did not dare to open their policies to comparison with other versions of socialism (Yurchak 2006). Even when dealing with seemingly straightforward cases of imitation, for example when an artist from the East covers a song from the repertoire of a western star, employing the paradigm of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and music as always being ‘on the move’, encourages us to consider it in multiple contexts: global, national and regional.3 Contributors to this collection are interested in all these contexts by, for example, examining the international careers of Eastern European stars and the ways they tried to fulfil expectations of different types of audiences.

WHOSE MUSIC?: REWORKING IDEOLOGY AT THE GRASSROOTS LEVEL Together with diverting from the ‘self-colonisation’ paradigm, this book tries to overcome the perception of Eastern European pop-rock as being merely a case of political subversion or collusion with the socialist state, as summarised by Ryback in his catchphrase: ‘Leninism versus Lennonism’ (Ryback 1990: 50). In this sense it follows in the footsteps of the recent collection Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc (Risch 2015). Its authors acknowledge that Eastern European pop-rock belongs to the sphere of politics, as does popular music in the West and in the rest of the world, but as John Street aptly observes, musicians under state socialism were not only imprisoned and exiled, but also feted and promoted by the state (Street 2001: 252–53).4 In some countries, most importantly East Germany, they were also involved in producing state policy concerning popular music (Wicke and Shepherd 1993; Robb’s chapter in this collection). On many occasions, it is difficult to say whether a given artist was an anti-communist martyr or a communist collaborator, as is argued in the chapter about

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Czesław Niemen. Moreover, pop-rock artists sang and played not only to upset or flatter the totalitarian rulers but also to express themselves and transmit universal ideas, as well as to gain popularity and earn their living. This often involved avoiding engagement in grand politics and ideology, instead investing their energies in micro-politics, for example being on good terms with local music journalists and music promoters. To understand the specificity of popular music in the Eastern bloc, we have to pay at least equal attention to such micro-politics and the economy of popular music, as to the grand narrative of the Cold War, with its heroes and villains. To do so, it is worth employing the Althusserian concept of ideology, which, although elaborated to account for capitalism, suits state socialism well. Following Marx, Althusser contended that the economic base or the infrastructure of the capitalist system determines a two-level superstructure. First, ‘the State is a “machine” of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the “class” of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class. The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) encompasses the police, courts, prisons, the army, as well as the head of State, the government and the administration’ (Althusser 2006: 92). Second, there are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): the church, educational system, family, legislation, political system, trade unions, communications (press, radio, television, etc.) and culture (Althusser 2006: 95–6). The ISAs, contrary to the RSA, which is single and operates in the public domain, are multiple and belong to the private domain. Moreover, while the RSA functions predominantly by repression, including physical repression, and only secondarily by ideological means, the ISAs function chiefly by ideology, but also secondarily by repression even if ultimately this is a very attenuated and concealed form of repression (Althusser 2006: 97–8). Following Marx’s formula that the ideology of the dominant class is a dominant ideology, Althusser believes that ISAs are ultimately in tune with the RSA. However, many authors after Althusser, even those belonging to the Marxist tradition, disagree. They argue that, while striving to appear unified, the terrain of ideology is actually scarred by hidden silences, elisions and contradictions (Eagleton 2006; on its application to Eastern Europe, see Näripea 2016). Moreover, ideology does not work simply by imposing on people certain ideas from the top, but also by reworking them at grassroots level. Ideologies and ideologues change (ordinary) people, but also people affect ideologies and not only during revolutions but at other times as well. This point is conveyed by the authors contributing to this collection. They refer to the fact that there was no single policy towards popular

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music in the Eastern bloc. Each country had its own (often unwritten) rules, which changed over the years and even within any given period were open to interpretation by different agents, such as political leaders, local politicians and government clerks, and the state media, including prominent journalists and musicians themselves, who tried to navigate between different expectations, often guessing the best course of action for their careers. One example is jazz, which was considered as the protest music of African Americans as well as ‘bourgeois’ decadent music (Yurchak 2006: 166–67; see also Ventsel and Ignácz’s chapters in this collection). Another example is offered by Ana Hofman in her chapter about the censorship of popular music in Yugoslavia, where she refers to the neo-folk song Jugoslavijo, which was panned by critics as kitsch, offending the taste of the Yugoslav people until it was endorsed by Tito himself as a great patriotic song. Although each country and each period was different, certain commonalities can be found. While the role of RSA was crucial during the Stalinist period, it diminished during the periods of ‘thaw’ when ISAs became more important. At the time, censorship eased and popular music gained more space and autonomy within the official culture. This allowed artists to develop their own idiom of expression, both due to reworking foreign influences and drawing on a larger palette of available motifs. Moreover, from the perspective of socialist ideologues the enemy was initially not only politically incorrect music, but also music seen as kitsch or inauthentic; what fits Adorno’s description of ‘popular music’ (Adorno 1990) and ‘culture industry’ (Adorno 1991). This is because under state socialism the division between serious and popular music was meant to disappear by bringing serious music to the masses5 and creating popular music of a high standard. As Peter Wicke and John Shepherd argue in relation to East Germany, the laws ‘required that the workers who were expending their energies building socialism should be entertained only by highly qualified individuals with an appropriate degree from an artistic educational institution’ (Wicke and Shepherd 1993: 26). Workers were meant to ‘benefit from the best kind of entertainment possible, and what was considered best derived from traditional bourgeois notions of art’ (Wicke and Shepherd 1993: 28). One means to achieving this goal was by encouraging popular musicians to gain a university education and attributing different categories or ‘tariffs’ reflecting their musical craft to them, as demonstrated by passing certain exams. Such an approach might indirectly have led to developing in Eastern Europe music which drew on high art to a

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larger extent than in the West, as exemplified by Czesław Niemen, who in his work drew on Polish romantic poetry, or Karel Gott who sang opera arias. Another aspect of the same approach was the use of folk music, seen as an ‘authentic’ expression of the masses. In this respect (as in many others) music in Eastern Europe was not very different from its western counterpart, where folk versus pop opposition surfaced in the 1960s, in part as a response to Bob Dylan abandoning acoustic guitar in favour of the electric guitar (Buxton 1990: 428). The difference was that the perception of authenticity of folk music lasted much longer in the East, leading to the development there of many types of folk rock, such as ‘shepherd rock’ and ‘ethno-rock’. The advantage of such genres was its attractiveness to foreign audiences, who regarded them as mildly exotic ‘world’ music (Connell and Gibson 2003: 121). Privileging of high(er) art within popular music also led to a situation where some genres of popular music subsidised others. A case in point was the use of revenue from rock concerts in Poland in the 1980s to help sustain the jazz industry (Zieliński 2005: 98-9). After the end of Stalinism not only did it become unlikely for musicians to be sent to prison for singing subversive songs, but the role of (any) ideology in the success of a specific musician or genre diminished. It was rather the quality of ‘music as music’ which decided the popularity and critical acclaim of a given artist or song. At this time it was also impossible for musicians to ignore the needs of the audience. Only by addressing them could they become popular and achieve a degree of artistic freedom and commercial success. It is true that under state socialism there was no simple correlation between the popularity of a particular performer and his or her financial success, largely due to the state monopoly of the record industry, which often reacted with delay to the audience’s needs and did not pay artists royalties in proportion to the sale of their records. Nevertheless, there was a link, as the more copies they sold, the more gigs they could play, which was typically the main source of their income. This also brought the chance to perform on television, which was a source of additional income, or to write music for film or theatre. Furthermore, success in the domestic market increased the chance to perform and make records abroad. Many bands from Eastern Europe had to content themselves with playing in small to medium size clubs, where they earned relatively little in comparison to their western counterparts. However, due to the high exchange rate of western currency on the black market, back home their earnings were significant and allowed them a standard of living which was much higher than the population average.

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In the 1980s in some countries such as Poland and Hungary, a slow neo-liberalisation of the popular music industry can be observed. At this time, creating the culture industry in Adorno’s sense was not only tolerated but encouraged. This was reflected in the breaking of the state’s monopoly of the record industry by private companies entering the market and an increase in concert ticket prices. This situation led to a greater differentiation of the economic status between the biggest stars and less popular musicians, and a greater independence of artists from state politics. In Poland in the last years of state socialism, despite the overall economic crisis, one could observe in the popular music business a shift from the economy of shortages to a market economy, where supply exceeds demand. This was reflected, for example, by cancelling various rock festivals and other gigs not because of their subversive character, but because there were not enough people willing to buy tickets (Zieliński 2005: 75-6). Moreover, changes in the technology, most importantly the almost universal accessibility of the audio cassette and a well-developed black market selling cassettes of foreign records, led to a situation where in some Eastern European countries the productions of local musicians had to effectively compete with music coming in from the West.

FROM ALBANIA TO ESTONIA, FROM LIGHT MUSIC TO POP-ROCK: MAPPING THE FIELD The main purpose of this collection is to present popular music in Eastern Europe during the state socialist period from perspectives which were previously neglected, and focus on areas which were under-represented. One of them concerns the political conditions of production and consumption of music. The authors consider issues such as the effect of socialist ideology on the state of the music business, paying particular attention to the shifts effected by the changes in the leadership of the communist parties. Another area which is examined is that of the role of censors and music journalists in shaping the discourse on popular music in specific countries. Music journalism is especially neglected in the existing literature on Eastern European music, in part because focusing on music journalists undermines the Manichean vision of Eastern European pop-rock culture, in which nonconformist rockers fought with the oppressive state, by introducing mediators and translators in this battle. Finally, stars are taken into consideration. This is because when thinking about popular music in any country or region one thinks immediately

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about its stars. Examining stars also allows us to see many other aspects of music, such as state politics regarding music, dominant genres, organisation of the music industry, fandom, and international connections between music businesses and scenes. Rock stars are frequently endowed with agency; they are regarded as the ultimate authors of their work, not unlike film directors, known as ‘auteurs’. Ray Shuker observes that such an approach to stars started in the late 1960s. John Cawelti claimed that ‘one can see the differences between pop groups which simply perform without creating that personal statement which marks the auteur, and highly creative groups, like the Beatles who make of their performance a complex work of art’ (Cawelti, quoted in Shuker 2013: 60). By the early 1970s, ‘self-consciousness became the measure of a record’s artistic status; frankness, musical wit, the use of irony and paradox were musicians’ artistic insignia—it was such self-commentary that revealed the auteur within the machine. The skilled listener was the one who could recognize the artist despite the commercial trappings’ (Frith, quoted in Shuker 2013: 60). By contrast, pop stars are seen as manufactured; they do what is expected of them rather than following their own ideas (Waksman 2015: 297-316). One can notice a similar rule pertaining to pop-rock in Eastern Europe. The first stars seen as auteurs appeared in the late 1960s (Niemen, Omega) and the closer we come to the present day, the more we find. As in the West, their status was to do with their perception as ‘auteurs within the machine’, as Colin Frith puts it, able to transcend the limitations of the national culture industry. Their presence in the Eastern bloc challenges the claim that the socialist state apparatus attempted to control all spheres of human life and that culture was created from the top down by means of Party directives. Analysis of specific cases demonstrates that the production of stars was a complex process, which involved a negotiation not only between a star-to-be and the political authorities but also between the star and his or her wider music habits, which included music journalists and promoters. The state socialist system was in some ways hostile to home-grown stars as demonstrated by, for example, limiting the salaries of stars by introducing a system of tariffs and paying them a standard fee for concerts and records, irrespective of the number of tickets and records sold, as previously mentioned. On the other hand, there were some ways in which it was conducive to their creation and sustainment of their careers. Paradoxically, this had to do with the same factors which thwarted or slowed their careers. The shortage of records for foreign and domestic popular music, unlike in

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the West when in any given period there were hundreds of bands competing for available space on the shelves in record shops, rendered the music produced by local stars more popular than they otherwise might have been. Moreover, the inertia in the state music business reflected in the slow reaction to changing fashions, and the nepotism dominating many state institutions, led to a situation where those who reached the Pantheon of popular music stayed there for decades. The authors of this collection do not use any official definition of ‘Eastern Europe’ because such a definition does not exist, but rather try to account for the way this term is currently employed in academic research (on the discussion on Eastern Europe in relation to cinema, see Mazierska 2010). For this reason, there are no chapters about popular music in Russia and the majority of countries comprising the old Soviet Union, because they are usually treated separately from its satellite countries. Nevertheless, the reader will find here a chapter about Estonian music because Estonia, together with other Soviet Baltic republics, functioned as a kind of ‘western enclave’ within the Soviet Union. Moreover, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Estonia positioned itself as a Baltic country, politically and culturally closer to Scandinavia than to the old colonial centre of Moscow. While excluding Russia, this collection tries to account for pop-rock in countries which are neglected in existing studies, namely Albania and Romania, on account of particularly harsh political regimes in these countries. The authors of respective chapters do not deny their harshness, but they acknowledge that pop-rock existed there, and in Romania even flourished, testifying on the one hand to the need of populations of these countries to participate in the flow of global popular music, and on the other hand to the difficulty in policing the taste of audiences and, at times, of the state accepting its existence and trying to use it to its advantage. The largest part of the book is devoted to music in the three countries which can be described as mini music empires within the Eastern bloc: Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. These countries had the most developed popular music business (Kan and Hayes 1994: 41). There, artists enjoyed the greatest artistic freedom, were most exposed to foreign influences and even managed to gain popularity abroad. Of greater interest is music produced in the later decades of state socialism, namely the 1970s and 1980s, because then one can observe an explosion of rock bands in many state socialist countries. Although influenced by western music, they managed to produce highly original works by incorporating elements of folk music, drawing on local classical music or poetry,

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employing metaphor, and taking issue with ‘socialist living’ with its numerous shortcomings, such as the sense of uniformity. In terms of genre, the emphasis in this collection is on what Motti Regev describes as ‘pop-rock’. As Regev himself admits, the term is problematic on two counts. ‘One is the relationship between “pop” and “rock”, and the other is the place of rock in popular music history.’ The author refers to several distinctions between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’, of which the most widely accepted is that ‘rock’ is a more authentic and artistic sector of popular music, while ‘pop’ is its more commercial, ‘inauthentic’ and watered-down version (Regev 2002: 251; on the division between pop and rock, see also Frith 2001: 94–5; Keightley 2001: 109). However, while not rejecting it altogether, Regev argues that what connects pop and rock is more important than what divides them; hence the use of the meta-category. He defines ‘pop-rock’ by three characteristics: a typical set of creative practices, a body of canonised albums, and two logics of cultural dynamics, namely commercialism and avant-gardism (Regev 2002: 252-57). The creative processes pertaining to ‘pop-rock’ include ‘extensive use of electric and electronic instruments, sophisticated studio techniques of sound manipulation, and certain techniques of vocal delivery, mostly those signifying immediacy of expression and spontaneity’ (Regev 2002: 253). Although the term ‘pop-rock’ is virtually absent from the discourse on popular music in Eastern Europe, and even the words ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ entered the literature on this music relatively late, being replaced by terms such as ‘beat’ or ‘big-beat’ (due to the initial association of ‘rock’ with western imperialism and decadence), this term was opted for because the discussion on Hungarian, Polish or Yugoslav music revolves around the issues identified by Regev as central to pop-rock. Hence, the reason why ‘beat’ was seen as different from other forms of music such as jazz, classical music and folk, which were exactly those identified by Regev. Moreover, in the discourse on pop and rock in the aforementioned countries a drive can be observed towards ‘canonisation of the so-called ‘classic’ AngloAmerican rock albums and authors of the 1960s and 1970s, and their inheritors in later decades’ (Regev 2002: 255). Indeed, the typical opinion of critics discussing pop-rock in a specific Eastern European country is that it achieved a state of maturity when it created its own canon, consisting of albums seen as inheritors of classical Anglo-American rock albums from the 1960s and 1970s, and had performers seen as authors of their own songs (see, for example, discussion of Polish rock in Kan and Hayes 1994;

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and Zieliński 2005). This is the main reason why Eastern European rock music of the 1970s and 1980s is valued more highly than that which was produced earlier, and why rock in Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia is seen as being of a higher quality than that in the remaining countries of the Eastern bloc. Similarly, the issue of commercialism and avant-gardism is of great importance to critics discussing Eastern European pop-rock, in relation to which an interesting paradox can be observed. While on the level of generalisation most critics castigate Eastern European pop-rock for rejecting the logic of the market, seeing it as the main reason why it lagged behind the West and especially its Anglo-American centre, when it comes to discussing specific artists, they condemn those who they see as ‘commercial’ and praise those leaning towards the ‘avant-garde’, although ‘commercialism refers to a cultural logic driven by market interests or organizational isomorphism’ (Regev 2002: 256). The question of how the state socialist economy at large and its application to the popular music industry affected the logics of commercialism and avant-gardism of Eastern European poprock is touched upon in some chapters but deserves a separate study. While the terms ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ refer to the music produced after the Second World War, the field encompassed by the term ‘popular music’ is larger as it can also be applied to lighter forms of music identified in the nineteenth century, as well as to genres and phenomena which are concurrent with pop-rock but different from it, as exemplified by the soundtrack from The Sound of Music (Regev 2002: 252). This type of music is covered in this collection due to a close proximity between popular and other types of music under state socialism, most importantly serious and classical music. This resulted from the fact that serious music under this system was meant to be popular and popular music was meant to be of high quality; hence the drive towards avant-gardism and, at an institutional level, pushing the artists to enhance their qualifications, as discussed earlier. The second reason is a porous boundary between popular music and pop-rock, especially in countries with a heavier censorship of rock, such as Romania, Albania and some Soviet republics. In these countries, popular music labelled ‘light music’ or ‘estrada music’, occupied a position which in other circumstances would be taken by pop-rock, and revealed some characteristics normally associated with this genre, as demonstrated by Aimar Ventsel in the chapter included in this collection. Similarly, the development of ethno-rock, which is one of the most interesting phenomena originating from Eastern Europe, can be seen as a way to hybridise pop-rock with popular music, or even a way to masquerade rock as popular music.

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Covering as many dimensions of popular music as possible comes at the price of exposing more gaps in research than closing them. Among them is the need to engage in a detailed and comparative study of topics such as music policies and industries in specific countries, sub-genres of pop-rock (for example, progressive rock, ethno-rock, punk, disco, electronic music), scenes, reception of western music, fandom and the relationship of pop-rock to other media, most importantly film and video. Some of this work is already taking place, as demonstrated by the recently published volumes and articles on the relationship between youth and rock culture in the Soviet bloc (Risch 2015), and on pop-rock in specific Eastern European countries, although usually of the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall (for example, Szemere 2001; Buchanan 2006, Mišina 2013)6, rather than the period of state socialism, as is the case in this collection. The hope is that this collection will be followed by more detailed studies. Only by engaging in such research will it be possible to demonstrate the richness of this music and the usefulness of studying it not only for the sake of offering a fuller picture of the cultural history of Eastern Europe, but also the cosmopolitan character of pop-rock music at large.

CHAPTER OUTLINE The collection consists of three parts. The first, entitled ‘Reworking State Policies by Grassroots’, examines how state policies affected the production and consumption of music in several Eastern European countries. The first chapter, by Ádám Ignácz, entitled ‘Propagated, Permitted or Prohibited? Popular Music in the First Two Decades of Socialist Hungary’, charts the differences in the attitude to popular music on the part of the Hungarian Communist Party and various state organisations, trying to identify the factors which affected it most significantly, such as Hungary’s relation to the Soviet Union and the West. Using extensive archival research, Ignácz argues that after the end of Stalinism in the mid1950s, Hungary adopted a cultural model which permitted (if at times grudgingly) the development of different types of popular music, including West-influenced rock. This was a result of taking a pragmatic stance, based on the assumption that the tide of popular music cannot be stopped by state documents, and later also a realisation that popular music is a source of significant revenue. At the same time, artists learnt how to ‘play the system’, maximising their cultural and real capital, which eventually led

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to Hungary becoming one of the musical ‘mini-empires’ within the Eastern bloc. Ignácz also draws attention to certain peculiarities of Hungarian policy towards popular music, such as officially equating classical with popular music and special treatment afforded to folk music. Such edification of folk music will also be mentioned by several other authors in this collection. Doru Pop in ‘Pop-Rock in Romania during the Ceaușescu Regime’ examines the attitude of the Romanian regime to western popular music, and those forms of Romanian popular music and youth culture which drew on western influences. In common with Ignácz, Pop underscores the fact that the attitudes to pop-rock kept changing, largely reflecting the changes in political leadership and relations between Romania and foreign countries. The crucial shift took place during the last years of the regime of the hard-line Stalinist Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in the first half of the 1960s and when he was replaced in 1965 by a more liberal-minded Nicolae Ceaușescu, until the early 1970s when Ceaușescu’s policies changed in order to make Romania self-sufficient and isolated from external influences. Although Romania of state socialism has a reputation as one of the most autarchic and authoritarian countries in the world, Pop, drawing on his own sociological research, argues that the local population was well informed about western music. Moreover, the local pop-rock bands, not unlike in Hungary, learnt to ‘play the system’, and used the state’s determination to produce a socialist culture to showcase their achievements, as demonstrated by the ‘Cenacle’, a state-sponsored multi-media festival. They also exploited Romanian folklore as part of their musical style, to meet the state’s demand to produce ‘national music’, as well as create an original style. Apart from discussing Romanian pop-rock as a distinct phenomenon, Pop also examines its influence on other spheres of popular culture, such as cinema. Aimar Ventsel in ‘Estonian Invasion as Western Ersatz-pop’ continues with the topic of the ‘West in the East’, but in a different context: the presence of Estonian light pop music (estrada) in other parts of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. He argues that within the Soviet sphere Estonian music, represented by artists Jaak Joala, Anne Veski and Gunnar Graps, and bands Apelsin and Fix, played the role of western music. Ventsel discusses the mechanism of their success, arguing that Estonia was the Soviet West and Soviet culture managers in Goskontsert and other state organisations promoted that image in order to create popular concert artists. Estonian singers were encouraged not to sing in Russian, and to

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appear as if they were western pop stars. At the same time, their work was not a simple imitation of western pop-rock, but a creative reworking and adjustment to the expectations of fans. The success of Estonian artists was a product of the informal music industry in the Soviet Union. Every successful Estonian artist had several informal managers who used their contacts to get maximum airtime in key musical programmes of Soviet central TV channels and as many big concerts as possible. Ultimately, Ventsel argues that in the Soviet Union there existed a buoyant profit-oriented music business that operated within the framework of official cultural institutions, contrary to the ‘cold war paradigm’ which emphasises the supremacy of socialist ideology in deciding what kind of music was created and promoted in this part of the world. Even after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when Russian audiences gained easy access to music from all corners of the world, some Estonian artists maintained their popularity, suggesting that they functioned not only as ersatz of the western product but something original. Bruce Williams in a subsequent chapter, ‘The Eagle Rocks: Isolation and Cosmopolitanism in Albania’s Pop-Rock Scene’, considers pop-rock in Albania, widely regarded as the most isolated of all Eastern European countries. Williams argues that despite its isolation, there was an underground penetration of international pop culture. The familiarity of Albanians with international pop music was due to the makeshift antennas, often constructed of soft drink cans wired to parts from transistor radios, which served as decoders and permitted the clandestine reception of Italian radio and television. Of particular consequence was the popularity of the Italian San Remo festival, which was viewed by large groups of friends in concealed locations. During the 1980s, private groups also met at Tirana’s artificial lake and performed forbidden western music. These performances by the so-called ‘Lake Bands’ provided an opportunity for Albanians to familiarise themselves with western rock music. Nonetheless, it was not until 1988 that singer/guitarist Aleksander Gjoka staged Albania’s first rock concert. What is of particular interest is the manner in which Gjoka avoided official censorship and performed the concert at an official venue inside the Palace of Culture. The concert was instrumental in debunking the notion of condoned aesthetics established during the Hoxha years. Although Williams’ chapter is not overtly concerned with censorship, he points to the fact that even in a country epitomising isolation and lack of respect for human rights, there was room for western music (although, significantly, coming not only from the geographical West but also the South), and indigenous pop-rock, particularly near the end of Hoxha’s regime.

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The second part of the collection, entitled ‘The Function of Gatekeepers’, looks at the role of people and institutions which mediated between the state, artists and their fans, such as censors, journalists, DJs and managers of music clubs. The first, entitled ‘Censorship, Dissent and the Metaphorical Language of GDR Rock’, authored by David Robb, considers this phenomenon in East Germany, a country where popular music and youth culture was treated with the utmost seriousness, as demonstrated by the fact that the music scene was controlled by a network of agencies which were directly linked to the organs of government. Robb charts the shifts in attitude to pop-rock on the part of the political regime from the 1960s to the end of state socialist period. Throughout this period the state limited the freedom of expression of artists, but it never tried to eliminate this type of music. Moreover, the pressure to conform was significantly eased after Eric Honecker came to power in the early 1970s until the so-called Wolf Biermann affair of 1976. Robb argues that the continuous struggle between artists and censors led to a specific style of lyrics of East German rock, marked by the wide use of metaphor, which he demonstrates by a close reading of songs from a repertoire of bands such as Puhdys, Renft and City. He argues that this metaphorical style of writing was on the wane in the final years of East Germany. The importance attributed by the political regime to popular music was also reflected in its attempts to play a major role in the international arena, as reflected by organising the annual Festival of Political Song in East Berlin, which was a showcase for international and local political musical artists, including Bob Dylan. On the whole, Robb argues that East German rock, while having some points of contact with its West German counterpart, cannot be considered to be an imitation as it constitutes an original phenomenon. Ana Hofman in ‘Folk Music as a Folk Enemy: Music Censorship in Socialist Yugoslavia’, takes issue with music censorship in Yugoslavia, a country which attempted, with a significant degree of success, to implement a so-called liberal socialism. This resulted, among other things, in complex censorship regimes of popular music that operated in the empty space between official negations and actual enforcements. Overt censorship mainly concerned a handful of issues, such as the national identities of the respective constitutional peoples of Yugoslavia and the representation of the country’s leader Tito. Because of that, Hofman shifts her attention from institutional mechanisms of censorship to personal, unspoken and unwritten norms and practices, in particular, self-censorship and so-called ‘editorial censorship’ concerned with limiting the presence of certain

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genres in the media. She focuses on one such genre: Newly Composed Folk Music (NCFM). This music was the object of prejudice and restrictions due to its perceived low artistic quality and purely commercial character, apparent in the characteristic blends of local music idioms and western production and technology. Recognising its strong market potential, the state tolerated its high sales, but distanced itself from its ‘un-cultural’ and ‘un-educational’ features, restricting its visibility in the media and banning its creators from honouring Tito, the Party or Yugoslavia in their songs. In a wider sense, Hofman sides with those authors who criticise the binary relationship between the ‘censor’ and the ‘censored’ and spotlights the multiplicity of actors involved in the censorial activities, instead of a single institution or authority. By the same token, she criticises the totalitarian reading of Eastern European history and its popular music, in which the evil state fought with the musician-political rebels, suggesting that the dividing lines were drawn elsewhere, most importantly between music regarded as high-class and that regarded as kitsch. Zsófia Réti, in a chapter ‘“The Second Golden Age”: Popular Music Journalism during the Late Socialist Era of Hungary’, drawing on archival research, most importantly Hungarian music and youth magazines from 1975 to 1989, analyses how popular music journalism functioned in the late socialist period of Hungary. She argues that although the state determined some of its aspects, and despite the fact that this type of journalism was missing some of the institutional support that was available for the other branches of journalism, it worked well. Hungarian music and youth magazines presented a wide range of opinions, which reflected not so much the Party directives as the views of specific journalists. Hungarian journalists operated as a close-knit community. Everyone was connected, and the most central nodes of this network, the legendary personalities of popular music journalism, were easily recognised by their intermediary nature. They worked in more than one medium, either in a consecutive or a parallel fashion and exerted considerable influence on the shaping of music fashions. The relative freedom and flourishing of music journalism reflected Kádár’s liberal stance towards culture, according to which what was not openly oppositional was tolerated. Réti also argues that the development of music journalism in Hungary was not linear—while in the 1970s the number of articles about pop-rock steadily grew, in the first half of the 1980s it saw a sharp dip. She also draws attention to the fact that there is a poignant disparity between the political position taken

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by journalists at the time of their activity and that in their memoirs, because after 1989 the majority of cultural workers attempted to present themselves as oppositional figures. The specificity of journalism in Eastern Europe is also a topic of the chapter ‘Youth under Construction: The Generational Shifts in Popular Music Journalism in Poland of the 1980s’, written jointly by Klaudia Rachubińska and Xawery Stańczyk. Drawing on the concept of the field of power, as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, they regard Polish journalists as the agents of ‘mild’ pressure that mediated between the state and the artists. However, what interests Rachubińska and Stańczyk is not what Polish music journalists had in common, but what divided them. They explore the topic by analysing articles published in two leading Polish music magazines of the 1980s: Non Stop and Jazz. Magazyn Muzyczny in the years 1979–84. The 1980s is of specific interest to them because it was a period when pop-rock flourished in Poland and there was a generational shift in the music establishment. The line dividing journalists working at these magazines did not concern their attitude to the state socialist ideology or the government, but rather their attitude to what was perceived as high and low art within popular music, and their own role as tastemakers. Hence, the older Jazz. Magazyn Muzyczny positioned itself as a defender of the avant-garde and educator of readers who it treated in a patronising way, while Non Stop, a specialist magazine for the entertainment industry, was more open to different musical genres and showed respect to professionalism and to the readers, as proved by publishing their letters. On the whole, Rachubińska and Stańczyk also ‘zoom in’ to discuss the case of some of the most influential Polish music journalists and the way the Polish press presented two arguably greatest music personalities of the 1980s in Poland, Grzegorz Ciechowski from Republika and Marek Jackowski from Maanam. The final chapter in this part, ‘The Birth of Socialist Disc Jockey: Between Music Guru, DIY Ethos and Market Socialism’, written by Marko Zubak and based largely on interviews he conducted with Yugoslav socialist disc-jockeys, examines how this profession developed in close proximity with the birth of its respective local pop-rock music scene and the surrounding youth lifestyles. Zubak looks at the difficulties of translating this relatively new pop-cultural profession into a seemingly foreign socialist environment, tracing its complex evolution from its beginning in the mid-1960s to its formal recognition a decade later. He argues that socialist disc-jockeys resembled rock journalists in so far as they

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acted as pop-cultural gatekeepers who spread the new worldview and shaped the musical tastes of the youth in a more direct manner while manoeuvring them on the dance floor. In addition, the specific ideological context forced them to develop a different skill set from that of their western colleagues. Linked by default to their natural habitat, they were often personally involved in the foundation and management of the first local discotheques. Faced with a limited supply of pop-cultural commodities, they showed a great inclination for improvisation and acquired records through various semi-legal channels. Lacking the expensive technology needed to perform their job, they built their own sound and light equipment, showing considerable electrical engineering knowledge in the process. Embracing a multitude of such diverse roles, from pop-cultural emissaries to business entrepreneurs, socialist disc-jockeys are emblematic figures of late socialism at large. They epitomise several of its key features, from ideological and cultural relaxation, greater western influence and the rise of consumerism, to a steady influx of market trends within the socialist economy, all of which defy dated Cold War schemes of repression and dissent, official cultures and youth subcultures. The third part of this collection is devoted to Eastern European stars. It begins with Petr Bilek presenting the career of Karel Gott (b. 1939). Gott was the greatest star of popular music in Czechoslovakia, as the title of this chapter announces, ‘Karel Gott: The Ultimate Star of Czechoslovak Pop Music’, and possibly in the entire Eastern bloc if the number of records sold is taken into account. Bilek situates Gott in the changing context of Czechoslovak politics and culture. His main argument is that Gott epitomised professionalism and the power of music as music. This gave the impression that regimes came and went, while Gott’s music remained the same; untainted by politics and offering solace to often disgruntled citizens. Indeed, although the Czech artist took some years to polish his style, once it reached maturity it changed little. This was possible thanks to Gott being a popular rather than pop star—he drew more on classical music and jazz than reworking world fashions. Bilek points to the fact that Gott was never a political rebel. On the contrary, in 1977 he played a role model for propaganda attempts to minimise the impact of the Charter 77 dissident movement. However, his stardom did not end with the end of communism. During the Velvet Revolution, he performed the Czech national anthem along with Karel Kryl, symbol of a banned exile singer. Even now, in his advanced age, Gott is a great star. Bilek also devotes part of his essay to Gott’s international career, noting his extensive travels to

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different corners of the world and the great popularity he enjoyed in the Eastern bloc and German-speaking world. Even people who had different musical tastes had to agree that his performance was always impeccable. He was living proof that Eastern Europe can stand not only for shabbiness but also perfectionism. The next star discussed in the book is Czesław Niemen (1939-2004). He is the protagonist of the chapter entitled ‘Czesław Niemen: Between Enigma and Political Pragmatism’. Like Gott in Czechoslovakia, Niemen in Poland occupied the position of a national superstar. However, in contrast to Gott, who is associated with light music and professionalism, Niemen’s posture was distinctly rock. Throughout his life, he was seen as an autonomous artist who created music of such quality that it moved into the area of high art. He drew on classics of Polish romantic literature, most importantly Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and favoured universal themes and messages, as epitomised by his greatest hit, Strange Is This World, rather than songs having distinctly political content. This allowed a large section of his fans to see him as a nonconformist artist without putting him in conflict with the authorities. Niemen also benefitted from the high status of progressive rock in Poland, which lasted longer than it did in Britain, thanks to being the first and leading representative of the genre. Niemen’s attempts at gaining international recognition are also discussed, especially in Italy and West Germany, which was, as the case of Gott also demonstrates, the most East-friendly music market in Europe. Structural and personal reasons which prevented him from becoming a global star are pointed out, and ultimately the author argues that Niemen lacked any distinct strategy for conquering foreign markets. It is only natural to follow a discussion of Niemen’s career with that of the Hungarian band Omega, the most internationally successful rock band from Eastern Europe, with over a million records sold outside of their country. The authors of the chapter ‘Omega: Red Star from Hungary’, Bence Csatári and Béla Szilárd Jávorszky, chart Omega’s career against the background of social, economic and political forces pertaining to the Hungarian version of state socialism. Although Csatári and Szilárd Jávorszky do not paint members of Omega as anti-communist rebels and martyrs, contrary to the approach taken by Bilek and the author, they emphasise the factors which had a negative influence on the band’s domestic and international career, especially the monopolistic and highly bureaucratic character of the institutions affecting the careers of Hungarian musicians. They suggest that if the commercial potential of

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Omega had been fully exploited by the Hungarian record industry and agencies who were sending artists abroad at least at one point in their career (when they recorded their hit Pearls in her Hair), the band could have reached worldwide fame. Still, Omega’s career is a genuine Eastern European success story, demonstrating that there is much more to Eastern European popular music than imitation. In common with the authors of two earlier chapters devoted to stars, Csatári and Szilárd Jávorszky point to the longevity of Eastern European stardom, with Omega being active for over 50 years, as well as the importance of the German market for musicians from Eastern Europe. The final chapter, authored by Piotr Fortuna, ‘Perverse Imperialism: Republika’s Phenomenon in the 1980s’, examines Republika, which together with Maanam was one of the most popular Polish rock bands in the 1980s. Its charismatic leader, Grzegorz Ciechowski became one of the greatest Polish rock stars of all time, despite his perceived arrogance and allegedly embracing the totalitarian character of a socialist state, or at least rendering it sexy rather than fighting it head on, as was allegedly the case with the rockers in Eastern Europe, according to Ryback and Ramet. Fortuna focuses on the years 1981–1986, from the foundation of Republika (previously Res Publica) until their first disbanding, when the band achieved its greatest successes. His chapter consists of two parts. In the first Fortuna discusses Republika’s lyrics authored by Ciechowski, arguing that its author uses the totalitarian imagery to depict erotic relations between the protagonists of his songs. In the second part, he takes a closer look at the radio mockumentary The Trip, in order to present the position of Republika in Polish rock culture of the 1980s and tease out the role of a rock star in Poland of state socialism. The majority of chapters are written by authors who are based in the countries whose music they present. This allows them to draw on their intimate knowledge of the phenomena at hand. However, others are ‘outsiders’ based in Anglo-Saxon academia or, like myself, are natives living abroad. Not nationality, but knowledge was the main criterion for choosing the authors for this collection. Equally, some authors remember the music they describe from their own experience; others were born too late to attend the concerts of their favourite stars. Such a mixture allows for a more nuanced assessment of popular music in state socialist Eastern Europe than if we hear the voice of one generation only. Although the bulk of the authors recognise that popular music produced in Eastern Europe was influenced by that produced in the West, especially in

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the UK and the USA, they refuse to treat this music as a simple imitation or its poor relative. Equally, they point to not only negative but also the positive influence of state socialism on the careers and type of music produced in the Eastern bloc. Although often seen in their own countries as amateurish and backward (because of suffering from under-development of the recording industry which required musicians to adopt multiple and diverse roles), Eastern European pop-rock can in many ways be seen as foreshadowing the future of popular music globally. In particular, the specific economic model which dominated in the countries of state socialism, in which the bulk of musicians’ earning came from live performance and subsidiary rights rather than from selling records, today dominates both in the East and the West. It will thus be worth examining in detail for the benefit of current and future generations of musicians. However, to see Eastern European music in this light requires overcoming the (post)colonial and martyro logical mindset, typical not only to researching pop-rock behind the Iron Curtain but also other artefacts coming from this region. It is hoped that the authors of this collection have made the first step in this direction.

NOTES 1. I am not the first to criticise Ryback and Ramet’s scholarship. For example, Tony Mitchell describes Ramet’s pronouncements as ‘melodramatic’ and reproaches her for caricaturing the political impact of rock music and factual inaccuracies (Mitchell 1996: 95–99; see also Szemere 1995: 273–75). 2. If the ‘imitation’ framework to Kanye West’s case is applied, then one might come to a rather absurd conclusion that sampling Omega the famous American rapper acknowledged the superiority of Hungarian music above its own or perhaps even that of Kadar’s ‘gulash socialism’ over Obama’s version of capitalism. 3. Imitation is also an issue widely discussed in relation to western pop-rock. Simon Frith argues that the attitude to the cover version shifted from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1960s. While in the middle of the 1960s British cover versions of US hits were regarded as necessarily inferior, by the end of the decade it was agreed that a ‘version’ of an old song could be as original as a new song (Frith 2007: 317). From this perspective it will be a fascinating task to examine the way artists from Eastern Europe covered western songs. 4. However, although Risch’s introduction diverts from the simple dichotomies employed by Ryback and Ramet, in some of the chapters they still prevail. For example, Tom Junes’ chapter aptly titled ‘Facing the Music: How the Foundations of Socialism Were Rocked in Poland’

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harks back to the idea promoted by Ramet, that rock destroyed state socialism (Junes 2015). 5. The use of serious music in the education of the masses is excellently portrayed by Dušan Makavejev in his film Čovek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird, 1965), where a symphonic orchestra visits a copper-processing plant in a remote region of Yugoslavia. It is not an accident that such practice was shown in a Yugoslav film, because in this country the socialist ideas were taken more seriously than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where they by this point largely transformed into an empty ritual. 6. In this respect Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav countries are most thoroughly represented, largely due to the use of popular music in the discourse on nationalism during the Yugoslav wars and their aftermath, proving the point that the special interest in Eastern European popular music concerns its political dimension.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. (1990). On popular music. In Simon Frith & Andrew Goodwin (Eds.), On record: Rock, pop, and the written word (pp. 301–14). London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor (1991). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. London: Routledge. Althusser, Louis (2006) [1970]. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation, In his Philosophy and other essays (pp. 85–126). New York: Monthly Review Press. Bennett, Andy (2000). Popular music and youth culture: Music, identity and place. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Buchanan, Donna A. (2006). Performing democracy: Bulgarian music and musicians in transition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Buxton, David (1990). Rock music, the star system, and the rise of consumerism. In Simon Frith & Andrew Goodwin (Eds.), On record: Rock, pop, and the written word (pp. 427–40). London: Routledge. Connell, John & Gibson, Chris (2003). Sound tracks: Popular music, identity and place. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry (2006). ‘Preface’, to Pierre Macherey. A Theory of Literary Production (vii–xiv). London: Routledge. Frith, Simon (2001). Pop music. In Simon Frith, Will Straw & John Street (Eds), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 93–108). Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frith, Simon (2007). Taking popular music seriously. Farnham: Ashgate. Groys, Boris (1988). The total art of Stalinism, trans. Charles Rougle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Junes, Tom (2015). Facing the music: How the foundations of socialism were rocked in Poland. In William Jay Risch (Ed.), Youth and rock in the Soviet Bloc (pp. 229–54). Lanham: Lexington Books. Kan, Alex and Nick Hayes (1994). Big beat in Poland. In Sabrina Petra Ramet (Ed.), Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 41–53). Oxford: Westview Press. Keightley, Keir (2001). Reconsidering rock. In Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (Eds), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 109–42). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazierska, Ewa (2010). Eastern European cinema: Old and new approaches. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 1, 5–16. Mazierska, Ewa (2015). Introduction: Setting popular music in motion. In Ewa Mazierska and Georgina Gregory (Eds), Relocating popular music (pp. 1–24). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mišina, Dalibor (2013). Shake rattle and roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the poetics of social critique. Farnham: Ashgate. Mitchell, Tony (1996). Popular music and local identity: Rock, pop and rap in Europe and Oceania. London: Leicester University Press. Näripea, Eva (2016). Soviet and post-soviet images of capitalism: Ideological fissures in Marek Piestrak’s Polish-Estonian Coproductions. In Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia (Eds), Red alert: Marxist approaches to science fiction cinema (pp. 48–71). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ramet, Sabrina Petra (1994). Rock: The music of revolution (and political conformity). In Sabrina Petra Ramet (Ed.), Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 1–14). Boulder: Westview Press. Regev, Motti (2002). The pop-rockization of popular music. In David Hesmondhalgh & Keith Negus (Eds), Popular music studies (pp. 251–64). London: Arnold. Regev, Motti (2013). Pop-rock music: Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Risch, William Jay (2015). Introduction to William Jay Risch (Ed.), Youth and rock in the Soviet Bloc (1–23). Lanham: Lexington Books. Risch, William Jay (Ed.). (2015). Youth and rock in the Soviet Bloc. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ryback, Timothy W. (1990). Rock around the Bloc: A history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shuker, Roy (2013). Understanding popular music culture, fourth edition. London: Routledge. Stokes, Martin (2003a). Introduction: Ethnicity, identity and music. In Martin Stokes (Ed.), Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place (pp. 1–27). Oxford: Berg.

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Stokes, Martin (2003b). Globalization and the politics of world music. In Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (Eds), The critical study of music: A critical introduction (pp. 297–308). London: Routledge. Street, John (2001). Rock, pop and politics. In Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (Eds), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 243–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szemere, Anna (1992). The politics of marginality: A rock musical subculture in socialist Hungary in the early 1980s. In Reebee Garofalo (Ed.), Rockin’ the boat: Mass music and mass movements (pp. 93–114). Boston: South End Press. Szemere, Anna (1995). Reviewed Work: Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia by Sabrina Petra Ramet. Popular Music, 2, 273–75. Szemere, Anna (2001). Up from the underground: The culture of rock music in Postsocialist Hungary. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Waksman, Steve (2015). The star system. In Andy Bennett & Steve Waksman (Eds.), The Sage handbook of popular music (pp. 297–316). London: Sage. Wicke, Peter (1992). ‘The times they A-Changin’: Rock music and political change in East Germany. In Reebee Garofalo (Ed.), Rockin’ the boat: Mass music and mass movements (pp. 81–92). Boston: South End Press. Wicke, Peter & Shepherd, John (1993). “The Cabaret is dead”: Rock culture as state enterprise—the political organization of rock in East Germany. In Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, Graeme Turner (Eds.), Rock and popular music: Politics, policies, institutions (pp. 25–36). London: Routledge. Yurchak, Alexei (2006). Everything was forever, until it was no more. The last Soviet generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zieliński Przemysław (2005). Scena rockowa w PRL-u: Historia, organizacja, znaczenie. Warszawa: Trio. Ewa Mazierska is professor of film studies at the School of Humanities and the Social Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include Relocating Popular Music, co-edited with Georgina Gregory (Palgrave, 2015), From Self-Fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema (Berghahn, 2015), Falco and Beyond: Neo Nothing Post of All (Equinox, 2014), European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and with Laura Rascaroli Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (Wallflower, 2006). She is currently working on the representation of the North of England in film, television and popular music. Mazierska’s work has been translated into nearly twenty languages. She is principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

PART I

State Policies and its Interpretation by Grassroots

CHAPTER 2

Propagated, Permitted or Prohibited? State Strategies to Control Musical Entertainment in the First Two Decades of Socialist Hungary Ádám Ignácz

When examining the history of popular music after the communist seizure of power in Hungary (1948–49), one needs to stay sensitive to the changing nature of the regime’s cultural policy. In the 1960s, western popular music was treated in a substantially different way than in the 1950s. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge a wide-ranging assumption which holds that the communist authorities continuously rejected, if not persecuted, the productions of western popular culture and they only supported the model of socialist realism. It is hypothesised that by the end of the 1960s the regime, while not giving up completely on propagating the ideals of aesthetic education and socialist mass culture,

This research was supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office—NKFIH, PD 115373. Á. Ignácz (*) Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_2

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tried to realise political and (later on) commercial profit from the popularity of dance music, jazz and pop-rock. The following analysis was primarily based on media coverage, interviews with the most popular musicians of the period1 and archival data of the Institute of Political History (Documents of Hungarian Communist Youth Association), the National Archives of Hungary (Documents of Ministry of [People’s] Education, the Association of Hungarian Musicians, the Hungarian-Soviet Society and the Communist Parties of Hungary) and the Archives for 20th–21st Century Hungarian Music in the Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

STRUCTURAL CHANGES

IN

POLITICS

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IDEOLOGY AFTER 1956

The Soviet Union and its satellites had already tried to overcome the legacy of the Zhdanovian musical resolutions from 1953.2 However, they insisted on not adopting the ‘bourgeois’ discrimination between serious music and light music as they were committed to the demarcation between politically ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ (or hostile) arts and not one between the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ spheres of art (Groys 1997: 28–31). Although musical experts had to handle the questions of the two musical spheres simultaneously, in practice the spheres were not treated on equal terms. Popular music was usually judged by the criteria of (socialist) high culture. By the late 1960s, the cultural leadership tried to establish a socialist mass culture, and at the same time acknowledged the right of the socialist man to entertainment, thus legitimising the existence of popular music in socialist culture. There was also a further demarcation within the different genres of popular music. Depending on whether they were described as useful or hostile to socialism, a few musical segments of popular culture (even that of western origin) were adopted and used by the Party (e.g. operetta in the 1950s and later on, jazz), and comrades occasionally attempted to create ideologically valuable new popular genres themselves. Moreover, Hungarian cultural policy, including the treatment of aesthetic and musical questions reflected the events of the Cold War. In particular, the assessment of popular music was influenced by Hungary’s peculiar relation to the Soviet Union and the West (György 2014: 67). The mechanical imitation of the Soviet models and isolation from western countries came to an end after the suppressed revolution in 1956. The revolution resulted in the adoption of a new political leadership which was, however, also unable to break ties with the Soviet Union, as evidenced by

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a number of documents from 1957 onwards (Vass and Ságvári 1964: 504–513). Nevertheless, in the 1960s, Soviet policy opened towards the West and advocated a ‘peaceful coexistence’ of the two camps. The favourable political atmosphere triggered economic and cultural reforms and a reconsidered foreign policy in Hungary which aimed at improving the western bloc’s opinion about the Hungarian socialist regime in the aftermath of 1956 (Rainer 2004: 20). As a consequence of the gradual ‘Thaw’ in the 1960s, the Iron Curtain turned out to be not so impenetrable anymore, as was ostentatiously announced in György Péteri’s famous pun, the ‘nylon curtain’ (Péteri 2004). Still, free communication between the East and West was not allowed, but by absorbing more news from the other side of the Wall, citizens of the Soviet Bloc were nevertheless capable of forming a more realistic picture of the West. In their everyday life, they were irresistibly drawn to the presumed prosperity, cultural effervescence and freedom of the West, and thus, to the new western forms of leisure and entertainment (K. Horváth 2015). Despite being physically isolated from the consumer goods and intellectual products of the West, Eastern Europeans became gradually more informed about western popular culture from the 1960s onwards. As a result, they also liberated their imagination and created cultural artefacts which could be consumed as substitutes for the western ones and later on, they established a new culture of their own which operated as the alternative or counter variant of the official, mainstream culture. This meant a new challenge for the government which had to find new solutions to handle their citizens’ modified perception of reality. The Party’s aesthetic and political evaluation of western popular music underwent a spectacular change from the end of the 1950s onwards. After 1949, in terms of ‘cultural revolution’, the Stalinist cultural policy still aimed at developing an ‘aesthetic totalitarianism’ in popular culture. Besides its administrative measures against jazz and western dance music, it tried to define all of those compositional and stylistic elements which made the transformation of popular music possible according to the Zhdanov principles (Groys 1992). The Party’s major ideologist and Minister of People’s Education, József Révai (1898–1959) advocated this transformation himself since he believed that arts and literature should be the most important media of communist ideology, and they should all serve daily political purposes. Radical changes were inaugurated in the popular musical scene from 1949/1950 onwards. The newly established musical institutions set up

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working groups, while the Ministry of People’s Education announced a call for Hungarian composers to write popular songs of the new kind following the general aesthetic ideal of ‘national in form, socialist in content’. At the same time, the Popular Music Department of the Association of Hungarian Musicians and its joint committees put serious effort into defining this new quality in popular music. The work in the committees often started with finding and naming the enemy. The aim was, on the one hand, to purge the musical repertoire of any song that may contain elements of western dance music, and on the other hand, to eliminate unwanted components from the music composed under the aegis of the Party and the Association of Hungarian Musicians. It was not only orchestration that could exude the influence of Americanism or imperialist jazz (such as the use of a saxophone, a brass section, a clarinet or pistons), but also the frequent use of certain types of chords (such as non-chords or eleventh chords), and techniques of melody-making (chromatic turns) rhythms that can be turned into swing, the more informal types of performance dotted with syncopations, or the atmosphere of a song itself. The second phase of the work concentrated on designing a new, ‘Hungarian’ (nationalistic) style of dance music. The most appropriate way seemed to be the modernisation and recycling of village folk music or folkish urban music which could be brought into harmony with the features of dance music. Composers and performers were encouraged to study the very features of folk songs and discover a particular Hungarian style of performance.3 (Ignácz 2016). A well-known example of that period is the dance-song Szállj, te madár (Fly, you bird 1952) composed by István Pethő, which was modelled on the nineteenth-century Hungarian operatic-style, showcased by the operas Bánk Bán and Hunyadi László of Ferenc Erkel. This programme survived Stalin’s death (1953), as well as the dramatic changes in Hungarian domestic policy in June 1953, which forced József Révai to resign. However, the newly announced government programme which aimed to overcome Révai’s dogmatic approach was not completely effective. Songs produced under the supervision of the so-called Opinion Committee, the state founded dance music composing schools or the Consultation Groups (which fully controlled composing up to the tiny details) were treated in the same manner as before. The regime had not with standing to acknowledge that creativity should not have been oppressed in the name of popularity and clarity.

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Cultural leaders of the post-1956 era emphasised high standards of (musical) education and taste. The Party drew up only the general ideological framework, and it was the artists’ and theoreticians’ personal responsibility to comply with the guidelines of socialist realism in their own individual ways. What is more, theoretical debates over the shaping of the official line were encouraged to involve the non-Party-member Marxist intellectuals. The Party refrained from interfering with the working methods of those authors ‘who [were] ready to serve the people’. However, the regime condemned those persons ‘who [were] working against the collective interest’ of society, and withdrew its support of artworks which were ‘indifferent to the common concerns of society’ in the continued struggled against the spreading of individualism and egoism. The Leninist principle of ‘partiinost’ (partisanship or party-mindedness) prevailed. Nevertheless, the well-known slogan of the Party leader János Kádár ‘anyone who is not against us is with us’, was extended to cultural policy. Politically neutral artists or consumers were no longer persecuted. A new three-grade system of cultural support was introduced by the new head of cultural policy György Aczél (1917–1991) in 1958, the so-called 3 T’s, after the Hungarian words ‘támogatott, tűrt, tiltott’. In this system not only propagated/supported (támogatott) and prohibited (tiltott) works of art appeared but, as a new category, tolerated/ permitted (tűrt) works. Contrary to its predecessor, the post-1956 regime was no longer under the illusion that providing ideologically correct works (e.g. the socialist realist music) would be automatically converted to correct popular belief system. The comprehensive control of popular musical life stayed in place, but the emphasis shifted from aesthetic and compositional questions to those of institutional positions and the circumstances of production and distribution. Melinda Kalmár argues that in the post-1956 period, the arts played a less important role in the transmission of ideology than previously. Science was designated to assume that responsibility. Leaders of cultural policy assigned a more important role to philosophy (aesthetics) and the humanities in general (e.g. sociology) than to art in spreading the ideal of socialist realism. From then on, scientific results were used in all domains of the construction of a socialist and eventually communist society (Kalmár 1998, 2004). This new turn was palpable in the field of popular music too. The former approach of aesthetic totalitarianism was replaced by a sociological one, which was based on large-scale public opinion polls

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focusing on the musical taste and leisure time activities of the masses (e.g. Losonczi 1963). On an institutional level, this meant that the control exercised by the above-mentioned Association of Hungarian Musicians and its departments was handed over to the newly established National Organising Office, which became responsible for issuing musical performance licences and organising all concerts in Hungary. To reinforce the control, more power was delegated to the Communist Youth Association (CYA), which translated a former pure musical (or ideological) matter into social and youth policy. An effective youth policy was among the main goals of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (HSWP) that concentrated its entire policy on the young generation to counteract the fact that students played a crucial role in the short democratic turn in the autumn of 1956. The efforts of János Kádár and his faithful supporters gave the unwanted impression that without convincing the youth the future of communism was endangered. One cannot compare the popular musical scene of the 1950s with that of the 1960s without mentioning the changes in the structure of the public sphere. With the acceleration of Sovietisation of the country (from 1949), a system of political vassalage and representative public sphere 4 (Behrends 2005 and Lázár 1988) emerged in both domestic and foreign policy. The arrangement of the reconsidered Hungarian-Soviet interstate relationship served as a model for the operation of the Hungarian Working People’s Party ([HWPP], the predecessor of HSWP). The leadership of HWPP became subordinated to the Kremlin and, being eager to win the favour of Stalin, tried permanently to outperform Soviet expectations. The same applies to the relations between the inner and outer circle of the Hungarian Party and their ministries: no one was allowed to contradict the decisions of the most powerful leaders. Regarding cultural life, this granted absolute authority to József Révai, especially after 1951. His expectations were accepted, supported and put into practice by his dependents. It seemed as if Révai and the Ministry of People’s Education were behind all cultural (and therefore musical) decisions or administrative measures. Although heads of the cultural policy, similar to other Party leaders, behaved as delegates of the working class and even the oppressed classes, they were not interested in the opinion of the lower ranks of society, but looked down upon the masses and wanted to establish contact only with the intellectual elite. The regime expected the upper classes to be the very medium of the new political and aesthetic ideals who would stake out the course for average individuals.

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The Kádárian regime regarded cultural work as being the most difficult and time-consuming of all forms of work. It tried to put an end to elitist behaviour as well as reach an agreement with various social groups. There were a few precedents for asking the people, and submitting (mostly insignificant) questions to vote. The effect of this seemingly democratic turn was making itself felt in a number of Party resolutions and declarations as well. It is no accident that in scholarly discourse, this gave rise to introducing the terms of simulated or quasi-open publicity. In communicating their political decisions, comrades always pretended to have regard for opinions of the masses. The media, which also became instrumental in the transmission of ideology, were required to exercise the same care. The Party recognised the opportunity of a rapidly growing news consumption and created new strategies for reforming the (printed) media market (Kalmár 1998 and Takács 2012). Youth magazines showing signs of the new approach started to be published as early as 1957. Entitled ‘Hungarian Youth’ [Magyar Ifjúság] and ‘Youth Magazine’ [Ifjúsági Magazin; from 1965], they communicated current political issues and at the same time served as substitutes for western pop magazines, so that they could meet the growing interest of the young generation in western fashion and music. By involving teenagers in the editorial process, these magazines hoped to exercise political influence and control over them. Well-known examples of expressions of opinions were the first Hungarian pop charts that, contrary to western practice, were compiled according to readers’ polls, and votes cast for contestants in Hungarian Dance-Song Festivals. The contemporaries attributed great importance to the polls and votes since these occasions gave people the impression that they had their freedom back, at least in their musical taste (Breuer 1967: 83). It is worth considering here the relationship between nationalism and communism in socialist Hungary. Starting from the Zhdanovian admonitions that ‘internationalism is being born where nationalistic art is thriving’ and ‘only those nations who have their own, sophisticated musical culture can appreciate the wealth of the music of other peoples’ (Zhdanov 1949: 69–70), the Stalinist heads of cultural policy made their stand, to the effect that the total negation of foreign tendencies in music was inevitable and the support of (national) folk music or ‘progressive traditions’ of classical music (e.g. 19th century national opera) was an absolute imperative. A new statefunded popular genre came into being which combined anti-western sentiments with socialist realism and national pride: the so-called ‘national dance music’ (Ignácz 2016).

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After the suppressed revolution of 1956, the new Party leader János Kádár made it clear that he no longer shared the views of the former regime on nationalist questions. The first resolutions of the Party in 1957 already used the term ‘socialist patriotism’ and displayed how the emphasis in the political rhetoric shifted from the national aspect of socialism to an international one. The new doctrine reversed the relation: one cannot be a nationalist without appreciating the Eastern Bloc. The good patriot of the socialist motherland was expected to recognise the ‘congenial interests’ of Hungary and other countries of the Warsaw Pact. The good patriot was expected not to put up a fight against an external enemy but rather against an internal one, for example, against the ‘reactionary ruling classes’ who had popularised ‘pseudo-nationalism’ during the ‘counter-revolutionary’ events in 1956. In a peculiar way, the shift of focus from the external to the internal enemy reinforced the growing tolerance towards western products. The regime, nevertheless, did not dismiss the idea of establishing a pure Hungarian popular culture which would be capable of putting an end to the inflow of western music and consumer goods. It is no accident that amateur bands ready to ‘play the game’ of the Party were the ones winning the ‘tolerated’ label. These ‘beat’ groups (i.e. bands that tried to create their own musical manner adopting the style of the early Beatles and Rolling Stones5), predominantly placed in the capital Budapest, the members of which were descended mostly from upperclass families with good political connections, were allowed to perform covers of western hits along with their own new-style songs, if they avoided emulating their western idols in behaviour and physical appearance, and if they concentrated most of their efforts on composing original songs with Hungarian lyrics. The communist leadership (especially through the agency of the CYA) facilitated the evolution of Hungarian beat music with administrative measures. For example, at state-organised amateur pop music competitions, the participants were required to compile their repertoire from foreign and Hungarian songs in equal measure. Youth magazines aimed to create local ‘stars’ by compiling Top 10 charts (from August 1968) of only Hungarian hits and publishing more and more articles about local bands.6 However, the comrades seem to have held false expectations, when at a closed debate session of the Youth Association, held on February 22, 1968, they stated with smug satisfaction that by supporting the most promising local endeavours they could ‘divert’ the youngsters ‘(away) from the adoration’ of western mass culture. The independent and

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quasi-self-catering Hungarian rock culture was indeed born in the late 1960s, but its members continued to look up to and pine after capitalist western living and entertaining standards, and were still looking to adopt musical examples of the West.

AESTHETIC EDUCATION During the transition period of consolidation (1957–1962/63), the right of the ‘socialist man’ to entertainment was not yet fully acknowledged, and the regime did not yet exploit ‘the taste forming ability of the “light” musical genres’ (Vass and Ságvári 1968: 205). However, neither did it want to impose strict rules on artistic activities. Rather, the regime tried to lead the young masses in the direction of (already existing) high-quality artworks and schools. It was not only about ideological consideration but rather an attempt to solve generational conflicts that became universal in the early 1960s. Makers of cultural policy also represented the predominantly conservative ‘adult society’ which continuously criticised the dealings and taste of the young generation. In a document written for the Youth Association in 1964 entitled ‘The role of arts and art institutes in the appropriate use of free time for the young people’ the authors explained the necessity of state intervention in musical taste to which former governments (even the one led by Mátyás Rákosi) had not paid due attention. In the 1950s, the document claimed, the struggle against bad taste had been badly neglected, and thus, the ‘remains of kitschy, petit bourgeois worldview could survive, even if in a guise of socialist common sense’. The concept of ‘aesthetic education’ focused on youngsters since teenagers and students were supposedly not able to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (art) and therefore it seemed necessary to protect them from the negative effects of bourgeois arts. ‘Most of the adults’, the document stated, ‘grew up on corny, mawkish culture . . . and it would be a sin to give the children the same culture. It is said, that [the corn] is to the taste of the youngsters. It is until they don’t know the “higher level in entertainment”’. The Party, as demonstrated in secret documents as well as in cultural columns of youth magazines, initially recommended that teenagers listen to folk tunes, rallying songs and classical music. It soon became clear, however, that the youth were more interested in products of western culture and those local amateur bands that popularised western hits.

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From 1957, quite a few new bands specialised in different musical genres (e.g. Benkó Dixieland Band [dixieland, 1957], Atlas [skiffle, 1960], Scampolo [rock’n’roll, 1961]) and performed regularly in pubs, clubs, community centres and the Budapest Youth Park (opened in 1961). In 1963, the CYA itself organised the first amateur pop music competition in the Budapest Sports Hall which provided an opportunity for bands operating in relative isolation (among others, the much-talked-of Illés and Omega) to become acquainted with each other and to play in front of not only their fans but a heterogeneous audience. However, the reforms of musical taste could only achieve the desired results if the Party could find a genre which was attractive to the youth, represented the ‘high level’ of entertainment, and was capable of counterpointing the flow of new musical genres from the West. The choice fell on jazz. Jazz was associated with the programme of aesthetic education in 1961/62. The current change of Soviet attitude towards jazz came at just the right moment. In April 1961, an editorial article was published in the journal ‘Life and Literature’ (Élet és Irodalom) which referred to a paper of the famous Soviet jazz singer Leonid Utesov (entitled: ‘Reflections on Jazz’). According to Utesov, it was ‘inconsiderate to identify jazz with imperialism and colonial oppression’ and ‘good jazz [was] required since it could serve the aesthetic education of the youth’ (‘Szükség van a jó dzsesszre’ 1961: 12). The Party attempted to collaborate with those few who fought for the emancipation of jazz, by separating the terms ‘jazz’ and ‘dance music’ from each other (since earlier jazz often simply meant American dance music), ideologically whitewashing jazz7 and, finally, assimilating it to the ‘socially useful’ genres, namely folk music and classical music. As it appeared in a panel discussion conducted in the beginning of 1962 by the music pedagogical journal Parlando, ‘by means of its ambitions, its great educational effect (in sense of rhythm, improvisation, etc.) and in general, of its moods, jazz is capable of bringing closer our youngsters to modern serious, contemporary music’ (Nagy 1962: 11). Two years later, a resolution of the Youth Association described the popularisation of jazz as an ‘obligation of the state’ since it had a great effect on the ‘development of musical taste’ of the youth. The role of jazz in the programme of aesthetic education was still a perennial topic in 1968, the same year when beat music fever culminated in Hungary. A secret report, issued for the Party, stated that beat represented ‘neurotic snobbism’ and ‘unwanted consequence’, such as promiscuous behaviour. The report also emphasised

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that ‘it [was] obvious that one can exert political influence on young people only under peaceful and calm circumstances, conducive to sustained concentration. Jazz guarantees these circumstances; the fundamental effect of this genre is the peace (of mind).’ One of the major consequences of the Party’s jazz policy was the establishment of youth jazz clubs, starting with the Dália Presszó in Budapest, and later on in bigger regional centres of the country. However, apart from a few appearances of amateur bands, such as Omega, Bajtala, Mediterrán, these clubs became forums of a narrow and very elitist professional circle who aimed at keeping the greatest possible distance between jazz and other western genres, particularly beat and modern dance music, and underlined the higher artistic level of jazz music.8 This finally diverted the teenagers from visiting the clubs which had obviously undergone a crisis by the beginning of 1964, as demonstrated by the closing of Dália the same year. The case of jazz clubs pointed out how important the control of places of entertainment was for the Party. Virtually, these clubs were more than just ‘rooms’, they also constituted a ‘free and informal form of education’. Leaders of cultural and youth policy believed that without (state) subsidy, those places where young people may be drilled to ‘good’ and ‘proper’ music would not be successful. The CYA had already organised undergraduate dance courses in 1959, and then in 1962/63 it launched a nationwide dance competition. An important change, however, occurred in the Party’s sentiment between the dates. In 1959, the communist leadership was still looking for teachers who ‘[had] the ability to create choreographies which are based, if possible, on Hungarian folk motives, and which improve the taste and the sense of rhythm’, whereas during the competitions of 1962/63 contestants were allowed to choose swing or Latin dances (rumba, samba, etc.), not only waltz and czárdás. The regime made no secret of relaxing their stance on the pursuit of different types of dance, such as swing or boogie woogie. ‘It must not be done to condemn the new partner dances’, they said, ‘just because they are more heftily pulsating and they are differing from the former dances’. From then on, theoretically only eccentric, and scandalous dancing and behaviour proved to be ‘wrong’. Finally, in 1964, the Youth Association wanted to organise the training of hundreds of new dance teachers in order to ‘help with the spreading of international dance style’ in Hungary.

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The latter endeavour was part of a year-long large-scale project as a result of which, on 13 June 1964, a resolution was passed with the title ‘Useful and practical spending of the leisure time for young people’. This was a key document of its time since it summarised all those abovementioned changes of cultural policy related to popular music in the 1960s. It reflected the new scientific approach of the regime using international literature of contemporary experts, such as the works of Joffre Dumazedier, or results of opinion polls, and it was widely discussed in the media, especially in the major youth magazine, Hungarian Youth. The resolution can be also considered as a watershed in the history of political decisions concerning popular music genres, since it distinguished between education and entertainment, even if it still claimed the necessity of connecting leisure time with raising cultural standards and developing the versatile personality of young people. It was the very first resolution in which an important Party organisation officially accepted the hegemony of ‘modern dance music’ among young people. Although it characterised the whole phenomenon of growing Occidentalism in popular music as ‘expected’ but ‘unfortunate’, they also admitted that post-revolutionary Hungarian dance music could not keep abreast of new western genres in terms of high standards and popularity. Among others, the recognition led the Youth Association and eventually also the Ministry of Culture to determine new conditions of a socialist mass culture.

SOCIALIST MASS CULTURE

COMMERCIALISM MUSIC

AND

IN

POPULAR

The well-known Party resolution about socialist realism, published in June 1965 (Vass and Ságvári 1968: 175–208), stated that due to mass communication popular genres kept expanding at a steady pace in Hungarian culture. In the same document, the HSWP encouraged local artists to relinquish their ‘aristocratism’ and strive for creating up-to-date ‘entertainment art’. However, the major cultural ideologist, György Aczél pointed out that ‘high culture’ should not be relegated to the background, even if ‘low culture’ worked in full conformity with state requirements (Aczél 1968: 37). In his famous 1968 speech on the ‘most important questions of cultural and ideological life’ (Aczél 1968), Aczél declared that the state should not

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fail to satisfy all generations and social groups. However, he drew a distinction between individual and common taste. He emphasised that the proper authorities of cultural organisations in this regard are not permitted to behave according to their own accord: they have to represent ‘common taste’ and consequently the Party’s intentions concerning the shaping of popular taste and its principles of cultural or aesthetic education. The authorities responsible for popular music, such as leaders of popular music departments in national radio and television, and heads of the State Record Label became the ‘guardians’ of the official cultural ideology while enjoying growing freedom for autonomous action from the middle of the 1960s. From 1965 onwards, there were some attempts to domesticate different forms of western-type entertainment in socialist culture, and to take the edge off their hostility, or fill them with ‘socialist content’. This can be illustrated by three revealing cases: the Hungarian DanceSong Festivals, the first Hungarian beat movie, and the genre ‘political beat’. The Hungarian Dance-Song Festivals (Táncdalfesztivál), which are considered to be among the most successful musical contests in the history of Hungarian media, were established as an initiative of Hungarian Television in 1966. The festival was inseparable from the special musical genre of ‘dance-song’ (táncdal) which blended beat music with the traditional dance music of the 1940s and 1950s by compelling beat musicians to work together with official lyricists or performers of traditional hits in order to play compositions of acknowledged composers, or to rescore guitar-centred music of their own into the manner of traditional songs arranged for big band or string orchestra. A good example is the first prize winner dance-song Nem leszek a játékszered (I’ll Be Not Your Puppet) from 1966, sung by the popular female beat music singer Kati Kovács. The first big Hungarian-speaking hit of the band Metró, Mi fáj? (What Is Wrong With You?), composed not by the band but by the traditional dance-song composer Ottó Nikolics, was also released in 1966. The first prize winner piece of one of the most successful composers during the Stalinist period, Júlia Majláth, Nem várok holnapig (I Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow) from 1967, was sung by Sarolta Zalatnay, accompanied by the band Omega, and was arranged for guitar ensemble by the pianist and major composer of Omega, Gábor Presser. These amateur groups had to show up well-combed and well-dressed to play their songs with discipline and decency more appropriate to classical

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than beat music.9 For the organisers and the jury, the collective form of music-making was sometimes unmanageable: composers and lyricists of the songs, as well as the singers, had to be prenominated and in many cases, front men had to perform separated from the rest of the band. However, economic considerations gradually appeared to prevail over ideological ones and the popular band Illés was allowed to win the contest of 1968 and, what is more, it did so with its own song Amikor én még kissrác voltam (When I Was A Little Kiddie), a piece which is probably the best example of how Illés endeavoured to create a type of urban folklore by combining traits of the tolerated beat genre with those of (rather Serbian than Hungarian) folk tunes. Illés also played a major role in Ezek a fiatalok (These Youngsters, 1967) by Tamás Banovich, which was the first Hungarian beat movie. The film tells the story of a naive 18-year-old László Koroknai who is about to take his A-level exams and considers his career options. The generational conflicts between adults and teenagers are eliminated rather than solved. The father easily accepts László’s decision of becoming a skilled worker rather than going to university, and in one of the final scenes, he also joins his fellow adults in a standing ovation to László who turns out to be successful as a beat musician as well. Both political and economic considerations interfered with the eventual releasing of the film. When the movie was screened in cinemas around the country, the estimated number of viewers hit almost a million in a few months. This extraordinary success can be explained by the fact that These Youngsters provided a platform for the most prominent contemporary Hungarian beat bands to present their own works and the twelve songs of the film were released on LP by the state record label. However, the film was directed by a marginalised filmmaker with a questionable record. Tamás Banovich had been sentenced to a ten-year period of silence in 1956 after making a children’s film with political overtones. Banovich did not want to risk any political innuendos in the film’s plot only one year after his reintegration into the professional world of filmmaking. He completely eliminated various factors of beat music (such as dynamism, anti-regime lyrics and rascal fans), which were likely to annoy the Party, and it was probably for the same reason that he decided to work with the so-called trinity of the three most popular bands, Illés, Metró and Omega since they had already proven their musical compatibility with the system. It is worth noting how diffident and reserved the performances of the

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bands are in the film’s concert scenes: short-haired youngsters in suits are playing without moving around on stage and with no apparent signs of excessive passion. Their audience is made up of likewise well-dressed people listening attentively to the performance in respectful silence (Ignácz 2016b). Reviewers and audience alike claimed that the visual content and music were too restrained, failing to portray authentically the ‘beat generation’. Nevertheless, the film achieved its ideological goal by influencing the musical manner of the bands and leading them in an acceptable direction. The above-mentioned examples shed some light on the rules of performance and reception. The genre ‘political beat’ or simply ‘polbeat’, made under the supervision of cultural policy, however, raises compositional questions. In 1966, the Youth Association announced a call for young musicians to compose ‘revolutionary songs of modern times’, and a few months later it wanted to organise an international musical meeting in Budapest to popularise unknown compositions of the Cuban revolution, peace marches or protest songs, and anti-Vietnam war pieces in Hungary. It encouraged the local few interested in these types of music to join the efforts of Hungarian Television and the Ministry of Culture. A year later (1967), a nationwide contest was organised with the title “Festival of Political Songs” (Polbeat fesztivál). Contrary to the original idea of allowing only individual guitarist-singers and groups of amateur supporters of the international protest song movement to perform at the festival, the organisers were finally compelled to invite popular beat and rock bands in the expectation of making the event more attractive to the youth. The beatniks were certainly expected to play music of their own style but with texts based on ‘topical and militant political message’ written by politically committed poets and lyricists (primarily István S. Nagy).10 These administrative measures and the commercial considerations contradicted the official goals of the genre according to which protest songs were the manifestation of individual efforts in the quest for truth by politically active revolutionary youngsters who protested colonial capitalism and the exploitation of the poor (Maróthy 1967; Mezei 1967). Moreover, after the failure of the second festival (1968), only a few comrades remained convinced of the importance of these folkish beat songs with political lyrics, even if they embodied an ideal of socialist mass culture. In fact, the official cultural policy tried to dismiss the bands and genres that made some small profit as quickly as possible.

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CONCLUSIONS By the end of the 1960s, albeit not giving up completely on propagating the communist ideals of aesthetic education and socialist mass culture, the regime tried to realise as much profit as possible from the enormous popularity of beat music. It thus began to separate mainstream pop from the alternative and underground schools in order to develop a new funding system of culture in which the successful but ‘useless’ products financed the costs of the ‘valuable’ but financially non-profitable high cultural items (Aczél 1968). As far as musical life was concerned, non-classical musicians were prevented earning as much money as their professional colleagues, because they had to pay additional charges (better known as ‘kitsch tax’ in the slang). This practice continued into the next decade even more spectacularly: for example, the State Record Label often funded the release of its classical musical LPs with the income generated from the sale of popular musical records. Nevertheless, the effects of this model on popular music and musicians were not entirely negative. The permitted and tolerated works of popular music became not only a determinant factor of the domestic economy, but also an important export product as a consequence of which Hungary was often referred to (along with Yugoslavia) as a ‘great power’ of rock music behind the Iron Curtain. The band Syrius made a name for itself in Australia in 1971, Locomotiv GT in the UK and the US in 1973/1974, and Omega became world-famous and toured regularly abroad, up to the democratic transformation of 1989/1990 (and further to the present day). The conservative turn in domestic policy, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) and the suspension of the reforms of the New Economic Mechanism (1972/73), did not stunt the liberalisation and commercialisation process of the Hungarian pop market. On the contrary: in 1972/73 the Party officially acknowledged that citizens held the right to entertainment, and further on, it struggled less enthusiastically to control the leisure time of people. Eventually, it lost its faith and power in creating state art of any kind.

NOTES 1. See the oral history collection on the website of the Archives for 20th–21st Century Hungarian Music in the Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. http://www.zti.hu/mza/index.htm?m0703.htm

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2. Following its campaigns against literature and philosophy the Soviet leadership began to intervene in the internal affairs of musical life at the beginning of 1948. The major party ideologist Andrei Zhdanov delivered two speeches during the convention of Soviet musical experts in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he incited them to struggle against formalism and cosmopolitanism. His words soon became party resolutions and were looked upon as doctrines for all musicians in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. 3. Verbunkos is an 18th Century dance and dance music genre in Hungary whose melodical and harmonical structure originates from folk music or folkish urban popular music. 4. The term ‘representative publicity’ was first used by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1990) 5. Beat or beat music (beatzene) was a collective designation which was related to the modern guitar ensembles or dance musical genres coming from the West. Later on, it was widely used in the Hungarian musical discourse for different types of popular music and was often blended with ‘rock’ or ‘pop’. The origin of the term is unclear. However, the same expression was used in the (Eastern) German musical scene (Beatmusik). 6. To be sure, from 1965 a growing number of local bands composed their own songs and, simultaneously, reduced the number of covers in their repertoire. Among the front-line fighters of ‘Magyarization’ one can find many of the most influential and most popular bands and musicians of the pop-rock scene: Illés, Omega, Metró, Atlantis, Syrius, etc. In this respect, the very first Hungarian beat-hits (On the Street [Az utcán]; Ah, Say It [Oh, mondd]; Be a Little Good To Me [Légy jó kicsit hozzám]), composed by the band Illés, were looked up on as the most important pointers, even for the rivals: the first own songs of Metro (Sweet Years [Édes évek ]; Diamond and Gold [Gyémánt és arany]) and Omega (I Love You [Szeretlek én]; Rose-Trees [Rózsafák]) were released e.g. only in 1966/67. 7. The genre took on a new ideological meaning, as an originally folk-music based genre of poor black people in the United States who have the same fate and therefore have a lot in common with white proletarians. 8. Aladár Pege or György Vukán began their careers in the Dália which also regularly hosted the Qualiton Jazz Quartet led by János Gonda. 9. ‘Deviant’ behaviour on stage always implied grave consequences. Following their extravagant performance in 1966, the band Illés came near to being disqualified from the competition. 10. E.g.: Syrius: Black Rat (Fekete patkány), Omega: Just Because Your Old Man Is a Boss (Azért mert faterod egy góré ), Atlantis: Who Killed Kennedy? (Ki ölte meg Kennedyt?).

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WORKS CITED Aczél, György (1968). Kulturális és ideológiai életünk néhány időszerű kérdése. Budapest: Kossuth. Behrends, Jan C. (2005). Die erfundene Freundschaft. Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (1944–1957). Köln: Böhlau. Breuer, János (1967). 649008. Valóság, 10(1967), 77–84. Groys, Boris (1992). The total art of Stalinism: avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Groys, Boris (1997). A posztszovjet posztmodern. Magyar Lettre Internationale, 26, 28–31. György, Péter (2014). A hatalom képzelete. Állami kultúra és művészet 1957 és 1980 között. Budapest: Magvető. Habermas, Jürgen (1990). Einleitung: Propädeutische Abgrenzung eines Typus bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit. In Habermas, Jürgen (Ed.), Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (pp. 54–86). Berlin: Suhrkamp. Ignácz, Ádám (2016) [In the press]. Hungarian in form, socialist in content. The concept of national dance music in Stalinist Hungary (1949–1956). In Emilia Barna, & Tamás Tófalvy (Eds.), Made in Hungary. Studies in popular music. London: Routledge. Ignácz, Ádám (2016b). These youngsters. The first Hungarian beat movie (1967). Kieler Beiträge der Filmmusikforschung, 12, 219–233. Kalmár, Melinda (1998). Ennivaló és hozomány. Budapest: Magvető Kalmár, Melinda (2004). Az optimalizálás kísérlete. Reformmodell a kultúrában 1965–1973. In János M. Rainer (Ed.), ‘Hatvanas évek’ Magyarországon. Tanulmányok (pp. 161–197). Budapest: Magvető. K Horváth, Zsolt (2015). Brit szellem és külvárosi dzsungaság. A Nyugat-kép felhajtóereje a magyar populáris zene korai történetében. In Ádám Ignácz (Ed.), Műfajok, stílusok, szubkultúrák. Tanulmányok a Magyar populáris zenéről. Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, (pp. 107–122). Lahusen, Thomas and Dobrenko, Evgeny (Eds) (1997). Socialist realism without shores. Durham: Duke University Press. Lázár, Guy (1988). A szocialista nyilvánosság történetének alapvonalai. Kritika, 10, 19–22. Losonczi, Ágnes (1963). A zenei ízlés. Zene és közönsége, a zene helye a művelődés körében’ (manuscript), Archives for 20th-21st Century Hungarian Music, Research Center for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (ACM), Estate of János Maróthy. MZA I. 2004/25. Maróthy, János (1967). Még egyszer a ‘pol-beat’-ről. Rádió és Televízió Újság, July 1967, p. 9. Mezei, András (1967). Modern igricek. Élet és Irodalom, July 15, 1967, p. 1. Nagy, Pál (1962). Beszéljünk a jazz-ről. Parlando, 1, 9–11.

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Péteri, György (2004). Nylon Curtain. Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the cultural life of state-socialist Russia and East-Central Europe. Slavonica, 10(2), 113–124. Rainer M., János (2004). A hatvanas évek Magyarországon. (Politika)történeti közelítések. In Rainer M., János (Ed.), ‘Hatvanas évek’ Magyarországon. Tanulmányok (pp. 11–30). Budapest: Magvető. ‘Szükség van a jó dzsesszre’ (1961), Élet és irodalom, 14, 12. Takács, Róbert (2012). Politikai újságírás a Kádár-korban. Hatalom és újságírás viszonya, 1956–1988. Budapest: Napvilág. Vass, Henrik, & Sárgvári, Ágnes (Eds) (1964). A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt határozatai és dokumentumai: 1956–1962. Budapest: Kossuth. Vass, Henrik, & Sárgvári, Ágnes (Eds) (1968). A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt határozatai és dokumentumai: 1963–1966. Budapest: Kossuth. Zsdanov, A.A. (1949). Felszólalás a szovjet zenei szakemberek tanácskozásán a SZK(b)P Központi Bizottságában. In id. A művészet és filozófia kérdései. Budapest: független nyomda. Ádám Ignácz graduated from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest) in history and aesthetics. He was enrolled in the Philosophy Doctoral School of ELTE, and received his PhD in 2013. He was awarded state grants to conduct research at the Humboldt University, Berlin and University of Vienna. He has published articles and chapters on early 20th century musical avant-garde, socialist realism and popular music of socialist Hungary in national and international books and journals. He has presented papers at conferences in German, English and Hungarian (e.g. in Vilnius, Birmingham, Liverpool, Kiel, Campinas, Belgrade Luzern, Dortmund, Helsinki, Budapest). Since 2013 Ádám Ignácz has been working as a research fellow for the Archives and Research Group for 20th–21st Century Hungarian Music, Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

CHAPTER 3

Pop-Rock and Propaganda During the Ceaușescu Regime in Communist Romania Doru Pop

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the validity of the assumption that pop-rock music was part of the changing forces that led to the dismantling of state socialism in Eastern Europe, as proposed by Sabrina Ramet in Rocking the State (1994). This will be done by taking a closer look at Ceaus, escu’s dictatorship to find out how the political system and its ideological apparatus reacted to this form of music. The main objective is to evaluate the impact of western pop-rock on Romania in the years 1965–89 by discussing pop-rock’s fandom and its influence on different cultural representations in art, literature and cinema. The main assumption is that rock music affected opinion leaders to a greater extent, rather than the general public.

METHODOLOGY One of the main difficulties of analysing a complex phenomenon like the impact of rock music on audiences in Communist Romania stems from the lack of factual data about the consumption of this type of music. Even if D. Pop (*) Department of Theatre and Television, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_3

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some informal research existed, it is not accessible. There is also no hard evidence about the political or psychological impact of western music on local consumers. So the first level of the research in this case is collecting factual data. An online survey was designed targeting people aged 35–65, who were in their youth during that period and who are still active on social media networks discussing rock music. Together with two graduate students this questionnaire was applied to online groups with the intention of verifying a classical argument in the field of research put forward by Troitsky. The assumption was that rock music somehow acted as a subversive ‘infestation’ that destroyed the regime from the inside (Troitsky 1987: 13–5). The results of this first online survey showed that the majority of the consumers of rock music during state socialism did not consider this music as having an ideological impact, nor did they believe that it changed their political opinions about the regime. Most of the answers indicated that they were not consciously using rock music as a form of social resistance, but rather as a form of private entertainment and socialising. The only indication of any impact was that rock music consumers and fans pointed to a general disillusionment with the regime. Following these results, a second hypothesis was elaborated upon based on the ‘two-step flow of communication hypothesis’, as developed by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet in their classical study on decision-making (1944). The question was whether there could be signs of a more profound impact on opinion leaders. If normal music lovers showed limited impact, it is considered relevant to verify if the intellectuals of that time showed any signs of a deeper alteration of their political and cultural options. For that purpose a second online questionnaire was designed and it was decided to send it to a dozen important writers and artists in Romania today, aged 35–65, all with large public visibility and considered to have great literary success, in prose, poetry and the arts. The results of these interviews were published at large in the Romanian Steaua cultural magazine (issue 1: 2016). The answers to the second survey indicated a clear shift in opinions. Although most of the respondents declared (as the general survey also confirmed) that the choice of listening to certain rock bands was based more on aesthetic pleasure than political reasons, the influence of this type of music on their subsequent work was major. And, as stated by one of the most important writers in Romania today (man, aged 59), when recognising that his role-model was John Lennon, another relevant fact that was revealed was that the musicians themselves had a greater impact on their audiences rather than their songs. Showcasing individualism and rebelliousness, the

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rock musicians provided the young intellectuals in Romania with an answer to their search for alternative social behaviour. Another opinion leader, a writer and publicist (man, aged 56) confirmed that a local subculture of protest was inspired by rock music, generating a certain ‘appetite for freedom’ and for rejecting the domination of the single party opinion-making. All the interviewed writers confirmed that there was an informal culture of sharing and distributing rock music, which in turn created a subculture of consumption, supplied by a black market of trade in the latest musical productions of Anglo-American music industry. More relevantly, as one of the most important woman writers today (aged 52) reminisced about her first encounter with Pink Floyd and The Wall, she confirmed the two-step flow of communication mechanism in place. Even high-school teachers were providing their students with access to rock music during state socialism, and small communities were developed around sharing this type of cultural product. As another woman writer (aged 48) confirmed, anti-communist attitudes grew widespread by listening to rock music, allowing young people to coalesce into small alternative groups.

HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF POLITICS AND MUSIC IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA Any interpretation of the impact of western rock music in Romania should begin by clarifying some misunderstandings about the historical evolution of the Romanian version of state socialism in previous literature. These differences must be correlated with the evolution of rock music in the West and their subsequent integration into the Romanian musical subcultures of that time. First, the different appraisals of the attitude of the state leadership in Romania towards western music should be taken into account. This needs to be done in order to explain the different understandings of the role played by western music in the transformation of Romanian society. Some authors, like Timothy Ryback, described rock music as a ‘triumph of democracy’ over totalitarian thinking, suggesting that there was a clear understanding by the communist leadership of the ‘poisonous’ effects of this youth culture on its citizens (Ryback 1990: 3). A more nuanced perspective is necessary, since there was no single or coherent policy towards the western youth culture in the Soviet Bloc and even in Romania several different attitudes towards this type of music and culture can be identified.

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Rock and roll music evolved in the United States and in the West in a period of time when Romania was under the early Stalinist rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a tough-liner Secretary-General of the Communist Party, who came to power with the support of the Soviet Union. Thus between 1948 and 1961 the ideological war of the Communist Party (at that time the Workers Party) was pitted against the ‘decadent’ West. This attitude dominated the everyday life of the citizens of the new People’s Republic of Romania, where any manifestation of western culture was assessed negatively. In the new regime culture was meant to promote the values of the working class and stimulate the integration of the principles of Marxist-Leninism into everyday life. There was a deep fear of the ‘class enemy’ and the ‘Anglo-American imperialism’ (Gheorghiu-Dej 1955: 283). ‘Mass culture’ institutions in the socialist style, such as reading clubs and cultural houses, were created where people had to learn how to fight an economic as well as a cultural war against ‘imperialist exploitation’. At that time, any western music was considered noxious, since the purpose of all arts, music included, was to promote Soviet culture, against any form of ‘cosmopolitism’ or ‘idealism’ (ibid: 464). The Party leadership called for watchfulness against the propaganda machine of the American government, which was claimed to spread dangerous ideas of the ‘imperialists’ using the radio station Voice of America in order to disseminate lies. This tight Stalinist grip on society eased during the last years of Gheorghiu-Dej’s rule, and was known as the ‘Thaw’. As a consequence, the perspective on western music gradually changed. This was triggered by the need of the local leaders to distance themselves from the new Soviet leadership in Moscow, and especially from Khrushchev’s aggressive international policies. During this period, Romanian communism changed and the permissiveness of cultural exchanges increased. From 1963 to 1964 a massive number of political prisoners were released and many banned writers were allowed to publish again (Cornis, -Pope 2004: 91). This, in turn, triggered a process of de-Sovietisation of Romania, which began with the 1964 ‘Declaration of Autonomy’, publicly announced by the Romanian Workers’ Party documents (Dragomir 2015: 78–180). A certain level of openness followed, as testified by the local development of rock cultures. Many of the most popular rock bands in Romania were created at this time (even before Ceaus, escu’s arrival to power), such as Phoenix/Sfinții (1962), Sfinx (1963) or Sincron (1964) and were already publicly performing their western-style songs and displaying their ‘rock’ attitude, hair styles and costumes. As early as 1959, Electrecord, the official music label in Romania, released a compilation called ‘Music

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from all over the World’, featuring fox trot and samba songs, such as Ain’t Misbehavin’, by Fats Waller. After the death of Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaus, escu came to power in March 1965, when he was elected Secretary-General of the Communist Party. As a close disciple of Gheorghiu-Dej, he continued the politics of ‘Thaw’. Ceaus, escu formally removed censorship and was opening up Romania to the West followed by a more relaxed official attitude towards rock bands. The new Party leader tried to present himself as ‘free’ from Soviet control, with this image accentuated by the conflict in Czechoslovakia when Ceaus, escu publicly protested against Russian intervention in the ‘brotherly country’. Although this was done because the Romanian Communist leadership was afraid that it would be removed by force from power, it actually generated a period of relative liberalism, which lasted from 1965 to 1971. This period coincided with transformations of rock music in the West, and with the development of a new form of mass culture, heavily influenced by phenomena such as Woodstock and the hippie movement. During the 1960s and 70s, when rock music became part of a global trend of political resistance, folk music was perceived by the Romanian Communist leaders as a form of criticism of capitalism. Such songs, especially those carrying anti-war messages, were included into officially accepted playlists and shows. In this context, the claims of some authors, such as Ramet’s radical argument that Ceaus, escu’s regime was ‘deadly to rock music’ (Ramet 1995: 256), are hardly valid. For instance, during this period even the official Party youth journal, Scânteia Tineretului, was publishing articles about rock, introducing albums of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and creating its own ‘music festival’, where Romanian versions of famous western songs were played, often in Romanian. The so-called ‘international repertoire’, allowed by the authorities for public broadcasting on national television and at various music festivals, included mostly classical love songs. One of the most popular singers during that time, Margareta Pâslaru, made her debut with Acesta este cântecul meu (Love, This Is My Song) which was a cover version of a song Charlie Chaplin wrote for A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), originally sung by Petula Clark, and continued with records including covers from Delilah by Tom Jones to ABBA’s Money, Money, Money. Male singers, like Gil Dobrică, also reached the peak of their popularity in Romania when playing international covers, such as a version of John Denver’s Country Roads. Many rock bands, such as Entuzias, tii/The Enthusiasts, who were playing pop-rock songs at the ‘V. I. Lenin’ cultural house in Bucharest

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started in 1962, used international covers to kick-start their careers. The playlists of many popular bands during state socialism included songs from the Everly Brothers, the Beatles and The Mamas & The Papas, as was the case with one of the most popular bands of that time, Sincron (with their LP released by Electrecord in 1967). It was only later, when Ceaus, escu started to impose a new policy of autarchy in Romania, when he was poised to build his cult of personality that rock music was considered once again to be decadent and efforts were made to forbid or neutralise its influence (Brucan 1998). New forms of propaganda were created, trying to integrate rock into the polities of the Party. Yet, by the end of the 1980s it was too late—the tide of history was moving against the national-communist regime and the dictatorship of the Ceaus, escu family.

THE INFORMAL NETWORKS OF INFLUENCE CONSUMPTION OF ROCK MUSIC

IN THE

Clearly one of the most important factors of dissemination and influence was the effort of mainstream western radio stations to broadcast musical content for Eastern Europe. Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Luxembourg had special programmes that promoted the newest trends in rock. As demonstrated by the extensive study edited by Johnson and Parta (2010), the impact of RFE and VOA was so profound that their traces are still present today. According to some data provided in this volume, Romania had the highest rate of RFE listeners in Soviet-controlled countries. More so, according to Germina Nagat, one of the contributors, in June 1980 the Romanian secret police (Securitate) created a special unit called ‘Ether’ to control and punish citizens who were listening to these illegal radio stations (Nagat, quoted in Johnson and Parta 2010). Yet, according to the interviewed writers, music broadcast by these stations was one of the main influences on their taste. How did the consumption of radio rock programmes of the time determine social attitudes, even if the consumption practices were controlled? The most important technique, as indicated by one female writer who acknowledged that she was listening to RFE, was the recording on tape of the most important shows. These in turn were re-distributed through informal channels. Many of the interviewed writers confirmed that they were in fact not only listening to RFE, but also tuning into

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stations such as Radio Monte Carlo or even Radio Novi Sad, to have access to their favourite music. Once more, the two-step flow model was confirmed, when the respondents reasserted the important role played by DJs during that period. One of the most important radio DJs was Cornel Chiriac, mentioned by several of the writers as their main source of information about rock music. Chiriac, who was initially an employee of the Romanian National Radio (Radio România), where he initiated in 1967 a popular music programme called Metronom, was showcasing the newest rock hits of the AngloAmerican industry in the mainstream media. After his show was banned in 1969, Chiriac escaped Romania the same year to become the main host of a similarly named music show on RFE. Chiriac not only introduced the most recent rock bands to the Romanian youth listening to the radio station, but also commented on political issues and promoted the freedom of expression against the regime. The programme, also called Metronom, ended in 1975, when Chiriac was stabbed to death in Munich, with some suggesting that it was part of a plot by the Romanian secret police (Tismăneanu 2012). Chiriac’s death impacted negatively on his listeners, who identified him as a voice of freedom and linked his death with the return of Stalinist style rule in their country. Nevertheless, music disc-jockeying was allowed in socialist Romania, as long as it served the interests of the political power. In 1977, in an effort to counterbalance the impact of RFE, the authorities decided to create a third station on national radio, called Radio România Tineret (Romanian Radio for Youth). Here ‘accepted’ rock bands were broadcast and promoted. Moreover, local and some international rock music continued to be released by Electrecord, the official Romanian record company. A relevant case is the collection titled, ‘Rock Bands’, with the first three neutrally called ‘Pop Bands’. From 1975 to 1989 ‘Electrecord’ released twelve vinyl albums of ‘Romanian rock’. These compilations, which include over 50 bands, feature some of the most important rock performers of the time. Many of the rock bands considered relevant by the writers interviewed (Sfinx, Phoenix and Ros, u s, i Negru) had their individual albums published here. Electrecord had ‘special’ collections labelled Songs from all over the World (Melodii din toată lumea) or International Cocktail where compilations were issued, including mostly French and Italian pop-rock songs. In the early 1960s Electrecord also released LPs by the Playboys, the Carrolls, the Federals, Bobby Solo, Nancy Holloway, Adriano Celentano, Nico Ventura and Udo Jürgens. In 1968 the socialist music label issued a compilation called The Hits of 1968

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(Șlagărele anului 1968), including pop-rock bands such as the Beatles, Bee Gees, and Canned Heat, and singers, including Johnny Nash, Leapy Lee and Mary Hopkin. Later in the 1970s access to western rock music was limited by a lack of distribution due to general banning of imports by the Ceaus, escu regime. This in turn led to the ‘illicit’ distribution of rock music on a much bigger scale. Many who had the opportunity to travel abroad took up pirating the newest labels of the Anglo-American music industry. As Florin Silviu Ursulescu, one of the Romanian radio DJs reminisces, during that time the process of music circulation was based on a wide network of personal connections, with the music then re-distributed by illegal multiplications of foreign labels. This network included foreign students, people working overseas, and others who had relatives abroad, generating a black market of rock music (Ursulescu 2015). Another common consumption environment was public meetings in student clubs. There were many student clubs in Communist Romania, like the Jazz Club at Bucharest University, the Pop Club at the Academy of Economics, 303 at the Polytechnic and Vox at the Medical School. The most important was Club A, set up in 1969 by the students of the Architecture Institute in Bucharest. Club A was to become an epicentre of alternative cultural activities, organising theatre shows and cinema projections, as well as music galas. There, together with pirated Hollywood movies which were presented illegally, many of the rock bands of that time were introduced to the public and gained notoriety. The founder of the club, Mac Popescu, remembers Club A as a hub promoting many of the rock bands of that time (Popescu, interviewed by Pârvu 2015). Other sources of notoriety were the ‘student rock festivals’. Among the first was the 1968 event organised in Iaşi, under the title ‘The Festival of Student Creativity’. Rock competitions were also organised by national television, such was Microrama TV, a TV show where rock bands competed against each other, and many of the winners were rewarded with record deals with Electrecord.

RECRUITING ROCK MUSIC

FOR

STATE PROPAGANDA

Regrettably, the liberalisation of Romanian society ended in 1971, when Ceaus, escu, upon returning from a visit in North Korea and China, impressed by the huge festivities dedicated to the local communist leadership, returned to the old Stalinist practices. In an effort to build his own cult of personality and to develop a nationalist version of communism which would allow him to stay in power despite his discord with Moscow, the Romanian leader imposed

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a new cultural revolution. He issued a now (in)famous document called ‘The July Theses’, which included 17 proposals, designed to improve the ‘MarxistLeninist education’ of all the cultural and artistic workers in Romania. The most relevant educational measure was fighting against all ‘cosmopolitism manifestations’ and other ‘artistic fashions borrowed from the capitalist world’ (Ceaus, escu 1971: 13). The immediate effect of these measures led to tighter political control of the rock subcultures. Even if many of the rock bands were still tolerated in the new circumstances, under the new law many rock fans were intimidated and the content of the music productions was heavily censored. Under the provisions of the ‘vagrancy’ and ‘refusal of employment’ claims stipulated by Article 327 of the Penal Code, all people who, ‘although able to work, refused to hold a job or to have a fixed home’, were sentenced to a prison sentence of three months to a year. This law also put pressure on the artists themselves, because many of them had no stable or official job. Unable to accommodate these political provisions, many rockers decided to defect to the West. According to music critic and journalist, Doru Ionescu—nicknamed ‘The Rocker’—more than 50 % of the rock bands of the 1960s had left Romania by 1989 (Ionescu, interviewed by Chivu 2011). Sometimes, all the members of a rock band emigrated, as was the case with Entuziaştii or Phoenix, who followed in the footsteps of their leader Nicu Covaci. The story of Covaci, who left the country in 1976, later to return and illegally smuggle some of his fellow band members, hidden in the band’s drum kit, is particularly revealing (more in Covaci 1994). Individual singers, such as Dan Andrei Aldea, the popular leader of Sfinx, in 1981 asked for political asylum in Germany. By 1975 the newly elected president of the Romanian Socialist Republic, Ceaus, escu, had tightened control over literature, cinema and music, requiring all artists to follow his plans of ‘creating a new man, completely dedicated to socialism and communism’. In his efforts to ‘revolutionarily transform society’, he implicitly viewed all cultural activities as a part of his compulsory propaganda. By 1975, when the Party organised its XI-th Congress, the communist leader had a 25-year strategy for the development in place. Among many projects (economic, social and administrative), the ‘national education of youth’ was central to its goals (Ceaus, escu 1975 68, 138). The Communist Party of Romania, abandoning the classical Marxist tradition, publicly proclaimed the importance of ‘national politics’, based on ‘historical, social and national specificity’ (ibid.: 156). Thus the role of

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art, literature and media was to allow the ‘popular masses’ to participate in the development of ‘national culture’ and to promote ‘socialist humanism’ (ibid.: 165). Some bands, like Savoy, who were officially part of the National Communist Youth, organised activities, conformed to the Party’s requirements and started to exploit Romanian folklore as part of their musical style. Orientation towards nationalism was accepted even by the most important representatives of counterculture rock, who wrote songs inspired by ‘national culture’. As early as 1971, one of the most important rock bands, Phoenix, issued an LP including a song called Mes, terul Manole. Inspired by a historical legend, this ‘ethnic’ rock style song is a mixture of folklore and national mythology. As Caius Dobrescu argues in his analysis of the role of this rock band in Romania after 1971, the pressures of the Ceaus, escu regime led to the apparition of a mixture of folklore and counterculture, with musicians trying to adapt their works to the requirements of the political regime (Dobrescu 2011). This ethnic-national compulsion of national-communism changed many other musical productions as was the case with the 1978 Sfinx album entitled Zalmoxe (which was the name of the supreme Dacian god). Just like Phoenix before them, Sfinx produced an LP which instrumentally sounded like a rock opera, but whose content was deeply rooted in the new version of communism dictated by the Supreme Leader. Using synthesizers and instrumental sounds similar to western bands, inspired by progressive rock groups like Yes and Pink Floyd, the Romanian rockers were singing about the ‘religion of the Dacians’ and the glory of a millennial people descending from Dacians, just as Ceaus, escu claimed he was the descendant of Burebista (the first Dacian ruler) himself.

‘CENACLUL FLACĂRA’

AND THE

PROPAGANDA MACHINE

In September 1973, Adrian Păunescu, poet and manager of the popular journal called ‘Flacăra’ (The Flame)—a spin-off of the old communist newspaper ‘Scânteia’ (The Spark)—started a mass phenomenon called ‘The Flame Cenacle of the Revolutionary Youth’, known simply as ‘The Cenacle’. Organised by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and praised for its ‘cultural-educational activity’, The Cenacle organised public meetings where music, poetry and propaganda intertwined. Under the direct supervision of Adrian Păunescu, the entire movement—which was banned in 1985, after a mass accident at a stadium in Ploiesti in June when

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five young people died in a stampede—illustrated Ceaus, escu’s idea that all ‘cultural-artistic-educative activities’ must serve the people and their leaders. In a melange of pop-folk music and ethnic rock, the programme put together by the Cenacle explicitly promoted nationalism. According to the suggestions of the Party documents, where solidarity between peasants and workers was of the essence, the poet and his band of singers were practising a rediscovery of folklore, used as a propaganda tool. The new ethnocentrism and the following cultural activities led to a ‘massification’ of rock music, which served the ideological purpose of creating a ‘militant youth’—as clearly stated in the July Theses. The Cenacle was an environment where literature, music and politics mingled, and where apparently innocent songs and poetry were presented to an enthusiastic public, when in fact they were closely following Ceaus, escu’s ideological precepts. The Cenacle was created in an effort to nationalise rock ‘n’ roll and the hippie movements, although for many Romanians it seemed to be a subversive alternative to the official culture. As stated by Păunescu himself in a later interview, the idea of the Cenacle was born after his visit to the USA, where he saw the impact of the political and social protest movements linked to the music of that time (Păunescu 2005). Although Păunescu later claimed that his efforts were to offer a form of resistance to state socialism, the Cenacle was in fact a multimedia propaganda machine, with magazines, radio and television shows operating simultaneously. From 1979 to 1985 the Cenacle was broadcast as a weekly radio show (‘Radiocenaclul FlacăraValori ale muzicii tinere’) and from 1977 to 1981 it was broadcast on Romanian national television on various TV shows (‘Antena vă aparţine’, ‘Antena Cîntării României’, ‘Gala Antenelor’). The whole phenomenon of the Cenacle cannot be understood outside the larger political and cultural movement created by Ceaus, escu, the socalled Cântarea României (the Praise of Romania), where a series of public manifestations were organised to create a mass culture similar to that of Communist China and North Korea. This is proved by the fact that, starting in 1976, the Cenacle officially became an integral part of the Cântarea României project and Păunescu himself was a member of the Communist Party in Romania. With over 1,600 shows, the Cenacle gathered more than six million people at stadiums and concert halls (Hentea 2015), with a clear political mission: to create a ‘megaphone of Romanian communism’ (Cărtărescu 2010). As is clear from one of the documentaries about the Cenacle made during 1982 and 1983, entitled Te salut generație în blugi (I salute you, generation dressed in blue jeans, after a song by Ion Zubas, cu),

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directed by Cornel Diaconu, the purpose of this movement was to offer an alternative for young people who, otherwise, ‘would take their freedom from abroad’. As the song goes (‘If your soul understands rock, hymns and prayers/I salute you youth in wearing Adidas, I salute you blue jeans generation’) the young generation had to be educated in the ‘new spirit of Romania’. The Cenacle was the mechanism designed to bring about the cultural revolution to this generation, serving the purpose of creating a ‘new man’ by the means of rock and folk music. Although the son of Păunescu, Andrei, later claimed that Elena Ceaus, escu blamed his father’s Cenacle for the collapse of the regime (Păunescu 2014), as is clear from a song created by Nicu Alifantis, one of the most popular folksingers of these shows, the music was part of an explicit drive to supporting the Supreme Leader. The lyrics of the song entitled Long Live Romania (Trăiască Romania), acknowledged the dominant role of Ceaus, escu and had millions of people singing along to the words: ‘Long live Ceaus, escu, Long Live the Party and the People’ (see Păunescu documentary 2008). In 1984 Păunescu himself published a poem on the front cover of the magazine Flacăra (that he also managed), which was very similar to the songs interpreted at the Cenacle. The cosy relationship between the Cenacle and the regime became even more obvious when Ceaus, escu made it his intention to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Cenacle then started using John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance as the soundtrack to promoting global peace. The 1963 Bob Dylan hit, Blowin’ in the Wind, was used in the same way. Even a traditional Jewish song Let Us Rejoice was transformed into a political tool, with the lyrics: ‘Let there be peace in the World’. Păunescu himself, as ‘the poet-propagandist’, was reciting the lyrics, slowly turning the anti-war tune into a calling for the interdiction of weapons, relevantly using the very words of the great ‘Conducător’ (the Ruler, in Romanian). To sum up, the Cenacle tapped into the rebellious resources of the western folk-rock movement, using the protest music of the 1960s and folk music as a means to support the dominant ideology.

QUALITATIVE EVALUATION OF THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF WESTERN MUSIC As many authors who were interviewed acknowledged, there are deep influences of rock music in their own works. Following up these influences would take a separate interpretation since this impact has continued even after the

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regime change. As indicated by one of the woman writers interviewed, the works of these opinion leaders show recurrent themes and ideas from the songs of the Beatles, Jim Morrison and the Eagles. One relevant example remaining is the collective volume of four poets (one of them interviewed for this study) which was published in 1982, and was printed under the title Aer cu diamante (Air with Diamonds). The volume, written by Mircea Cărtărescu, Ion Stratan, Florin Iaru and Traian T. Cos, ovei is a clear reference to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the 1967 song composed by Lennon and McCartney. The fact that the volume is an example of the positive representation of rock music, is visible not only in the poetic content of this remarkable literary work, published during the last years of the Ceaus, escu regime, but also in its illustration. The group of four poets posed for the back cover of this book in an explicit reference to the Beatles. Dressed in blue jeans, the Romanian writers look down at their readers from atop a heavy steam engine locomotive. With their ‘beatnik’ haircuts and an attitude projecting a clear form of social rebellion, they posed as their western models. Clearly, this was only one of the reasons why the critics of the communist regime described them as ‘cosmopolitan’ writers, and why the censorship banned them from publishing further works. Not always, however, were rockers represented so positively. A poignant example is a children’s musical film entitled Mama (1976), with the international title Rock’n’Roll Wolf. The movie, a Romanian-Soviet-French co-production, was directed by Elisabeta Bostan, one of the country’s most talented children’s film directors and was designed as part of the Soviet musical cinema. Inspired by a Romanian fairy tale and other stories in which Good defeats Evil, this production focuses on the opposition between an idyllic life led by hard-working animals, such as bears and sheep, and the perverse lifestyle of a wolf pack. Featuring Lyudmila Gurchenko (as the Goat-Mother) and Mikhail Boyarsky (as the Evil Wolf), two of the most popular Soviet singer-actors of that time, the narrative revolves around an ideological conflict between the Mother, a hard-working woman, and the rocker Wolf, who holds no job and uses his time to exploit others. ‘Aunty Rada’, the Goat who is not wealthy, but has just enough to share with others her hard-earned work, and who is naturally inclined towards collaboration, is a manifestation of the communist spirit. Rada appears dressed in a rural outfit as a representative of the peasant class, and is an integral part of the community in the woods, a collective habitation similar to that of the Soviet block of flats, where everybody helps

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everybody. Of course, this is not the case with the Wolf, played by Mikhail Boyarsky. Dressed as a rocker, The Wolf is called Duru or Titi Suru (that is, Tough Titus the Grey). He is greedy and menacing, bullying the entire Forrest and, more importantly, controlling a gang composed of two other less intelligent beasts, such as the Donkey and the Lynx. They terrorise the otherwise peaceful animals while singing rock tunes. If the goats or the sheep are singing melodic-rhythmic songs, with folklore undertones, the Wolf gang is performing hard rock, with guitar solos, base accords and noisy drums. The change in rhythm and acoustics makes explicit the ideological opposition between the orchestra-like singing of the other animals and the Wolf gang imagined as a typical four-member rock band, each with individualistic traits. ‘Tough Titus’ is always introduced by an electric bass guitar and the typical 4/4 time rhythm, and even the dancing of the Wolf gang is a parodic mimicking of rock style dancing. Dressed in black and indulging in idleness, the lifestyle of the wolf-donkey-lynx gang is politically opposed to that of the hard-working, group loving, and happy-go-lucky goat-mother. In addition, the rockers break the quiet life of the community, and their leader is a ‘bandit’.

CONCLUSIONS Reviewing the two decades of pop-rock music practices in socialist Romania shows that Anglo-American rock bands played a major role in the identity formation of the young generations. By the same token rock music was of importance to the Romanian political establishment. The attitude of the Party leadership towards it was ambivalent. On one hand the authorities tried to counterbalance these influences by providing Romanian citizens with its own version of pop-rock. While some rock bands were tolerated and limited forms of consumption were accepted, the ‘rocker’ behaviour was not. This is why the socialist authorities made important efforts to integrate pop-rock music into its politics. Yet, as it became clear from reviewing the impact of the music and poetry events called ‘Cenaclul Flacăra’—a phenomenon specific to Romanian society— not all young people who were listening to rock music accepted being ‘integrated’ into the mainstream mechanisms put in place by the state propaganda. Many developed their own social practices and used westernstyle music as a background for creating informal cultural environments, which then enabled them to develop their own lifestyle and culture.

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Numerous intellectuals used this music to stimulate their inherent cultural dissent. The values of individualism and social resistance promoted by it eroded the cohesion so desired by the socialist state. In conclusion, even though Anglo-American rock music did not create a mass political dissent nor ideological manifestations of anti-communism, it allowed the formation of subversive social behaviours and the development of nonconformist opinions and ideas.

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Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe (1955). Articole ,si cuvîntări, ed. IV. Bucures, ti: Editura de Stat pentru Literatură Politică. Hentea, Călin (2015). Ghiveciul propagandistic comunist, iluzia libertății s, i s, opârlele studențes, ti. In Historia.ro. http://www.historia.ro/exclusiv_web/ general/articol/ghiveciul-propagandistic-comunist-iluzia-libert-ii-i-op-rlelestuden-e. Accessed 14 December 2015. Ionescu, Doru (2011). Interview with Mariu Chivu, in ‘Rockîntarea României’, Dilema Veche, 411, 29 December 2011. http://dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/temasaptaminii/articol/rockul-era-un-reflex-al-lumii-occidentale-libere. Accessed 14 December 2015. Ionescu, Doru-Emil (2011). Club A 42 de ani. Bucures, ti: Casa de Pariuri Literare. Jurnalul National (2011). Anul 50 după Phoenix. Indicație comunistă: Sfinții se transformă în Phoenix. 21 November 2011. http://jurnalul.ro/cultura/ muzica/anul-50-dupa-phoenix-indicatie-comunista-sfintii-se-transforma-inphoenix-629584.html. Accessed December 14, 2015. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York: Columbia University Press. Nagat, Germina (2010). Ceausescu’s war against our ears. In A. Ross Johnson & Eugene Parta (Eds.), Cold war broadcasting: impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: A collection of studies and documents (pp. 239–259). Budapest: Central European University Press. Observator Cultural (2015). Cine dădea muzică la toată România. Observator Cultural, 2 November, 2015. http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Cine-dadeamuzica-la-toata-Romania*articleID_32471-articles_details.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Pârvu, Mihnea Petru (2015). Istoria rockului, folkului s, i pop-ului românesc a început într-un subsol. Legedele din Club A, cum i-au învins studentții pe milițienii s, i politrucii comunistii, Evenimentul Zilei, 10 May 2015. http://www.evz.ro/ istoria-rock-ului-folk-ului-si-pop-ului-romanesc-a-inceput-intr-un-subsol-legen dele-din-club-a-cum-i-au-invins-studentii-pe-militienii-si-politrucii-comunisti. html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Păunescu, Adrian (2005). Interview in with Carmen Anghel. in Jurnalul Național, 16 January 2005. http://jurnalul.ro/vechiul-site/old-site/suplimente/editiede-colectie/cenaclul-flacara-libertate-si-cultura-558821.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Păunescu, Adrian (1988). In ‘Cenaclul Flacăra. Te salut generație în blugi’, a documentary made by Cornel Diaconu. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=HnQqccjtm1I. Accessed 14 December 2015. Păunescu, Andrei (2014). Interview with Anca Murgoci for DC News, http://www. dcnews.ro/cenaclul-flacara-aniversare-andrei-paunescu-interviu_453730. html, Accessed 14 December 2015.

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Ramet, Sabrina Petra (Ed.) (1994). Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press. Ramet, Sabrina Petra (1995). Social currents in Eastern Europe. The sources and consequences of the great transformation. Durham: Duke University Press. Roman, Denise (2007). Fragmented identities: Popular culture, sex, and everyday life in postcommunist Romania. Lanham: Lexington Books. Risch, William Jay (ed.) (2014). Youth and rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth cultures, music, and the state in Russia and Eastern Europe. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ryback, Timothy W. (1990). Rock around the block. A history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press. Stokes, Gale (1993). The walls came tumbling down: The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Tismăneanu, Vladimir (2010). Adrian Păunescu, rapsodul comunismului dinastic, in ‘22’. 11.07. 2010. http://revista22.ro/9307/.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Tismăneanu, Vladimir (2012). In Memoriam Cornel Chiriac: un neuitat soldat al libertății. 10 May 2012. http://www.contributors.ro/cultura/in-memoriamcornel-chiriac-un-neuitat-soldat-al-libertatii. Accessed 14 December 2015. Troitsky, Artemy (1987). Back in the USSR: The true story of Rock in Russia. London: Omnibus Press. Ursulescu, Florin Silviu (2015). Interview with Doru Ionescu. In Observator Cultural, nr. 792, 2015. http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Trebuia-sa-fim-lazi-cu-ceea-ce-reprezenta-muzica-de-aici-si-de-pretutindeni*articleID_32472articles_details.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Volceacov, Mircea (2013). Paradoxurile muzicii pop-rock-folk romanesti din anii comunismului. In Observator Cultural, 26 June 2013. http://www.observator cultural.ro/Paradoxurile-muzicii-pop/rock/folk-romanesti-din-anii-comunis mului*articleID_28814-articles_details.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Yoffe, Mark, & Dave Laing (2005). History of Soviet and Russian Rock Music. http://www.toastormulch.com/history-of-soviet-and-russian-rock-music.html. Accessed 14 December 2015. Doru Pop is associate professor at the Department of Theatre and Television, Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj in Romania, where he researches visual culture, cinema and the media. He has an MA in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a PhD in the philosophy of visual culture from Babes, -Bolyai University. In 2012 he was a Fulbright fellow at Bard College, New York, where he taught a course on Romanian cinema. He is the editor in chief of the Ekphrasis academic journal. His most recent book is Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction (McFarland & Company, 2014).

CHAPTER 4

Estonian Invasion as Western Ersatz-pop Aimar Ventsel

As soon as the taxi driver in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, heard where I came from he started to complain: ‘For a long time I am looking for a song of Tõnis Mägi but they do not play it. Never.’ And he hummed me a melody I was unable to recognise. This happened in March 2012 and was not the first time in a former Soviet republic country where I encountered the fame and popularity of Estonian artists and their music during the Soviet era. As a matter of fact I was not exactly surprised. Since the mid-1990s, when I began my research in Russian Siberia and the Far East, I have constantly met people who associated my Estonian origin with once famous singers such as Jaak Joala, Tõnis Mägi or Anne Veski. The short period between the mid-1970s and the end of perestroika in the late 1980s, which in Estonian music circles is known as ‘the invasion of Estonian music’1, is generally ignored in academic and popular writing, both in Estonia and abroad. In the few works that discuss Soviet popular

This publication was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory, CECT) and Estonian Research Council grant (IUT34-32).

A. Ventsel (*) Department of Ethnology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_4

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and underground music, the authors focus mainly on Russian music, and precisely with the music from the central cities of Moscow and Leningrad (MacFadyen 2001, 2002; Rothstein 1980; Urban 2004); one of the rare exceptions is the analysis of Soviet Ukrainian rock in Zhuk (2010). Interestingly, western academic interest in Soviet era music culture, especially the late Soviet period, seems to be attracted to rock as an ambivalent semi-illegal music culture embodying resistance to the state socialist mass culture (Cushman 1995; Friedman and Weiner 1999). This is also the only context where Estonia is mentioned in English language articles—as a setting for the discussion of the relatively liberal cultural shift where the first rock and jazz festivals were organised (Urban 2004; Yurchak 2006). This image of Soviet Estonia is also supported by non-academic pieces. For example, Russian rock journalist (and probably the only rock journalist of the Soviet Union), Artemii Troitskii characterises Estonia as a rock paradise of the Soviet Union, where rock was played on the radio and gained full support from the local institutions of culture (Troitskii 2007: 117). In Estonia, the period of the ‘Estonian invasion’ is also largely ignored, although for other reasons. This part of Estonian cultural history seems to be irrelevant because it happened outside the country. Estonian artists, who in the 1980s performed outside Estonia, were often criticised at home during the Soviet era, and especially for singing in Russian. In many respects, this activity was regarded as a form of ‘collaboration’ with the Soviet authority. This explains why in the wave of autobiographies, biographies and nostalgic publications, this aspect of culture in Soviet Estonia is rarely mentioned. The ‘Russian period’ in Estonian language publications, is extensively discussed only in a few works (Kangur 2015, Kilumets 2015, Rinne 2009, Salumets 2010). This article thus draws on very limited written resources, but also on interviews conducted with former members of the Estonian bands Fix and Apelsin, and people related to the former Estonian Philharmonic. Methodologically it combines anthropology and history to scrutinise the mechanisms of Soviet culture industry using Estonian artists as an example.

SOVIET CULTURE INDUSTRY The success of the ‘Estonian invasion’ is impossible to understand without paying attention to the Soviet culture industry. The term ‘culture industry’ was developed by Adorno and Horkheimer (2001) in response

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to the notion that the music business is just a mechanism to make profit by establishing a coherent ‘mass culture’ to ‘manufacture’ quite tasteless music that people passively accept. It is possible that the sceptical sentiments of Adorno were shaped by his disillusionment with the development of ‘low art’ in general and a dislike of jazz in particular (Bernstein 1991; Hutnyk 1998, 2000). A strong antipathy to jazz and a critical view of the capitalist production of music was something that most Soviet ideologues and politicians of culture had in common with Adorno. The official understanding of Soviet culture was, and still is, that it was merely oriented to ideological goals to educate and entertain socialist people, a position that denied the existence of any kind of culture industry. However, by taking a closer look it seems that even in the framework of the ideological regulations and planned economy the existence of a culture industry cannot be dismissed. Soviet authorities were keen to provide ‘socialist fun’ (Tsipursky 2012, manuscript) but the details and meaning of how the ‘fun’ should be constituted were unclear. First, it must be noted that in the Soviet Union there was no perceived difference between ‘highbrow’ and ‘low brow’ music as was the case in the West. Moreover, the boundaries between musical genres have never been as clearly formulated as in the western market oriented music business (Negus 1999). Opera and other genres of orchestrated classical music in the Soviet Union were accessible to the proletarian masses (Rothstein 1980; Shakhnazarova 2001). Classical concerts and theatre were cheap, often collectives visited them in an organised manner. For instance rural collective farm workers were transported to performances using the enterprise’s buses. Composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev were well-known and listened to; their music was taught in schools and even used in children’s cartoons. On the other hand, the border between ‘serious’ folk and ‘light’ entertainment music (which was later called Estrada) remained blurred: orchestrated folk songs were in the repertoire of pop music performers, who often switched groups and styles between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ genres (Rothstein 1980). In Soviet music it was not unusual for folk groups to adopt the Estrada style to achieve more success and respectively re-arrange their songs to fit that genre (Olson 2004; Smith 2002). On the other hand, many, especially non-Russian artists, used folk melodies in their pop songs (Merchant 2009; Rancier 2009). In the Soviet Union there was only one record company—Melodia, probably the biggest record company in world history—which released a chaotic multitude of different styles of music and whose policy (as well as

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output) remains a mystery even today. The reason for the distinctive nature of Soviet music was its political and educational mission—controlled by several state institutions—to propagate socialist values. It must be noted that the debate about what precisely is proper ‘music for the masses’ began with the early years of the Soviet Union and continued until its collapse (MacFadyen 2001: 12–13, 18; Rothstein 1980). The existence of the top-down control of state institutions did not mean that Soviet music was entirely manipulated and controlled by the state. Tomoff argues in his review on Shakhnazarova (2001) that despite state control classical music existed, complete with artistic ambitions for high levels of musical expression and an ambivalent response to the pressure to create music according to the canons of socialist realism (Tomoff 2003). Similar tendencies existed in the whole of the Soviet cultural sphere. This does not mean that individual and state interests were in conflict. Alexei Yurchak calls it a ‘deeper paradox of the socialist system’ and at first inspection contradictory elements, positions and cultural manifestations existed together (Yurchak 2006: 168). This argument in his book—and the paradox in general—is mostly neglected in academic writing where several scholars support the view that Soviet citizens lived a double life where public and private spheres were strictly separated (Dragadze 1993; Humphrey 1983; Verdery 1996). The black and white portrayal of Soviet life prevailing in the existing literature, does not help in understanding such a complex society and is especially problematic when it comes to the analysis of everyday socialist culture. Yurchak’s reading of Soviet internationalism demonstrates its ambivalence between the concepts of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ culture: ‘Ultimately, this means that one did not have to think of “socialist” and “bourgeois” cultural forms as inherently incompatible because their meaning could shift depending on how and where these forms were used’ (Yurchak 2006: 165). As an example Yurchak uses jazz music, which was considered as the protest music of African Americans as well as a ‘bourgeois’ decadent music (Yurchak 2006: 166-67). A similar ambivalence existed across all spheres of life, especially culture. The Soviet Union and the whole Eastern bloc did not exist in a vacuum, contacts with the western world existed on a formal and informal level. Music, fashion and other spheres of ‘capitalist’ mass culture were followed, copied and consumed by Soviet people, ironically and not always illegally (see on jazz Starr 1983). Despite the intention of designing a new socialist cultural space, the authorities and industry were too slow and

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ineffective to create a socialist substitute for the more attractive western consumer culture (Péteri 2008). There exists plenty of theorising on why the socialist people found the western consumer culture in its material or immaterial forms so attractive. One explanation is that, apart from a brief flirtation with anti-consumerist ideology, the socialist states motivated their workers through material values like cars, apartments, higher pay or access to limited consumables (Verdery 1993). Therefore, products of the West were valued more than domestic ones (Caute 2003; Dunham 1976). Moreover, the ambivalent position towards western culture increased during the short period of relaxation, or Détente, which was politically regarded as rather unsuccessful (Kaiser 1980). However, Détente legalised western music, films and other art forms in the Soviet environment. (From childhood the author recalls reading newspaper articles harshly critical of the ‘bourgeois’ governments of France and Italy. At the same time they grew up with French and Italian comedies, openly shown in Estonian cinemas.) Détente also made it possible for western music to receive some airplay on Soviet radio and was also released on the Melodia record label (Zhuk 2010: 125, 126, 166).2 The ‘deeper paradox of the socialist system’ applies—among others— to Soviet (light) music culture. It is difficult to say when the concept of Estrada was born and this question is also beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, the concept has multiple meanings and content as shown by the scholar of Russian popular music David MacFadyen, who discusses the Russian term Estrada investigating the word’s French roots. MacFadyen argues that in the French tradition Estrada means ‘small stage,’ and defines it as ‘a wide ranging term that includes pop music as well as modern dance, comedy, circus arts, and any other performance not on the “big”, classical stage’ (2002: 3). Indeed, Estrada artists could have also performed stand-up, or as circus artists, and were often officially named so. However, in the popular understanding of Soviet people, the term Estrada was interchangeably associated with the term ‘popular music’ or ‘pop music’ and the term svezdy estrady (Estrada stars) was generally (but not exclusively) used to indicate successful and wellknown singers. Estrada music was not always dance music but could also be performed in seated concert halls and take the form of a romantic song or ballad. Estrada, as a broad Soviet pop music genre, was sometimes very ironic; while some artists were deadly serious, some songs were extremely Schlager-like, others included elements of rock music (Grabowsky 2012). The musical output is probably not so defining for

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the genre as the form: typical of Estrada music was (and still is) that the singers were—as a rule—accompanied by huge orchestras dominated by wind instruments. While the nature of Estrada is fluid, there is also another phenomenon surrounding Soviet pop music—the vocal-instrumental ensemble (vokal’no-instrumental’nyi ansambl’) or VIA. It is widely accepted that the term was used for state-approved rock collectives because the word ‘rock’ was essentially forbidden in the Soviet Union. Due to the Soviet institutional setting, all music collectives had to be registered (more about this below) and because it was impossible to register as a ‘rock ensemble’, yet impossible to ignore the popularity of rock music, the concept of the VIA was invented in 1966 (Wickström and Steinholt 2009: 314; see also Troitskii 2007). However, there is evidence that the term VIA was used for the first time on a concert poster in 1964 by the seven-piece band Avangard from Donetsk, Ukraine who performed their own interpretations of western artists like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies or the Shadows (Iasenov 2012). The scholars (and supporters) of Russian and Soviet rock tend to juxtapose VIAs as ‘official’ watered-down rock as opposed to the ‘real’ or unofficial rock bands (Cushman 1995; Steinholt and Wickström 2009; Troitskii 2007). However, the opinion of VIA musicians is usually not sought. Väino Land, the leader and initiator of the Estonian VIA Fix explained that VIAs were neither rock nor Estrada but should be seen in the tradition of western bands like the Bee Gees or the Eagles. Their music was distinguishable by a high level of musicianship and complicated song structures. Line-ups of the VIAs were usually large, containing six to twelve musicians. It was not unusual for a VIA to have three singers, string and wind instruments, keyboards, and always accompanied by electric guitars. The music of one VIA band could contain a mixture of different genres from folk, reggae, pop, rock or Estrada. Also their appearance was not unified. For instance, Belorussian group Pesniary not only performed psychedelic versions of folk tunes but also wore folk costumes on stage. The Estonian band Fix had in its heyday various costumes for the band members encapsulating the image of a rocker, worker, Estrada artist and so forth. Considering the nature of VIA music, the assumption of Grabowsky that VIA was young musicians’ attempt to play rock music within an ideologically determined official framework (Grabowsky 2012: 31) sounds more correct than the previously mentioned negative interpretation.

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In order to be officially recognised or to have the status as a ‘professional’ performer, all artists and bands had to be registered and were subject to various regulations. Estrada performers and VIAs had to belong to a certain enterprise (as club artists) or to a state concert agency (philharmony). Every Soviet republic and most big cities had their own philharmony (Roskontsert, Estonian Philharmony, Moscow Philharmony, etc.) subordinated to the state concert agencies of Goskontsert and Sovkontsert. In order to perform, every professional artist had to undergo ‘tarification’ (tarifitseerimine in Estonian), a demonstration concert where every artist presented five songs in front of a committee that fixed the ‘artistic’ level of the performer. According to that level, performers were given a ‘category’. The musical ‘category’ was important because it determined the activity and income of the performer. Artists with lower categories were allowed to perform only in factory clubs or houses of culture, whereas a higher category meant permission to perform all over the Soviet Union and abroad. The higher the category, the higher the salary tariff, or punktitasu per performance. The tariff was paid independent of the size of crowd and length of performance. The ‘tarification’ was essential for determining the status of a musician in the artists’ and bands’ community, because the category directly affected their travel possibilities and size of audience. Not only were lower category artists unable to perform officially outside of their home republic, but because categories were given according to ‘artistic maturity’, they also symbolised the quality of the band. VIAs and Estrada artists not only had to prove their level of their mastery but also register their repertoire. The bulk of a set list of a Soviet performer had to contain works of Soviet composers (especially members of the Union of Composers) and only a small percentage remained for works of composers from other socialist countries, with an even smaller quota allowed for music of western origin (Rothstein 1980). This regulation is often interpreted as a strategy for the ideological control over music to guarantee a correct ideological bias for the entertainment of the masses. Alas, these regulations had a financial basis as well. ‘In the Soviet Union existed a well-functioning copyright system,’ explained Alar Madisson, long-time vocalist and manager of Fix: ‘At every concert we had to fill in repertoire lists and the authors of these songs received money. When your songs were popular then all the bands played them and altogether the sum of money could be very substantial. Can

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you imagine how many thousands of roubles Raimonds Pauls earned with his ‘Alye rozy’ (Purple roses)? Every restaurant band played it’.

The role of the Union of Composers as the monopolistic Soviet music publisher remains unstudied. However, in cooperation with other state institutions like the Muzfond and Kompozitor publishing houses, the Union of Composers collected and distributed royalties and was therefore interested in ensuring that the songs of its members were performed as a first priority. This also explains why throughout the Soviet period the Union of Composers lobbied for the compulsory use of its members music3 (Rothstein 1981).

ESTONIAN INVASION

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MUSIC BUSINESS

For many people in the Soviet Union, Estonia and the Baltic states generally embodied western culture; these republics were the ‘Soviet West’. When Yurchak (2006) writes about the ‘imaginary West’ in Soviet culture as a non-reachable illusionary space, the Baltic republics were the physical embodiment of those imaginings. This imagery was supported by Estonian self-isolation and distance from Soviet cultural life: Soviet music, theatre or literature was not particularly popular in Estonia during the Soviet era and people preferred to read books or newspapers in their mother tongue not in Russian. The only notable exception was Soviet films, which were consumed via state TV. During fieldwork it was discovered that Estonians throughout the Soviet era embodied a certain ‘Other’. It is usual to hear about the culture shock people experienced when visiting Estonia (and the Baltic republics in general) with their western architecture, cafe culture and restaurants. The ‘otherness’ of Estonians was also stressed by the fact that their Russian working skills were notoriously bad4. Estonia has a strong entertainment music tradition oriented to western musical styles. In the 1930s, Estonia danced the foxtrot and tango, popular dances everywhere in Europe (Pedusaar 2007). This western orientation continued after absorption into the Soviet Union: in the 1960s Estonia was swamped by the beat music and rock performed by ‘guitar ensembles’ (Salumets 1998). Estonian young people, along with musicians, tried to be up-to-date with contemporary developments in pop and rock throughout the Soviet era. In several memories, people spoke of how new records appeared in Estonia within a few months or even weeks after they were released in the West, and circulated via

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cassettes within the music-loving community. Many people also had relatives in the West who sometimes provided their Soviet kin with new music on cassette or vinyl LP. The citizens of Tallinn were able to watch and listen to Finnish TV and radio, new music was recorded from these sources and re-recorded later by other people. It was not unusual for Estonian artists to re-record contemporary hits with Estonian texts and in this way new hits were spread among listeners5. In the 1970s, Estonia had a healthy Estrada and VIA scene, and this music was played on TV and radio. The first Soviet Estonian artist to achieve huge popularity in the Soviet Union was Georg Ots, an opera and Estrada singer. Georg Ots’ success in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated to the Russian concert agencies that an accent and western-style could be an exotic bonus that draws an audience from all over the Soviet Union (Raig 2002)6. Later in 1974, in Tallinn, the band Apelsin was established. Apelsin played a mixture of country and western, rock ‘n’ roll and Estrada but nevertheless embodied western rock music for Russian music fans (Troitskii 2007: 117). As the long-time road manager of the band, Aare Nahk said, ‘Apelsin has always toured in Russia’ and probably they were the first Estonian band to enter Soviet concert halls. In the early 1980s, another band, Fix, started to tour Russia, performing their first concert in Leningrad together with Valeri Leontev and other Estrada stars. The self-isolation of the Estonian music scene is well reflected by the recollections of Fix’s manager Alar Madisson: ‘We had no idea about Russian music whatsoever. We did not know Leontev at all. After the concert we understood that he was a first class star in Russia.’ The phenomenon of the Estonian invasion can be seen in the context of changes in Soviet cultural policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Christine Evans (2011) demonstrates in her article about Soviet mass culture, in that period officials began to look for new concepts of entertainment. New shows appeared on TV that included music and comedy. After Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Détente, and a stabilisation of society and increase in prosperity, Soviet people looked for a new kind of entertainment. As a result, western music appeared on Soviet TV and radio programmes (Zhuk 2010) and people apparently wanted more. TV shows like the Song of the Year or Little Blue Flame opened the door for the success of Estonian music, and for new genres of music in general. A performance on Little Blue Flame guaranteed success and concert bookings all over the Soviet Union (Evans 2011: 620; Rinne 2009: 165). These shows were

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aired on Central Television and watched throughout the whole country. Song of the Year and similar shows created a framework that could rapidly be filled with new content once censorship weakened in the second half of the 1980s, and which could (and did) transition quite ‘seamlessly to post-Soviet Russian television.’ (Evans 2011: 620). This observation can be generally applied to the whole Soviet entertainment sector. The existence of western mass culture could no longer be denied and officials attempted to offer a Soviet equivalent to western music, fashion and TV entertainment, all of which helped to enable the later success of ‘domestic’ western music. Anne Veski—a diva who still tours in Russia—believes that she was discovered when Central TV showed a film in which she had performed. In the early 1980s several Estonian artists toured (gastrolirovali in Russian) continuously in Russia. They performed either solo concerts or in huge gala concerts with other artists. ‘A gala concert was an easy job,’ comments Rein Lang, a former functionary of the Young Communist League Komsomol, ‘You performed two songs but got paid for a fulllength concert’ (Rinne 2009: 156). Specific to Soviet show business was that artists often had to perform several concerts a day over a period of three or four days. ‘When modern rock bands boast that they perform over forty concerts a year then I just laugh. We performed seventy concerts in a month,’ said Arne Nahk from Apelsin. Tõnu Aare, the singer of Apelsin opines that the record for the band was seventy-two concerts in eighteen days in Ukraine (Rinne 2009: 163). Alar Madisson disclosed that the Estonian record is held by Jaak Joala, who in the mid-1980s in Moscow, performed twelve gala concerts in one day, switching between two stadiums with a bus. Not only was the workload of Estonian performers large, the distances they had to travel were huge. During one season that lasted several months a band could have performed in the Far East, Central Asia, Ukraine and the Caucasus, constantly travelling on planes and trains. By the mid-1980s an unofficial hierarchy among members of the Estonian invasion was formed7. All the respondents agreed that the most popular Estonian artist in the Soviet Union was Jaak Joala. ‘Jaak Joala was number one. Then there was a huge gap and then came Anne Veski and Tõnis Mägi. And then the rest,’ explained members of Apelsin. ‘Jaak Joala was worshipped like a god in Russia. He did not even walk three steps, he had always a white Volga8 to transport him,’ remembered Arne Nahk. ‘Jaak Joala is damned talented. Of course he was successful,’ said Väino Land. There is also an assumption that Soviet concert agencies were

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looking for non-Russian performers so as to have variety in their programme, and thus consciously promoted Jaak Joala. The role of Roskontsert and its boss Felix Katz in the success of Estonian artists in the Soviet Union is undisputable9. However, not only Roskontsert had a commercial interest in the relationship. All Estonian artists and bands successful in the Soviet Union had developed strategies and made business partners in show business. ‘Every band had its own contact person in Roskontsert, Goskontsert and Sovkontsert. Details were kept secret’, said Väino Land. These contacts were instrumental for both promotion and bookings. Simultaneously, the Estonian Philharmony and its director Oleg Sapoznin organised concerts and tours using their own contacts with other Soviet concert agencies. But the initiative of bands was tolerated: ‘We allowed them to do what they wanted’, commented Oleg Sapoznin. Such liberty and different business partners, combined with stylistic differences, were the reason why Estonian bands built their fan bases in big cities like Moscow or Leningrad. While Magnetic Band and Fix were clearly rock-oriented, Radar, for example, with its experimental jazz-rock sound, was able to draw an audience looking for something different. Jaak Joala’s romantic image was contrasted with the Kuldne Trio’s semi-vulgar stage show; Anne Veski as the more or less classic diva, was popular with older audiences, whereas Kare Kauks’ youthful disco appearance made her popular among young Russian and Ukrainian girls. Oleg Sapoznin argued that the variations in audience preferences were taken into account when tours featuring several different styles of bands were organised. Management skills and informal networks were of great importance for the success of Estonian artists, but probably even more important was the music and performance. ‘You cannot fool a Russian audience,’ stated a band member of Fix. ‘They recognise immediately when you perform in a half-hearted way. Either you are 100 % committed or people just leave. We always left the stage covered with sweat.’ The selection of songs and orchestration of the stage choreography were carefully discussed and planned (Rinne 2009: 158). ‘When we had a short slot in a gala concert we usually performed four or five songs. Fix always started with a melodious tune, the next one was faster and the culmination of the performance was a rock song. The last song was slower, usually reggae, we cooled people down and prepared them for the next artist (Interview with Väino Land, 12 April 2013).’

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MAKING

OF

ERSATZ-POP

When presenting the research at a conference about Soviet pop and mass culture in Swiss St. Gallen in 2013, an unexpected difficulty was encountered. A series of old Soviet era music videos from YouTube was played; first of all, several typical Soviet Russian Estrada songs were played, followed by Estonian artists, in order to demonstrate the stylistic difference. One of the aims was to show why Anne Veski was so different. For that purpose music videos of Russian Estrada female stars with their standard performances accompanied by a lack of movement and motionless faces with deep ‘inside-looking’ stares were chosen. Then Anne Veski’s video of Viimane vaatus, a cover song of Pat Boone’s Speedy Gonzales was played. The Estonian version could be translated as ‘The last stage play’ where the video was shot in a small stage in the park. Young Anne, in a long pink dress, looked incredibly sexy, literally flirting with the viewer, smiling and doing funny grimaces. She is accompanied by another Estonian star—Tõnis Mägi—who is sitting on a chair in front of a stage as a theatre director. When singing his part, Tõnis also makes funny gestures and grimaces. During the discussion it was discovered that the academic audience was divided: western colleagues were convinced that the video was a deliberate parody of a western pop song, while colleagues with a Soviet background had no problems understanding that it was, indeed, a serious Estrada pop song, claiming authenticity by mimicking western sound and stage performance. In his article about the anthropologists’ role in postcolonial analysis, Edward Said stresses the role of a scholar as an interlocutor between western culture and colonised people who have taken the form of an ‘Other’. Here that concept is borrowed and placed in the context of that text. Said writes: ‘Once again representation becomes significant, not just as an academic or theoretical quandary but as a political choice’ (Said 1989: 224). In a situation of the ‘imaginary West’ Estonian artists were a representation of the West, not the West itself. The choice to emphasise their ‘westernness’ was also a decision to stress their ‘Otherness’, being an Estonian, an identity that was impossible to hide10. In retrospect, videos of young Anne Veski and other such artists evoke twilight feelings. Watching some videos of Anne where she sings in Russian (songs like Krutoi povorot11 or Slova12) the result is as western as it was possible to produce in the Soviet Union: modest but fashionable costumes (in contrast to the flamboyant glittering dresses Russian female singers wore), the skyline of

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Hanseatic Tallinn and a modern 1980s pop sound. But it is not real. The costumes look cheap, the eye catches Soviet concrete buildings and the sound is poor. What the artist performed and concert agencies sold was a representation, a creation of the ‘imaginary West’. According to Hennoin, fulfilling the expectations of audience is crucial for the success of the artist: If one wishes to analyse pop music, one is always led back to real audiences in the form of consumers; a pop song, which owes its ephemeral existence to the public in the first place, is sustained only by that which gave it its substance from the start (Hennoin 1990: 187). It seems that the audience happily believed in the pseudo-westerness of Estonian artists, ignoring obvious Soviet components in sound and performance. Anne Veski argues in her interview that Estonian music was ‘exotic’ for Soviet people, it was more oriented to western pop and rock than towards ordinary Soviet Estrada or VIA music (Rinne 2009: 149). Musicians from Fix divulged that they were even told not to sing in Russian, but in Estonian or English. ‘If we wanted to have Russian music we would have booked a Russian artist’, one manager told them. ‘We were different,’ Alar Madisson said, ‘We dressed differently to Russian bands, and we had a real western-style stage show. One of our best tricks was when the guitarist ran to the edge of the stage and then slid on his knees beneath the piano while playing a solo. That drove people mad.’

As mentioned above, when looking at videos in YouTube it appears that Estonian bands were visually remarkably different from the typical Soviet Estrada artists. They tended to move around more on stage, wore westernstyle stage costumes and in the case of Apelsin or Fix incorporated humour into their shows (Fig. 4.1). Notwithstanding the fact that touring Estonian artists were introducing the live experience of western culture to a Soviet audience, they were not the ‘real’ stars but offered cover versions of well-known western pop songs. In her book about Japan’s fascination with western culture, the author Joy Hendry asks ‘Is this reverse Orientalism’ when describing how Japan offers ‘Japanness’ to a western audience in various exhibitions (Hennoin 1990: 49), or building western-style theme parks in Japan. The concert agencies exploited the reverse Orientalism, using the ‘Exotica’ (Hutnyk 2000), and the audience of a largely closed country—as the Soviet Union was—was

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Fig. 4.1

Fix in Vanemuise theatre, Tartu, Estonia, 1983

Credit: Valeri Parhomenko. Copyright Alar Madisson

willing to pay for it. The Soviet culture industry produced a controlled version of the ‘imaginary West’ that was acceptable ideologically and sonically. Estonian artists had their own reasons for playing the game. As pointed out by Alari Madisson—and confirmed by others—there were three motivations to perform in other Soviet republics. First of all, the artists earned more money and were able to be engaged in a pretty lucrative trade buying scarce consumables (like winter boots or make-up) in various places, and selling them at a profit in Estonia (Kangur 2015; Kilumets 2015; Rinne 2009). The second reason was the possibility to travel, in some rare cases even outside the Soviet Union13. Last but not least, it was important to be part of a largescale show business by performing for huge audiences. Anne Veski tells: ‘In Russia you feel like a star. In Estonia you are just a singer’ (Rinne 2009: 182). Artists of the Estonian invasion performed on a level that was unthinkable in Estonia. A major part of the Fix folklore is the concerts in Omsk where the band would perform twice a day, each time for 20,000 people.

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Anne Veski’s biggest concert drew 36,000 listeners (Rinne 2009: 160). The experience to perform in front of a huge mass of people makes the artist emotional even today, two decades later. ‘You know what is the biggest kick? You flip your fingers and 10,000 people flip their fingers. Then you say “Oooo!” and 10,000 people repeat it.’ said Alari Madisson. Huge concerts were accompanied with life in luxurious hotels, fancy cars and worshipping fans. This all built an emotional link with the Russian music scene, and the country itself, an affection that several artists felt even in 2013.

CONCLUSIONS In February 2010 Estonia was embroiled in a small scandal. The president of Estonia sent an invitation to Anne Veski to attend a reception in honour of the anniversary of the Estonian Republic. During the reception the diva was supposed to receive a medal of honour. However, Anne Veski turned down the invitation because she was booked for a series of concerts in Russia. As she explained, contracts were signed six months ago and there was no possibility to change the dates. The Estonian social media was full of angry comments accusing Veski of unpatriotic behaviour. Veski is currently the only Estonian artist actively performing in Russia. In 1993 managers of former famous Estonian bands organised a meeting with representatives of a Russian show business firm in Moscow’s Estonian embassy, with the aim to restore the former fruitful relationship. It turned out to be a fiasco. The time was over, Russian promoters were no longer interested in Estonian artists. It is surprising that the second smallest Soviet republic by territory, and the smallest in population, left such a lasting legacy on the Soviet and postSoviet culture. The period of the Estonian invasion was short, the number of singers and groups limited, but the artists and songs are still remembered in many former Soviet republics. The popularity of Estonian artists offers the possibility of looking behind the state-controlled media and concert organisations. The Estonian invasion was not only the outcome of the individual ambitions of musicians, but closely related to changes in the larger political and cultural setting. With a closer reading it appears that Soviet culture and its structures were not so strictly controlled and manipulated by the state, but full of contradictions and ambivalence. First of all, the methods and policies of the Soviet cultural and media institutions were not only ideological. Behind the slogans of educating the masses and influencing people’s political views, there existed a culture industry with the aim of making a profit and reaching a bigger audience by offering a wide

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range of entertainment. For that purpose Estonian music was the substitute for the existing ‘imaginary West’. Neither were artists subordinated to strict control that determined their appearance and music, as is believed. It is apparent that musicians were able to manipulate official regulations and pursue their own interests, whether musical or financial. The agency of performers and mercantile politics of the Union of Composers, philharmonies or TV stations demonstrate the ‘deeper paradox’ of Soviet life, the multiple sides and layers of Soviet culture. The paradox becomes deeper considering that most artists who were popular in the Soviet Union participated as leading figures in the Singing Revolution of the 1990s, recording several important patriotic songs. It is believed that analysis of the Estonian musical invasion helps to understand how the presumably highly regulated, ideology driven and centrally controlled Soviet society functioned. The pop music in the 1980s was a complex phenomenon mirroring the tastes of the audience. The story of the official music—Estrada and VIAs—demonstrates that there existed certain freedoms within the strict framework of ideology of the socialist culture. To a certain degree, simultaneously, Westernness was incorporated into a socialist project of culture.

NOTES 1. It is difficult to prove but some informants believe that the term ‘‘Estonian invasion’’ was coined by the singer Ivo Linna in one of his interviews. However, the term is widespread, especially about the Estonian Soviet era musicians and culture managers. 2. It must be noted that no one spoken to in Estonia had heard about the Détente. 3. Because royalties were paid on the grounds of a repertoire list, it was not uncommon that artists performed other songs but delivered lists with the ‘right’ selection to avoid trouble with the officials (Rinne 2009). 4. The non-sufficient knowledge of Russian language of ethnic Estonians was a big problem for local and Muscovian authorities throughout the Soviet period. The controls of the Ministry of Education found that in the 1950s one fifth of primary school pupils had an almost non-existent knowledge of Russian, the results of others were mediocre. Some of the children could not write their name in Cyrillic. In 1968 the control found that all pupils of the fifth grade of a Southern Estonian school were unable to write basic Russian words correctly. Notwithstanding several reforms of Russian teaching in Estonian schools in 1979 40 % of Estonian students in the Tartu State

4

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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University did not speak Russian at all, whereas others’ Russian knowledge was mediocre (Vahter 2015: 30, 34, 82). For instance, Eurovision winners were often re-recorded already on the night the song won the contest and played on the radio the next day. The covering of Western pop hits was interpreted by Estonian artists as a mission to introduce fresh music to the Estonian audience and regarded as resistance to Soviet cultural policy. Interestingly, Georg Ots was also immensely popular in Finland, probably the only Soviet Estrada artist who was regularly able to perform in a capitalist country. The list of the bands associated with the Estonian invasion is relatively short, including artists like Anne Veski, Jaak Joala, Tõnis Mägi and the Magnetic Band, Vitamiin, Laine, Fix, Radar, Mahavok, Kuldne Trio, Nemo. Most bands were operating under the Estonian Philharmony. A Soviet luxury car. The controversial nature of Mr. Katz needs additional research. While Estonian artists praise him as a great friend of the Estonian Estrada (Rinne, Harri 2009 Laulev revolutsioon. Tallinn: Varrak.) Oleg Sapoznin told me that Mr. Katz was just exploiting artists and the Estonian Philharmony refused to work with him. Even Jaak Joala, who adopted a lyrical Russian style at an early stage of his career, was unable to hide his remarkable ‘Baltic’ accent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfy2gFfS5Pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfy2gFfS5Pc Anne Veski and Jaak Joala were able to represent the Soviet Union in a Sopot song festival in Hungary in 1984; also Fix, and Jaak Joala with his backing band, toured Africa as members of a Soviet cultural mission.

WORKS CITED Bernstein, J.M. (1991). Introduction. In J.M. Bernstein (Ed.), Theodor W. Adorno. The Culture Industry. Selected essays on mass culture (pp. 1–28). London and New York: Routledge. Caute, David (2003). The dancer defects: The struggle for cultural supremacy during the cold war. New York: Oxford University Press. Cushman, Thomas (1995). Notes from underground. Rock music counterculture in Russia. Albany: State University of New York. Dragadze, Tamara (1993). The domestication of religion under Soviet communism. In C.M. Hann (Ed.), Socialism: Ideals, ideologies, and local practice (pp. 148–156). London, New York: Routledge. Dunham, Vera S. (1976). In Stalin’s time: Middleclass values in Soviet Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Evans, Christine. 2011. Song of the year and Soviet Mass culture in the 1970s. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 12(3), 617–645. Friedman, Julia P., & Weiner, Adam (1999). Between a rock and hard place: Holy Rus’ and its alternatives in Russian rock music. In A.M. Barker (Ed.), Consuming Russia. Popular culture, sex, and society since Gorbatchev (pp. 110–137). Durham, London: Duke University Press. Garšnek, Igor (2010). Ruja: Must ronk või valge vares. Tallinn: Pegasus. Grabowsky, Ingo (2012). Motor der Verwestlichung. Das sowjetische EstradaLied 1950–1975. Osteuropa, 62, 21–35.Hann, Chris, & Elisabeth Dunn (Eds.) (1996). Civil society: Challenging Western models. London: Routledge. Hennoin, Antoine (1990). The creative process. In S. Frith & A. Goodwin (Eds.), On record. Rock, pop and the written word (pp. 186–206). London and New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max, & Adorno, Theodor W. (2001). The culture industry: Enlightement as mass deception. In M.G. Durham & D.M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies. Keyworks (pp. 71–101). Malden, Oxford: Blackwell. Humphrey, Caroline (1983). Karl Marx collective: Economy, society and religion in a Siberian collective farm. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Hutnyk, John (1998). Adorno at womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity talk. Postcolonial Studies, 1(3), 401–426. Hutnyk, John (2000). Critique of Exotica: Music, politics, and the culture industry. London: Pluto Press. Iasenov, Evgenii (2012). Zdes’ nachinalis’ VIA 2012 [cited 30.12 2012]. Available from http://www.donjetsk.com/retro/1592-zdes-nachinalis-via.html. Kaiser, Robert G. (1980). U.S.-Soviet relations: Goodbye to Détente. Foreign Affairs, 59, 500–521. Kangur, Paavo (2015). Jaak Joala. Ka unustuse jõel aeg kord silla loob. Tallinn: Kunst. Kilumets, Margit (2015). Jaak Joala. Kuulsuse ahelad. Vol. Tallinn: Hea Lugu. MacFadyen, David (2001). Red stars: Personality and Soviet popular song, 1955– 1991 Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. MacFadyen, David (2002). Estrada?! grand narratives and the philosophy of the Russian popular songs since Perestroika. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaka: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Merchant, Tanya (2009). Popping tradition: Performing Maqom and Uzbek ‘national’ Estrada in the 21st century. Popular Music and Society, 32(1), 371–386. Negus, Keith (1999). Music genres and corporate identities. London and New York: Routledge. Olson, Laura J. (2004). Performing Russia. Folk revival and Russian identity. London and New York: Routledge. Pedusaar, Heino (2007). Tardunud helide maailm. Tallinn: Koolibri.

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Péteri, György (2008). The Occident Within—or the Drive for Exceptionalism and Modernity. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 9(4), 929–937. Raig, Kulle (2002). Saaremaa valss. Georg Otsa elu. Tallinn: Varrak. Rancier, Megan (2009). Resurrecting the nomads: Historical Nostalgia and modern nationalism in contemporary Kazakh popular music videos. Popular Music and Society, 32(3), 387–405. Raud, Mihkel (2008). Musta pori näkku. Tallinn: Tammerraamat. Rinne, Harri (2009). Laulev revolutsioon. Tallinn: Varrak. Rothstein, Robert A. (1980). The quiet rehabilitation of the brick factory: early Soviet popular music and its critics. Slavic Review, 39(3), 373–388. Said, Edward (1989). Representing the colonized: Anthropology’s interlocutors. Critical Inquiry, 15, 205–225. Salumets, Vello (1998). Rockrapsoodia. Tallinn: Eesti Entsüklopeediakirjastus. Salumets, Vello (2010). Fikseeritud Fix. Tallinn: Greiff. Shakhnazarova, Nelli G. (2001). Paradoksy sovetskoi muzykal′noi kul′tury: 30-e gody [Paradoxes of Soviet Musical Culture: The 1930s]. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Indrik. Smith, Susannah Lockwood (2002). From peasants to professionals: The socialistRealist transformation of a Russian Folk Choir. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 3(3), 393–425. Starr, S. Frederick (1983). Red and hot: The fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917– 1980. New York: Oxford University Press. Steinholt, Yngvar B., & Wickström, David-Emil (2009). Introduction. Popular Music and Society, 32(3), 307–311. Tomoff, Kiril (2003). Paradoksy sovetskoi muzykalnoi kultury: 30-e gody, and: Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (review). Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 4(2), 466–480. Troitskii, Artemii (2007). Back in the USSR. Sankt-Peterburg: Amfora. Tsipursky, Gleb (2012). Having fun in the Thaw: Youth initiative clubs in the post-stalin years. The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2201, 1–45. Tsipursky, Gleb. manuscript. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and StateSponsored Popular Culture in the Cold War Soviet Union, 1945–1970. Urban, Michael (2004). Russia gets the blues. music, culture, and community in unsettled times. With the assistance of Andrei Evdokimov. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Vahter, Tarmo (2015). ‘Karuks istus vangitornis . . . ’ 1980—aasta, mis raputas Eestist. Tallinn: OÜ Hea Lugu ja Tarmo Vahter. Verdery, Katherine (1993). Ethnic relations, economies of shortage, and the transition in Eastern Europe. In C.M. Hann (Ed.), Socialism. Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice (pp. 172–187). London and New York: Routledge.

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Verdery, Katherine (1996). What was socialism, and what comes next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wickström, David-Emil, & Steinholt, Yngvar B. (2009). Visions of the (Holy) motherland in contemporary Russian popular music: Nostalgia, patriotism, religion and Russkii Rok. Popular Music and Society, 32(3), 313–330. Yurchak, Alexei (2006). Everything was forever, until it was no more: The last Soviet generation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Zhuk, Sergei I. (2010). Rock and Roll in the rocket city: The west, identity, and ideology in Soviet dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985. Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington and Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Aimar Ventsel works as a senior researcher in the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Ventsel has conducted extensive fieldwork in East Siberia studying property relations, local music business and identity processes. Ventsel has published about Siberian pop music and how it is related to ethnic identity. His second field site is East Germany where he researched punk and skinhead subculture. Currently he is studying the ‘Estonian Invasion’, a little known chapter in Estonian music history. His main publications include Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity: kinship and property relations in a Siberian village (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia Bd. 7, LIT Verlag); ‘Sakha Pop Music and Ethnicity’, in Properties of Culture – Culture as Property. Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia (edited by E. Kasten; Dietrich Reimer Verlag); ‘Sakha Pop Music – A Celebration of Consuming’, in The Anthropology of East Europe Review 24 (2):68–86; and ‘Consumption and Popular Culture Among Youth in Siberia’, in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 134:1–22 (with J. O. Habeck).

CHAPTER 5

The Eagle Rocks: Isolation and Cosmopolitanism in Albania’s Pop-Rock Scene Bruce Williams

Rock ‘n’ roll in communist Albania was a rara avis, yet surprisingly to many, it really existed. Non-Albanians knew very little about it, particularly inasmuch as very few foreigners had access to clandestine or public rock performances held in Albania during the country’s isolation. Moreover, there is virtually no written documentation, since rock ‘n’ roll was not a musical genre condoned by the State, and hence, most performances were indeed underground. The phenomenon is only now being uncovered internationally as part of a vibrant onset in interest in Albanian culture. This essay will explore the emergence of pop-rock in Albania during the communist period, with an examination of the clandestine rock scene as well as the sole rock concert performed during this time period, a 1988 event featuring singer Aleksandër Gjoka. It draws upon definitions and theories put forth by Motti Regev, who views pop-rock as a music form using electric and electronic instruments and amplification, and which spread from England and the US to

B. Williams (*) The William Paterson University of New Jersey, New Jersey, USA © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_5

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other countries and ethnic contexts. For Regev, pop-rock foregrounds interconnectedness and implies what he terms ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’. Particularly with regard to what concerns such cosmopolitanism, Regev’s theories help the understanding of pop-rock during the communist period in Albania.

RE-MAPPING ALBANIA It is essential to note that Lonely Planet deemed Albania to be the world’s ‘Number One’ tourist destination in 2010. This decision is well in line with the budding interest in Albanian culture among international academics and art enthusiasts. A case in point is the recent upsurge in the study of Albanian cinema, which has led to numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, conference panels, and a workshop in November 2015 held at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.1 The round-table focused on how scholars can re-read Albanian films from the communist era outside of the hackneyed polarities of propaganda and resistance. In a number of ways, the discussions from this event provide a model through which one can approach the sketchy details available on the underground rock scene as well as what is known of more public performances of pop music in communist Albania. In what concerns the international pop-rock world, one must stress that absolutely nothing was exported under communism. Moreover, with regard to the music scene domestically, Albania has been missing from most studies of Eastern European rock during the communist era. It is notably absent from Timothy W. Ryback’s seminal Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (1990), a work which presented research from as early as 1985, and focused its discussion on the Soviet Union and six Warsaw Pact countries. Ironically, the inclusion of Albania in the discussion would have likely caused Ryback’s book to receive more negative reviews since it had already been critiqued for spreading itself too thin and exploring too wide a selection of national contexts. Greg Gaut, for instance, indicts Ryback precisely on these counts. Nonetheless, he argues that ‘Ryback structures his narrative as an epic of the struggle between anti-rock governments and determined rockers, in which the bureaucrats won nearly every battle, but lost the war’ (Gaut 1991: 250).

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FROM ARGENTINA TO ISRAEL: TOWARDS A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Motti Regev’s work is especially helpful here, not only in defining poprock as a genre but, moreover, in providing a solid foundation for examining the phenomenon in a national context. In the case of Argentina, Regev explored the relationship among folklore, tango, and rock that helps define Argentine pop-rock (Regev 2013: 2). Such a process is not unlike that of Albania where, particularly in light of strong censorship against hard rock, there developed a close relationship with folkloric music, light, or ‘variety’ music, and, eventually, pop-rock. Regev’s use of the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, as set forth by Ulrich Beck (2006) is useful, moreover, in establishing a framework for the manner in which, even under communism, Albania appropriated western pop music. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, an earlier study by Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi (2004), is helpful in applying the notion of cultural cosmopolitanism to a national context. In the introduction to their study, Regev and Seroussi remind us that ‘in Israel the idea of a new nation is thoroughly interwoven with the creation of a new culture and arts’ (Regev and Seroussi 2004: 2). For them, aside from the re-emergence of Hebrew as a living language, ‘Israeliness’ is most clearly signified through popular music, which ‘represents convincing “proof” of the existence of Israel as an indigenous cultural entity’ (ibid.: 2). They argue that there are two threads that dominate the study of modern national cultures; ‘their connection to earlier premodern entities from which they supposedly evolve; and the regional ethnic, class, religious, and other forms of cultural diversity that exist within any nation-state’ (3). They distinguish the ideas of ‘primordialists’, such as Anthony D. Smith (1986, 1991) and John A. Armstrong (1982), who argue that modern national cultures are ‘natural transmutations of earlier, premodern ethnic entities’ (ibid.: 3), from modernists, such as Ernest Gellner (1983), Benedict Anderson (1991), and Eric Hobsbawm (1990), who view the phenomenon as ‘constructed and invented in recent history’ (Regev and Seroussi 2004: 3). Regev and Seroussi, nonetheless, find commonalities between the two approaches. They cite Uri Ram, who argues that ‘since primordialists concede that the “past” is a selective and interpretive present [Regev and Seroussi’s emphasis] construction, and since modernists concede that the “present” must make use of available past [Regev and Seroussi’s emphasis] cultural repertoires of the collectiveness in question, the gulf between the two is

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indeed minor’ (Uri Ram 1995: 93). Regev and Seroussi further stress the undisputable impact of globalisation on national cultures. They argue that one cannot neglect the dissemination of products and materials of the international culture industry. For Regev and Seroussi: [ . . . ] the current global flow of cultural materials—for which the terms ‘global culture’ and ‘world culture’ are commonly used—should be viewed primarily as having the effect of increasing the amount and variety of cultural materials present in a given national cultural setting, available for the construction of a contemporary sense of their national culture. (ibid.: 4).

‘ITALIANS’

FROM THE

EASTERN ADRIATIC

As a preface to the discussion, albeit limited, of the emergence of a pop-rock scene in communist Albania, some words on the Balkan nation’s identification with Italy are in order. Italy proved to be one of the most significant influences in the development of pop music in Albania, and this is the fruit of a legacy that spanned some 500 years. Thus, there is a direct link between Albania’s ‘primordial’ past and its present rocking identity. During the Italian Renaissance, parts of Albania belonged to the Republic of Venice, and a strong level of trade was fostered between the regions. One needs only to recall the Venetian training of the painter Onufri, who, in the early 16th century, infused Albanian icon painting with the artistic climate of the Italian Renaissance. One also witnessed a significant exodus of Albanians to Italy in the 15th century following the annexation of Albania into the Ottoman Empire. Even to this day, there exists a sizeable population of speakers of a language variety of Albanian known as Arbëresh in a number of Italian provinces, among these Abruzzi, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily. Thus, both Italian and Albanian are still spoken on both sides of the Adriatic. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Italy was venerated by many educated Albanians because it represented a European outlook absent in the westernmost outpost of the Ottoman Empire. In the 20th century, close ties between King Zog and Italy, and the subsequent occupation of Albania under the Italian Fascists, further strengthened Albania’s bond with Italian culture. An informant for this research, Kristina Linadi, a native of the Shkodra region, shed further light on the role of the Italian language

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and culture in communist Albania, and in particular upon the spread thereof throughout Albania’s North. Linadi views religion as a paramount issue and points out that the northern part of the country, particularly Shkodra and environs, is home to the majority of the country’s Catholics. This population had been westward looking for many years, and a good number of Albanian Catholics actually supported the country’s role as a Fascist puppet State. Prior to the onset of the Hoxha years, many Albanians had studied or travelled in Italy, and hence Italian grew to be the country’s second language. During the early years of the communist regime, Albania maintained close ties with the Soviet Union, and the main foreign language studied in school became Russian. Nonetheless, Linadi recalls that, although the Italian language was not taught in schools, many Albanian Catholics shared books, and encouraged children to copy the pages of old Italian grammar books. In this way, the language continued to spread in an underground environment. Culturally, northern Albanians were, thus, particularly predisposed to develop a knowledge of the Italian language. Yet the situation is even more complex. The country’s Muslim population tended to be the most secular during the communist years. Although traditionally it had not been the most westward looking of Albania’s diverse groups, the communist period was an ironic exception. Hence, the use of Italian grew throughout the entire country. When Albania broke ties with the Soviet Union and Russian was no longer taught in schools, fluency in Italian was a sign of prestige, even or especially for secular Muslims. Today, the language ranks alongside English in popularity in Albania.

I WANT

TO

WATCH PRONTO, RAFAELLA

Reception of popular music was extremely different in Albania from that of virtually any other Eastern Bloc country, due largely to the nation’s complete isolation. Over the course of the communist period, it is essential to note that very few Albanians had access to shortwave radios, and the vast majority were, therefore, unable to tune into stations from the West. However, during the 1970s and 1980s Albanians, nonetheless, clandestinely came to appreciate Italian pop culture and music, and this was due largely to makeshift technology. A second informant for this research, Albanian actor Andrea Lekaj, grew up in the small town of Han i Hoti, which served as a border post with Yugoslavia for those few individuals

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allowed to cross the northern frontier during the Hoxha years. Lekaj recalls the use of improvised antennas that allowed the reception of Italian television. He describes the process whereby Albanians, by wiring up a soda-can and connecting it to a small, hand-crafted box outfitted with parts from transistor radios, were able to transform UHS broadcasts into accessible VHS frequencies.2 Such devices were, in larger towns or cities, passed from friend to friend, although, in a small town like Han i Hoti, it was most likely that only one family possessed one, which was attached to their television set. In other cases, such antennas were secretly placed on roofs for a few hours during the night, so that they were less likely to be discovered. Nicola Mai describes a slightly different variant of this phenomenon: As Albanian television sets could only receive VHS waves, other foreign public and private television networks broadcasting in UHF waves (Yugoslavian and Italian in central and northern Albania, Greek and Italian in the south of the country) could only be seen with the help of a special aerial—which would be kept indoors during the day and stretched out in the open at night—and of a canoçe (tin, in Albanian), an electronic device made secretly and illegally out of a couple of transistors, a condenser, and a tin. One had to be very careful not to talk about Italian television or to sing an Italian song openly. During the interviews, many Albanian young people told of having been punished severely by their schoolteachers when caught singing an Italian television advertisement jingle or whistling an Italian song. A group of young friends from Tirana told me how, in order to call one another and arrange meetings from window to window, they used to whistle as a secret command code call the opening tune of the Italian RAI 1 evening news program. (Mai 2001: 107).

It is essential to note that the inventor of these devices, Saimir Maloku, was sent to prison for his subversive activities.3 Governmental officials, on the other hand, had official decoders.4 The Italian language became the vehicle through which information and culture from the West could be accessed. Over the course of two decades, many Albanians who were too young to have used the language during the Mussolini occupation gained a solid level of aural comprehension through such homespun technology. For many, Italian became the language of Hollywood cinema insofar as only a privileged elite in the capital Tirana were permitted to see American films in the original English versions, the rest of the population being dependent upon the

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above-mentioned antenna rigs and versions dubbed into Italian. Lekaj recalls that annually, some twenty people, friends and strangers, would gather in his family home with shutters and doors closed, to watch the San Remo Festival on an antiquated black and white television. There he was exposed not only to the World Cup, Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino but also to Italian music and Madonna. The Lekaj living room was at times transformed into a stadium and at others a music festival venue! Together with the San Remo Festival, RAI’s Hit-parade broadcast on Sunday afternoons was very popular among Albanians, who in the North and West were able to receive it by radio, without any special decoding device. The programme featured western pop music, often translated into Italian. Noted singers heard by Albanians included, but were not limited to, Fausto Leali, Adriano Celentano, Georges Moustaki, Domenico Modugno, Lucio Battisti and Elton John. Through their antennas, Albanians also gained access to Yugoslavian television. Due to Enver Hoxha’s fear of Yugoslav expansionism, such viewings had to be just as clandestine as those of Italian TV. Particularly popular were programmes from both Titograd and Beograd, from which Albanian musicians could learn prohibited songs by ear. The music heard included hits from the 1960s and 70s, as well as lighter ‘variety’ tunes. While classical American films, such as Citizen Kane, could be viewed with Serbian subtitles, it was also possible to view the British soft-porn series, Electric Blue, as transmitted by Beograd. Thus, pop-rock music reached Albania through Yugoslavia as part of a broader package of high and low culture. Despite the importance of television broadcasts from Yugoslavia in Albania’s exposure to pop-rock music, the Serbian language simply never caught on as did Italian. For Albanians, Serbia represented a certain proximity to the East; it did not have the cultural clout that Italian did. Hence, television broadcasters in Titograd and Beograd served as vehicles through which western culture could reach Albania, yet did not constitute the strong affiliation that accompanied Italian television. In the case of Italian broadcasts, in contrast, the soda-can antennas and living rooms packed with avid viewers, imply an audacious form of interactivity a generation prior to the interactive age. Albanians would gain a passive comprehension of spoken Italian, learn what they could actively by any vehicle, including photocopies of grammar books, and so make the language their own. Even if the result was somewhat of a pidgin

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language, ‘Albitaliano’ became a means of communication, or at least, a means of ‘potential’ communication with the outside world, given Albania’s isolation. This linguistic competency, be it rudimentary or more developed, gave Albanians appreciation for Italian pop culture, which, though seemingly a world away, was readily available behind closed curtains. Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) presents a film testimony to this phenomenon. Following an Italian scam artist who loses his identity in Albania during the chaos of the fall of communism, the film looks at the mass exodus from Albania to Italy that defined this period. A young woman dances to Italian television; refugees awaiting departure memorise Italian vocabulary around a campfire, and Italian is presented as the main vehicle of communication between the shady protagonists and the equally sleazy Albanian officials with whom they must deal. In one sequence, a truckload of Albanian men driving through the wilds of the country’s far north en route to the port at Durrës, break into a chorus of ‘Sono italiano vero’, which underscores their thorough identification with the foreign culture they misunderstand completely. To paraphrase a character in Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road, who comments on the cultural colonialisation of West Germany by the Americans, it can be said that, ‘The Italians have colonised Albania’s subconscious’. And such colonisation is largely due to pop music, the words of which were memorised and sung by Albanians during the height of the country’s isolation and the waning years of the communist regimess. One can question, from the view of Italy expressed in Lamerica, whether what is at stake is a form of superficial mimicry, or a failure to grasp or internalise at a deep level what Italy represents. A soon-to-be refugee to Italy asks of fellow emigrants whether he will receive a house and swimming pool upon arrival at the port across the Adriatic, a question which indicates his total lack of comprehension of all that lies in store for him. Nonetheless, the issue may be more in line with Regev’s definition of an openness towards foreign cultures, which consists ‘not only of straightforward consumption of imported cultural goods’, but also of ‘explicit absorption, the indigenisation and domestication, or exogenous stylistic elements, creative practices, techniques of expression, and other components into the production of local, ethnic, and national culture’ (2013: 8). Such openness can be seen not only within the context of clandestinely received popular music but also in the popularity of Italian clothing and cuisine among Albanians.5

5 THE EAGLE ROCKS: ISOLATION AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN ALBANIA’S . . .

FROM LIGHT MUSIC

TO

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ROCK

The relative dearth of rock music in communist Albania is implicit in Jane Sugarman’s entry on Albania in Volume seven of the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Sugarman explains that, during the communist period, the government-approved musical genres included western classical music, folk music, and light music (muzika e lehtë), also known as ‘variety music’. With regard to the latter, she references similarities with the San Remo Festival: Light music was most indebted to styles in Western European countries, particularly that featured at Italy’s San Remo Festival. Major new compositions were debuted each year at the Festival of Song (Festivali i Këngës), which still takes place each December. Other types of western popular music, particularly rock, were actively discouraged. (Sugarman 2005: 93)

Nonetheless, the issue is considerably more complex than Sugarman suggests. Together with the popularity of Italian culture, one must not deny the impact of all things Anglo-American insofar as these could penetrate national borders clandestinely. Such penetration is evidenced by the popularity of the given names Elvis and Elton in 1980s Albania. It is further evidenced by the emergence in Tirana of the liqeni (lake) bands, which will be discussed in the following section. In 1971, a group of secondary school students in Tirana took advantage of the popularity of light music and pushed the genre one step closer to pop-rock. Leonard Agora, Paul Shjezi, Kaiku Agron, Kristaq Gjokrushi, Vanjel (Orges) Toçe and Kujtim Spahiu, most of whom were students at the Petro Nini Luarsi high school, formed the band Matura, which was later renamed Matura 72, ‘matura’ being the word for an Albanian high school diploma. They were active for a 15-month period from October 1971 to February 1973. The young musicians played on Czech and Soviet acoustic guitars, singing an exclusively Albanian repertoire of popular songs, hits from Albanian films, and original compositions. They were soon invited to join Tirana’s estrada, a variety theatre. Matura 72 travelled throughout Albania singing at construction sites, including those of the railway, as well as military bases. Some of their most important appearances took place in Korça and Shkodra, and a video recording was made of their work in Vlora.6 In early February 1973, they were further invited to perform on the third floor of Tirana’s Palace of Culture, only days before

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Fig. 5.1

Matura 72

they dissolved in the wake of rumours that the musicians had ‘foreign contacts’ (Uvil Zajmi 2016). What is most significant is that the group introduced to Albania a musical style similar to that of the Beatles, and brought it to select, but diverse audiences throughout the country. Moreover, they served as a precedent for the activities of the ‘lake bands’ of the following decade (Fig. 5.1).

MEETINGS

AT THE

LAKE

It is ironic that the first Albanian fiction film, directed by Mihallaq Mone and titled Takim në liqen (A Meeting at the Lake, 1943) has been permanently lost, or perhaps never even completed, most likely in the shuffle between fascism and communism. The film supposedly depicted two women and a man who meet on the shores of Lake Pogradec to sing folk songs. It featured Romanian-born, ethnic-Albanian, Kristaq Antoniu, known especially for his renditions of operetta music and folk songs, and whose musical career in the Balkans was very well established. The loss of this film points to another loss, that of other ‘meetings at the lake’, which took place some forty years later, not at scenic Lake Pogradec, but rather, at Tirana’s artificial reservoir. Such meetings have been lost, or better, neglected by written sources, but are still remembered by the individual

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participants. It was there that rock music was performed under communism, perhaps in its most authentic form. During the late Enver Hoxha era, there were sporadic cases of marginal groups of friends who would assemble at the lake to defy official censorship and perform prohibited western poprock songs. Performances were made on folk guitars, given the government’s disapproval of electric guitars. Knees were often used as percussion. These ‘happenings’ took place at night, and the audiences consisted exclusively of private friends, many of these secondary school students, in whom the performers could trust. A common informal venue was the amphitheatre located in the park. The phenomenon increased following Hoxha’s death in 1985, and such groups became known as the ‘lake’, or liqeni bands. Among the figures whose names have been associated with such impromptu performances are Genc Dashi, who would later perform with the Albanian Radiotelevision Symphony Orchestra as a guitarist7; Eno Alimerko, who would subsequently assume the role of director of Radio Ime; Dashnor Diko, who would become a well-known popular singer following the fall of communism; Nertan Molla, who would be the lead guitarist of the group ‘Centaur’ from 1991–1998; singer/songwriter Gjergj Jorgaqi, known for rock, soul, hard rock, and folk ballads; Elton Deda, known for both his work in bands and as a soloist, and Aleksandër Gjoka whose career began in the early 1980s, and who has produced a wide range of songs. Thus, a true continuum is evidenced from the height of isolation to the new millennium. The lake band phenomenon is significant both with regard to Albania’s developing cosmopolitanism and to transformations within its own music industry. Firstly, it revealed that somehow Albanians had access to the decadent tunes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Like Italian music, which penetrated through jerry-built technology, Anglophone pop-rock was slowly gaining ground. Such cachet is clearly an example of cultural cosmopolitanism and a most impressive one at that, given Albania’s isolation. Although English was not a well-known or understood language, since the members of the bands and their audiences were probably much more familiar with Italian, Albania made Anglo-American music its own. Perhaps it was most absorbed as a sort of talisman against the repression of the communist regime. As previously emphasised, the lack of written documentation regarding the lake bands forces means that anecdotal evidence must be relied upon. Yet one thing is undeniable; the transition of several of the lake artists into the post-Communist Albanian music scene mirrors, in numerous ways, processes apparent in the film industry, namely, the inroads of a number of directors of the communist era’s

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Kinostudio into the independent cinema world of the 1990s and 2000s. The fall of communism, from a cultural perspective, did not imply a total rupture with the past in either case.

SMUGGLED GOODS, FOREIGN ARTISTS, AND STUDENT PROTESTS During the 1980s, western music was also brought to Albania clandestinely in the form of (mainly copied) music cassettes. These were occasionally smuggled in by the children of Albanian diplomats living in the West and gifted to their family and friends. Given their families’ prestige, authorities often turned a blind eye. Another source involved tapes smuggled into Albania on rare trucks entering the country from Germany via Yugoslavia over the course of the waning years of communism. During the late 1980s, although tapes by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix were exceedingly popular, the Swedish group Roxette became one of the most popular bands heard on cassette. Hence, Albania’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism began to expand its scope beyond Italy and the Anglophone countries. This phenomenon was intensified as Albania approached its first elections in 1991. Despite what appears to have been a slightly more relaxed period, it should not be forgotten that smugglers of such contraband risked severe penalties. In the years immediately prior to the fall of communism, rare possibilities were offered to foreign pop singers to give concerts in Albania. Most notably, Al Bano and Romina Power performed in Albania in 1989 and, once again, the experience further strengthened the love of Albanians for Italian pop music. The experience was especially emotional for Bano, whose father had served in the Italian Army in Saranda, Albania, during World War II.8 During this period, moreover, local musicians became more defiant. For instance, on the 8th December 1990, during Tirana’s student uprisings, a group of students and professors met at the Academy of Arts to mark the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death by singing and dancing to such songs as Revolution, Working Class Hero and Imagine. They replaced portraits of Ramiz Alia and Hoxha with those of Lennon, lit candles, and drafted a letter to Yoko Ono, which was never sent for want of her address. Among the coordinators of this protest were Blendi Gonxha, a future activist for freedom and democratic society; Adrian

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Klosi, an academic and journalist, who fought for social justice until his suicide in 2012; and Edi Rama, who would become the leader of Albania’s Socialist Party in 2005 and is currently Albania’s Prime Minister.9

CONCERT

IN THE

YEAR 1988

Another analogy with Albanian film is in order here. A 1978 film by Saimir Kumbaro titled Koncert në vitin 1936 (Concert in the Year 1936) tells the story of two women, an internationally-trained singer and her accompanist, who defy conservative local forces and succeed in performing an uncensored concert in the provincial town of Luzhnja. This film reveals the power of music, not only as a driving force for nationalism but perhaps more importantly, as a site of resistance against fascism. In 1988, a similar phenomenon occurred in Tirana. Zëri e Jetës (The Voice of Life), a band which had been formed one year earlier by lead singer Aleksandër Gjoka, performed a concert in the Palace of Culture. This event, which played to a packed 400-seat venue in the small auditorium on the second floor, represented one of the first examples of freedom of expression in the realm of music. The performance consisted of a combination of original Albanian songs from the 1980s together with works by Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, Joe Cocker, Lucio Batisti and Adriano Celentano. The ratio of works performed was roughly 80 % Albanian and 20 % foreign. The concert was especially audacious in its use of electric guitar, which was strongly discouraged by governmental authorities. Gjoka stresses that the concert did not necessary imply a threat to the lives of the performers, however, caution was needed due to the watchful eye of the sigurimi, whose disapproval could result in sanctions against the performers and their families. Due to the nature of the music performed, there were no written reviews of the concert. Gjoka considered himself an autodidact in music, who had been inspired by the works of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, with his primary influence being Joe Cocker, whose work he emulated. In his early years as an artist, the singer worked with guitarist Genc Dashi, one of the primary driving forces of the lake bands. Gjoka is an advocate for the intensive and extended study of one’s own voice, and indeed, his husky, yet nuanced bass-baritone vocal expression is most original. He is most known for his romantic love songs, which have characterised much of his repertoire since the early 1990s. Gjoka feels that he influenced young artists, including the members of the lake bands, through both his musical composition and the rhythm of his lyrics.

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From the perspective of ‘cosmopolitanization,’ Gjoka’s 1988 concert was of special consequence for the further familiarisation of Albanian music fans with the works of British, American and Italian rock. The momentum initiated by Gjoka’s concert was continued by the abovementioned importation of contraband music cassettes and by the early appearances of foreign performers in the waning years of communism in Albania. On a surface level, Gjoka’s influence on Albanian rock music seems similar to that of the lake bands. Yet there is one significant difference. His 1988 concert took place in a respectable venue where those musical genres condoned by the State were performed, a fact that cannot be effaced by the official disdain for pop-rock (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2

Aleksandër Gjoka in concert

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RE-READING ROCK IN COMMUNIST ALBANIA In an extended study of popular music and the processes of democratisation and de-communisation during the first six years following the fall of communism in Albania, Nicholas Tochka views democratisation as ‘an aesthetic and cultural process’, and outlines ‘popular music’s significant role in the cultural construction of conceptions of liberal democracy and “good” citizenship in one post-authoritarian context’ (Tochka 2014: 298). According to Tochka, ‘[ . . . ] particular musical performances, commentaries and received ideas about the ‘power’ of popular music in democratic and nondemocratic contexts helped to shape and promote an ideal kind of agent, a “free” Citizen-Subject’ (298). Tochka argues: In democratising Albania, popular representations of music before and after ‘communism’ provided key frames for understanding how the past might, or perhaps, should, have been experienced. The retrospective simulation of a certain experience of ‘communism’ depended on a range of notions: about the resistant potentials of popular culture; the western-oriented performer’s body as a locus of individualism, and his or her voice as a means to articulate social truths; and the ‘naturalness’ of a universal dissenting subject before 1989. (310).

Through pop-rock in such forms as clandestine radio reception, the lake band phenomenon, and Aleksandër Gjoka’s 1988 concert, Albanians sought to incorporate the western models of individualism and resistance. Yet their own context of isolationism was radically distinct from that of Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and a good number of their socialist neighbours. If, in Regev’s terms, cosmopolitanism implies interconnectedness and the sharing of aesthetics, perceptions, forms of expression, and cultural practices, the case of Albania is of special importance. Although Albania’s liminal location between East and West would, under other circumstances, endorse it as a naturally born cosmopolitan society, its decades—or better, centuries (if one considers the Ottoman Empire)—of isolation, dissuaded its growth in this direction. When it was finally able to incorporate what it knew of pop-rock into its own cultural discourse, this process was far more limited than those of other Eastern Bloc countries. Exposure to rock was underground or when official, cautiously monitored. Nonetheless, such cosmopolitanism was, as the communist government feared, a harbinger of drastic change. Albania’s rock scene came to full fruition hand-in-hand with the fall of the regime it actively helped topple.

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From a reverse perspective, as nascent cosmopolitans, musicians in communist Albania sought integration with the rest of the world, yet their own voices were squelched from international discourse. Very few foreigners could hear their songs. Only now is it hoped and expected that today’s burgeoning academic and artistic fascination with Albania will provide the country’s pop-rock scene with a salvo conducto to transnational audiences. Acknowledgements The author is deeply indebted for the assistance and support of Aleksandër Gjoka, Leonardo Voci, Floriana Paskali, Eol Çashku, James Miles, Kristina Linadi and Andrea Lekaj in the preparation of this article.

NOTES 1. The round-table included topics ranging from early Kinostudio documentaries to the work of Xhanfise Keko, the sole woman director of the communist period. 2. For further information in Albanian on this makeshift technology, see Kujtim Xhaja, ‘Një shkipe drejt lirisë’. 3. An Albanian-language interview with Saimir Maloku regarding his arrest can be found at ‘Saimir Maloku: Si e ndërtova kanaçen a famshme për të kapur stacionet e huaja’. KosovariMedia. 4. Tirana’s trendiest neighbourhood today is known as ‘The Block’. It is home to stylish restaurants, bars and boutiques. Under communism, it comprised an off-limits zone that included a villa which was the home of Enver Hoxha, and the residences of other high-ranking officials. It is ironic that what is now Tirana’s most ‘western’ neighbourhood was then the precinct that was home to the greatest concentration of official decoders, and hence, Albania’s main window to the West. 5. One notes not only the proliferation of Italian restaurants in Tirana, but also the omnipresence of espresso, whose popularity has virtually eclipsed that of the more local Turkish coffee. 6. A video published in 2012 on YouTube titled ‘Zilja e fundit’ presents an homage to Matura 72 and their hit song, ‘The Last Bell’. 7. In homage to the early popularity of the Beatles, Elena Duni and Genc Dashi can be found performing ‘Something’ on YouTube. 8. In the song ‘Saranda Okinawa’, the duo sang of their fathers’ participation in Europe and Asia during World War II. While Bano sang of his father in Saranda, Power sang of her father, actor Tyrone Power, who was a military pilot in Okinawa. 9. For a discussion of this organised protest, see Fred Abrahams, ‘Albanian Students Challenged Communism 20 Years Ago’.

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WORKS CITED Abrahams, Fred (2014). Albanian students challenged communism 20 Years Ago. The World Press, 8 December. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-abra hams/albanian-students-challan_b_793819.html. Accessed 8 January 206. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Armstrong, John A. (1992). Nations before nationalis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Beck, Ulrich (2006). The cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge: Polity. Camineti, Luca (2006). The return of history: Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica, memory, and national identit. Italica,83(3/4), 596–608. Cushman, Thomas (1995). Notes from the underground: Rock music counterculture in Russia. Albany: SUNY Press. Duni, Elena, &Genc Dashi. “Something”—The Beatles. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ZR-WExyrMRg. Accessed 26 October 2015. Gaut, Greg (1991). Review of Timothy W. Ryback’s Rock around the Bloc: A history of rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Popular music, 10(2), 249–251. Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric (1990). Nations and nationalisms since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Russell, & Nicola Mai (2008). Out of Albania: From crisis migration to social inclusion in Italy. Oxford: Berghahn. KosovariMedia.com. ‘Saimir Maloku: Si e ndërtova kanaçen e famshme për të kapur stacionet e huaja’. 4 August 2014. http://www.kosovarimedia.com/index. php/aktual/intervista/17886-saimir-maloku-si-e-ndertova-kanacen-efamshme-per-te-kapur-stacionet-e-huaja.html, Accessed 10 January 2016. Lonely Planet (2010). Albania: Lonely planet’s top 10 destinations for 2011, 31 October. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/albania/travel-tips-and-articles/ 76164#. Accessed 4 June 2013. Mai, Nicola (2001). The role of Italian television in Albanian migration to Italy. In Russell King and Nancy Wood (Eds.), Media and migration: Constructions of mobility and difference (pp. 95–109). New York: Routledge. O’Connell, John Morgan, & Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, eds. (2010). Music and conflict. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press. Ram, Uri (1995). Zionist Historiography and the invention of modern Jewish nationhood: The case of ben Zion Dinur. History and Memory, 7, 91–124. Ramet, Sabrina Petra (1994). Rocking the State: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: CO: Westview. Regev, Motti (2013). Pop-rock music: Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

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Regev, Motti, & Seroussi, Edwin (2004). Popular music and national culture in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ryback, Timothy W. (1990). Rock around the Bloc: A history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954–1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Anthony D. (1986). The ethnic origin of nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Smith, Anthony D. (1991). Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sugarman, Jane (2005). Albania. In John Shepherd & David Horn (Eds.), Continuum enclyclopedia of popular music of the world: Volume. 7 (pp. 93–98). Tochka, Nicholas (2014). Voicing freedom, sounding dissent: Popular music, simulation and citizenship in democratizing Albania. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(3), 298–315. Torçe, Orges (2012). Zilja e fundit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= QeIaJ73gqoY (video). Wenders, Wim (1976). Im Laufe der Zeit/Kings of the Road. Cologne: Westduetesche Rundfunk (motion picture). Xhaja, Kujtim (2012). Një shpike drejt lirisë. Online News Albania, 19 April. https://onlinenewsalbania.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/nje-shpikje-drejt-lir ise/. Accessed 16 January 2016. Zajmi, Uvil (2016). Kush ishin vazkat e guximshme të rock&roll në Shqipërine e ‘70s’. Tirane: Panorama, 11 April. http://www.panorama.com.al/kush-ishinvajzat-e-guximshme-te-rockroll-ne-shqiperine-e-70-s/. Bruce Williams is professor and graduate director in the Department of Languages and Cultures and co-coordinator of the program in International Cinema at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. He has published extensively in the areas of cinema history, film theory, Latin American and European cinemas, and language and cinema. He is co-author, with Keumsil Kim Yoon of Two Lenses on the Koran Ethos: Key Cultural Concepts and Their Appearance in Cinema. His current research focuses on Albanian cinema, with special emphasis on the Kinostudio era, the transition to international co-productions, and women directors. Williams is currently at work on a book on Albanian cinema. His article, ‘It’s a Wonderful Job! Women at Work in the Cinema of Communist Albania’, published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema in 2015, received the 2016 award for best essay by the Central Eastern, and Southern European Media Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

PART II

The Function of ‘Gatekeepers’

CHAPTER 6

Censorship, Dissent and the Metaphorical Language of GDR Rock David Robb

The development of rock and pop in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was constantly impacted upon by two poles of influence which were to a large extent irreconcilable with one another, but which made GDR rock into the distinctive phenomenon that it became. These two factors were the irrepressible rise in popularity of pop and rock music and the constant constraints of the regime which tried to shape it to suit its ideological aims. A problem from the outset lay in the fact that GDR viewed pop and rock culture as western decadence, constantly threatening to undermine the socialist way of life. Forced to accommodate it due to public demand, however, the state facilitated a pop and rock industry intended on one hand to meet the needs of the population but at the same time to help mould socialist consciousness. The contradiction which emerged here—the rebellious Geste of rock music did not rest easily with social and political conformity—reflected wider inherent contradictions of the system which were to contribute to its ultimate demise. It is significant that the lifespan of the GDR, from 1949 to 1990, corresponds with the first four decades of pop and rock music, the phenomenon that came to D. Robb (*) School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_6

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dominate popular culture internationally, as we know today. In other words, the GDR state, almost from its onset, was faced with an ideological battle with a new youth culture it did not understand and for which Marxist-Leninist philosophy had no explanation. The chapter will firstly look at the infrastructure of the GDR music industry, the political conditions under which the artists worked and the compromises they had to endure. Alongside this it will observe case studies of the lyrics of prominent groups and artists from the 1970s and 1980s—the decades in which GDR rock came into its own—illustrating the difficulties, complexities and ambiguities of navigating a career within the GDR music industry. These groups will include Renft, Puhdys, City, Karat, and Stern Combo Meißen in the 1970s, and Silly and Pankow in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As well as looking at the music, it will observe how, as a result of political circumstances, a distinctive practice of metaphorical lyric writing emerged. This was firstly as a result of the need to circumvent censorship (of the various institutions such as GDR Radio and the state record label Amiga which vetted all outputs), and secondly to satisfy a public thirst for critically challenging art in the face of the dearth of any oppositional culture in the public arena. Key recurring themes in songs of GDR groups will be examined here. These will include: the GDR’s sense of historical mission, the division of Germany (linked to the torn inner-self), and the urge to travel and experience a greater life than was possible within the confines of the state. Singers and groups who tackled delicate political subjects head-on without sufficient recourse to poetic or metaphorical disguise were banned or, worse still, ended up in jail where they could be pushed off to the West via a prisoner exchange system. Many others were worn down to the point of submitting an application to leave. The history of GDR pop, rock and protest song is consequently littered with examples of prominent musicians—from Veronika Fischer and Nina Hagen to Pannach and Kunert, Wolf Biermann, Bettina Wegner and many more— who left for a new life in West Germany. But this chapter is also about the groups and performers who remained until the bitter end, honing the lyrical writing and hybrid rock musical form that made GDR rock a distinctive category. From the mid-1980s onwards, coinciding with the Gorbachev period, it will be examined how pop and rock artists such as Pankow and Silly increasingly abandoned self-censorship—leaving behind the excessive use of metaphor which characterised the 1970s—and began to address the problems as they were.

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

OF

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GDR ROCK AND POP

Since 1989 many books and academic articles have appeared on the subject of the GDR’s pop and rock music industry. Peter Wicke and John Shepherd’s article, ‘“The Cabaret is Dead”: Rock culture as state enterprise—the political organisation of rock in East Germany’ (1993) deals with the manifold contradictions of making rock music in the GDR. Unlike in the West, its rock music did not have to be economically self-sufficient, but only had to be ideologically accountable to the state. The contradiction here, however, lay in the fact that rock music, due to mass popularity, had to be accountable to the wider GDR population, who did not wish to see it as politically conformist. And despite attempts by the institutions to determine what became popular, it was actually the people, with their word-of-mouth culture and radio charts based on fan ratings, who had the final say in this. And herein lies a further contradiction: the successful rock artists, largely chosen by the people, also sat on the committees of the official institutions who steered the development of GDR rock music. An example was Toni Krahl, singer of the band City, a former dissident who had been imprisoned for protesting against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, who later became president of the Rock Music branch of the Committee for Entertainment Art. Such ambiguities challenged customary perceptions in the West after the Wende (turning point) which tended to divide GDR artists into stark oppositional or conformist categories. In reality the division was blurred, mirroring a contradiction which existed throughout the whole system. The artists were ‘the people’, yet they were often party to the implementation of policy which the people no longer trusted or could live with. The inertia which emerged from this stalemate spelled the death knell of the state (Wicke and Shepherd 1993: 35). The above thesis was further confirmed in the years after 1993 when the full extent of rock musicians’ collaborations with the Stasi secret police was revealed. Examples included Wolf Rudiger Raschke from Karussell and Manual von Senden from Electra, or others who, in a common scenario, became entangled with the Stasi involuntarily, such as Peter ‘Cäsar’ Gläser from Renft (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 53–55) and Jürgen Ehle from Pankow (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 79). The impossibility of performing music in the GDR independently of state supervision becomes clear when one considers the apparatus

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specifically put in place to monitor the groups. As the 1974 Youth Law stated, young musicians and bands could not simply exist independently of supervision of the Socialist Unity Party (SED)-led district councils and the Free German Youth (FDJ). Reflecting an inherent distrust of popular culture, all music firstly had to be positively vetted by a panel which should include classically trained judges (GDR Youth Law 1974: Point 30). All musicians, amateur and professional, had to possess this official evaluation which functioned as a licence to perform and determined one’s fee. Over and above this, career musicians were required to have a music school diploma, although several managed to study for this while simultaneously working with a professional band (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 107–108). As well as artistic quality and political suitability, another criteria for passing the evaluation was that all repertoires had to contain at least 60 % of songs from the GDR or other countries of the Eastern bloc, thus limiting the quota of British and American music to a maximum of 40 %. This ‘Programme Structuring Order for Entertainment and Dance Music’ from 1958 was often used by the authorities as a pretext to ban undesirable bands (Wicke 1996: 28). In reality, however, bands would circumvent this by presenting the prescribed quota at their auditions then proceeding to play a majority of songs in English at their gigs (Winter 2009: 17–18). The law could also be used as a tool of repression in the context of the purchasing of musical equipment. Decent quality instruments and PA systems (as well as transport vans) were extremely hard to obtain in the GDR. As a result, groups frequently tried to smuggle instruments in from the West at exorbitant prices whereby one had to exchange GDR money for the D-Mark at inflated black market rates. If one was caught doing this, as well as having equipment confiscated, musicians could receive excessive fines for not having paid tax on the original purchase (see Winter 2009: 19–22). In the course of a career, singers and groups had to deal with a myriad of political institutions which controlled who was allowed to perform, record, or be heard. The aforementioned Committee for Entertainment Art, formed in 1973, was the state artist development agency directly answerable to the Ministerial Council of the GDR (Hintze 1999: 74) and responsible for ensuring implementation of GDR cultural policy. Due to pressure from musicians, it increasingly took over the function of a performers association after 1984, when it was restructured into various departments for each musical genre (jazz, rock, chanson, political song, etc.). The Committee’s Head Office took a proactive role in monitoring

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113

the ideological development of the artists, and could issue directives to the other music sector organisations regarding how artists were to be treated. These included the Directory for Concerts and Guest Performances (KGD) which organised inland concerts, and the Artists’ Agency, which decided—in conjunction with the Central Committee of the SED—which GDR acts obtained authorisation to play abroad. The agency also negotiated all concerts of foreign acts (Hintze 1999: 181–82). Most artists had a subservient relationship towards these institutions. While groups such as the Puhdys, Karat, Elefant and Karussell obtained gigs in the West, the cult group Klosterbrüder was an example of many others who were restricted to playing in the GDR, their successor group Magdeburg only being permitted to play in Eastern bloc countries after years of applying (Winter 2009: 42–4). Radio, television, and the state record label Amiga too, had a complete monopoly over what music the public could listen to. According to the Youth Law of 1974, they were expected to disseminate new works of art which would ‘correspond to the youth’s growing interest in and needs for socialist culture, art, entertainment and sociability’ (GDR Youth Law 1974: Point 32, 2). The editorial committee of Radio GDR, which vetted all potential broadcasts, stood directly under the notorious Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the SED (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 85). It included prominent writers, loyal to the state, such as Gisela Steineckert. She had previously been cultural editor of the satirical magazine Eulenspiegel and a mentor for the Oktoberklub, and became the last president of the Committee for Entertainment Art from 1984–1990. Steineckert also wrote texts for pop and rock groups including Karussell’s 1987 hit Als ich fortging (As I went forth). This unaccountable editorial committee sniffed out any ideological ambiguities and repeatedly sent texts back to groups for revisions or rejected them entirely (Larkey 2007: 63; Winter 2009: 46–63). The stakes for bands could not have been higher. Listening figures for the pop programmes were very high. The youth station DT64 (which ran from 1964 to 1993) broadcast Duett-Musik für den Recorder (Duet Music for The Tape Recorder) which was one of several radio shows which actively encouraged listeners to record the songs at home. This fulfilled a vital gap in the market given the chronic shortage of records in the shops. The DJs even played whole sides of albums from the West as well as from the GDR, and never spoke over the music thus allowing for a clean recording (Beatmusik und Bruce Springsteen 2014). Other pop shows included

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‘Beatkiste’ and ‘Tip Parade’, which both compiled record charts based on fan ratings (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 16–17). Amiga was the subsidiary popular music label of VEB German Records. With its task to implement the GDR’s planned economy in music, it manufactured records according to fixed quotas for genres. These were 25 % Schlager (light entertainment songs), 15 % blues and jazz, 15 % song chanson and folk, 10 % children’s songs, 10 % musical and operetta, and 25 % rock and pop. It also licensed limited editions of records from highly popular western bands such as Eric Clapton, Deep Purple and Abba, which were always snapped up quickly. In terms of GDR acts, Amiga prioritised song-based rock. This was due to the importance attached to high quality texts, which the authorities saw as a characteristic attribute of GDR rock, distinguishing it from its western counterpart (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 84–85). A band’s readiness to compromise was essential. As Renft guitarist Cäsar remembered, up to 80 % of the texts of their two mid-1970s albums were revised versions (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 116). Winter cites the example of a third verse of the Renft song Kinder ich bin nicht der Sandmann (Children I’m Not the Sandman), a critique of conformism in the GDR, which was cut by the censors (Winter 2009: 51–52). It was easier, however, to circumvent the censors in Amiga, who were answerable to the more lenient Ministry of Culture, than those in GDR Radio, which, as stated, stood directly under the Central Committee of the SED. The Renft song Besinnung (Reflection), for example, after popular response to initial radio airplay, was banned in 1975, and never played again, while Amiga were happy to release the same song for Cäsar’s subsequent group Karussell in 1979 (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 117). Amiga’s chief editor, the former Oktoberklub stalwart Dr. René Büttner, was faced with the dilemma of having to sell records while at the same time implement government policy, knowing that conformistsounding GDR acts would be rejected by the public. While in the 1980s, Amiga increasingly released records with critical texts by bands such as Silly, City and Pankow, the latter’s concept album Paule Panke (1982), which portrayed a social delinquent, was banned. By the time it was finally released in 1989, its critical impact had been lost. Another policy discrepancy could be seen in the case of acts like Klosterbrüder, who had Number 1 hits on the radio chart shows, but still were denied the possibility of making LPs (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 66–67).

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TWO CONTRASTING FACES OF THE GDR: THE SINGING MOVEMENT AND GDR ROCK The irresolvable contradiction between rock and GDR cultural policy was inherent in the prescriptive guidelines set by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Particular emphasis was put on the need to educate ‘socialist personalities’ among the youth. The first paragraph of the Youth Law of 1974 indicates the role culture in general was expected to play ‘to educate all young people to become [ . . . ] loyal to the ideas of socialism, think and act as patriots and internationalists, strengthen socialism and defend it reliably against all enemies’ (1974: Point 1, 1). Art and culture was understood in GDR policy primarily in terms of high culture with an emphasis— particularly in the first decades of the state—on the classical literary Erbe (heritage) of Goethe and Schiller. Newly written literature had to reflect the dictates of socialist realism, which, among other things, entailed portraying the model development of a GDR citizen. In terms of more ‘popular’ culture, the type of music which was promoted in the GDR was the historical workers’ and revolutionary songs, which were viewed as the state’s socialist inheritance. As well as appearing on the records of celebrated singer Ernst Busch, these were published in songbooks of the Free German Youth (FDJ) such as Leben Singen Kämpfen. Liederbuch der FDJ from 1949 onwards. These had an educational function and were sung in the FDJ, in schools and in the army. This repertoire would later include international songs of freedom, as popularised by the American folk singer Pete Seeger and promoted in East Berlin from the late 1950s onwards by the resident Canadian Perry Friedman (Kirchenwitz 1993: 31–35; Böning 2004: 201). This culminated in the formation of the state-sponsored singing club movement in 1967 symbolised by the Oktoberklub. Originally popular, this movement fell into disrepute as it was perceived by the youth as an instrument of state propaganda (Robb 2007: 229–235). Its popular anthem was Sag mir wo du stehst (Tell Me Where You Stand) written by Oktoberklub member Hartmut König, who was also in the beat group Team 4, and later served as Secretary of the Central Committee of the FDJ from 1976–1988. The song openly called for youths to back the GDR’s policies as opposed to being tempted by western ideology. Lines in the text reflected the SED Party’s Marxist belief that the GDR was forging a historically predestined path in creating a model socialist state: ‘Backwards or forwards, you have to decide / We’re making history step by step! / You can’t indulge yourself with us as well as with them / For if

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you go round in circles you’ll just stay behind’ (Oktoberklub 1968). As a result of such blatant manipulation, youths increasingly turned away from the singing club movement. This was particularly so after the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students hosted by East Berlin in 1973, at which many poor quality GDR groups were perceived as an embarrassment (Kirchenwitz 1993: 63–66). Despite notoriety, the singing movement was the breeding ground for many well-known rock performers of the 1980s and beyond, including Tamara Danz from Silly, originally from the Oktoberklub,1 and Gerhard Gundermann, originally from the Singeklub Hoyerswerda. It was also synonymous with the annual Festival of the Political Song in Berlin, which was founded by the Oktoberklub in 1970 and organised by the Central Committee of the FDJ. It featured renowned international folk and world music acts over the years such as Pete Seeger, Mikis Theodorakis, Miriam Makeba, Bruce Cockburn, Michelle Shocked and Billy Bragg. Although there were dissident singers too, such as Wolf Biermann, Bettina Wegner and Stephan Krawczyk (Robb 2007), political song, due to its associations with the regime, was never as popular a genre as rock, which was considered more rebellious. The history of rock in the GDR was always fraught with conflict. From the late 1950s onwards musicians had been copying the new sounds of American and British pop, blues and jazz, which they listened to illegally on West German radio. However, after the GDR sealed its borders to the West in August 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall, the state felt empowered to display a more liberal attitude towards the arts. In this period, a host of beat groups came into being, including the Butlers from Leipzig, who were later to evolve into the legendary Renft. This cultural thaw lasted until the infamous 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December 1965, which heralded a renewed clampdown. From the spring of that year, Stasi surveillance of young musicians had increased, culminating in the complete ban of ‘guitar groups’ in Leipzig in the autumn. On 31 October 1965, a ‘cautious demonstration’ against this ban was ‘ruthlessly suppressed’ (Wicke 1996: 29). Cäsar, the then 16 year-old apprentice, later-to-be guitarist with Renft, gives an eye-witness account of this in his autobiography (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 29–34). But attempts to ban these beat groups ultimately failed. Many of them re-emerged in the early 1970s in the wake of a renewed cultural thaw, when Erich Honecker replaced the ageing Walter Ulbricht as leader of the GDR in 1971. With the 8th Party Congress of that year, a shift in policy occurred whereby rock and pop came to be seen as an aspect of the socialist

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entertainment industry which was to be integrated, monitored and steered. In a major drive to bring artists onto the side of the state, art no longer had to conform rigidly to the principles of socialist realism. Laws became more lax towards long hair as well as western radio and TV. In this thaw period, a host of new pop and rock bands emerged. Initially these had an ‘Ersatz’ function in their covering of songs by British bands whom GDR fans could never see live. For example, Electra from Dresden were famed for their rendition of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, Thomas ‘Monster’ Schoppe of Renft for his vocal performance of Deep Purple’s Child in Time, and Stern Combo Meißen for their covers of Colosseum and ELP (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 12). The Puhdys covered Uriah Heep at live gigs, but were also known to ‘borrow’ tunes from western groups for their own songs. For example, the melody of their 1973 single Geh zu ihr (Go to her) was taken, note for note, from Slade’s 1972 UK hit Look wot you done. Increasingly, the above bands wrote their own German texts as this was a precondition for making a record or being played on the radio. In the years 1973–1974, the Puhdys, Renft, Panta Rhei and Electra released the first rock albums of the state and laid the foundation for GDR rock.

THE LYRICISTS

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GDR ROCK

Because of the onus on high quality original material and the political sensitivity surrounding the written word, GDR rock group members were not simply given carte blanche to write their own lyrics. On the contrary, specially anointed lyricists were commissioned to provide texts. For example, Wolfgang Tilgner wrote for the Puhdys, Kurt Demmler, Gerulf Pannach for Renft, Gisela Steineckert for various acts, Werner Karma for Silly, Alfred Roesler for City, and Frauke Klauke (aka Wolfgang Herzberg) for Pankow. This practice contributed to the distinctiveness of GDR rock. On one hand, it resulted in a somewhat highbrow, almost literary level of rock lyric, which could sound stiff in comparison to English rock, which in turn had often been associated with youth language, slang and vernaculars since the advent of blues and rock ‘n’ roll. In the GDR of the 1970s, there was certainly nothing comparable with the delinquent sounding anarcho-rock of West Berlin’s Ton Steine Scherben. At the same time, GDR rock lyrics were often unique in containing metaphorical allusions to political issues. A practice reflecting the anticipation of censorship, such ‘Verschlüsselung’ (codification) led to a culture of reading between the lines, cultivated by fans and committee lectors alike. The tendency to couch a particular

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problem within a more universal picture can be seen in the Puhdys’ Wenn ein Mensch lebt (When a Person Lives). This was the theme song for Heiner Carow’s Die Legend von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula) from 1973, a film which reflected the initial open and upbeat feeling of the Honecker period in tackling a sensitive subject: a young couple’s problems in attempting to break out of the preordained structures of life in the GDR. The song Wenn ein Mensch lebt also alludes to this in talking about the short time one has to live a full life on earth: ‘Each person has their time, / To gather stones, / To throw stones, / To plant trees, / To cut down trees, / For living, dying and fighting’ (Puhdys 1973). If this veiled allusion to GDR reality was rather indirect, it nonetheless marked a departure from addressing this sensitive subject at all in a pop song. The line ‘Each person has their time’ must be seen in connection with the official claim of the GDR state that—historically speaking—its time had come, corresponding with its Marxist self-image as ‘Sieger der Geschichte’ (champion of history). This was particularly acute in the early 1970s when the economy was expanding and visibly providing a basic living standard for its workers. A far more direct and controversial treatment of the issue, however, came in the form of the song Nach der Schlacht (After the Battle) written by Kurt Demmler for Renft in 1973. In the GDR, these rebellious, harddrinking rockers from Leipzig were frequently seen as the antidote to the clean-cut Puhdys from Berlin. With associations to the 1910 expressionist poem of the same name by Georg Heym, Nach der Schlacht uses the metaphor of the premature celebration of the victorious revolution without taking stock of the sacrifices: ‘Much blood spilled, but we’ve won power / And the battle for power was the final battle./ Now people will be nice and humane. / Comrade don’t worry about your leg, / It had to be so, comrade.’ Furthermore, the supposedly ‘new people’ of the new society are depicted as not being any different from the old: ‘The new people, the new man / [ . . . ] looks just how he used to be / On the outside and inside [ . . . ]’ The song concludes, somewhat pessimistically, that Utopia is still far away, implying that the working class cannot simply assume the mantle of power overnight: ‘After the victory the green meadows were red. / After the victory many comrades were dead. / And we’re standing on the remaining leg, / Because the battle will last much longer’ (Renft 1973). Demmler’s text, while critical, is ambiguous as it does not reject the continuation of the struggle to create a genuine socialism. In this respect Henry Kreikenbom sees Nach der

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Schlacht as one of the last GDR rock songs to express the hope that reform of the political system was still possible from within (1997: 167–168). Such texts, however, earned the group condemnation from both sides of the political spectrum: the Party only saw the expression of hostility towards the state, while dissidents criticised the group as ‘roter Renft’ (red Renft) for having embraced the system at all (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 118). With the image of the amputated leg, Nach der Schlacht is also reminiscent of GDR dissident political singer Wolf Biermann’s Ballade vom Mann, der sich eigenhändig beide Füße abhackte (Ballad of the man who cuts off both feet of his own accord). This mocking parable of the SED party’s tendency to score own goals was to contribute to Biermann’s performance ban in 1965, a ban which was to last for 11 years. His expatriation from the GDR in November 1976, after being refused reentry after a short tour of West Germany, unleashed a storm of protest among musicians and writers in the GDR. These included members of Renft, whose lyrics, increasingly written by Gerulf Pannach, had become more radical, with songs such as Rockballade vom kleinen Otto (Rock Ballad of Little Otto) dealing with the taboo subject of fleeing the GDR, and Glaubensfragen (Questions of Faith) about refusing military service. On 22 September 1975, the group were finally told by the evaluation committee that they ‘no longer existed’ as a band and had to give up their work permits. The reason given was that their lyrics had ‘no correspondence with socialist reality’ (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 119–121). Many of the group members subsequently ended up in the West: Klaus Renft leaving in 1976 and Thomas ‘Monster’ Schoppe in 1978. After demonstrating solidarity with Wolf Biermann, Christian Kunert and lyricist Pannach spent nine months in jail before being pushed out to the West on 26 August 1977 (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 25–26).2 Another of the many artists who left for the West in this period was Nina Hagen, the daughter of actress Eva-Maria Hagen and stepdaughter of Wolf Biermann. She was already known in the GDR for her pop song Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You Forgot the Colour Film) (1974) and went on to enjoy international stardom with an exotic mixture of punk rock and cabaret. Another group of the 1970s which implicitly addressed the theme of the GDR’s place in history was Stern Combo Meißen. Their Kampf um den Südpol (Battle for the South Pole) represented a break-through for the band in 1976, achieving the Number 1 position for eight weeks on the

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radio show Beatkiste (Winter 2009: 48). The Kurt Demmler text was influenced by Stephan Zweig’s 1927 novella about Scott and Amundsen’s race for the Antarctic. At first glance, the text is politically harmless in questioning the sense of the pursuit of fame (see Balitzki 2001: 257). On second glance, however, it invites analogies with the GDR’s historical mission and the role of the individual within that: ‘What remains after death, / when the name no longer remains? / And what becomes of the name, / when history is made? / How is history made, / when we discover [ . . . ] / what was previously / hidden from our view?’ (Stern Combo Meißen 1976). Two further famous GDR rock songs, from the groups Karat and City respectively, also contain the introspective reflections on the possibilities and limitations of individual action. One of these is Karat’s Über sieben Brücken musst du gehn (You Have to Cross Seven Bridges) from 1978. With its universally applicable text by Helmut Richter, it was covered by Peter Maffay in West Germany, where it became a big hit in 1980. Viewed through a GDR lens, however, it also alludes to the ideas of wasted time, travel restrictions, and the deficit of experience: ‘Sometimes life’s clock seems to stand still, / sometimes we seem to go round in circles / Sometimes it’s like we are ill from wanderlust, / sometimes we sit quietly on a bench’ (Karat 1978). City’s Am Fenster (At the Window) from 1978, likewise a hit in the West, also conveyed a sense of longing. Sung by Toni Krahl, the song, with its folk-rock arrangement by Bulgarian violinist Georgi Gogow, became legendary in the GDR. The text by poet Hildegard Maria Rauchfuß, with its perspective from inside a window looking out, conveys the hope that the experience of a night of bliss will not be transitory. In the final lines the poetic subject, inviting analogies with the restrictions of life in the GDR, compares herself to a bird with its wings weighed down by the rain, attempting to fly through the world: ‘To capture once, to feel deep in the bloodstream / This is mine, and it’s only through you; / A bird laments, but, oh, my plumage too / Is wet by the rain; I fly through the world’ (City 1978). Not least due to the presence of the Berlin Wall, the theme of flying was not unusual in GDR lyrics. Dissident Liedermacher (singer/ songwriters) Biermann (1976) and Bettina Wegner (1979) both had songs featuring the mythological figure of Icarus, which they used as a symbol of political impotence and crushed ideals (Robb 2007: 88). In 1988, Arno Schmidt released an album on Amiga entitled Aber Fliegen (But Flying).

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GDR ROCK

IN THE

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1980S

The final decade of the GDR was marked by developments in rock music which were a wider reflection of the population’s increasing dissatisfaction with the state. The Biermann affair of 1976 had resulted in a renewed clampdown on the arts. The sense of injustice combined with the exodus of leading artists was testing the patience of many who remained. Except for the cases of City and two new elite bands, Silly and Pankow, the popularity of GDR bands—reflected in the sales of Amiga—was waning by the late 1980s. The authorities responded by initiating the FDJ Rock Summer Festivals, which invited western acts including big names such as Bob Dylan (1987) and Bruce Springsteen, the latter playing a legendary concert in Berlin Weißensee in 1988 (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 151– 152). Musical style was also changing: the hard rock sound of the 1970s, still popular, was now combined with influences from New German Wave. Like Puhdys and Karat before them, Silly and Pankow enjoyed recording profiles in both West Germany and the GDR. Indeed Silly had a record contract with a West German label in 1981 before they were even noticed by Amiga (Hentschel and Matzke 2007: 185). While Silly were musically and stylistically a combination of hard rock and the New Romantics, singer Tamara Dance additionally brought vocal inflections from cabaret and chanson. Having sung with the Oktoberklub, she had also completed a three-year course at the Music School of Friedrichshain in Berlin, which alongside the Carl Maria von Weber Music School in Dresden produced many of the GDR’s professional rock musicians. Pankow, on the other hand, often called ‘the Rolling Stones of the GDR’, modelled their guitar riffs on Keith Richards, while also incorporating influences from New German Wave. In 1982, at the start of their career, Pankow performed the rock spectacle Paule Panke about a disaffected young apprentice fitter, played by singer André Herzberg. His brother Wolfgang Herzberg (alias Frauke Klauke) wrote the lyrics. Albeit a full decade later, this concept piece was the rock equivalent of Ulrich Plenzdorf’s groundbreaking literary parody from 1972 Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young W.) about the assimilation problems of a young worker in the GDR. Written with slang expressions, the songs of Paule Panke displayed the same longing for testing the boundaries of life in the GDR. In Nach der Arbeit (After Work) the central character sings: ‘Oh if only I knew where it’s going, / this trip somewhere. / When will I ever find proper

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happiness.’ In Sitzung (Meeting) there is unconcealed contempt for the communist party ideology which permeates working life. Amiga refused to bring the album out due to its controversial lyrics, and delayed release until 1989, the irony being that the critical content of Paule Panke compared to its successor album Hans im Glück (Hans in Luck), which Amiga released in 1985, was relatively tame. It even finished with the conformist statement: Komm aus’m Arsch (Move Your Arse), a rousing call to disenchanted GDR workers to make the best of the situation: ‘because moaning makes you dumber, / moaning makes it worse / than it is in reality.’ If this was a ploy to appease censors, it certainly was not enough to satisfy those in Amiga. Hans im Glück, Pankow’s ‘rock fairy tale’ of 1985 was more uniformly critical. Hans’s opportunity—as in the original Grimm brothers’ parable— to try out different roles in life enabled Herzberg to parody different social types in the GDR. The ironic call in Festrede (Speech) for school leavers to develop their ‘socialist personalities’ anticipates the contrary direction in which Hans will develop. In Die Schule ist aus (School’s Out), he sings: ‘My head is as heavy as a lump of gold / I’m sick of the theory / Now reality will be interrogated / I want to experience Spanish tango and nothing / that makes me give up my dreams.’ The song Familienpapa (Family Daddy) is a dark parody of petit-bourgeois comforts in the GDR. With music and text reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, it alludes to the unofficial, private world of the GDR, closeted away from the interference of state and Stasi: ‘Within my own four walls / I want my peace / I see the world comfortably / Through my colour television / In my own four walls / I curse the state.’ The criticism culminates in Hans Negativ (Hans Negative) which, while intended as an extreme parody of the ‘total negation’ attitude common among dissidents, nonetheless conveys certain truths about the widespread discontent and perceived stagnation in the GDR: ‘The air is poisoned / The canals filthy / The land sucked dry / [ . . . ] Heading for downfall.’ From 1985 onwards, with the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and the GDR government’s rejection of his reformist policies, musicians increasingly turned against the ageing politicians in the Politbüro. Rock lyrics reflect this: where in the 1970s, songs such as Wenn ein Mensch lebt cautiously raised the question ‘what about my time on earth’ in relation to the GDR’s grand historical goals, now there was a shift towards the subject taking matters into his/her own hands. This is reflected in Silly’s Großer Träumer (Big Dreamer) written by lyricist

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Werner Karma: ‘Nobody can tell me what is still to come / Nobody knows if I’ll win or lose / Somewhere a new chance is waiting for me / And somehow I’m going to find it.’ But the optimistic will to change the course of one’s life is also countered by despondency. Indeed, albums released in the GDR’s final years have a distinctly dark feel. Liedermacher Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, who won a Golden Amiga for his 1987 album Komm Stirb mit mir ein Stück (Come Die with Me a Little), was one of several writers to exploit the ‘waiting’ motif, a controversial symbol of the GDR’s failure to fulfil its self-proclaimed historical destiny. Leeder writes: ‘What had been [ . . . ] the sheer enthusiasm of Aufbau (“erwarten”), becomes in the texts of the 1980s, a passive and alienated waiting (“Warten”)’. This was true in other literary spheres: the playwright Heiner Müller, for instance, equates contemporary life with ‘ein großer Wartesaal’ (a big waiting room) (Leeder 1996: 53). The motif also featured in rock and Liedermacher texts: in Lancelot Gerhard Gundermann sang: ‘I don’t know if I can wait to be counted by the world’ (1988). Wenzel’s Die Wartung eines Landes (The Maintenance of a Country) uses a pun playing on the similarity of the German words for ‘waiting’ and ‘maintenance’ to present the GDR as a land in waiting: ‘The girl waits for the letter / The speaker waits for the speech / The boy in the park waits for the void / The country waits for the golden age’ (Wenzel 1989). The motif also crops up in the Pankow song Langeweile (Boredom) from the album Aufruhr in den Augen (Riot in Your Eyes): ‘Seen the same country too long / Heard the same language too long. / Waited too long, hoped too long / worshipped the old men too long’ (Pankow 1988). Werner Karma’s text Die alten Männer (The Old Men) from Silly’s album Liebeswälzer (Love Waltzes) even depicts the Politbüro as waiting. The ageing leaders are portrayed sitting around at a dance, out of step with the new times, waiting for the old times to return: ‘The old men don’t dance anymore / [ . . . ] The old men, they’ve got time / A beer will last them a while / The new wave doesn’t drive them away / They’re just waiting for Johann Strauß’ (Silly 1985). Another popular motif for the rock bands and Liedermacher was that of the divided Germany, resulting—in terms of perspectives and senses of loyalty—in the individual being split in two. On their album Casablanca, City sang a song called Halb und Halb (Half and Half) with a text written by Kuno Kleinfelt und Titti Flanell3, which reflects this torn state: ‘In the half-country and city cut in two / half-happy with what you have’ (City 1987). At a concert in Berlin Weißensee in 1988 Toni Krahl was told by FDJ Secretary Hartmut König not to play this song because Politbüro

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member Egon Krenz was in the audience. Krahl initially complied with the instruction, but then defiantly recited it as a poem. Years later, watching the performance on video, Krahl noticed the fear in his eyes and recalled that City never dared perform the song live again (Zeit-Online 2014). Another song of the same name was recorded by Hans-Eckardt Wenzel on his album Reise Bilder (Travel Images). ‘Only ever the middle / Only ever half-content / Half anger, half-hearted request, / Only half a piece from life. / [ . . . ] The city where I earn / Is only half fenced-in’ (Wenzel 1989). The sense of constantly having two perspectives on life is also expressed by Werner Karma in the Silly song Die Ferne (Far Away): ‘I love to look / Far away / With my double binoculars / [ . . . ] / I love to go / Far away / With my double shoes’ (Silly 1985). In the final year of the GDR, the albums Aufruhr in den Augen by Pankow, and Februar by Silly, summed up the sense of endgame as the disaffected increasingly applied to leave the GDR. The message of Pankow’s Der Ausreißer (The Runaway) is: ‘There is no way back, / It’s over’, while Du kriegst mich nicht (You won’t get me) states categorically: ‘Listen I’ve got no desire / to hang around with you here any longer’ (Pankow 1988). Silly’s Februar marked a new development in that most of the texts were written by Tamara Danz in collaboration with Gerhard Gundermann. SOS uses the metaphor of a ‘Narrenschiff’ (Ship of Fools) sailing to its doom, while Ein Gespennst geht um (A Ghost is Going Round) parodies the famous quotation from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: ‘There’s a ghost going round / In the Mitropa / It spits / On the cemetery of dreams.’ The fury of the 1989 generation is most explicit in the song Traumteufel (Dream Devil), which, with its metaphor of winter and the dying forest, expresses the perception that the GDR is a sick land beyond healing: ‘I dreamt / The winter had passed / And the minister who yesterday was still laughing, / Hanged himself / At his desk, /Because the forest no longer know how to make leaves’ (Silly 1989) (Fig 6.1). In September 1989, GDR rock musicians and Liedermacher came out in support of the newly formed civil rights organisation New Forum. A resolution with a list of demands was drafted by musicians, who included Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, Steffen Mensching, André Herzberg, Tamara Danz, Toni Krahl and many others. Performers from all over the state read it out before concerts, not knowing how the secret police would respond. On 7 October, the fortieth anniversary of the GDR, police reacted heavy-handedly to counter-demonstrations in Berlin. On the 4th November half a million people demonstrated on the Alexanderplatz

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Fig. 6.1

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Silly in the 1980s

Copyright Ute Mahler. Ostkreuz-Agentur

in Berlin, where Liedermacher including Kurt Demmler, Jürgen Eger and Wenzel and Mensching sang songs to demonstrate solidarity with the protesters. Five nights later the Wall fell (Robb 2007: 247–48).

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has given an account of the history of GDR rock, the cultural policy which governed it, and the political infrastructure in which it operated. In doing so, it has demonstrated how GDR rock

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was subject to a particular set of conditions which resulted in a distinctive style of rock in its own right. Between the constraints of censorship and the need to express a critical voice, lyricists developed an original rock language of their own. The highly metaphorical treatments of political themes in the 1970s gave way to a greater directness from the mid-1980s onwards, as GDR musicians lost patience with their government’s refusal to embrace reform. During the Wende (turning point) these rock bands and Liedermacher of the GDR were in the right place at the right time, reflecting the unheard critical voices of the people in their songs. As it turned out, the results of autumn 1989, that is, the fall from power of the Politbüro and the Stasi, meant that lyricists quickly had to look around for new themes to write about. After an initial period in the early 1990s when East German fans rejected their own bands, preferring to ‘catch up’ with the western live acts which had previously been withheld from them, ex-GDR groups gradually regained their profile as fans rediscovered their sense of East German identity (Gläser and Pötzsch 2007: 176). Many capitalised on the ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East) which has been a feature of East German society since the mid-1990s. Despite exceptions such as Nina Hagen or Silly, most successful ex-GDR rock acts have generally not made big inroads in the West German market since unification. This is in no small part due to the strong sense of East German cultural identity which such groups emanate: it is shared with their audience and finds expression in the lyrical themes of their songs, and is something which West German audiences find difficult to relate to.

NOTES 1. Danz can be seen in the middle of the picture as one of the lead singers on the video ‘Oktoberklub ist das klar!’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wjaq5elkRXU 2. Kurt Demmler was also among the signatories of an open letter of protest to the government against Biermann’s expatriation. In 2009, Demmler hanged himself in prison awaiting trial for child sexual abuse offences. 3. These were pseudonyms for the Berlin writing duo Alfred Roesler and Scarlett Kleint.

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WORKS CITED Balitzki, Jürgen (2001). Electra *Lift” Stern Combo Meißen. Geschichten von Sachsendreier. Berlin:Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf. Beatmusik und Bruce Springstein—Jugendradio DT64. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 May 2014. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/news/wirtschaft/medien-beatmu sik-und-bruce-springsteen—jugendradio-dt64-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com20090101-140515-99-01482. Accessed 28 January 2016. Böning, Holger (2004). Der Traum von einer Sache: Aufstieg und Fall der Utopien im politischen Lied der Bundesrepublik und der DDR. Bremen: Edition Lumière. Freie Deutsche Jugend (1949). Leben Singen Kämpfen. Liederbuch der FDJ. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben. Gesetz über die Teilnahme der Jugend der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik an der Gestaltung der entwickelten sozialistischen Gesellschaft und über ihre allseitige Förderung in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik— Jugendgesetz der DDR-vom 28. Januar 1974. http://www.verfassungen.de/ de/ddr/jugendgesetz74.htm. Accessed 14 January 2016. Gläser, Peter, & Pötszch, Gerhard (2007). Cäsar. Wer die Rose ehrt. Leipzig: Militzke. Hentschel, Christian, & Matzke, Peter (2007). Als ich fortging . . . Das grosse DDR-Rock-Buch. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben. Hintze, Götz (1999). Rocklexikon der DDR. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf. Jahn, Hagen (2002). Jugend, Musik und Ideologie. Zur Geschichte der FDJSingebewegung. in Hallische Beiträge zur Zeitgeschichte, 12, (pp. 5–28). Kirchenwitz, Lutz (1993). Folk, Chanson und Liedermacher in der DDR. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Kreikenbom, Henry (1997). Zwischen Blauhemd und Beatles. Die frühen Jahre des DDR-Rock. In Wolfgang Findte, Thomas Fahrig, Thomas Köhler (Eds.), Deutsch-deutsche Sprachspiele (pp. 156–177). Münster: Lit. Larkey, Edward (2007). Rotes Rockradio. Poluläre Musik und die Kommerzialisierung des DDR-Rundfunks. Berlin: Lit-Verlag. Leeder, Karen (1996). Breaking boundaries: A new generation of poets in the GDR. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Müller, Heiner (1982). Rotwelsch. West Berlin: Merve Verlag. ‘Oktoberklub ist das klar!’ (ca. 1974). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wjaq5elkRXU. Accessed 15 January 2016 Robb, David (2007). Political Song in the GDR: The cat- and- mouse game with censorship and institutions. In David Robb (Ed.), Protest song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (pp. 227–254). Rochester/NY: Camden House.

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Rock und Zensur. Tausend Augen auf dem Kassettenabspielgerät. Zeit-Online, October 2014. http://www.zeit.de/kultur/musik/2014-10/mauerfall-rock musik-zensur-ddr-silly-city/seite-3. Accessed 26 January 2016. Wicke, Peter (1996). Pop music in the GDR between resistance and conformity. In Margy Gerber & Roger Woods (Eds.), Changing identities in East Germany. New Hampshire Symposia Studies in GDR Culture and Society 14/15 (pp. 25–35). Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America. Wicke, Peter, & John Shepherd (1993). ‘The Cabaret is dead’: Rock culture as state enterprise—the political organization of rock in East Germany. In Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, Graeme Turner (Eds.), Rock and popular music: Politics, policies, institutions (pp. 25–36). London: Routledge. Winter, Robert (2009). Geschlossene Gesellschaft. Die DDR-Rockmusik zwischen Linientreue und Nonkonformismus. Norderstadt: Grin Verlag. David Robb is a senior lecturer in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens. Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (Berlin, 1998) and the editor and main author of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (Rochester, NY, 2007). From 2009–12 he was involved in an AHRC funded collaborative project with the Centre for Popular Culture and Music in Freiburg on the ‘History of Reception of Songs of the 1848 Revolution’. He is also an experienced musician and singer/songwriter having performed extensively in the UK, Ireland and Germany.

CHAPTER 7

Folk Music as a Folk Enemy: Music Censorship in Socialist Yugoslavia Ana Hofman

In 1977 the well-known Yugoslav violinist and composer Milutin PopovićZahar collaborated with the lyricist and singer Danilo Živković: together they adapted and re-wrote the original song Makedonijo, a work of the Macedonian singer Aleksandar Sarievski. Zahar wrote the new patriotic lyrics and under the new title—Jugoslavijo, Danilo Živković released it on his 1978 single.1 The melody was based on traditional south Serbian and Macedonian music styles featuring the irregular 7/8 rhythm, while the score included traditional instruments like frula (flute) and tapan (wooden drum), with the main theme played on the accordion. Female vocals accompanied the singer’s voice in the refrains in a choral-singing style. The lyrics2 glorified the main symbols of the Yugoslav society—‘brotherhood and unity’, worker’s self-management, partisan battles, and cultural diversity: From the Vardar to the Triglav peak From the Đerdap to the Jadran sea . . . Like a string of pearls and ivory, shining in the Sun so brightly,

A. Hofman (*) Institute of Cultural and Memory Studies, Research Center of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_7

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and the Balkans’ heart so proudly, Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia.

The sleeve of this single featured a photo of the singer Danilo, surrounded by the members of the vocal group Ladarice in the folk costumes of different Yugoslav nationalities. Soon after, this song became an unofficial Yugoslav anthem and one of the most popular patriotic songs. More than 30 years later, Milutin Popović-Zahar described the first reactions to this song as exceptionally negative. According to his words, editors, journalists, intellectuals and the general public panned the effort of composing a song about Yugoslavia in the novokomponovana muzika (newly-composed folk music, NCFM/new folk music/commercial folk music/neo-folk) manner. The song was additionally problematic because it was performed by a folk music singer (from the interview).3 Jugoslavijo was immediately labeled as schund (šund)4—a song of low quality that offends the main tenets of Yugoslav socialism, indeed ‘an embarrassment to the Yugoslav working people’ (ibid.). Zahar explained that in those times it was utterly inconceivable that such a song would stand ‘on equal terms’ with works of the authors of classical music or so-called ‘light music’ (also called ‘entertainment music’—zabavna muzika), considered as the most qualified for composing songs about Yugoslavia and Tito (e.g. Nikola Hercigonja or Oskar Danon). The public outcry over the song and its authors compelled Danilo Živković to sue Zahar because the latter had not informed him that ‘official permission’ to record a patriotic song had not been received from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (ibid). However, the circumstances unexpectedly changed. According to Zahar, one trumpet player from the Belgrade military orchestra and a member of the band which often performed at the parties held on board Tito’s well-known ship Galeb (The Seagull), once played Jugoslavijo (unaware of the public controversy over the song). When he heard the song, says Zahar, Tito made a comment that it was a great piece of music and exactly what Yugoslav people needed at that moment. As he already knew Zahar as the leader of the respectable amateur folk orchestra ‘Lola’ from Belgrade and a musician who often played his violin during official visits and celebrations in his residence,5 Tito referred to the song as a true folk anthem. The very editors who had banned the song and launched a public campaign against its authors changed their attitude instantly. Zahar pointed out that the same people who had tagged the record as schund, due to potential problems related to introducing

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‘serious subject matter’ into cultural products of ‘low artistic value’, needed just one positive word from Tito to start glorifying the song. In a short while the song became extremely popular—as the first unofficial anthem which (unlike the patriotic songs featured in formal occasions) could be performed informally and in everyday life situations (celebrations, weddings, kafanas). According to many musicians, they earned a lot of money whenever they played it, as for the listeners emotional associations of the song were quite intense, which made Jugoslavijo a perfect music product. Journalists, critics and musicologists ascribed the success of the song to its traditional melody and its sincere and inspiring lyrics. Moreover, PGP RTB—Produkcija gramofonskih ploča Radio-televizije Beograd (Production of LPs of Radio-television of Belgrade) awarded Danilo Živković with a prestigious medal of honor. Apart from the easy-to-sing melody and emotional patriotic lyrics, the personal biographies of the composer and the singer also contributed to the popularity of the song. Danilo Živković was a member of the Party and the executive committee of the professional association of ‘estrada workers’. Milutin Popović-Zahar was a leading violinist and head of one of the most popular Yugoslav amateur folk orchestras. Their social positions implied a certain legitimacy that granted more space for maneuvers within the unwritten rules of censorship. The case of Bojan Adamič, eminent Slovenian composer, pianist and conductor, is also a good example of such ‘maneuvers’. His active promotion of jazz and popular music was tolerated due to the fact that he was a partisan fighter within the antifascist movement during WWII (Adamič served as a machine gunner in the National Liberation War):6 The trouble was that (with the exception of Zlatko Černjul) almost none of my colleagues had been a partisan or had any kind of political background. I even got some medals—I got them in the war, not afterwards—and, at the time, that meant something. When a man risks his life for something, and even gets credited for that, you dare not say he is not ‘one of us’. (Matošec 1987)

It seems that Zahar was particularly aware of this: he openly played with the practices of censorship, circumventing established procedures—for example, not seeking permission to record a song beforehand. Having a prominent position in the orchestra which regularly performed in front of Tito and his wife Jovanka, he seized the opportunity to subvert the unwritten rules which regulated the production of NCFM as an inappropriate genre for the dissemination of political and ideological content.7 The result

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was an NFCM song which successfully promoted patriotic content and was later performed by many notable singers of various music genres (e.g. Zdravko Čolić, vocal group Ladarice, etc.) And not only that: it proved the dynamic practice of censorial mechanisms was strongly related to intergenre politics in socialist Yugoslavia music production.

‘COMMUNIST’ CENSORSHIP This chapter proposes a more nuanced view on censorial practices drawing from the recent academic contributions from authors like Jansen (1991), Holquiest (1994), Burt (1994), Butler (1998) and Müller (2003), all of whom disagree with simplifying and reducing the concept of censorship to a restrictive technology. The ‘new censorship’ debate8 questioned the prevailing understanding of censorship as a set of regulatory and institutionalized interventions, perceiving it as an intellectual practice set in a specific social-historical context (Boyer 2003: 539). Such approaches criticize the binary relation between the ‘censor’ and the ‘censored’, challenge their fixed positions, and spotlight the multiplicity of actors involved in censorial activities, as opposed to a single institution or authority. Besides this, such approaches challenge the binary division between censorship and freedom, effectively demonstrating how every cultural production emanates from a process involving regulation and selection (Fish 1994). From the perspective of music censorship, the chapter calls for the shifting of attention away from institutional censorship mechanisms to more personal, unspoken and unwritten norms and practices. It engages not only with a complex interplay between ideology, representational and social practices, but also with significant authorial self-censorship indicating a play with awareness of censorship (Levine 1994). Censorship thus partakes in the process of self-subjectivization, through unconscious internalization of the norms essential for self-representation and self-perception. It is argued that it simultaneously operates through internalized forms of censorship (understood in Freudo-Lacanian terms as ‘everyday situation/ experience censorship’) and external norms (like institutional restrictions), not only in the socialist, but, for that matter, in all societies. Then a small number of academic contributions addressing music censorship in Yugoslavia9 revolve around two main points, which from the aspect of censorship practices appear as most paradigmatic. As Svanibor Pettan noted, after WWII two music genres were of special

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interest to the censors: songs which somehow emphasized the national identities of the respective constitutional peoples of Yugoslavia (carried strong national symbolism), and religious songs performed outside the venues designated for religious ceremonies. According to Pettan, those were ideologically motivated bans of nationalist, anti-communist and religious songs: the songs themselves were perceived as attacks on the multicultural Yugoslav identity, the Communist Party and the political system in general (Pettan 1998). In this instance I adopted a different analytical approach, not focused on overtly political content (perceived as dissident and a priori forbidden by the dominant politics and in the public discourse), but on the music content recognized as (an) ideologically ‘neutral,’ mass-cultural, and apolitical product. The genre of NCFM is explored, which major deficiency (ascribed by state officials, intellectuals and academics alike) was its ‘low quality’, apparent in the characteristic blends of local music idioms and western production and technology: this ‘hybrid creation’ kept something of its rural symbolism and background as folk music addressing the popular market (Vidić Rasmussen 2002: xix). I used a dialogical approach, which in itself combined different research methods: personal statements of interviewees, official (state and academic) narratives and media discourses, which made up the contemporary framework for research and assessment of music censorship in socialist Yugoslavia.10 However, consulting official documents did not turn out to be particularly useful, since the official Yugoslav cultural politics claimed that ‘absolute’ freedom was granted to all artistic and cultural activities: ‘ [ . . . ] in the SFRY, there is no censorship of press and other means of information, except in a state of war or when an authorized government body officially declares imminent war emergency’ (Opća enciklopedija 1977). Denial of censorship, a usual procedure in the majority of social systems, took a form of absence of censorial practices from legal documents, which complicates the tracing of their implementation.

THE YUGOSLAV CASE It is not intended to romanticize Yugoslavia as a ‘unique case’. However, it is important to note that in the realm of popular music production Yugoslavia was an exception in comparison to other countries of the Eastern bloc. Foundation of the music market had already begun in the 1950s, due to abandoning of the centralized model of state government and liberation of many other segments of the political, economic, public

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and cultural life in the country (Naumović 1996: 56). Thus, in the early 1950s, at the end of the initial phase of ‘revolutionary romanticism’, the political leadership did not find it particularly useful to censor different music genres with administrative regulations. The case of jazz also confirms this: its post-war sanctioning governed by political and ideological motivation did not prevent the founding of new jazz orchestras and its broad reception in Yugoslavia (1946 saw the launching of the Dance Orchestra of Radio Zagreb, as well as the jazz band Dinamo from Serbia) (Vučetić 2009: 88). In the first post-war years, certain level of censorship of western popular music existed ‘because it exerts bad influence on the upbringing of our youth’, but even then it was not conducted in a systematic and organized manner: ‘CPY’s cultural politics was confused and unconsolidated’, and the party leaders ‘even expressed contradictory attitudes among themselves towards western popular music’ (Vuletić 2010: 75). The early 1960s were marked by the advance of Yugoslav popular music production and the gramophone record industry, as well as a growing network of local radio stations (by the late 1960s this included privately owned ones).11 By the mid-1960s the record industry embarked upon one of its most important economic activities,12 justified by the state officials who argued that the rise in standard of life for the Yugoslav working people inevitably led to new cultural needs. Those needs should be met by new methods of education and new cultural products, like the gramophone record ‘as a cultural achievement and indispensable tool, instrumental in spreading and improving the music culture and education in general’ (Gavarić 1973: 154).13 As Ivan Čolović points out, The authors were given complete freedom to open towards the modern western art tendencies and aesthetics, and contribute to the official ideology merely in a passive way—by not questioning its main symbols: Tito, brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples, socialism and later the self-management system and foreign affairs of non-alignment (Čolović 1993).

Popular music was, therefore, not only an important outcome of cultural politics, but also an important economic asset and a lucrative export line of the entertainment industry. In addition, it was proof of success of the Yugoslav socialist project (Vuletić 2008: 862), providing a unique ‘window to the West’ for countries of the former ‘Eastern bloc.’14 The 1970s, which were marked by the perplexed political and social climate, brought rapid changes in the sphere of Yugoslav cultural politics

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and censorial mechanisms. The year 1971 saw the beginning of the socalled ‘quasi-confederate phase’ in Yugoslav history, initiated by the Slovenian ‘road affair’, Croatian nationalist 1971 mass movement and activities of the ‘Serbian liberals’ (Naumović 2008: 220). Already after 1968, but especially after those events, censorship became increasingly intense: in this period in Serbia only there were more restrictive interventions in the cultural sphere than in the previous 20 years (Pašić in Vučetić 2011: 703). Claims for national independence, disputes between the republics and growing tensions between the national cultural elites resulted in administrative measures aimed at legal regulation of some aspects of censorship restrictions—for the first time in Yugoslav history.15 In his speech at the 21st session of the Presidency of SKJ (League of Communists of Yugoslavia—Savez komunista Jugoslavije), Tito criticized the press and reprimanded the Central Committee of the Croatian League of Communists for being tolerant to nationalist, separatist and antigovernment stances (Broz 1977: 422). In the same year (1971), the Congress of Cultural Action held in Kragujevac (Serbia) adopted new restrictive guidelines for official cultural politics. These were followed by administrative measures against ‘un-cultural’, ‘un-educational’ and ‘low quality’ cultural products.16 The 10th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, held in Belgrade on 27–30 May 1974, launched an offensive against all forms of nationalism, cultural ‘kitsch’17 (kič) and ‘schund’—in response to the overwhelming intellectual crisis and inter-ethnic tensions. ‘Cultural genres of low quality’—magazines, books, films18—were labeled as especially problematic, including the commercial NCFM.19

IDEOLOGY

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GENRE POLITICS

The growing presence of popular music from the West and the beginnings of the national music market in the mid-1950s effected the so-called ‘ideologization’ of Yugoslav popular culture. Accordingly, from the 1960s onwards, ‘serious themes’ like the partisan WWII resistance, socialist revolution, ideology of modernization or Yugoslav identity, claimed their place in the popular realm. ‘Revolutionary themes’ were no longer reserved for formal events, like the state ceremonies featuring symphonic orchestras and choirs: ideological content was advanced through genres considered as belonging to the ‘easy-listening’ consumer culture. Such themes could now be communicated to the new generations by means of accessible and widely popular cultural products, which were attractive to

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the audience. As for this question, the relationship between form and content has been the primary focus of the researchers who stress that in formal terms ‘anything went’ (pop and abstract art, avant-garde and experimental music), whereas the ideology of brotherhood and unity, working class struggle, workers’ self-management and leadership of the Communist Party had been unquestionable and defended by all means (including administrative ones) (Vučetić 2011: 705). However, as this chapter shows, not all music genres were permitted and acceptable, even if they treated the symbols of the Yugoslav society ‘in the correct manner’. The ‘entertainment music’ genre was the first in Yugoslav popular music that began to include politically engaged and revolutionary content: it was used as a major instrument for arousing patriotic sentiments. Yugoslav popular music developed as a part of the ‘Yugoslav project’ and, according to Dalibor Mišina, was ‘nurtured’ by official politics (Mišina 2013: 21). When concerns rock music, the general policy of tolerance instead of repression (with carefully outlined borders) indeed produced better results (Ramet 1994: 130) and popular music genres gradually became ‘state projects’. In this kind of genre politics, NCFM apparently remained outside the spotlight of official scrutiny. Official attitudes to this music reflected all the ambiguities of the state’s cultural policies and its censorial mechanisms. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the professional association in charge (Udruženje estradnih umetnika Jugoslavije) made some attempts to regulate the production, legalize the music market and grant formal and official recognition to NCFM (Hofman 2010: 151). Other attempts included the ‘festivalization’ of this genre (Vidić Rasmussen 2002: 59) and Yugoslav tours of NCFM performers were organized (together with performers of other genres, mainly zabavna muzika) aimed at incorporating the genre into ‘more formal’ cultural events. Recognizing its strong market potential, the state tolerated its high sales, but distanced itself from its ‘un-cultural’ and ‘un-educational’ features—restricting its visibility in the media.20 The growing presence of this genre in the contemporary mass culture was not considered as ‘altogether appropriate’: this reveals a particular interplay of visibility and marginalization of NCFM in the public discourse (Vidić Rasmussen 2002: xviii). Regardless of the fact that from the very outset it had enormous popularity and the highest sales in comparison to other music genres,21 NCFM represented a confusing ‘minefield’ of ideological and aesthetical prejudice. Record labels which released NCFM acts were

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panned for their exclusively commercial objectives, hyper-production and resultant debasement in quality of the music: The sales of gramophone records serve as an excellent indicator of trends in musical tastes since—unlike, for instance, radio and television programs, which usually contain a strong cultural and educational element—they are dictated by purely commercial considerations. Market laws, that is, the intensity of demand, are those which determine the number of copies that will be made of each record and in each particular category or genre of music. (Kos 1972: 62)

Cultural workers and intellectuals lamented the absence of clearly defined policies in the field of music publishing which, according to them, had been left without any supervision from the state: few companies had ‘public management bodies’, while the majority of them operated with no communication or cooperation with the associations of professional musicians (Gavarić 1973: 158–159). Regardless of the public and academic debates on the subject, concrete steps aimed at changing this state of affairs were rarely undertaken. All this affected the elusive and changing strategies of cultural politics in the field of popular music, especially when it came to censorship. Most scholars agree that in the absence of a framework that would distinguish between desirable and undesirable music content (indeed the absence of censorship as such in the public discourse) the main strategy was in fact a lack thereof (‘non-policy policy’) (Mišina 2013: 26). Latinka Perović claimed that the lack of system was indeed a system, resulting in systematic actions, but not on the part of a single center or instance which initiated prohibitions.

POLITICS

OF

NCFM

All this resulted in the delicate ideological position of the NCFM in Yugoslav society. NCFM was labeled as a commercial genre made for mass consumption and marked by conformism, superficiality, ignorance and dilettantism. However, its close associations with the everyday life of the ‘people’ could not be denied: ‘truth, not lies—reality, not lullabies— (this music) brings people closer to the arts and blurs the difference between folk art and art for the folk’ (Ivanović 1973: 169). According to some views, this very music was a major topos of ‘bottom-up’ emancipation and reflection on the daily lives and realities of the Yugoslav working

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classes. Through NCFM songs they demonstrated creativity and claimed space for artistic expression—especially when taken into account that most of the performers came from poor, ‘working class’ families or a rural background. Moreover, with its roots in traditional music, NCFM literally represented a par excellence reflection of the socialist transformation from rural to modern industrial society, and a specific kind of autochthonous genre (Vidić Rasmussen 2002: xxvd). NCFM embodied the transformations of Yugoslav society, targeting a social group which was the main protagonist of the changes—urban(ised) villagers. Namely, the major part of the NCFM audience was held to be made up of ‘city newcomers’ and dwellers of industrial centers who came from rural areas: for them, this music was a nostalgic expression of their former village life, as well as their dislike for the unsympathetic and harsh conditions in the city (Grujić 2009: 85). According to the dominant narratives, in the process of adapting to new life conditions and respective changes they were still unaccustomed to (the) ‘highest forms of culture offered by the city such as concerts or theatre performances’ (Kos 1972:69). Some intellectual commentators even defined NCFM as the ‘folklore of the transitional period’22—a phase which precedes the full selfrealization of this social class and its art, and features transitional forms between genuine folk music and contemporary pop (ibid. 63). Describing everyday life and its manifestations, affairs of the heart or the pastoral rural idyll, these songs were not merely a form of escape from socialist reality into a ‘parallel universe’ but, on the contrary, the best indicator of the general social climate in Yugoslavia, ‘reflecting the spirit of the time and its main cultural and aesthetical characteristics’ (Dragićević Šešić 1994: 23). On the other hand, in spite of the fact that such cultural production addressed ‘broad masses of the working people’, precisely this inclusive potential was considered to be its major deficiency. The themes of NCFM songs came from the reality, which, according to the official narratives ‘should offer the richest sources of material for creative-artistic work’. However, they were criticized as sheer entertainment without social significance, limited solely to the sphere of amusement. They lacked a ‘socially educational aspect’ which would grant them an ‘added value’: this was perceived as the main point of difference between the ‘real culture’ and ‘pseudo-cultural’ expressive practices. It was under these circumstances that patriotic themes and political messages found their way into NCFM and its ‘banalities’ of everyday life: this kind of music was not considered appropriate for communicating politically and ideologically engaged messages. According to the music

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press, it was necessary to make sure that Tito, Party, WWII and other important legacies of Yugoslav socialism were not depicted in a distasteful manner (Lopušina 1991: 251), especially in the commercial genres reserved for ordinary and trivial topics. Songs that would ‘touch upon sensitive matters’ would normally be taken to the radio for ‘professional expertise’: those judged as inappropriately using patriotic symbols or feelings were banned from the airwaves (ibid.). While by the 1970s all other music genres had introduced revolutionary themes, the NCFM performers were not allowed to honor Tito, the Party or Yugoslavia with their songs.23 In the early 1970s, authors who would occasionally try to introduce patriotic content into their songs faced harsh public criticism.

CAPITALIST PRODUCT Nevertheless, did socialist cultural politics’ restrictive attitude toward the ‘music close to the working people’ come exclusively from its banal, entertaining, mundane content? What was the problem with a genre showing no affinity to social engagement or transmitting any kind of political messages? In discussing this it is important to note that, in a socialist context, ‘ideological indifference’ was deemed as equally dangerous for the society as inadequate use of political and ideological content: such ‘bourgeois positivism’ perceived the cultural/artistic artifact as a product of human spirit and instrumentalized human creativity (Tanović 1974:191). Exactly that feature of the NCFM was derived from its commercial nature associated with a capitalist, market-oriented economy.24 This music genre developed spontaneously in an entrepreneurial environment (Rasmussen 2002: xxiv) in the music business which emulated capitalist characteristics (with its managers, agents, record companies . . . ) and openly advocated consumerism. Besides, the major part of music activities took place in the kafana,25 a venue which provided opportunities for a looser financial control of this music than, for instance, ‘light music’ or rock (Hofman 2015). Precisely those ‘liberal features fomented the flourishing of pseudo-culture, kitsch and schund’ (Stojičić 1973: 215) which was deemed to be especially detrimental to the emancipation of the working class. Although NFCM had its roots in traditional folklore, it was not considered as its ‘legitimate’ progeny, because it lacked educational and ‘enlightening’ elements—main precepts of socialist cultural politics. Accordingly, while ‘institutional folklore’ was considered to be an appropriate genre for the public display of patriotic content,

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NCFM—its commercial counterpart—was not. As Ivan Čolović points out, NCFM was not concerned with political issues and did not ‘mess with the government’ (Čolović 1993). It was nevertheless a subject of fierce criticism from the establishment, because ‘people’ featured in the lyrics of the songs (as well as people in their audience) apparently embraced the values of a western consumer society, thus departing both from its authentic cultural tradition and the values upheld by socialist society.

WE ARE ALL CENSORS Radina Vučetić, drawing on Zagorka Golubović asserts that in socialist Yugoslavia censorship had not worked in the way that someone from the Central Committee would straightforwardly request a ban. However, in the atmosphere that was thus created, those concerned would respond— without any official prohibitions (2011: 698). So, the only evidence of censorship was in fact the ‘social atmosphere’ concocted by the collective affective mechanisms.26 As Zahar’s story about Jugoslavijo at the beginning of the article shown, restrictions were based on a tacit understanding/ agreement that censorship should be performed by the protagonists themselves (cultural institutions, publishing companies, radio and TV editors, artists and authors . . . ). Taking this into account, a whole range of censorial practices was developed in accordance with ‘unwritten rules’, which left a lot of room for differing interpretations, improvizations, individual perceptions and affective ‘techniques’. There were special committees for culture, art or publishing; social and workers’ boards (editorial, artistic) or groups for the assessment of ideological ‘correctness’. However, many restrictions and bans depended on the personal responsibility of an individual and his/ her affinities, courage and choice of the correct moment (at one point in time some things could be considered to be problematic, at other times, not). Yugoslav cultural theorists defined this aspect of ‘editorial control’ as a specific form of autochthonous ‘self-management censorship’: here, the responsibility for supervision of ideological content was transferred from institutions to individuals (Golubović 1990: 24). Editors were the main guardians of the ideological, moral and political ‘uprightness’ of any cultural product, often in order to keep their status and positions. Because of this, most of the censorship took place in a sort of vacuum —in the interplay between the official, interpersonal and subjective. And this form of interpersonal approach opened a space for more elaborate, intricate and efficient censorial mechanisms.

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On the other hand, editors’ actions were often governed by their personal aspirations and moral dilemmas. Very often, they tried to maintain the ‘consequence’ of their moral positions and to balance between their personal attitudes and what was deemed as a politically and socially acceptable standpoint. This called for constant negotiation between professional stance and personal musical preferences, on the one hand, and attitudes of the public and political officials, on the other. All of this required a special kind of intellectual ‘gymnastics’. In many cases, editors collaborated with the authors, helping them reorganize the ‘problematic work’ according to the ‘rules’ (Đogo 1990: 20). In this way, they kept their positions safe, but often became major sources of new and fresh ideas. In order to prevent a ban, they would opt for ‘print errors’ (erasing lines or words), thus helping many potentially ‘subversive’ works to get published. Moreover, it often happened that the censor and the censored had the same social background, or were friends, or even swapped their roles for a while, further complicating the censorial practices. Thus ‘editorial censorship’ implied constant and conscious maneuvering with (self)censorship, on more than one level. ‘Censorship’ thus did not result from coherent strategies, but from confusing and vaguely defined guidelines. Most of these ‘cases’ were but sporadic actions instigated by concrete problems or current social and political events, which informed the dominant discourses or common understanding of the appropriateness of the respective acts. They could be approved at one moment, and in the next their content would be opposed, depending on the new readings resulting from changes in the social climate.

CODA In 1949 Oskar Davičo, a Yugoslav writer and cultural worker, claimed that every intellectual in the self-management society should cultivate a policeman in himself: in this way the regular police might become obsolete (Kešetović 1998: 80). This statement is the best description of the attempts of the Yugoslav intellectual and political establishment to advance an individual, subjective approach to censorship with no strict rules and institutional control. An author was often left to decide for himself what to do with his work: thus censorial practices operated in the realm of the informal. Court trials were rare, and officials seldom discussed the values or deficiencies of a particular piece of music or its performers (Ramet 1999: 136). After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the newly established states claimed that they had set themselves free from cultural dictatorship and repression,

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finally establishing a cultural production relieved of state control. The post-socialist reality—marked by the commercialization of public culture, forced consumerism, domination of the corporate media, and the emerging (new) political and economic elites—established other ways of control of cultural production, seemingly ‘free’ of any ideology. In such a setting, a ‘democratic market’ was granted with the main agency of censorship, with or without the awareness that it may in fact be the most exclusive agency of all, and the most difficult to trace, for that matter. Today, post-Yugoslav music markets seem more centralized than ever before— with the prevailing influence of the two record companies that publish NCFM in Serbia (Grand produkcija and Produkcija gramofonskih ploča RTV Srbije) on the one hand, and the global music publishers conforming to the rules of the corporate music industry, on the other. ‘Market censorship’ made the artists entirely dependent on ‘general taste’ and ‘sale increase’, leaving them with less and less creative freedom. And, again, the editors are not willing to take risks, this time due to different ideological obstacles—ideologies for boosting sales which resulted in a variety of censorial procedures carried out by different agents. This closely follows Bourdieu’s remark: ‘Censorship is never quite as perfect or as invisible as when each agent has nothing to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say: in this case he does not even have to be his own censor, because he is, in a way, censored once for all, through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which impose their form on all his expressions’ (1991: 138).

NOTES 1. Single Jugoslavijo, Jugoton 1971. B-side of the single featured the workers’ song ‘Let’s Work Together’ (Radimo zajedno). 2. Due to copyright, only the first couple of lines of the song are provided for illustrative purposes. The entire lyrics can be find on: http://lyricstranslate. com/en/od-vardara-pa-do-triglava-vardar-triglav.html 3. Milutin Popović-Zahar, interview 18. 7. 2012. 4. German word for ‘pulp’ or ‘trashy’. 5. ‘Lola’ was an amateur orchestra because it was formed by the SKOJ (Young Communist League of Yugoslavia). Zahar personally entertained Tito and Jovanka Broz on more than 100 occasions. 6. It is interesting that, although long ago criticized for promoting ‘inappropriate music’, in the mid-1980s Adamič became a member of an antischund committee of the Radio-Television Slovenia.

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7. Milutin Popović-Zahar authored the lyrics of other well-known and popular patriotic songs, like Živela Jugoslavija (1980) and Hej Jugosloveni (1985). 8. The new studies of censorship revolve around the live debate on the effectiveness of its redefinition as an omnipresent practice. Researchers question the possible simplifications and trivialization of its understanding, including the loss of its power in political mobilization (see Hearn 1988). On this point, the author tends to agree with Michael Hardt, who opines that the insistence on this concept and debates around it, which aim to preserve the ‘good legacy’ associated with it, effectively contribute to the vitality of its significance (Hardt 2010: 131). 9. Most of the authors focused on the freedom of speech and press, as well as censorship in literature and (partly) cinema, leaving a relatively modest contribution to the debate. Thus the issue of censorship in socialist Yugoslavia remains only fragmentarily illuminated. 10. Records of the Archives of Yugoslavia were used, along with significant periodicals from the socialist period, as well as personal archives of interviewees. 11. According to official records, the first steps in development of the record industry had been made already in the early 1950s (in Serbia, in 1952). The first gramophone records were produced in 1959 (Archives of Yugoslavia, 475, Peti kongres Udruženja muzičkih umetnika, 5–7.11.1965). 12. In 1965, ten million copies of records were manufactured throughout Yugoslavia (Archives of Yugoslavia, 475, Peti kongres Udruženja muzičkih umetnika, 5–7.11.1965). 13. By 1987 there were eleven companies involved in the production and distribution of vinyl records and cassettes. They were mainly located in Zagreb (Jugoton) and Belgrade (Produkcija gramofonskih ploča Radiotelevizije Beograd—PGP RTB), and released 75–80 percent of the music products marketed in Yugoslavia (see Vidić Rasmussen 2002: 178). 14. In the 1980s this music was extensively used as a symbol of rebellion against the socialist establishment (at that time Yugoslav rock bands and folk singers performed in stadiums), which was seen as a sign of democratization of these societies. 15. Even in the situations when official bans did happen, the public space was open for debate, both in intellectual circles and the media (Vučetić 2011: 703). In a way, this may be understood as a strategy of the system to convey an impression of public debate, in which those who went astray would be rightly judged in the end. 16. In addition to this, new legal acts were issued, e.g. the Act on Prevention of Misuse of the Freedom of Press and Other Forms of Information (19 April 1973) (Paraščić 2007: 29).

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17. In the Yugoslav context, the phenomenon of ‘kitsch’ referred to all kinds of artworks considered as aesthetically inferior and morally dubious, as well as low in artistic quality (Ivanović 1973: 191). 18. The first ‘victims’ of the Congress of Cultural Action were the popular newspapers, magazines, comics and pulp fiction—burned in public. Following the 1972 sanctions against the ‘popular press’, the law regulated other cultural domains (films, books, music) as well. 19. More about šund tax and šund commities see Čvoro 2014: 45–46. 20. This music was mostly present in the national television’s ‘special’ programs -e.g. ‘Folk parada’. 21. The Yugoslav record industry (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) relied heavily on the production of NCFM: in 1972, 427 records were released in 5 887 028 copies, Gavarić, 155. The major record labels were PGP RTB, Beograd Disk and Diskos in Serbia, Jugoton and Suzy in Croatia, and Helidon in Slovenia. 22. Among other descriptions, they were interestingly termed as ‘agricultural schlagers’ (see Ivanović 1973: 190). 23. Until the rise of the biggest Yugoslav star Lepa Brena, this music, considered by the proponents of high culture as trivial, was not concerned with the political and social reality (Hofman 2012: 29). 24. For more on the introduction of the ‘neoclassical’ liberal economy in Yugoslavia see Bockman 2011. 25. Kafana has been the central spot for informal socializing, communication and entertainment in rural, semi-urban and urban communities, from the nineteenth century onwards (see more in Hofman 2010: 155). 26. Teresa Brennan puts forward the question of ‘atmosphere’ in her book Transmission of Affect. She points out that the very transmission of affect enables an environment/atmosphere to ‘overwhelm’ the individual (2004: 1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archive Sources Archives of Yugoslavia, Savez komunista Jugoslavije, records: 475, Peti kongres Saveza muzičkih umetnika 5–7.11.1965.

Works Cited Bockman, Johanna (2011). Markets in the name of socialism: The left-wing origins of Neoliberalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boyer, Dominic (2003). Censorship as a vocation: The institutions, practices, and cultural logic of media control in the German Democratic Republic. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(3), 511–545. Brennan, Teresa (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Broz Tito, Josip (1977). Radnička klasa i Savez komunista Jugoslavije. Sarajevo: Svjetlost. Burt, Richard (Ed.) (1994). The administration of aesthetics: Censorship, political criticism and the public sphere (Cultural Politics 7). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith (1998). Ruled out: Vocabularies of the censor. In Robert C. Post, Gett (Eds.), Censorship and silencing: Practices of cultural regulation (pp. 247–259). Los Angeles: Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Čolović, Ivan (1993). Bordel ratnika. Beograd: Slovograf. Čolović, Ivan, Kultura i politika u Srbiji, http://www.google.si/url?sa= t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&ved=0CFgQFjAIOAo&url= http%3A%2F%2Fwww.balkansehara.com%2Fimages%2Fslikenc% 2FIvanColovic%2FKultura%2520i%2520politika%2520u%2520Srbiji. doc&ei=_rVmUf_PPMTZ4QSeoICYDA&usg=AFQjCNE4a7ZkxEk OZNNwqfRuGTwGRUBZA&sig2=uzsC7VVjR19O3vdQG3 K7Kw&bvm=bv.45107431,d.bGE Čvoro, Uroš (2014). Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia. Burlington: Ashgate. Dragićević-Šešić, Milena (1994). Neofolk kultura. Publika i njene zvezde. Sremski Karlovci, Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića. Dražen Matošec (1987). ‘Muzičke legende: Bojan Adamič—Mitraljezac sa dirigentskom palicom’, Studio. http://yugopapir.blogspot.co.at/2012/10/ muzicke-legende-bojan-adamic.html Đogo, Gojko (1990). Književna kritika, 3–4, 20–23. Estrada—Year I, October 1963; Year IV, December 1968 Fish, Stanley (1994). There’s no such thing as free speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gavarić Dragoljub (1973). Kulturna delatnost bez kulturne politike (Kultura 23). Beograd: Zavod za proučavanje kulturnog razvitka. Golubović, Zagorka (1990). O samoupravnoj cenzuri. Književna kritika, 3–4, 23–24. Grbelja, Josip (1998). Cenzura u hrvatskom novinstvu: 1945.–1990. Zagreb: Jurčić. Grujić, Marija (2009). Community and the popular: Women, nation and Turbofolk in Post-Yugoslav Serbia. Budapest: Central European University, PhD dissertation.

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Hardt, Michael (2010). The common in communism. In Slavoj Žižek & Costas Douzinas (Eds.), The idea of communism (pp. 131–144). London: Verso. Hearn, Kirsten (1988). Exclusion is censorship. In Gail Chester and Julienne Dickey (Eds.), Feminism and censorship. The current debate (pp. 212–217). Bridport: Prism P, Dorset. Hofman, Ana (2010). Kafana singers: Popular music, gender and subjectivity in the cultural space of socialist Yugoslavia. Narodna umjetnost, 47(1), 141–161. Hofman, Ana (2012). Lepa-Brena: Re/politization of musical memories on Yugoslavia. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta, 60(1), 21–32. Hofman, Ana (2015). Music (as) labour: Professional musicianship, affective labour and gender in socialist Yugoslavia. Ethnomusicology Forum, 24(1), 28–50. Holquist, Michael (1994). Corrupt originals: The paradox of censorship, PMLA, 14–25. Ivanović, Stanoje (1973). Narodna muzika između folklora i kulture masovnog društva. Kultura, 23, 166–196. Jansen, Sue Curry (1991). Censorship: The knot that binds power and knowledge. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kešetović, Želimir (1998). Cenzura u Srbiji. Beograd: Zadužbina Andrejević. Kos, Koraljka (1972). New dimensions in folk music: A contribution to the study of musical tastes in Contemporary Yugoslav Society. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 3 (1), 61–73. Levine, Michael G. (1994). Writing through repression. Literature, censorship, psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Lopušina, Marko (1991). Crna knjiga: cenzura u Jugoslaviji 1945–91. Beograd: Fokus. Lučić-Teodosić Ivana (2002). Od trokinga do tvista. Igranke u Beogradu 1945-1963. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar. Mišina, Dalibor (2013). Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav rock music and the poetics of social critique. Ashgate: Farnham-Burlington. Müller, Beate (2003). Censorship and cultural regulation: Mapping the territory. Critical Studies, 31, 1–31. Naumović, Slobodan (1996). Identity creator in identity crisis: Reflections on the politics of Serbian ethnology. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 8(2), 39–128. Naumović, Slobodan (2008). Brief encounters, dangerous liaisons and neverending Stories: The politics of serbian ethnology and anthropology in the interesting times of Yugoslav socialism. In Vintila Mihailescu, Ilia Iliev, Slobodan Naumović (Eds.), Studying people in the people’s democracies II, socialist era anthropology in South East Europe (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Vol. 17) (pp. 211–260). Berlin: LIT Verlag. Opća enciklopedija. Zagreb, Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod 1977, vol. 2.

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Paraščić, Ivan (2007). Cenzura u Jugoslaviji od 1945. do 1990. godine, (PhD thesis). Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet. Pettan, Svanibor (1998). Music and Censorship in ex-Yugoslavia—Some views from Croatia. Paper presented at the 1st Freemuse World konferenciji in Copenhagen, 20–22 November 1998 (http://www.freemuse.org/sw26648.asp). Ramet, Sabrina P. (1994). Shake, rattle and self-management: Making the scene in yugoslavia. In Sabrina P. Ramet (Ed.), Rocking the state. Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 103–132). Boulder: Westview Press. Ramet, Sabrina P. (1999). Balkan Babel: The disintegration of Yugoslavia from the death of tito to the war of Kosovo. Boulder, Oxford: Westview Press. Stojičić, Đoko (1973). Radnička klasa i kultura. Kultura, 23, 214–220. Tanović, Arif (1974). Stvaralaštvo i sloboda (Tribina X kongresa). Kultura, 24, 190–193. Vidić Rasmussen, Ljerka (2002). Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York – London: Routledge. Vučetić, Radina (2009). Džez je sloboda: džez kao američko propagandno oružje u Jugoslaviji. Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, XVI(3), 81–101. Vučetić, Radina (2011). Između avangarde i cenzure. Tito i umetnost šezdesetih. In Olga Manojlović-Pintar (Ed.), Tito – viđenja i tumačenja (pp. 684–706). Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije. Vuletić, Dean (2008). Generation number one: Politics and popular music in yugoslavia in the 1950s. Nationalities Papers, 36(5), 861–879. Vuletić, Dean (2010). Yugoslav communism and the power of popular music (PhD thesis). New York: Columbia University. Ana Hofman works as a research fellow at the Institute of Cultural and Memory Studies of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana, and is a lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities of University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Her research concerns music and sound in socialism and post-socialism, gender, memory politics, applied ethnomusicology, all related to former Yugoslavia. She has published a number of articles and book chapters related to music and politics in socialist Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav societies. In 2011 she published the book Staging socialist femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (Balkan Studies Series, Brill Publishing). In 2015 she published a book about the afterlife of partisan songs in Slovenia, Music, Politics, Affect: Afterlife of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (ZRC SAZU).

CHAPTER 8

‘The Second Golden Age’: Popular Music Journalism during the Late Socialist Era of Hungary Zsófia Réti

The popular music public sphere of the late 1970s and mid-1980s in Hungary may be best described through the eyes of those who were witness to its rise and decay. The following two quotes, although depicting reality from very different perspectives, have one thing in common. Their stances are equally founded on the idea of a ‘silver age’, that the classic days of popular youth music (and of very visible state control) are long gone. Levente Szörényi, leader of the band Illés, a pioneer of Hungarian beat music from the 1960s, expressed his bitterness concerning the multiplication of musical genres, which he perceived as a visible decline in comparison with the revolutionary strength of youth culture in the 1960s, when beat was at its peak:1 ‘The difference is that the breakthrough of the youth in the sixties was of a societal scale. The changes today are genre questions at best’ (Sebők 1978a: 28). The second quote by Péter Erdős, ‘the Pop Caesar’, the best known and feared popular music manager of the Hungarian Record Manufacturing

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Company, was ironically published in the first (and last) issue of a magazine titled Pop Panorama, which was later destroyed due to ‘ideological and taste issues’.2 ‘We must acknowledge that today’s freedoms are the results of yesterday’s temperance, and the even greater freedoms of our tomorrow will be measured against our wits and sense of reality today. Last year, for example, many things were allowed to be published that would have been unimaginable earlier on, but that doesn’t qualify those who had said no previously’ (Csontos 1986). As a mild apology for ‘those who had said no previously’, he presents a narrative of the gradual loosening of top-down limitations in the Hungarian popular music industry. In the light of these two interpretations of the situation of popular music, the present chapter aims to analyse how popular music journalism functioned in Hungary in the late socialist period. It argues that although state control determined many aspects of writing about popular music— just as it did in most areas of the public sphere—a well-functioning and dynamic popular music journalism network still came to life by the early 1970s. In order to support this claim, first the already available literature on popular music journalism during the Kádár-era will be briefly reviewed, and the limitations and possibilities of the ‘really (non-)existing popular music journalism’ in Hungary will be examined. The research combines quantitative and qualitative approaches on the one hand, by analysing the press bibliography of Hungarian popular music from 1945 to 1975 recently collected by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Musicology, and on the other hand, by archival research of the relevant magazines from 1975 to 1989, and by comparing these results to the contemporary reports of the Hungarian Communist Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department and the memoirs of popular music journalists.

PRELIMINARY NOTES But prior to that, it is expedient to add two preliminary notes on the topic. First, Hungary’s cultural policy during its state socialist period was very nuanced and multi-layered. Popularised by György Aczél, the principle of 3T (tiltás, tűrés, támogatás—banning, tolerating or supporting) was in line with János Kádár’s credo (‘who is not against us is with us’). During this practice, as dictatorship softened, so did the range of tolerated pieces widen with a decrease in explicitly banned or supported authors or pieces. By the 1980s, the majority of popular music belonged to the tolerated category. Besides, classification was always short term: it was possible to

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move between categories, for instance from tolerated to supported, just as the bands Illés and Piramis did in the 1960s and 1970s respectively (Csatári 2015: 40). Second, to elaborate a little on the term ‘really (non-)existing popular music journalism’: When György Czippán, iconic popular music journalist of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was asked about the rock journalism of the Kádár-era in a 2013 interview, he gave an interesting response: Interviewer: What was rock journalism like in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Czippán: There was none. It was only called that subsequently; at those times, no one specialized in that. Writers wrote articles in all the other fields too; actually they were all just outside workers in this topic. And yes, some guys with a degree, who had a gift for it and liked music, they also wrote (Bálint 2013).

Czippán’s seemingly controversial insight, although with different undertones, is shared by most authors discussing the era. Imre Wilpert, popular music editor of Világ Ifjúsága, also touched upon this issue in his memoir (Wilpert 2008), as it is reflected by his fellow journalist from Ifjúsági Magazin, Tibor Csontos: ‘Wilpert, however, mentions the pop journalists too, and says that he still can’t protect them. “I could barely find anyone among the pop writers of the age, who had the faintest idea about music as such”, he writes. The ex-pop manager with a teacher’s degree, that is, who, as an aesthetics major, worked his way into the Institute of Musical Science, although he never played any instrument’ (Csontos 2008). True, popular music journalism in the Kádár-era was certainly missing much of the institutional background that was both available and mandatory for all the other branches of journalism. There were no special schools training music journalists, popular or otherwise, there was no organised popular music journalist trainee programme as opposed to the state controlled general (political) journalist traineeship, which was under the direct jurisdiction of the Agitation and Propaganda Department.3 Technically, it would have meant that the same kind of top-down critique and the same guidelines from the state could not be applied to popular music journalism, similarly to how popular music was not necessarily regarded as a form of ‘serious’ art, and hence, was slightly outside official art policies.4 In practice, though, popular music journalism in the 1970s and 1980s still notoriously transgressed the boundaries set by the regime.

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THE GOLDEN AGE—HUNGARIAN POPULAR MUSIC JOURNALISM BEFORE 1972 János Sebők, one of the most prominent popular music journalists of the era nostalgically evokes the period between 1977 and 1982 as a ‘second golden age’ of music journalism (Sebők n.d.). But first, in order to give shape to this second golden age, the story of the first one, beat and beat journalism, is reviewed. Approximately 20 years after the birth of youth culture in the West (ca. 1945), a cultural tendency that is exclusively characteristic of the young people was also created in Hungary. Before that, as novelist Colin MacInnes puts it, ‘you were just an overgrown boy, or an undergrown man, life didn’t seem to cater for anything whatever else between’ (MacInnes 1961: 21). In Hungary, the birth of youth culture can be dated to the early 1960s, when, on the one hand the three first major beat bands were founded: Metro in 1960, Omega in 1962 and Illés, which gained its final form in 1964 (after having operated as a family band since 1957). Besides this, another key event occurred: the first issue of Ifjúsági Magazin (Youth Magazine) made its way to the newsstands in the autumn of 1965.5 Parallel to the first pieces of criticism and direct state control towards the pioneering beat bands,6 popular music journalism was also strictly and frequently checked upon. If one looks at the reports for the Agitation and Propaganda Department, it can be seen that the committee tabled the issue of youth press and evaluated various youth periodicals quite regularly, altogether three times7 from 1965 to 1972—acknowledging their efforts, but strongly criticising them, mostly for their ‘outdated strive for extremity, which is, for example, manifested in the exaggerated and unreflected popularisation of beat, dance bands in general and other evanescent and changing fashion phenomena’ (HU-MOL M-KS 28841/186). After 1972 though, the next instance when the problem of youth press appeared as an official point in Agitation and Propaganda Department meetings was only in 1984 as part of a general report on the print press, which concluded that a new popular music journal needed to be created (HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/428). However, its tone was not at all critical (not even evaluative) towards youth press—as opposed to the previous reports. The only work so far to exclusively discuss the history of popular music journalism in Hungary also stops the analysis in 1972, because ‘after 1972 (up to 1989) there were no such pronounced turns in the reception of

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popular music in the youth press of the Kádárian Hungary as in the first 15 years’ (Ignácz 2013: 9).8 Although Ignácz deliberately focuses on youth magazines in relation to popular music journalism, he covers all the available resources. As a general statement it can be said that the main forums of popular music journalism during the Kádár-era—before or after 1972 alike—were the three major nationwide youth magazines: Magyar Ifjúság (Hungarian Youth), Ifjúsági Magazin (Youth Magazine) and Világ Ifjúsága (Youth of the World).9 Apart from these, a frequent medium of texts about popular music was the Budapest-based cultural magazine Pesti Műsor (Pest Programme), founded in 1945, while in special cases other cultural periodicals—such as Kritika (Critique), Kultúra (Culture), Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature)—or the traditionally high culture focused Film-Színház-Muzsika (Film-Theatre-Music), also touched upon the topic of popular music. Ignácz constructs a narrative of gradual expansion of the popular music public sphere, where more and more articles focused on musical genres, and more popular music bands were included in the three major youth magazines, which were able to react ever faster to the changes in popular culture. He identifies a single fall back in this process, dated around 1969, when a temporary wave of restrictions threw back the evolution of popular music journalism. Ignácz traces back the source of decay to the Agitation and Propaganda Department, which explicitly criticised the abundance of dance music in the youth press—at the expense of folk and classical music. At the same time, it also condemned the magazines’ lack of criticism concerning the ‘long haired, bearded clowns’ (quoted by Ignácz 2013: 16). Bence Csatári, in-depth monographer of the Hungarian popular music landscape under the state socialist era also identifies the same point of rupture, although he places it at a slightly later date, to the early 1970s. As he explains: After the 1972 arrest of the economic mechanism by the Soviet Union, cultural reforms were also perceivably played down. ( . . . ) In popular music it coincided with the superannuation of the great generation, the members of which were more concerned with family formation and with making a living by the mid-seventies. ( . . . ) The magazine Világ Ifjúsága must have sensed the change of times and ceased its beat columns in October, 1971. Similarly, Ifjúsági Magazin did the same to its hit chart and reduced its pop columns. Magyar Ifjúság also joined the obligate changes: they suspended their column entitled ‘Ritmus’ (Rhythm). (Csatári 2015: 191–2)

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Fig. 8.1 The total number of popular music-related articles in the Hungarian youth press, 1964–1974 Adapted from the Hungarian popular music journalism database by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Quantitative data also supports these claims. Based on the bibliography of Hungarian popular music journalism from 1945 to 1975,10 it seems that there was a considerable fall back in popular music-related content of the three major youth magazines after 1969. As can be seen in Fig. 8.1, after exponential growth in the first four years, the overall number of popular music-related articles fell back to almost one-third of the previous rate. After locating the point of relapse, Ignácz concludes that the resetting experiment of 1969-1971 failed, and the youth press returned to the more and more commercialized popular music ( . . . ). Under special circumstances and with limitations notwithstanding, the Hungarian popular music press started to follow the path of western rock media around 1972 (Ignácz 2013: 17).

The present paper tells the story of those ‘special circumstances’—from 1973 to 1989.

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STATE CONTROL IN THE SILVER AGE—‘INEXPRESSIBLE BOUNDARIES THAT CAN BE NEVERTHELESS SENSED BY EVERY DECENT PERSON’ By 1973, beat music was already past its heyday. The singer-songwriter generation of the 1960s was well into their mid- to late-thirties by the end of the 1970s. From the revolutionaries and rebels they used to be, they turned into the representatives of the semi-formal institutions of popular music.11 Gradually, a new kind of popular/youth culture, a new kind of music and a new kind of official attitude towards music became mainstream. However, in retrospect it is not easy to dissect the various genres and subgenres that co-existed, because by this period, the word beat started to function as an umbrella term, which, from the perspective of the state included the majority of popular music—with the exception of traditional dance music and operettas. At the same time, the terms rock and even punk started to gain a universal meaning.12 A very characteristic episode of the history of popular music at that time was the first ever official policy-related meeting between politicians, professional musicians and the state establishments responsible for popular music as late as in 1981. Dezső Tóth, undersecretary in the culture department suggested the followings: ‘I ask you to remain within those normally understood, yet officially inexpressible boundaries that can be nevertheless sensed by every decent person, and within which you can plentifully express what lives in each and every human being, in the youth’ (Szőnyei 2006). This approach demonstrates very well how the boundaries of public discourses were felt intuitively rather than expressed explicitly in the second half of Hungary’s state socialist period, but it also shows how those in power required more and more cooperation and feedback from the journalist and musician community.13 Naturally, the presence of invisible boundaries contributed to the development of the very successful method of self-censorship.14 This is a general characteristic of the entire era, and is true for all the segments of the public sphere, not exclusively the popular music-related part. However, those ‘normally understood, yet officially inexpressible boundaries’, in addition to being unspeakable, offered no stability either. Although it would be easy to picture a linearly expanding popular music (or any other) public sphere from 1957 onward, or from the 1969–1971 fall back, by turning around Erdős’s phrase from the motto, many things were allowed to be published that would have been unimaginable later

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160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 19731974 197519761977197819791980 1981198219831984 19851986198719881989 Popular music content

Fig. 8.2

Number of pages

Popular music content in Ifjúsági Magazin, 1973–1989

on. The mid-1980s for instance, saw a very visible relapse both in the spectrum and quantity of popular music-related content in the youth media. Fig. 8.2, for instance, shows a very severe reduction in the amount of pop music content in Ifjúsági Magazin after 1982, with the nadir in 1984. This turn coincides with two important events in the life of the magazine’s popular music columns. First, Péter Tardos, permanent author of the column Beat—Pop—Rock, and then Popföldről jelentem (Reporting from Pop-land) died in October 1984. Second, in the summer of the same year, almost the entire popular music staff of the magazine was sacked (with the exception of Tardos), including György Czippán, deputy editor and author of many csöves15-related articles. Czippán remembers this era as one of relative freedom and very sharp boundaries: We were free to the extent anyone could be free at those times. Of course, there were boundaries. In 1984 for instance, I and the entire crew were fired with the cause that we taint young people. We arouse, they said, thoughts that are harmful to them, since we popularise the csöves and punk phenomena. [ . . . ] We wrote about these phenomena and our sales immediately tripled. (Bálint 2013)16

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After the changes in personnel, Ifjúsági Magazin moved on with an almost entirely new team, including László B. Tóth, the popular music editor of Petőfi Rádió’s cult show, Poptarisznya (Pop haversack). The change was perceptible, even for the readers: instead of the scandalous csöves-reports, the readers now got a well-groomed, uneventful pop column. János Sebők summed up the situation in the November 1985 issue of the magazine: ‘during the last few years, youth press dealt a lot more with rock music, showed more awareness of the topic, reacted to the events in a more up to date manner, introduced new stars month after month, featured longer interviews showing conflicting views. Nowadays, pop life as it is mirrored in the press is not very interesting: the characters are missing, so are the posters of the favourites’ (Sebők 1985: 47). The previously mentioned 1986 case of the smashed Pop-panoráma also illustrates the same point: a sudden tightening of boundaries in the mid-1980s.17 Although, as the short-lived new magazine itself called attention to it, this new-found ‘return to decency’ in Hungary coincided with a new wave of conservativism in the USA: in 1985, the Parental Music Resource Center (PMRC) was founded by the wives of both Republican and Democrat politicians, seeking to introduce stronger control and Parental Advisory stickers on song lyrics that featured drugs, violence or sexually provocative and/or suggestive lines. Another characteristic feature of the late 1970s through the mid1980s’ public sphere is an omnipresence of social criticism. Although it was in fact, to a certain extent, always encouraged during the Kádár-era, the golden rule was to avoid a number of taboo topics and the critique of the system’s very foundations. However, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw an impressive amount of works that, through the critique of a certain subsystem, and within a certain topical segment of the public sphere, questioned the entire basis of the regime. This idea may be well illustrated by contrasting two articles from Ifjúsági Magazin. Both of them apply a kind of popular music-related social focus in relation to the noise young people make, yet they do it with very different undertones. The first one, Csendet kérünk (Silence, Please!) by Julianna R. Székely, was published in September, 1973 (R. Székely 1973). The report focuses on urban communities where retired people and children are frightened and frustrated by teens listening to music too loudly. Solely for the purposes of illustration, here’s how the narrative starts to unfold: ‘Auntie Annus from Izabella Street probably knows the all-time British Top 10 chart by heart. She just shakes her head in despair,

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the poor thing, and tries to explain the obvious: that she can perfectly hear the five Jackson brothers singing from the neighbouring flat’ (R. Székely 1973: 21). Only five years later, Ifjúsági Magazin presented an entirely different approach towards the noise young people made. In a 1978 article titled Miért üvöltesz? (Why Are You Screaming?), János Sebők elaborates on the (not so) new phenomenon of hysterical behaviour at rock concerts (Sebők 1978b). In a nuanced report on the situation, he argued that a generation shift in popular music, as well as a general social discontent in young people, caused this situation. Although he includes readers’ letters from members of the older generation who blame the young csöves people for ‘tainting the decent youth who still listen to proper music’, the final conclusion is the following: Similarly to religion, popular music is a substitute, an escape route for them. They are escaping from something. This is not only about forgetting their everyday, unresolved problems but also a forum where they can belong, they can feel good. It is without doubt that popular music is not the real forum. But, as the youngsters put it, there is nothing else in its stead (Sebők 1978b: 7).

This is how a popular music phenomenon becomes a forum for allpervading social critique, which also means that such a portrayal of the events was certainly disapproved by those in power—yet, the late 70s and early 80s were witness to an impressive amount of csöves—and later on punk-related articles, especially in Ifjúsági Magazin. Interestingly, these texts were almost without exception based on the idea that ‘popular music is a lymph node in the body of the society, which signals by swelling that there are some anomalies in the body’ (Sebők 1979: 27). To put it briefly, the difference between R. Székely’s and Sebők’s interpretation of youth culture is that R. Székely, with her sympathies unambiguously lying with the elderly sufferers, seeks to appeal to feelings of compassion and propriety in young people, while Sebők tries to analyse youth deviances as symptoms of societal diseases. By the 1980s, another characteristic feature of Hungarian public spheres and socialist ideology emerged—especially in terms of popular entertainment. From the 1950s, ideology in Hungary had made a great journey, consolidating into a cultural system that is much closer to either tradition or common sense than to ideology as an external, false consciousness. This is to say that ideology by the late Kádár-era was rather presented as a source of taken-for-granted behavioural patterns that was

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not directly originated from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party or the Soviet Union. Instead, although practically no one meant or believed ideology literally, it was still treated as common ground, doxa in the Bourdieusian sense, a ‘measure of normalcy’, so to say.18 As a result of the blurred boundaries between implicit ideology and tradition or common sense, a new scenario became visible in popular music journalism. Issues that could have been (and on other forums were in fact) approached from a clearly ideological perspective, were often played out as questions of good taste or social order in the field of popular music journalism. To put it in a slightly different way, by the late 1970s, ’socialist morale’, the top-down encouragement of hypocrisy and philistinism on a societal scale, to a large extent coincided with the generational oppositions that by definition occur between the older and younger members of society. Young people and the always already counterculture and rebelmusic they were creating was equally remote for the representatives of state cultural policies and middle-aged members of the society. A very illustrative example of this phenomenon is the memorable debate on the issue of ‘Piramis-brigád’ in Ifjúsági Magazin, which went on for more than half a year in 1979 (Sebők 1979: 10). The discussion was started apropos some fan letters to the band Piramis, claiming that they named their brigade after members of the group. The author of the first, keynote article, János Sebők raises the following questions: Since this article was written to generate debate, we only raise a number of sudden questions here. Why do high school kids decorate their school corridors with the posters of pop stars, where historical figures, art reproductions used to hang? [ . . . ] Why can girls hoe better under the name of Sándor Révész than János Lékay?19 Would it all mean that a grand majority of young people have lost their old imprinting, their thought schemes, that there are no more taboo topics? Or is it a change in the earlier idols, traditions, societal norms, habits in one particular group of young people? (Sebők 1979: 11)

After the keynote, the debate lasted for more than half a year, and was finally brought to a halt in the January of 1980. Throughout the discussion, the initial problem of changing role models was presented as a symptom for a wide range of social critique: an inherited, second-degree revolt of the youth, the shallowness of history education, the excess spare time modern technology caused, whereas the csöves-issue, while of course a problem of public safety, education policies, youth policies, was most of all

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a question of ideological deficiency. In theory, communist ideology would prevent the birth of such a counterculture. The hopelessness and the vacuum that generated the whole situation should not have been present in a socialist society. Yet, these ‘hobos’ were living proof of the abyss between ideology and reality. With the Piramis-brigád debate, the problem, which was rooted in a cognitive dissonance between socialist ideas and realities, was presented as a multilayered issue that would occur in any normally functioning society: ideological turned generational rhetoric.

‘YOU WERE

A

COMMIE TOO, SWEETHEART’: BEYOND STATE CONTROL

As should be apparent by now, the state cast quite an impressive shadow on Hungary’s popular music journalism in the 1970s–80s, as well as earlier. Yet, within the ‘inexpressible boundaries’, a mostly regularly functioning popular music public sphere was flourishing. As Norbert Vass argues in connection with the representation of the Hungarian punk movement in youth magazines, the aesthetics of punk for instance, were first introduced to the Hungarian audience by the popular music journalists, who, of course, were employed and paid by the KISZ (Hungarian Young Communist League). He concludes that ‘although there might have been mood-boosting distortions and exaggerations [ . . . ], in general, they were not bad-willed. If they judge, they do it by their personal musical tastes’ (Vass 2012). Within the limitations of the mild dictatorship, popular music journalists were in fact gatekeepers for any new (mostly western) trend. Although popular music journalism was (and still is) a closed world in itself, inside it functioned as a network, which, in network science terms could be described as a small world: with a limited number of very central nodes (characters), a lot of diverse connections, where even actors on the farthest edges of the network could reach each other through just a few people. In the popular music journalism of the Kádár-era, everyone was connected, and the most central nodes, the legendary personalities of popular music journalism were easily recognised by their intermediary nature: they worked in more than one medium, either in a consecutive or a parallel fashion. The majority of these central, most-connected nodes, the most prominent journalists, have already been mentioned here: János Sebők, Péter Tardos,

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György Czippán, László B. Tóth. János Sebők for instance, in the early 1980s, published regularly in Ifjúsági Magazin and Világ Ifjúsága, but his work was also allowed to appear in Kritika as a response to Péter Erdős’s pamphlet in 1983. As someone responsible for most of the popular musicrelated scandals that happened on the pages of Ifjúsági Magazin, he was one of the most well-known popular music journalists—for readers and popular musicians alike. Similarly, Péter Tardos, first a comedian, then a songwriter, musical editor of Hungarian Radio’s shows Csak fiataloknak (Only for the Young) and Tánczenei koktél (Dance Music Cocktail), columnist of Pesti Műsor and later on Ifjúsági Magazin, also participated in the creation of music-themed TV shows. He was very visible in all media that had anything to do with popular music. In addition, György Komjáthy, editor of numerous youth music sessions on the Hungarian Radio, and who occasionally invited experts in all of the youth magazines, was unambiguously one of the most central nodes in Hungarian popular music journalism in the late Kádár-era. Due to his ambivalent position, László Cseke (Géza Ekecs), music editor of Radio Free Europe’s Teenager Party, also had a special role in the network of popular music journalism. He or his show was rarely mentioned in official print; however, Cseke did review all the popular music content from a semi-outsider’s perspective,20 and Hungarian popular music journalists were anxious to hear his verdict. In this sense, Cseke played an officially not admitted, yet focal role among popular music journalists. Recent works on the conditions of present day music journalism in Hungary frequently complain that state control over popular music journalism in the Kádár-era made it impossible for any kind of substantive critique to be born, let alone the language that would have been required for such acts (Tófalvy 2009). Still, the 1970s and 1980s saw the publication of more than two dozen popular music-related books about Hungarian and international subject matters. The first one of its kind, Beat kislexikon (The Little Cyclopedia of Beat) by Péter Tardos, was published as early as 1971, and over the coming two decades, most of the illustrious popular music journalists had two or three such volumes in their portfolio.21 This phenomenon can be, on the one hand, explained by the peculiarities of the print press under the Kádár-era (in some respects, it was easier to get a book published than a periodical), and on the other hand, partly related to that, it also illustrates a very special medial situation where documentary books had a wide-ranging popularity and persuasive power.

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The most interesting feature of this very self-contained segment of the public sphere—that of popular music—only becomes visible in retrospect. It is no novelty—and with some irony it might be regarded as a basis for each and every really existing communism—that personal distaste and opposition is often played out as ideological. What has radically changed since 1989 is not this fact, but the direction of the ideology in question. What used to be the threatening menace of fascism for the Kádár-era, smoothly transitioned into the shadow of communist ideology, which, as a strong charge in an era of alleged self-cleansing and tabula rasa, could be cast upon basically anyone who was an adult before 1989. In his novel ROM—A komonizmus története (ROM/Ruin—The history of commonism) the poet and writer Endre Kukorelly makes an ambivalent statement concerning the complicity of people, especially that of clerks and the creative class under communism: ‘And now, I would like to present the (for me just as) frightening theorem that above a certain standard, but do tell me if I’m wrong, you were a commie too, sweetheart’ (Kukorelly 2006: 44).22 To illustrate this point, two debates will be briefly compared: one from 1983, the infamous szennyhullám (filth wave) debate between Péter Erdős and János Sebők, and the second one the already quoted Wilpert-Csontos skirmish after the publication of Wilpert’s memoirs in 2008. Regarding the relationship of Erdős and Sebők, György Czippán shares a very telling memory: ‘At that time, László Harsányi was the head of the KISZ’s Cultural Department. Later on he told me—I didn’t know it back then—that Erdős denounced me every week; he had a separate cupboard to collect the papers. Not only me, but also János Sebők, who was his great favourite.’ (Bálint 2013). In 1983, their mutual dislike peaked in the so-called ‘filth wave’ debate. Erdős wrote an article about the Hungarian punk phenomenon, apropos of a song by the punk group Cpg, which happened to address the Pop Caesar himself in a very pejorative manner. Instead of blaming the group of youngsters, Erdős accuses the gatekeeper, János Sebők for publicising such actions and makes an attempt to establish a legitimate link between punk, fascism, terrorism and János Sebők personally; arguing that he deliberately popularises fascist views: Let me illuminate this with an example. A true gem. In the pilot issue of a planned youth magazine named Poptika, a two-page article was published about David Bowie, ancestor of punk, who praises terrorism. His bio can be

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found in any rock lexicon; yet, the author felt it necessary to mention that he used Gergely Molnár’s 1977 slide show presentation about the same topic. (Erdős 1984)

The very same Molnár, he goes on, was a member of the group Spions and moved abroad ‘after he caused public outrage and disgust by his vulgar and rude song that was an offence to Anne Frank’s memory’ (Erdős 1984). He concludes that those who live in the very narrow social stratum that was affected by the punk phenomenon will probably get the hint about Gergely Molnár and will gain strength and a sense of direction from such an article. Therefore, from the safety of a classical Kádárian position of power, Erdős indirectly condemns Sebők for spreading fascist views.23 Later on, Sebők responds in a cool, rational manner in the same paper, demonstrating how the arguments Erdős presents are invalid. In this case, however, the emphasis is on Erdős’s charges against the journalist. As a contrast, Tibor Csontos’s review of Imre Wilpert’s memoir shows an entirely different picture. The case of Erdős and Sebők can be regarded as a rather ordinary situation, where the Pop Caesar, the person in power, closer to the state standpoint keenly attacks the journalist who supports (barely) tolerated and banned ideas. Wilpert and Csontos were in a somewhat similar relationship, yet the outcomes could not be more different. Imre Wilpert was both the musical editor of the magazine Világ Ifjúsága and second in command after Péter Erdős on the head of the Hungaroton’s pop-rock division, while Tibor Csontos worked as a journalist for Ifjúsági Magazin. Still, what Wilpert seems to criticise is the direct dependence of popular music journalists from KISZ: Magyar Ifjúság, Ifjúsági Magazin and Világ Ifjúsága were all under the control of the KISZ Central Committee; the young titans of popular music press were practically the subordinates of KISZ, received their salaries from them and had to comply with the KISZ guidelines (Wilpert 2008, quoted by Csontos 2008).

Csontos replies by recalling that Wilpert was in fact an editor and manager of the Hungarian Record Manufacturing Company (MHV), which completely and uncritically put through the Party’s cultural policy, and who also received his salary from a socialist state company. He evokes how Ifjúsági Magazin was the only one to report on the ‘Black Sheep’, the banned musicians of the late 1970s (such as Beatrice, P. Mobil, Hobo

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Blues Band), that the magazine promoted punk and new wave, and that they also critiqued the MHV’s LP publishing policies—with KISZ financial support. What is happening here is not unusual in any post-communist public sphere: due to unavoidable participation in the Kádárian public sphere, debate partners can be mutually discredited by hinting at their various levels of involvement with the state and the party. Once again, Endre Kukorelly wittily remarks, that: . . . my poems that were published back then, independently of whether they were good or bad, legitimated the system. I remember legitimating it. I legitimated it by, firstly writing, then submitting it to a paper, and I was happy when it was accepted, and joyful, when it was published. I even got paid for that (Kukorelly 2006: 18).

From the rather clear opposition of Erdős and Sebők, we have moved to a scenario where the representatives of Kádárian popular music journalism, like pieces of a collapsed puzzle, intermingle and are presented from a very different perspective.

A FOOTNOTE

ON THE

LATE KÁDÁRIAN PUBLIC SPHERE

Finally, the journalist András Domány’s remark from 1980, which gives a very accurate summary of the Kádárian public sphere, is evoked. He said that, ‘everything’s fine with mass communication until everything’s fine’. It is believed that this also applies to popular music journalism in particular. Some of the popular music journalists worked in order to assure that ‘everything’s fine’. Others sought to cause trouble and hence to make the inexplicable boundaries visible. What can be interpreted as an act of heroism from one side is easily regarded as an example of shameful cooperation with the ‘system’ from the other. What is missing is a zone of toleration and tolerance. The ‘middle T’ in toleration, as the in-between state of Kádárian cultural policy, seems to have disappeared from the Hungarian postcommunist public sphere. No self-narrations, memoirs or novels commemorate this feature, because it represents precisely what is not acceptable from the post-1989 perspective: the normalcy of the late Kádár-era. And tolerance, as in the acceptance of the fact that ‘you were a commie too, sweetheart’.

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ARCHIVAL RESOURCES HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/186.—Agitation and Propaganda Department, 1 August, 1972 HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/428.—Agitation and Propaganda Department, 12 June 1984. HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/467.—Agitation and Propaganda Department, 13 May, 1986.

NOTES 1. He was especially ironic about the ’generation shift’ from traditional beat music and his band Illés to new voices in rock, such as Piramis, the members of which were actually the same age as those of the Illés—around 33 when the interview was made. 2. As it is documented in the relevant report of the Agitation and Propaganda Department, ’comrade Katalin Radics orally notified the committee that a brochure entitled Pop-panorama 1986/1 was published by the Music Press Company in 80.000 copies. The still unsold 68.000 copies are destroyed due to ideological and taste issues. The permit of publication was for a book, and not a periodical.’ (HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/428) 3. For more detailed analysis of journalism in the late Kádár-era, cf. Hegedűs 2001. 4. In 1981, on the first open negotiation between the policymakers and the musicians, Ildikó Lendvai, Head of the KISZ Central Committee Cultural Department, gave the following warning to János Bródy, representative of musicians: ‘When we suggested to the cultural policymakers that it’s a kind of art that should be dealt with accordingly, ( . . . ) it doesn’t mean that you will be receiving attention in a way that the state and the cultural policy will embrace popular music as such. It may be even more adverse for popular music, because it would also mean that it receives the same kind of attention as any other kind of art, which entails the three T-s: support, tolerate, ban. And still I think that it would mean a kind of progress, because up until now, there was only toleration and ban regarding the great majority of the genre’ (Szőnyei 2006). 5. As opposed to Magyar Ifjúság, which targeted young people in general, from the age of 14 to 30, Ifjúsági Magazin was specifically meant to involve teenagers from age 14 to 18. 6. For a more detailed depiction of the state’s role in popular music under the Kádár-era, see Bence Csatári’s excellent monograph on the subject matter (Csatári 2015).

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7. Once in 1965, right after the founding of Ifjúsági Magazin, then in 1971, and finally in 1972. 8. Counted from 1957, the foundation of the first youth magazine, Magyar Ifjúság. 9. Although all three were under the jurisdiction of the Agitation and Propaganda Department, and all of them were published by the Hungarian Printing Press Company, their limitations and liberties were different – just as well as their popularity among young people. According to a poll/report conducted by Miklós Győrffy, senior fellow of the Hungarian Radio after the request of the critical journal Kortárs, the most popular one in 1986 was Világ Ifjúsága; the readers also liked Ifjúsági Magazin, but they did not really read Magyar Ifjúság because it consisted almost exclusively of politics (Győrffy 1986). 10. Here the notion of popular music is counted from the first appearances of beat in the youth press, which date back to 1964. 11. For example János Bródy, ex-Illés member, became the elected president of the popular music performers’ lobby by the 1980s. 12. Rock was gradually understood as anything within youth culture that is not the equally frowned upon disco, including a whole range of subgenres. At the same time, punk was often used as a fashionable synonym for freshness, playfulness and inventiveness in popular music. Lajos Som, leader of the band Piramis, complained in a 1978 interview: ’punk is spreading as a new trend and much can be described with it. Enough to say, that one of the ‘pop writers’ recently wrote that Szörényi and his band plays punk music in a good sense on their new record. Ridiculous. We must acknowledge that punk only happens under certain social conditions.’ (Sebők 1978a) 13. A very similar process happened in all the fields of journalism. For a detailed analysis, see Takács 2009. 14. While, however, this method resulted in a very metaphorical mode of writing in the literary public sphere, in the case of the popular music public sphere, self-censorship triggered the preference of certain topics over others. 15. A youth subculture of the late 1970s; mostly treated as a criminal, not a youth subculture issue. The term roughly means hobo, bum or dosser, and csöves people were often regarded as the forerunners and primary audience of the specifically Hungarian realisation of the punk movement. The term csöves remains untranslated as it conveys meanings that cannot be fully represented in English. Most often, the self-proclaimed csöves youth were fans of the rock band Piramis. 16. Truth be told, the last punk- or csöves-related article was published in the second half of 1982, and János Sebők, a major nuisance for many in power, could keep his job all along at Ifjúsági Magazin.

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17. The restrictions were not unique to the popular music public sphere. In 1983, the entire staff of the literary and cultural journal Mozgó Világ was removed, with an issue banned and smashed in, and in 1986, the Szegedbased literary journal Tiszatáj was banned for 6 months for publishing a poem by Gáspár Nagy about the 1956 revolution and the execution of Imre Nagy. Cf. Müller 2001. 18. Although Jürgen Habermas greeted the end of communism as a ’rectifying revolution’, by the late 1970s a consolidated, tamed and ‘pastiched’ ideology in Hungary mostly overlapped with what the older generations viewed as ’normalcy’. 19. Sándor Révész was the singer of the band Piramis, while János Lékay was an anarchist journalist, who (unsuccessfully) tried to assassinate prime minister István Tisza in 1918. 20. Radio Free Europe Hungary was transmitted from Munich, and later on from Portugal. 21. True, the majority of these works is rather documentary than analytical, rather chronicle than critical. It was only in 1984, that even the youth magazines included any music-based critique of new vinyl records. 22. In theory, the principle of 3T would grant that merely the fact of being published during the state socialist period would not necessarily imply complicity. In practice, however, the twilight zone of tolerated works and artists was so wide that the statement is still true in retrospect: after 1989, the tolerated segment seems to gradually fade away. 23. For a more detailed take on the topic, see József Havasréti’s analysis (Havasréti 2006: 51–59).

WORKS CITED Bálint, Csaba (2013). Czippán György interjú. http://passzio.hu/modules.php? name=News&file=article&sid=28825. Accessed 15 February 2016. Csatári, Bence (2015). Az ész a fontos, nem a haj. A Kádár-rendszer könnyűzenei politikája. Budapest: Jaffa. Csontos, Tibor (1986). Erdős Péter: Minden reformra szorul. Pop-panoráma, 1986/1, 27. Csontos, Tibor (2008). A felnevelt köldökzsinór, avagy egy popmenedzser emlékiratai. http://rimretro.hu/doc.php?id=1028. Accessed 15 February 2016. Erdős, Péter (2001[1984]) Felszólalás a szennyhullám ügyében. Kritika, 1984/3, http://www.zene.net/?type=20&id=1130. Accessed 15 February, 2016. Havasréti, József (2006). Alternatív regiszterek. Budapest: Typotex. Hegedűs, István (2001). Sajtó és irányítás a Kádár-korszak végén. Médiakutató, 2001/1, http://www.mediakutato.hu/cikk/2001_01_tavasz/04_sajto_es_ iranyitas. Accessed 15 February, 2016.

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Ignácz, Ádám (2013). A populáris zene megítélésének változásai a kádári Magyarország ifjúsági sajtójában—az első 15 év (1957–1972). Médiakutató 2013/4, 7–17. Kukorelly, Endre (2006). ROM—A komonizmus története. Budapest: Fapadoskönyv. MacInnes, Colin (1961). Absolute beginners. London: MacGibbonKee. Müller, Rolf (2001). A Tiszatáj-ügy állampárti dokumentációja. Kortárs, 2001/7. http://home.hu.inter.net/kortars/0107/muller.htm. Accessed 15 February 2016. R. Székely, Julianna (1973). Csendet kérünk!. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1973/9, 21–23. Sebők, János (1978a). Szörényi és a pofonok. Interjú Szörényi Leventével. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1978/4, 27–30. Sebők, János (1978). A Piramis-jelenség. Interjú Som Lajossal. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1978/7, 27–30. Sebők, János (1978b). Miért üvöltesz?. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1978/10, 5–7. Sebők, János (1979). Kell-e nekünk Piramis-brigád?. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1979/6, 10–11. Sebők. János (1985). A Titanic süllyed, a zenekar játszik tovább. Ifjúsági Magazin, 1985/11 47–49. Sebők, János (nd). Második aranykor | 1977–1982. http://rimretro.hu/doc.php? id=47. Accessed 15 February 2016. Szőnyei, Tamás (2006). M.U.Z.I.K. / Mélypince / Jegyzőkönyv. Politikai- és periratok. http://www.artpool.hu/muzik/melyjegy.html#1/C. Accessed 15 February 2016. Takács, Róbert (2009). A sajtóirányítás szervezete a Kádár-korszakban. Médiakutató, 2009/3, http://www.mediakutato.hu/cikk/2009_03_osz/ 07_sajtoiranyitas_kadar Accessed 15 February 2016. Tardos, Péter (1971). Beat kislexikon. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó. Tófalvy, Tamás (2009). Nincs és nem is volt—a magyar popzenei újságírás. Emasa, https://emasa.hu/cikk.php?id=5487. Accessed 15 February 2016. Vass, Norbert (2012). Boldog, szép napok Nirvániában. A megfigyelt, a láttatott és a magáról beszélő magyar punk. Kommentár, 2012/1. http://kommentar. info.hu/iras/2012_1/boldog_szep_napok_nirvaniaban. Accessed 15 February 2016. Wilpert, Imre (2008). Dübörög a basszus—Egy popmenedzser emlékiratai. Budapest: Duna International. Zsófia Réti is a literary and cultural critic. She majored in English and Hungarian Literature and Culture at the University of Debrecen in 2009, and in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in 2012. She wrote her PhD at the University of Debrecen on the popular culture of the 1980s in Hungary and its memory in the 2010s. Her research interests include

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post-socialism, post-colonialism, memory studies, nostalgia and popular culture. So far, she has published 11 scientific papers in Hungarian, mainly related to the popular culture of the 1980s. Her most recent papers (Az olvashatatlan nyolcvanas évek—The Unreadable Eighties and Eldalolni Kelet-Közép-Európát—Singing Central Eastern Europe) were published in the journals Prae and Szépirodalmi Figyelő.

CHAPTER 9

Youth Under Construction: The Generational Shifts in Popular Music Journalism in the Poland of the 1980s Klaudia Rachubi nska and Xawery Sta nczyk

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the many facets of Polish music journalism in the first half of the 1980s, the final decade of the People’s Republic of Poland, and its role in shaping Polish popular music. The common view of cultural production in the People’s Republic of Poland as a centralised, governmentally planned, consolidated political vision is opposed. Instead, it is argued that all sorts of individual and institutional actors (from entire magazines to particular critics, editors and journalists) participated in the production of the field of popular music. This article intends to examine a series of generational shifts that contributed to the reorganising of popular music journalism. In the early 1980s, large sections of editorial staff were replaced for political reasons. Many of those who remained aged rapidly: when confronted with the nascent music genres of the youth, they tried to impose their tastes as the national

K. Rachubi nska (*)
X. Sta nczyk Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Warszawa, Poland © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_9

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canon on their audience. Therefore, the tension between ‘artistically old’ and ‘artistically young’ journalists emerged as the dominant struggle contributing to the transformation of Polish popular music in the 1980s. This tension was reflected in many areas, such as the shifting significance of authenticity, expertise and professionalism, the growing popularity of some artists and genres and the decline of others, as well as the change in journalists’ attitudes towards the audience. To properly assess these changes, a comprehensive inquiry into the two most notable Polish music magazines of the time: Non Stop and Jazz. Magazyn Muzyczny has been conducted. By reading thoroughly all the issues from 1979 to 1984, patterns were identified, significant shifts of interests mapped, and authors’ and editors’ tactics and strategies for improving their positions in the field of popular music distinguished.

METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK In the discussion, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the field’, as presented in his book The Rules of Art (1995) is examined. The field is a relatively self-contained social system—in this case: the autonomous world of a particular section of cultural production (e.g. literature, visual arts, theatre). The field of cultural production is itself embedded in a broader subfield of power, which is, in turn, part of the social space. Due to their connection to the field of power, all particular fields are spaces of tensions and struggles between various actors who occupy different social positions and hold distinct (often contradictory) visions of the prescribed distribution of capital, both economic and symbolic. In the field of popular music, there are many kinds of actors who hold different positions and participate in the struggle on unequal terms: from artists and groups, through managers, promoters and cultural animators, to journalists. Their initial positions are determined by direct dependence on people of influence, but are subject to renegotiations due to the actors’ own actions and in accordance with other changes in the field’s dynamic. Bourdieu claims that there are two main instances that intercede between particular artists and the field (understood as a complex network of artists’ relations and interests) and result in the artists’ structural subjugation. The first instance is the market system, with its expectations and rewards, as well as art criticism and journalism. The second consists of the relationships between groups of authors and political factions, based on similarities of lifestyle and value systems (Bourdieu 1995: 49) and

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manifests itself through either censorship and pressures (direct and indirect) or through patronage, awards and praise. Both popular and academic literature concerning pop culture in the People’s Republic of Poland tend to concentrate mostly on the political aspect and exaggerate the influence on the field of music of factors such as censorship, the Security Service or the personal tastes of the Party leaders. In this chapter, however, the focus is on journalism, in order to present a more nuanced view of that era’s cultural production. In the intersection of the field of power and the particular artistic fields, the interests of authorities coincide with the interests of those who are prepared to grant them some influence in exchange for privileged status. Thus emerge the informal groups of ‘mild’ pressure that mediate between the state and the artists. The mediators are influential enough to represent the community, but not sufficiently influential to achieve an actual respectability among the wealthy. In the Poland of State Socialism, this duty was mostly performed by industry organisations, either state-controlled, grassroots or mediating between the two. An important type of interest group consists of the individuals possessing the double status of both critic and artist who: . . . set themselves up, in all innocence, as the measure of everything in art ( . . . ), thereby authorizing themselves to disparage everything that surpasses them and to condemn all initiatives which might question the ethical dispositions influencing their judgements and which above all express the limits and even the intellectual mutilations inscribed in their trajectory and their position (Bourdieu 1995: 52-53).

Through a process of autonomisation, the field gradually gains independence from immediate social and political factors and becomes a self-determined domain of cultural production. In this process, the field creates its own ‘market system’ which provides artists’ actions and attitudes with social acclaim. This especially applies to the provocative and transgressive actions which are aimed at more traditional tastes and conventions. The more autonomous the field, the more respected and valued within it are the gestures that either: invoke the particular values of the field (e.g. purely literary, purely musical), explicitly contradict the field of power and the socially dominant values or are manifestly indifferent. Through achieving higher positions within the field, the artist increases their distance from both the ruling class and the audience—the two sides

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against which their independence is measured. The process of achieving autonomy leads to the eventual triumph of the artist over the mass audience. Although the audience remains the potential buyer of artworks, they can never truly consume the acquired goods for their value is no longer subject to outside influences. When the value of art lies in a complexity and/or transgression so extreme that it is unable to achieve the audience’s approval, the artist’s creation becomes a sacrifice at the altar of art. Hence ‘an economic world turned upside down’ is born, in which ‘the artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain’ (Bourdieu 1995: 83). It is most often the young artists who, in the absence of the means to satisfy their aspirations, forge poverty into a virtue of self-denial in the name of art. The young underground musicians represent new genres and a lifestyle different from both the already highly regarded artists and the conservative ‘bourgeoisie’1. It is specifically the influx of youth who begin to form a musical underground, that contributes most to the field’s autonomisation. ‘It is not enough to say that the history of the field is the history of the struggle for a monopoly of the imposition of legitimate categories of perception and appreciation; it is in the very struggle that the history of the field is made; it is through struggles that it is temporalized,’ claimed Bourdieu (1995: 167). This struggle often assumes the form of creating names meant to distinguish new schools, styles and genres and inscribe them into a historical order in relation to earlier properties. This is an area especially enticing to the journalism sector, which is bent on building a popular music vernacular and creating its taxonomy. The greatest opportunity for advancement lay in the task of naming new music genres and tracing (or outright inventing) their genealogies. In Poland, the aim of this process was to validate the journalists’ own perceptions of noneconomic values and help create a dominant canon and lineage that would serve as a basis for future artists’ legitimisation. The struggles within the field lead to the splitting of genres into the avant-garde and commercial poles. Together with this differentiation the field becomes unified and polarised according to the axes common to all subfields. This regularity explains how collaborations of experimenting artists from different genres could be formed—as long as in their respective subfields they opposed ‘pandering to a mass audience’. A consequence of the basic opposition between ‘pure’ and ‘mass’ production is the secondary opposition between the avant-garde and the consecrated avant-garde (Bourdieu 1995: 121). These are usually split along the

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lines of artistic generations, often divided only by a few years. A small age difference is nonetheless enough to create a classification that motivates the claims of particular groups. The constantly accelerating frequency of aesthetic revolutions expresses the youth’s expectations of overtaking the dominant positions by portraying their seniors as dated. Consequently, revolution becomes the common model of change in the field. It creates two modes of ageing of cultural products and their producers. While the avant-garde artists are young twice over, due to both their aesthetic choices and the rejection of immediate profits that would accelerate their artistic ageing—the fossilised artists are doubly old because of the conventionality of their art and lifestyle, part of which is due to prompt success, both financial and symbolic (Bourdieu 1995: 150). This explains how people born in the same year can be of different artistic age, as well as how the biologically older can be artistically younger than the next generation if only they remain loyal to the cult of youth, with its spontaneity, innovation, distance and silliness. The artists who cannot comply with youths’ demands can either go down in history, or drop out of it. The acceleration of stylistic revolutions initiated by young underground artists to overthrow their consecrated seniors and claim the uppermost positions in the field is a telltale sign that order in the autonomous field has been established. The shaped field, although seemingly anarchistic, is compared by Bourdieu to ‘a sort of well-regulated ballet in which individuals and groups dance their own steps, always contrasting themselves with each other, sometimes clashing, sometimes dancing to the same tune, then turning their backs on each other in often explosive separations, and so on, up until the present time . . . ’ (Bourdieu 1995: 113). Such was the case with the popular music field in early 1980s Poland.

POPULAR MUSIC

IN

1980S POLAND

According to the prevailing narrative, Polish popular music in the 1980s was marked by two factors: one was simply its ‘boom’; the other was the ‘rebellious’ attitude of musicians towards the political regime, particularly in relation to censorship and the other repressive measures of martial law. This simplified perspective does not explain the transition that Polish popular music underwent in the early 1980s, nor does it allow the formation of a more comprehensive and precise interpretation than the common theories of either Zeitgeist and ‘public moods’ or a simplistic

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claim of musicians’ ‘rational’ reactions to socio-economic factors. Both the public moods (primarily comprised of the opinions held just by the most visible social group, rather than the public as a whole) as well as the political and economic pressures were not simply expressed in musical creativity, but were mediated by the dynamic of institutional configurations, different forms of capital, obtainable social positions, and the very possibility of occupying social positions, the expectations, aspirations, fashions, and styles that intertwined to distinguish the field of popular music from other forms of cultural activity. Therefore, while both the increasing popularity of rock music, as well as some effects of the implementation of martial law, influenced the music scene, their impact and mutual interactions were much more complex. For example, what contributed most to the popularity of rock music were the actions of the promoters of a stylistically diverse, yet commercially effective, project known as Muzyka Młodej Generacji (MMG, Music of the Young Generation) on the one hand, and the more grassroots emergence of punk music linked to the circles of young artistic Bohemia on the other. Although punk and MMG were in many respects different, they both originated in 1978 and over the next two years became important enough to attract the attention of the press and festival organisers. Likewise, the decomposition of the music and entertainment industries that occurred after 1981 coincided with a hasty staff replacement in state-owned institutions and enterprises. The ‘old’ staff members occupying managerial positions were suspended or dismissed and replaced by ‘younger’ (not necessarily in the biological sense) employees, who were more accepting of rock music. Because of the reconfiguration of the media, musicians who could not or did not want to enter the formal channels of music circulation began to successfully build an underground musical movement, effectively connected through the unofficial distribution of DIY zines and audio tapes. The only2 two nationwide popular music magazines of the time considered in this chapter, Non Stop (NS) and Jazz. Magazyn Muzyczny (JMM, eng. Jazz. The Music Magazine), have occupied particularly privileged positions. Their opinion-forming potential was derived from their connections to the music industry (NS) and their long-standing journalistic traditions (JMM). While it was the radio (and to a lesser extent, television) that had the greatest influence on audiences’ tastes and the popularity of songs, it was the magazines’ editors that formed the overarching narrative that not only described but also contributed to the

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formation of the Polish popular music scene in the 1970s and 80s. As the two main institutional actors of this sort, JMM and NS often employed contrasting policies and standpoints. Their attitudes towards the audience, opinions on particular artists and music genres, assessment of what was and what was not authentic, and even their ideas about the rules governing the western music market, all became areas of conflict at one time or another. And yet it is not as simple as assigning a particular point of view to either editorial staff, whose views and composition were diverse and dynamic. It seems that the divide was clear for both editorial teams, even though no line of demarcation was drawn and the range of common topics was surprisingly broad, with the main difference lying in language use and attitudes. The monthly, Jazz, was established in the 1950s as one of the first magazines dedicated entirely to jazz music in the Eastern bloc. At first, it was devoted primarily to popularising jazz, but in the 1960s and 70s it gradually broadened its interests to include pop and rock music. A decline in the popularity of jazz, in favour of other genres, in the second half of the 1970s coincided with an increased presence of columnists from the post-war generation (Wiesław Królikowski, Wiesław Weiss), and major changes in editorial staff. As a result of these shifts, with its first issue in 1980 the journal changed its name to Jazz. Music Magazine, then again next year, on its 25th anniversary, to Music Magazine. Jazz, to finally settle in 1984 on just Music Magazine. These name changes were accompanied by an important reassessment of dominant values. Although jazz, an avant-garde genre requiring a refined music taste, maintained its privileged status, the magazine’s continued existence depended on broadening the authors’ musical interests. This happened gradually and was at first perceived by the editorial staff as an unpleasant but necessary compromise. Taking an interest in youth music—first disco, then punk, new wave and new romantic—was seen as pandering to a lower taste and an unwanted form of commercialisation. From its inception in 1972, Non Stop positioned itself as a magazine specialising in the entertainment industry, focusing on the professional problems of the trade. Its older authors, the editor-in-chief Andrzej Tymczy nski, the regular columnist Lech Terpiłowski and the casual writer Andrzej ‘Ibis’ Wróblewski, were attached to the customary light entertainment songs ‘for community singing’, deriving from the pre-war tradition of variety shows and cabarets, sung poetry and ‘student music’, Italian pop and French chanson from the 1950s and 1960s (on this type of music, see

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also Ventsel in this collection). Other members and collaborators of the editorial staff preferred rock, with some of them being the main animators of rock music and its most current trends. What both factions had in common was the sense of contributing to the entertainment industry based on an active involvement in the organisation and production of music. In 1979, when NS began to promote the MMG, it only supported a new project of the music industry with the interests of which it identified: a project that clearly met the expectations of a young audience and was therefore potentially profitable.

PROFESSIONALS

AND

AMATEURS

The initial position of both NS and JMM in the field of popular music was defined primarily by their attitudes towards the audiences of popular music and their stance on professionalism. As these particular areas were especially connected to the values upheld by both editorial staffs, they turned out to be predictive of the magazines’ future positions in the field, as well as their artistic ageing. For the authors of JMM, the popular music audience was, for the most part, an ‘other’: a thoughtless, indiscriminate and ill-mannered youth in need of proper schooling from professional music critics. The journalists aspired to an objective and informative language, not for the difficulty of putting into words the impression music has on a person (the columnists scarcely expressed delight or admiration) but for the sake of educating the readers. Their rhetoric was structured around a basic opposition between ‘high’ culture (consisting of jazz and other interesting phenomena—from Gdynia’s musical theatre repertoire through Anglo-Saxon progressive rock to the local experimental music projects) on the one hand, and mass entertainment on the other. Consequently, anything that fell short of the authors’ excessive criteria of art was seen as being tainted with vulgarity. Professionalism was therefore either the domain of the educated and erudite music critic, or of a musically literate artist who, in his work, paid tribute to his most eminent predecessors. When these forms of creating a distance between the authors and the readers did not suffice, the editors of JMM turned to what they called a ‘sociological interest’, where the popular music audience itself became the object of judgemental scrutiny. This policy was laid out explicitly in the editorial of the second issue from 1981, which read: ‘We are also interested in the sociological approach towards musical production and its perception as well as the place music holds in the process of

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cultural education3’, n.n. 1981). This point was reiterated in 1983: ‘We are not interested in the musical fashions but in their sociological background, at best’, n.n. 1983). Due to its staff being more directly involved in the music business, NS had different ideas about both professionalism and the audience. Jean Michel Jarre and ABBA, Boney M. and Czesław Niemen were, from their perspective, stylistically different but equally valuable cultural products. NS constantly examined the audience, usually with affection but sometimes reluctantly. This distaste, however, was dedicated to particular tastes and behaviours and not the audience as a whole. As a representative of the industry, NS was naturally obliged to closely observe the audience’s tastes and respond to them even if the response would be unfavourable. JMM took a different approach to the question of professionalism. Even though from the beginning of the 1980s, the magazine was gradually becoming more and more geared towards a younger audience in both subject matter and visual style, its transition towards embracing popular taste remained for the most part in contradiction with its elitist rhetoric. In fact, JMM as a whole (unlike particular columnists who were much more permissive in their authorial pieces) often turned explicitly against their target audience, because the young readers failed to conform to the journal’s ideal of musical connoisseurs. Ironically, the more ‘youthful’ the magazine became throughout the years in terms of themes and visuals, the more it distanced itself from the youthful readership. The authors framed their own identities as knowledgeable critics/experts as opposed to their young readers who (according to the magazine’s own rhetoric) lacked good taste, easily succumbed to fashions, indulged in the ‘AngloSaxon racket’, favoured discotheques over high-class live acts and could not behave properly during concerts. This split between NS and JMM varied depending on the stance of particular authors and was subject to change over time. For example, in 1979 Roman Waschko argued in NS that the Polish pop charts should be based neither on sales of records—since the arbitrary choices of retailers do not represent the real demand—nor on listeners’ polls, since they can vote multiple times and do not possess the required competence due to their young age. Instead, songs’ popularity should be assessed by skilled professionals ‘whose expertise and integrity raise no doubts’ (Waschko 1979: 4). A statement like that could also appear on the pages of JMM and it did, in fact, come up in Weiss’s 1983 article critiquing the common ‘cult’ of pop charts and proposing different ways of assessing an artist’s

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value (Weiss 1983). However, the very fact that the NS editorial team held opinion polls and responded in the magazine to readers’ letters shows that they had respect for the audience’s opinions. In NS, the patronising tone waned over time and the critics started to take the side of audiences in the disagreements concerning the positions of popular artists who were derided by the musical aesthetes of JMM. After seeing Boney M perform during the Sopot International Song Festival, Krystian Brodacki admitted that although the music they ‘manufacture’ was ‘trivial’, the band put on a spectacular show (Brodacki 1979: 5). Jerzy _ Wertenstein-Zuławski wrote in defence of young music fans: During the concert I was trying to observe the viewers when they shouted, danced, sung, hugged and kissed. Apart from a few, not too glaring, misdemeanours the youth did not commit disturbances, they did not turn out to be spoilt. If a few chairs were indeed broken it’s because they were needlessly placed in the flat part of the Arena and when the enthusiastic audience jumped on them, they turned out to be too weak. More experienced organisers of rock shows know not to set up chairs, [while] we’re only just learning. The concert in Pozna n was a good lesson which showed that _ youth can be allowed to have fun as they choose. (Wertenstein-Zuławski 1980: 11).

Halfway through 1980, NS also introduced a readers’ vote in the charts published on its pages, which up until then was put together exclusively by experts. The attitude of the audience towards particular musicians became by this point the key measure for the assessment of the value of music. Viewing the field of music from the industry’s point of view and through its categories, as NS did, not only resulted in transforming the audience into a ‘market’ that produced ‘demand’ but also led to describing the artists as ‘commodities’ which should be professionally promoted and profiled to fit the expectations of consumers. Terpiłowski noted that investing huge amounts of money into promoting Drupi was a mistake precisely because he was considered a good singer who could fend for himself (Terpiłowski 1979: 14). Wagnerowski, an eager promoter of young rock bands, was equally enthusiastic about the male vocal quartet VOX, listing ‘musicality’ and ‘originality’ among its advantages, as well as a ‘stage savoir-faire’ (Wagnerowski 1979: 18). The criteria of professionalism and popularity that were common among both the ‘young’ and ‘old’ journalists at the beginning of the decade became obsolete

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during the next three years as more significance was given to ‘authenticity’. Those who ‘invented’ (Grądzka et al. 2014) authenticity while following audiences’ tastes were elevated to the most prestigious positions in the field, while those who remained with popularity—or even worse, professionalism—became obscure relics.

GENRES

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GENEALOGIES

A particularly important goal, from the journalists’ point of view, was asserting the privilege of naming new music genres and identifying artists’ genealogies. Needless to say, for both JMM and NS the stakes of this struggle were high: while the former was struggling to remain relevant in the shifting field and attempted to use the genre/genealogy arguments in order to self-consecrate, the latter employed generational rhetoric to secure not only their own position but also that of the music projects they conceived, managed and promoted. An important characteristic of the genre systematics present in Polish popular music of that era, and one that also contributed to the industry’s politicisation, was the use of ‘euphemisms’. The music industry institutions had enough political autonomy to promote rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s, but not enough to use the original term linked to an unwelcome western decadence. Genre pseudonyms were created with the intention of avoiding the authoritarian censorship of things deemed too ‘western’. However, this only led to confusion. For example, ‘big beat’. This term was coined by music promoter, animator of culture and NS co-creator Franciszek Walicki with the intent of pseudonymising rock ‘n’ roll (viewed unfavourably by the authorities) and later reflexively Polonised4. Eventually, ‘big beat’ became confusingly synonymous with both the youth music of the 1960s (like Karin Stanek and Trubadurzy) and rock (like Breakout and Klan), including its variations from the next decades. It also prompted the tendency to name—and, therefore, produce in abundance—genres, styles, and movements. This trend culminated in the creation of the MMG as both a semiseparate music phenomenon and a marketing ploy, since gathering stylistically diverse artists under a common label made for easier and more effective promotion. It was no coincidence that NS was one of the main arenas of the MMG’s promotion: one of its editors was Jacek Sylwin, MMG’s co-founder, who was expected to become Walicki’s successor (Wodniczak 1979: 13). The magazine’s title itself stemmed from a series

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of rock ’n’ roll parties initiated by Walicki in 1962 and popular among the youth (Idzikowska-Czubaj 2011: 160-62). The big beat, Non Stop, and MMG names, obscure for the profane, were creating a genealogy of Polish rock music based on a continuity that was more personal than institutional. The MMG project—both the effect of the field’s autonomisation and the reason for its intensification—was from the start consecrated by the particular prestige of its ascribed genealogy and seemed destined for success. If success didn’t follow, it was because the MMG managers couldn’t foresee the subversion of their projects by the punk and postpunk underground, categorised together (and eventually pacified) as the ‘new wave’. The triumphant march of MMG through concert halls, festivals and recording studios, loudly supported and gladly proclaimed by NS authors, slowed down significantly in 1981, to the extent that after the third Festival of the Young Generation of Music in Jarocin in 1982, the next edition changed its name to the more general Festival of Rock Musicians. This was accompanied by the transformation of the musical profile of the event that would subsequently become associated mostly with punk and new wave. The surfacing of ‘rock musicians’ in the festival’s name is yet another demonstration of the music field’s attempt to autonomise itself from the field of (state) power: although in the beginning of the 1980s punk was better described as new wave, and new wave as ‘good old rock, only in a slightly different form’ (Trąbi nski 1980b: 22-23), those euphemisms were getting not only less and less necessary, but they were also perceived in a more negative light. While NS based their genre labels on Polish music traditions and local historical connections built upon interpersonal ties between individuals, JMM intended to validate their policy through reaching out to western music and construing connections mostly with broader music genres that had already achieved some international appreciation. The JMM authors would sooner look for ‘musical nationalisms within jazz’ (Wiero nski 1979) than proclaim a new and separate genre stemming from earlier Polish music traditions. As their interests focused mostly on jazz and rock music, the key struggles concentrated on differentiating between the rock and jazz subgenres and separating the ‘high’, ‘pure’ and acclaim-worthy tendencies from those undeserving of attention, usually due to their mass appeal. This led to some interesting paradoxes when the authors became uncertain whether to complain about the lack of appreciation of jazz music among the Polish audiences or be disgruntled about the

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listeners getting acquainted with certain genres’ avant-garde nature and extravagance. On one hand, complaining about the disappointing attendance of young audiences to jazz concerts was part and parcel of the critics’ mission to ‘enlighten the masses’. On the other hand, however, the popularisation of recently niche artists threatened the experts’ elite position built on their supposedly refined palates. This conflict was best illustrated in JMM’s first issue from 1981 which included both an elaborate editorial piece bemoaning jazz music’s decreasing popularity and Królikowski’s rant about the Boomtown Rats’ appearance on German television. Królikowski was explicitly less concerned with the band’s commercialisation and more with the audience easily ‘getting accustomed to extravagance’ (Królikowski 1981: 15). Still, the genre hierarchies promoted by JMM were in place for quite a while and even the destabilisation of the field of popular music in the 1980s did not entirely erase the structure or, at least, the elitist sentiments that fuelled its formation. The hierarchy of music genres in Poland both mirrored and enhanced the emerging structure of the field and the positions of particular artists and institutional actors. From the 1960s, the top spot was occupied by jazz, a supposedly elite genre with a small but educated audience that required a long, intense learning process on the part of the musicians. In the early 1970s, the editors of Jazz patronised the young free jazz musicians by arguing that the basis of improvisation should be a mastery of classic jazz technique and a profound knowledge of the genre’s history. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Jazz Jamboree and Jazz nad Odrą remained the most prestigious festivals, where the most distinguished jazz artists reaped their laurels. Both festivals soon opened up to rock, ethnic/world and intuitive music, reflecting the snobbish appreciation of such genres. Rock, especially in its more ‘demanding’ subgenres such as jazz-rock, progressive rock, art-rock, etc., was situated right below jazz: hampered by a bigger audience but rescued by formal complexity and sophistication. The field’s opposite pole was music for a mass audience, especially pop music, including disco, but also the light entertainment ‘songs for communal singing’, often containing folk motives (like vocalist Urszula Sipi nska and band Andrzej i Eliza). Student music, cabaret, and sung poetry were genres selected by an educated but not elitist audience, intended rather more for contemplation than entertainment, but not requiring a great musical competency or high production costs; those were situated in-between. This division was reflected in the polarisation of the two music magazines: JMM was a monthly of experts and connoisseurs,

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interested in the aesthetic qualities of jazz and rock while NS, a representative of the music industry, aimed at promoting and supporting the solid and professional forms of entertainment, that may (or may not) possess an extra artistic quality.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF YOUTH EMERGENCE OF AUTHENTICITY

AND THE

During the 1970s the consecrated avant-garde position was occupied by Jazz (later JMM). The magazine was, at first, preoccupied exclusively with jazz and jazz-rock music and only later started to cover rock in the appendix Rhythm and Song. In 1977 (the year that chief editor Józef Balcerzak retired) the separation of Rhythm and Song was removed, and rock was granted as much space as jazz. Its leading editors, Wiesław Królikowski, Wiesław Weiss, Marek Wiernik, Janusz Mechanisz, and Jerzy Rzewuski, were especially approving of the most ennobled rock genres of the time, such as progressive rock. The music preferences shaped in the 1960s allowed them to define the current canons and to condescend towards aspiring young musicians. When the management group involved with NS, Tonpress, and the Pozna n Jazz Society began to successfully promote the MMG and new wave groups, the tastes of the JMM critics became anachronistic. Born in the late 1940s (Wirnik, Rzewuski) and 1950s (Weiss, Królikowski) they were biologically much younger than NS’s Tylczy nski (b. 1925) and Gaszy nski (b. 1939) and were roughly the same generation as Mann (b. 1948), Chojnacki (b. 1948) and Rogowiecki, Soporek and Hołdys (all born in the 1950s). However, it was the NS authors who, in the beginning of the 1980s, turned out to be artistically younger, and it was Mann—the magazine’s editor-in-chief since 1983—who eventually (together with Chojnacki and Hołdys) called the shots of the genre hierarchies for the whole of the 1980s. Although they themselves were in their thirties, the editors of NS were in the best position to define youth music due to their sensitivity to the public’s choices and their personal connections to other elements of the entertainment industry: the agencies, labels and broadcasters, including Polish Radio Three. As a magazine representing the entertainment sector, NS had an appreciation of the amateur movement; it had voiced demands for developing a proper popular music education and supported the Polish Socialist Youth Union’s attempts at ‘fostering singing among the youth’.

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An important change occurred around the year 1980. From this point forwards, youth became seen as a value in itself. That same year Bogdan Gieraczy nski wrote, drawing on McLuhan’s and Benedict’s concepts, that in the contemporary global village a young person has so many interests and lifestyles to choose from that it is impossible to speak of one cultural pattern; therefore, new technologies should be applied to extend the access to new content instead of defending the institutional and the canonical (Gieraczy nski 1980: 4). At the same time, Roman Waschko, drawing a parallel between punk and new wave and the 1960s underground, exposed with overt satisfaction the ageing of radio broadcasters. He pointed out their fear of punk and its ideology, as well as the fossilisation of their tastes and attitudes in the face of the changing music scene: Radio journalists prefer jazz, the music of their youth, or a more sophisticated rock in the manner of Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd; those once almost avant-garde bands have now been surpassed by the new wave and became ‘backwards’; groups ( . . . ). Even the once so up-to-date Polish Radio Three [who used to] present all the novelties, errs much on the side of caution when it comes to new wave music. ( . . . ) It’s hard to say what’s the deal here: is it excessive wariness or maybe our radio journalists are growing a bit old? (Waschko 1980: 4).

In the Polish popular music press ‘youth’ was from the very beginning linked to ‘authenticity’. Earlier in the music discourse, the adjective ‘authentic’ meant as much as ‘actual’, ‘real’—it was used in this sense when writing about ‘authentic hit songs’. With the beginning of the 1980s, this meaning evolved into sincerity, spontaneity and integrity of one’s inner nature. It is in this use that Adam St. Trąbi nski described the new wave Kryzys as ‘perhaps the only band who authentically plays youth music’, emphasising the spontaneity of interactions with the young audience and the critics’ astonishment (Trąbi nski 1980a: 5). Meanwhile Wojciech Soporek juxtaposed the ‘devoid of authenticity’ and ‘covered with a thick layer of bland sugar-icing’ folk music of commercial song and dance ensembles against the ‘authentic and original’ musical practices of rural musicians who follow local traditions (Soporek 1981: 5). Hołdys drove the point home when he linked the compulsion of authenticity with rock music5: ‘The rock musician must tell the truth and must be himself. For the public immediately rejects any falseness. ( . . . ) When

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we enter the stage we strive to be authentic at all times’ (Hołdys 1982: 5). The music underground, the ‘authentic youth rock community’ (Rogowiecki 1982: 4) therefore became the depositary of authenticity. Even though at first the audience’s reactions were treated as a measure of authenticity, soon rock musicians needed less and less audience acclaim to achieve desirable positions in the field, and eventually appealing to a mass audience became a reason for shame. In 1980 JMM’s Wiesław Weiss praised the authenticity of Jethro Tull, who had suspended their tour after recognising that their music stopped resonating with their target audience (Weiss 1980); as the 1980s went on, playing to the gallery became an insult. That is why the successful lyricist Andrzej Mogielnicki fervently denied writing for anyone but himself: ‘In fact I don’t care whether my songs are listened to by a [teenager] or an eighty-year-old lady. It so happens that youth are the most mass and interested audience. But I’m not writing [specifically] “for the youth” ’ (Mogielnicki 1982: 15). The artists’ attitudes towards mass acclaim were correlated with their position within the field. The avant-garde band Republika did not need the broad audience sought out by the more mainstream-oriented Lady Pank and Budka Suflera. This sometimes led to paradoxical situations, such as when in 1981 the new wave band Kryzys attracted crowds of young listeners through their ‘authenticity’ and an exceptional ‘charisma’, while lacking recordings, proper equipment and media recognition—an occurrence that amazed Wagnerowski, who seemed incapable of comprehending the fans’ enthusiasm (Wagnerowski 1981: 28).

THE INTERNAL LOGIC OF ARTISTIC REVOLUTIONS As the 1980s began, NS columnists were already aware that disco, advertised in the previous decade as a modern and attractive form of mass entertainment, had not performed all that well. Discotheques were commonly criticised for promoting vulgar tastes and for having an atmosphere of shady dealings and high alcohol consumption. Rock, jazz and light entertainment music artists, such as Violetta Villas or Halina Frąckowiak, who had dominated the national music scene since the 1960s, were now presented as descending and out of place or, in the best case, as living classicists—worthy of praise, but otherwise obsolete and unable to produce anything fresh or worthwhile. This was the case for Czesław Niemen, Ewa Demarczyk, Mieczysław Fogg and Tadeusz Nalepa. Canonisation was employed as a defence against ageing by the editors of JMM who

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saw themselves as connoisseurs of refined tastes. The authors insisted on presenting themselves as defenders of the classical forms and genres of jazz and rock against the ‘racket’ of subsequent aesthetic revolutions, all of which were depicted in their writing as mere short-lived fads that come and go while the timeless canon lives on forever. Another form of resistance against ageing required employing national music traditions, as opposed to the ‘mindless’ imitation of cosmopolitan western styles. This line of argument often showed up in 1981 and 1982 in the texts of ‘Ibis’ and Terpiłowski who glorified the Polish ‘songs for communal singing’. A particular variant of this tradition-based reasoning is folklorism and a manifest interest in anything folksy in music. The pressure of new generations of musicians and their ever-growing audience was too great for the consecrated avant-garde to keep their positions in the field. ‘The new young music groups demonstrate initiative and effectively attack the positions that were until now reserved for the older young generation represented by Kombi, Exodus and Krzak’, wrote _ Soporek commenting on the success of TSA, Dzem and Bank in an NS reader’s poll in early 1982 (Soporek 1982: 6). In the case of NS, this change in attitude was supported by a reshuffling within the editorial team: after Tylczy nski emigrated in 1981, leaving open the editor-inchief position, his duties were handed to Stefan Drabarek, and then, in 1983, to Wojciech Mann who introduced Jan Chojnacki and Zbigniew Hołdys to the editorial team. It is then that the monthly became a ‘rock magazine’ and began employing a language more direct and closer to the younger music fans. Hołdys, who took up journalism after disbanding his rock band Perfect in 1983, held a particularly influential position in the 1980s, due to his double status of critic and musician. He and the other new authors of NS were the same people who influenced the tastes of millions of listeners of Polish Radio Three; the magazine was also open, although to a lesser extent, to the editors and broadcasters of Rozgłosnia Harcerska (eng. Scout’s Broadcasting), a niche radio station promoting alternative music genres. Radio and the press have constituted, together with record companies and TV transmissions of the most important domestic music festivals, the main media defining popular trends (a function often reported in NS’s analyses of the music industry). The music tastes of Mann, Niedzwiecki, Wiernik, Sylwin and Rogowiecki, presented concurrently in NS and Polish Radio Three, have shaped the scope of the 1980s music and contributed to the dominance of hard rock, new wave, synth pop and reggae.

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When Radoszewski wrote about Bank he emphasised that the band ‘assembled experienced musicians who have had practice in professional British formations as well as Polish bands’ and played an art-rock ‘enriched with heavy rock elements’. In his view, Bank did not play traditional gigs but ‘concert enterprises’ because ‘the musicians wish for their every show to be remembered by the audience as an aesthetic presentation that leaves a lasting trace in the listener’s memory and sensibility’ (Radoszewski 1981: 22). Similarly ‘high’ aspirations were a hallmark of many other MMG groups. Ironically, it was the groups associated with the MMG who most rapidly fell victim to this new aesthetic revolution. The disbanding of Kasa Chorych and Perfect at what was believed to be the height of their popularity has become a symbol of this degradation. The underground bands, linked to a lesser degree to the popular music market, fared much better during the economic breakdown of the early 1980s than did the professional groups more firmly fixed in the entertainment sector. In 1981 WIFON and Tonpress reverted to publishing recordings on reel-to-reel tapes (an ‘act of desperation’ on their behalf), complaints about the quality of vinyl pressings were very common, and the future of the Sopot and Opole music festivals was questioned. In the following year both festivals were suspended, the state-owned management agencies were on the verge of bankruptcy due to the withdrawal of subsidies and increased taxation, and the phonographic production remained inadequate, which caused an increase in record and tape prices as well as concert ticket prices. Marek Wiernik raised the alarm: Let’s linger for a bit on Stołeczna Estrada. This [concert] agency, who up till now has been making good money, used to organise some 20,000 events per year and had a turnover of around 200 million zloty. Currently, because of the martial law and the increased expenses, the enterprise does not possess any financial means of their own. The number of events has decreased 60 to 70 percent compared to last year! The shortage is increasing, the turnout is dropping, the company’s operating costs are growing. Without domestic subsidies which would allow for a cheapening of events or outside ‘help’— the ticket prices will continue to grow. And so the vicious circle turns (Wiernik 1982: 4).

The music industry crisis opened the door to Polish companies from abroad, who then sold records and tapes of domestic bands at an inflated price, as well as the alternative scene, who formed their own informal

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circulation, which allowed them to remain relatively independent from the fluctuations of the economic situation.

INDIVIDUALS WITHIN

THE

FIELD

The strategy of linking punk and new wave to the rock and underground scenes of the 1960s was employed by Wagnerowski to present the profile of Marek Jackowski, the creator of Maanam. In his narrative Jackowski was an authentic and original author, a seeker, incredibly innovative, one who stemmed from the underground, won the acclaim of experts and finally, with Maanam, mass popularity (Wagnerowski 1980a: 20). Jackowski’s originality was based, among other things, on his compliance with the ethics of authenticity: he followed his heart instead of trying to fit either the audiences’ or critics’ expectations, or to imitate foreign trends. This artistic strategy bestowed upon Jackowski a symbolic capital of a particular kind—highly acclaimed in the most avant-garde section of the field. Because of this capital, the artist had obtained a ‘charismatic consecration’ (Bourdieu 1995: 122) which radiated to Jackowski’s closest collaborators: his wife and lead singer of Maanam Kora and other members of the early line-up of the band, such as Milo Kurtis and John Porter. In a similar way, this charismatic consecration was attained in 1983 by Grzegorz Ciechowski who held his position until at least the end of the decade (see Fortuna’s chapter in this collection). Jackowski and Ciechowski were figures who not only continually reinvented themselves but also devised the space within the field that they would occupy—a position that hitherto existed only potentially, but also became necessary to create with the field’s autonomisation. Even more so, those artists invented themselves against themselves, so to speak, putting enormous effort into discarding the styles which inspired them: Jackowski parted ways with poetic ballads to enter the domain of ‘harsh’ rock, while Ciechowski gave up his inspiration—Jethro Tull—to build a combination of cold new wave sound, a futurist-industrial lyrical imagery and the visual code of constructivism. The other musicians’ success was mostly based on either sensing and co-creating audiences’ expectations (as with Perfect and Lady Pank), skilfully adapting western trends (as did Kapitan Nemo), or employing a form of ‘forward retreat’ meant to save one’s authenticity from being petrified in a particular music style6. Punk, new wave, reggae, ska, hardcore—the successive music revolutions of the underground—can

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be interpreted as the youth storming the positions occupied by the old and out-of-date avant-garde.

CONCLUSIONS The 1980s in Poland are remembered for the ‘boom’ of rock music, a genre associated in the popular imagination with authenticity, spontaneity, and opposition to the communist regime. The goal here was to counter this dominant image through an analysis of trends in music journalism, shifts in the condition of the music industry and the self-creation practices of some prominent figures that formed the music scene of the time. The two main titles which were examined, NS and JMM, occupied two different positions within the field from the very beginning, and have maintained specific and distinct types of narrative about popular music, from jazz to Estrada music and from progressive rock to synth pop. During the period from 1979 to 1984, their statuses changed: NS, previously primarily a journal for the music industry, became a popular rock magazine for youngsters, while JMM grew older (in Bourdieu’s meaning of this term) and in spite of the efforts of its editors turned into a specialist magazine for classic jazz and rock connoisseurs. The process of ageing was correlated with the social inventions of youth and authenticity; two ideas bonded together and rooted predominantly in rock music, especially in the punk and new wave genres. Even the economic collapse of the early 1980s did not strongly impact the undergoing reconfiguration of the music field with its outermost poles of the consecrated avant-garde and the popular entertainment for the mass audience, with the Music of Young Generation and punk bands situated between them. Alongside the ageing of some journalists and promoters as well as the rising importance of authenticity and spontaneity of attitudes and stage performances, new music genres and styles emerged. Under new names and armed with the new values, young musicians stormed the highest positions in the field, gaining strong support from their audiences. The audience turned into an influential agent whose taste and opinions could not be ignored by journalists, managers and animators. Thus, an era of artistic revolutions started—opening the doors for underground rock groups created by subsequent generations of musicians and presented as the young opponents of the old consecrated avantgarde artists who occupied the top spots in the field. However, the ones

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who were perceived as the most talented innovators did not, in fact, care much for the expectations of the audience. Their self-inventions independent of current trends and styles brought them charismatic consecration and high status. This autonomy of the great artists from both popularity and the audience’s moods, as well as the music industry and political influences, was an apparent sign of the emergence of the autonomous field.

NOTES 1. In the case of the People’s Republic of Poland, the term ‘bourgeoisie’ refers to the dominant social groups i.e. bureaucracy workers, professionals, whitecollars etc. Although their dominance is unrelated to the possession of the means of production, this ‘state socialism bourgeoisie’ still aims at ensuring their supremacy by symbolic means. 2. Another music magazine active at the time was Jazz Forum, a niche publication which didn’t venture into broader popular music. Other general interest music magazines – Rock Estrada, Rock Jazz, and Rockowisko – were being issued only after 1983 and did not succeed in achieving a prominent role in the field. 3. JMM’s interest in education usually took the form of criticising youth for not being educated enough. Lack of proper music education was often blamed for young peoples’ bad taste in music and their valuing of rock and disco above jazz and avant-garde genres. 4. The polonization of music genre names was accompanied by the famous slogan ‘the Polish youth should be singing Polish songs’ – also forged by Walicki – which was part of a campaign of colonization of rock ’n’ roll by the Polish language and folk motives (with such bands as No To Co and Skaldowie) as well as a general tendency to familiarize the genre, all in the context of the nationalist atmosphere of the Gomułka era. 5. This, of course, is not a phenomenon peculiar to the Polish popular music scene. The common conflation of authenticity with rock music and artificiality with pop music was described in depth in Mary Harron’s 1990 essay McRock: Pop as Commodity. This genre dichotomy of authenticity and artifice readily translates into gender relations as well (see: Coates 1997). 6. This was skilfully done by Robert Brylewski, an important figure of the music underground who at the time of punk’s popularization distanced himself from the movement and formed the reggae band Izrael, and then when that also gained popularity, he turned to a new group Armia, this time drawing mostly from hardcore.

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WORKS CITED Bourdieu, Pierre (1995). The rules of art. Genesis and structure of the literary field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brodacki, Krystian (1979). Chata Morgana. Non Stop, 10, 3–5. Clifford, James (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Coates, Norma (1997). (R)evolution Now? Rock and the political potential of gender. In Sheila Whiteley (Ed.), Sexing the groove. Popular music and gender (pp. 50–64). London: Routledge. Gieraczy nski, Bogdan (1980). Futurologiczne spekulacje o kulturze rozrywkowej. Non Stop, 3, 4–5. Grądzka, Natalia, Michnik, Antoni, Migut, Mateusz, Rachubi nska, Klaudia, Sta nczyk, Xawery (2014). ‘Maszyna do nadawania autentycznosci. Perypetie polskiej muzyki popularnej w latach 80.’, Kultura Popularna, 2, pp. 26–42. Harron, Mary (1990). McRock: Pop as commodity. In Simon Frith (Ed.), Facing the music: Essays on pop, rock and culture (pp. 173–220). London: Mandarin. Hołdys, Zbigniew in conversation with Soporek, Wojciech (1982). Zbigniew Hołdys: Świadczyć usługi dla ludnosci. Non Stop, 2, 5–6. Idzikowska-Czubaj, Anna (2011). Rock w PRL-u. O paradoksach współistnienia. Pozna n: Wydawnictwo Pozna nskie. Królikowski, Wiesław (1981). O muzyce, emocjach i tolerancji. Jazz Magazyn Muzyczny, 1(293), 15. Mogielnicki, Andrzej in conversation with Nowicki, Lech (1982). Andrzeja Mogielnickiego PYTANIE O SIEBIE. Non Stop, 1, 15. Radoszewski, Roman (1981). Bank. Non Stop, 3, 22. _ Rogowiecki, Roman (1982). Zyła . . . złotych. Non Stop, 4, 4. RSW [Wagnerowski, Rafał Szczęsny] (1979). VOX—nadzieja polskiej wokalistyki w stylu pop. Non Stop, 8, 18. Soporek, Wojciech (1981). Chro nmy polską muzykę. Non Stop, 4, 5. Soporek, Wojciech (1982). Po plebiscycie. Non Stop, 1, 6. Taylor, Charles (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Terpiłowski, Lech (1979). Remedium potrzebne od zaraz. Non Stop, 6, 14. Trąbi nski, Adam Stanisław (1980a). Bez rewelacji. Non Stop, 8, 5. Trąbi nski, Adam Stanisław (1980b). Z kraju jednym tchem’, Non Stop, 4, 22–23. Wagnerowski, Rafał Szczęsny (1980a). Maanam, Non Stop, 8, 12–20. Wagnerowski, Rafał Szczęsny (1980b). Zjednoczone Siły Natury—MECH. Non Stop, 6, 22. Wagnerowski, Rafał Szczęsny (1981). Kryzys. Non Stop, 1, 28. Waschko, Roman (1979). Plebiscyty, ankiety, zestawienia. Non Stop, 6, 4. Waschko, Roman (1980). Co z nową falą?. Non Stop, 5, 4.

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Weiss, Wiesław (1980). Jethro Tull. Jazz Magazyn Muzyczny, 2(282), 12–13. Weiss, Wiesław (1983). Wielki poker. Magazyn Muzyczny Jazz, 4(308), 10–12. _ Wertenstein-Zuławski, Jerzy (1980). Muzyka Młodej Generacji. Rock w Poznaniu. Non Stop, 2, 10–11. Wiero nski, Marek (1979). W kręgu rodzimej tradycji. Jazz, 7 (275), pp. 6–9. Wiernik, Marek (1982). Czarne chmury, czyli widmo plajty. Non Stop, 3, pp. 3–4. Wodniczak, Krzysztof (1979). Apokalipsa a la Ibis. Non Stop, 9, p. 13. Klaudia Rachubi nska is a PhD student at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. She is writing a thesis on the critical effectiveness and political potential of anti-glamour strategies in women’s popular music. She is a member of the Practices of Late Modernity Research Group. She has published articles in Kwartalnik Filmowy, Kultura Popularna, Zeszyty Literackie and Glissando. She has also co-edited and contributed chapters to collections Narracje – estetyki – geografie. Fluxus w trzech aktach (Narratives, Aesthetics and _ Geographies: Fluxus in Three Acts, 2014) and Bądzmy realistami, ządajmy niemo_zliwego. Utopie i fantazje w modzie i dizajnie (Let’s Be Realists, Demand the Impossible: Utopias and Fantasies in Fashion and Design, 2014). Xawery Sta nczyk is an assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture at University of Warsaw. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Polish Studies at University of Warsaw in 2015 for a thesis about alternative culture in Poland in the years 1978–1996. He is a member of the Practices of Late Modernity Research Group. He has published papers in many Polish academic and popular journals, such as Stan Rzeczy, Studia Litteraria et Historica, Res Publica Nowa, Kultura Współczesna, Kultura Popularna, Glissando, Lampa, Przekrój, Gazeta Wyborcza _ and Arteon. He co-edited an urban studies anthology, Miasto na ządanie. Aktywizm, polityki miejskie, dos wiadczenia (City on Demand: Activism, Urban Politics and Experience, 2013).

CHAPTER 10

The Birth of Socialist Disc Jockey: Between Music Guru, DIY Ethos and Market Socialism Marko Zubak

‘Did you ever, two or three years ago, think that someone in our country could earn his bread by playing records on a gramophone? No? Well, comfort yourself, neither did we.’ (Jelinčić 1970: 25). Similar questions were posed by an array of Yugoslav newspaper reporters who in the late 1960s and early 1970s noticed the birth of a new ‘modern and attractive profession’ (Kosanović 1970: 30). This chapter explores this scarcely researched aspect of the rich Yugoslav socialist pop culture: local club disc jockeys. An attempt will be made to identify the specificities shared by Yugoslav disc jockeys which emerged as the profession accommodated the new socialist environment that differed considerably from the one in which it first appeared. Following this complicated trajectory, from its beginnings to its gradual affirmation between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, attention will be drawn to the diverse impact that disc jockeys exerted on the local pop-rock music scene, closely reflecting its various historical stages. Mirroring the

M. Zubak (*) Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_10

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familiar transfer of western pop culture into a foreign context, Yugoslav disc jockeys developed, along with a range of traditional features, a set of distinct qualities and skills, dissimilar to their origins. By highlighting these idiosyncrasies that emerged through the localisation of vocation in a seemingly unnatural socialist framework, the unique social and (sub)cultural capital shared by the local disc jockeys will be exposed. How Yugoslav disc jockeys were forced to play a variety of roles, from early pioneers of pop culture to proto-entrepreneurs who paved the way for private businesses by navigating the array of contradictions that underpinned the state-run economy will be shown. They can rightly be seen as emblematic figures of late Yugoslav socialism, embodying several central features of local pop culture and society as a whole, such as the rise of consumerism and indigenous pop culture, increasing westernisation, the influx of market socialism, the emergence of the grey economy, gradual ideological erosion and ad hoc improvisations used to circumvent the official rules.

RESEARCHING

THE

YUGOSLAV DISC JOCKEY: LITERATURE AND SOURCES

Despite this complicated legacy, the existing literature has thus far ignored the Yugoslav club disc jockey. This is understandable when placed within the wider scholarship on Yugoslav pop-rock music. After its initial growth dating back to the socialist era, the study of Yugoslav pop-rock music faced a huge setback during the 1990s caused by the tendency of most Yugoslav successor states to distance themselves from any kind of socialist past. With few exceptions, the crisis lasted up until the last decade when a new generation of scholars profited from a more relaxed academic atmosphere and the legitimisation of the topic (Vuletic 2011; Mišina 2013). However, very little is known about the prolific rock journalists of the time with whom disc jockeys shared a vital function in the mediation of pop culture, albeit in a more direct manner (Vučetić 2010: 145-64; Zubak 2012: 23–35).1 More importantly, the same is true of the direct milieu into which disc jockeys were naturally immersed. Research on Yugoslav socialist discotheques has yet to be properly undertaken, even if a certain discursive tradition was established long ago within the field of socialist youth studies.2 The study of local club culture has thus yet to benefit from the new wave of scholarship. The initial impulse toward further research typically

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emerges within the circles of former actors and journalists who first touched upon the subject by framing discotheques within the context of the rock scenes in individual cities (Đekić 2013: 38–81; Žikić 1999: 179). Yet there is a crucial difference. Whereas local rock journalists outlined the key landmarks of Yugoslav rock history way back in the days of the new wave, basic features of club culture still remain unknown to this day. As early as the 1980s, rock writers charted what is now a widely shared narrative of indigenous rock evolution from initial forms of imitation, through the merger of local and foreign idioms and on to the eventual invention of relevant musical expression fully synchronised with global trends (Glavan 1983: 15). Potential students of club cultures, on the other hand, need to start from scratch, working with a largely unknown chronology, fragile local memories, and contradicting myths on such key questions as the names of the first actors and institutions. Not to be overly critically of ex-Yugoslav scholarly communities, one should bear in mind the detrimental effects of the unflattering status that the vocation traditionally enjoyed within the large part of rock community. Its contemptuous view of disc jockeys as little more than musical parasites who exploit the creativity of others, penetrated through rock journalism into the scholarly treatment of pop-music, stripping them of their due place within western academia as well. Only in the 1990s, with the newly born dance club milieu, did scholars began to re-evaluate disc jockeys as knowledgeable collectors who acquire specific records and relate them to a community of dancers (Thornton 1995: 60–66). Feeding on the growing importance of disc jockeys in contemporary music, the scholarship has gradually increased over the past two decades. Disc jockeys, both at present and in the past, are now considered a worthy subject of study (Lawrence 2003). Authors have highlighted the long history of the profession, its organic links to the immediate club environment and its inherent tendency to expose new artists and styles (Brewster and Broughton 1990). A significant number of studies acknowledge disc jockeys as music gatekeepers, trendsetters, community leaders and cultural icons (Rietveld 2013: 1–9). New approaches recognise a variety of other roles too, reaffirming them as improvisers, performers, cultural mediators and artists (Reitsamer 2011: 40; de Paris Fontanari 2013: 248). As will be seen, undercurrents of some of these themes can be detected in the actions of Yugoslav socialist disc jockeys as well. Available sources on Yugoslav disc jockeys, though, are limited. Part of the potentially relevant archives of socialist youth clubs is inaccessible.

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Discotheques founded through semi-private initiatives, did not generally have their own archives in the first place. Fortunately, the profession drew periodic interest from the Yugoslav media which presents valuable, if hard to trace material. Personal testimonies of disc jockeys thus proved to be of great significance, as did those rare cases in which they preserved their own archives. This article owes much to these private collections and interviews which were conducted with a number of disc jockeys of diverse generational profiles and professional statuses.3 A carefully chosen sample allows for wider conclusions to be drawn concerning the whole of socialist Yugoslavia. The Croatian capital Zagreb where most of the interviewees were conducted represents an appropriate disc jockey microcosm in this regard. Being arguably the most important centre of Yugoslav pop-rock music, Zagreb was home to nearly all available channels for disc jockey activities, while at the same time being closely integrated with the coastal region where disc jockeys often worked during the summer. Moreover, disc jockeys who worked at various times and under different conditions, both in top-notch clubs and in less glamorous environments were interviewed. Bringing together such a range of perspectives should provide a realistic dissection of the profession and the multifaceted nature of the practice itself.

CREATING

THE

AMBIENT: SOCIALIST DISCOTHEQUES

A Yugoslav disc jockey was deeply immersed in the surrounding context. His birth was both a reflection and a product of the wider local pop-music culture which was greatly influenced by Yugoslav socialism itself. Yugoslavia’s early split with Stalin ensured that it was exposed to the West to a greater degree than other Eastern bloc countries. It also forced Yugoslav communists to adopt a new state doctrine to legitimise their unprecedented detour within the socialist world. Though an offshoot of Leninist-Marxism designed to return the decision-making process back to the workers, Yugoslav self-management proved to have great democratic potential that was used in the periods of liberalisation (Mezei 1976: 55). The (con)federal state framework, on the other hand, triggered strong decentralising forces that worked to fragment cultural production, making its control more difficult. All these factors contributed to the early introduction of market elements within the planned economy, which in turn brought about an extraordinarily rich and consumerist pop culture. By the late 1960s, pop-music became the most prominent element of this

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emergent pop culture, as seen in the rise of true pop stars, the establishment of the music industry and scene, the strong support from the media and the accompanying infrastructure (Škarica 2005). It is against this unorthodox background that the new West European discotheque craze managed to cross the ideological divide in the late 1960s and take hold in socialist Yugoslavia. Already, a decade earlier, Yugoslav youths spontaneously gathered in local community centres to listen and occasionally dance to records obtained in various ways. With the rise of rock culture, these were gradually replaced by dancing venues with live concerts of the first rock bands. Records were once again present. Spinning on primitive gramophones, they filled in the silence during performance breaks and occasionally provoked more excitement than the actual musicians. Yet it would be premature to date the emergence of the profession to this period. These proto-disc jockeys remained anonymous, trapped in a collective endeavour, both of which are features alien to the true essence of the disc jockey. To firmly step onto the historical stage, disc jockeys had to move out of the shadows and into the spotlight where they would become the centrepiece of the dance floor. This shift was facilitated by the parallel transition from early dance halls to discotheques, with their specifically designed interiors, blaring audio systems and general magnetic ambience. When and where the first local discotheque was exactly established is still a matter of some dispute. For a long time it was believed to be Belgrade’s discotheque commonly known as ‘Diskoteka kod Laze Šećera’ which opened its doors in April 1967 in the cellar next to the famous Theatre 212 (Vukadinović 2001). A recent documentary, however, reopened the issue, persuasively pointing to other legitimate candidates, primarily an open-air café-size disco in the small village of Jelsa on the island of Hvar, founded in 1964 by a fresh ‘returnee’ from Paris where he had learned about the new phenomenon first-hand (Rumboldt 2015). Indicatively, though, confronted with inadequate starting definitions and contradictory information, authors have ultimately left the issue unresolved.4 Regardless of the precise name and date, it is clear that discotheques mushroomed throughout the country over the course of a few years between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, with disc jockeys ready to play their role. Financial incentive was certainly there. As records were becoming more easily available, it soon became obvious that is was cheaper to pay a single person with a diverse music repertoire at their fingertips, than an entire band which played the same songs over and over again.

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YUGOSLAV DISC JOCKEYS AT WORK In the late autumn of 1968, an 18-year-old Domagoj Veršić, who would soon become the first disc jockey in the Dalmatian coastal town of Split, sent an intriguing offer to the local Sailing Club Gusar. Along with his two friends, Veršić wished to ‘provide the youth with one more form of leisure’ and open a ‘disco-club’ in Gusar’s old training building located in the city’s seafront where some time before a popular dance hall had operated: ‘This new mode of entertainment, both relaxing and refreshing, had already been introduced in many cities at home and abroad and has a significant number of followers. I am sure that it will be met with a full approval of our youth, guaranteeing it would be very popular.’ Veršić’s proposal brilliantly illustrates the scope of the duties of early disc jockeys: The host, popularly known as ‘disc-jockey,’ introduces the audience to novelties at home and in the world through vinyl records. The programme is based on concert principle. Regarding the revenue from the ticket sales, I am willing to donate up to 25 % of the profits to the club upon which we will agree later in more detail. I guarantee peace and order, but if needed, I will cover the costs for security. If the existing bar is not able to fulfil all the needs, I am willing to help out and take it over if agreed. I am also taking over the everyday cleaning of the hall as my responsibility. In agreement with You, I wish to provide your active members with a certain ticket discount. (Domagoj Veršić, Contract with the Sailing Club Gusar, 1968)

The central role that Veršić had in the founding of the first Split discotheque was not an aberration. There existed a key link between the emergence of disc jockeys and the local discotheque boom from the late 1960s (Fig. 10.1). Disc jockeys are essentially defined by the clubs where they work, just as they, in turn, determine the ambience of these clubs with their personalities. In the Yugoslav case, however, the connection was more important, because many of the early disc jockeys were personally involved in the setting up of the first clubs. This close relationship was conditioned by the very channels through which discotheques could be formed in the first place. With private ownership severely limited, discotheques could operate primarily as some kind of internal enterprise or separate service within a larger frame. Those wishing to found a discotheque had two major options: discotheques could be opened either within the premises of youth unions or sports clubs or, alternatively, within some state-run catering enterprises, such as

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Fig. 10.1 Pioneer disc jockey Domagoj Veršić at work in 1969 in Split’s Gusar club

restaurants or hotels, with the responsibilities shared. Only under exceptional circumstances could a private citizen become an owner and register a club as a cafe or a night bar, most easily at the seaside due to the increased relaxation of the growing tourist industry. Concrete arrangements differed across the disco world, both concerning the disc jockey’s position in relation to other actors and the scope of his responsibilities. In general, the disc jockey would make a deal with the respective entity to enter into a joint disco venture in which the two sides would agree upon their obligations and responsibilities and determine the division of profits, with the initial initiative coming from either side. Some disc jockeys were hired for their services and paid a fixed honorarium. Others, frequently taking over a larger workload, received their revenues from ticket sales, out of which they financed their other duties. In these cases, they often left the profits gained from the bar to the

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catering enterprise. Finally, a disc jockey could even take over the complete organisation of the club, either independently or as part of a wider team. In this capacity he could effectively run the place; acquiring the necessary equipment, organising ticket sales, the bar service, and the placement of bouncers at the entrance, while handing over a fixed percentage of the earnings to the organisational body in which the disco was formed. Yet, even if the disc jockey acted strictly as a provider of music, he could be asked at times to bring his own equipment (and people), particularly in venues that served as discotheques only on certain days of the week or year, which was a frequent feature in the early days. To account for such variation, a formal framework was slowly being developed that acknowledged the disc jockey as an increasingly visible actor on the music scene. The Union of Yugoslav disc jockeys was established in 1971 but failed to make a lasting impact. More important were the state music agencies that gathered professionals associated with the music industry, from artists to sound engineers. During the 1970s, these agencies included the disc jockey as a distinct occupational category. As recognised professionals, disc jockeys could circumvent those rare formal restrictions and with special permits legally import equipment for their work. Music agencies also served as intermediaries between enterprises that requested a music service and disc jockeys, often providing the latter with potential gigs. This situation was particularly relevant at the summer resorts where hotel management normally did not know how to organise discos on their own and contacted agencies instead. Selected disc jockeys would spend up to three to four months in makeshift summer discotheques, where they often managed the entire enterprise. These gigs were highly lucrative and difficult to secure. Once secured, moreover, disc jockeys were eager to return the next holiday season. Duško Cvetojević was among the many disc jockeys who applied for the job at summer discotheque Grota, in Makarska, a town ten times smaller than Split which by the early 1980s had as many as six dance clubs. Cvetojević’s detailed application demonstrates the types of skills and resources a disc jockey needed to command in 1983 in order to attain a stable position. For the job, I offer my own posters which I will personally place all over Makarska, my own (VIP) tickets, stickers, flyers, etc. . . . Of course I will bring the best disco equipment with which top disco clubs are equipped as

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well as a diverse music repertoire and the best light effects. Regarding my fee, bearing in mind last year’s ticket prices, the cost of technical equipment, records, audio cassettes (imported), maintenance and amortization, I think it is not too much to ask 7000 dinars net per month, plus apartment and board, if possible for two people. . . . After all, it is four to six hours of work. . . . At the end of this agreement, I would like you to transport my equipment from the Split train station to Makarska and back. To be honest, I would not like to deal with anything but music. Everything else, I am leaving to you: security, bar, ticket sales, wardrobe, etc., since I do not want to enter in any sorts of conflicts and altercations. For me, it is crucial to do a good music job and return safe to Zagreb. (Duško Cvetojević, Contract with Disco Grota, Makarska 1983)

A variety of operative modes affected individual disc jockeys only indirectly, imposing different working conditions. A single disc jockey often easily switched between different environments as nicely exemplified by Veršić who, within a span of just a few years, worked in virtually every kind of discotheque.5 On the other hand, such a wide spectrum of employment opportunities gives a good indication that both the profession and disco business was entirely new. All those involved were operating in uncharted territory, trying to manoeuvre their way between loose institutional rules and real-life experiences. Not all disc jockeys were disco managers, but some conflated the two roles. A few of the most successful would eventually quit disc jockeying altogether and instead devote their efforts to running and spreading the disco business.

MUSIC COLLECTOR, PROMOTER

AND

ARBITER

Along with a few local radio stations, discotheques quickly became principal channels through which contemporary popular music was directly promoted and Yugoslav youths could get in touch with global music trends. The time lag was surprisingly small in that regard. In the late 1960s, the locals of Jelsa could hear the same song twice in a day, first on Radio Luxembourg and later that evening in their village disco (Rumboldt 2015). Disc jockeys and their record collections were essential factors that kept this time gap as narrow as possible. As a rule, they had to be a step ahead of others, by being informed about the newest musical developments. This is not just somebody with a pile of records, mostly world hits, and a gramophone. The job of a disc jockey is not only to play records before a crowd. His job starts much earlier, when he hears or reads about a new

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record released at home or abroad. And to follow the record industry is not easy, considering that in England alone hundreds of new records appear each week. (‘Affirmation of a profession’, Studio magazine, 1970)

Such expertise, a key prerequisite for every disc jockey, required considerable effort since it usually involved securing access to records. Ever since sailors returned home with the first rock’n’roll singles in the 1950s, any kind of contact abroad was precious. Not surprisingly, a considerable number of early disc jockeys had Gastarbeiter background and received records from their parents or relatives temporarily working abroad. Others established contacts with flight attendants, foreign correspondents or radio editors who acquired records through their own connections. From the mid-1960s onwards records could also be ordered by post from foreign record wholesale dealers such as Records Seller, Tandy’s or Cob Records. Virtually everyone who could afford them was able to legally buy just about any record by selecting the title from their catalogue and in approximately two weeks a package would arrive at their home address. At first, for fear of confiscation, banknotes were placed between two indigo sheets so that they could not be seen when the envelope was checked through the light for content. This practice, however, soon became so common that it was not stopped even under exceptional circumstances. A Zagreb disc jockey in the early 1970s caused a minor panic during his military service when a suspicious package from Birmingham, containing an LP record, arrived at his military address. Another way to obtain records was to travel abroad and buy them personally. Favourite destinations were those near the border, such as Graz or Trieste, where disc jockeys would rummage for hours in music stores listening to LPs and singles, or when pressed for time, hastily buy them judging by the cover. Such shopping sprees became a necessity for experienced professionals during the 1970s. The better-off among them commuted once or twice a month and visited specialised genre stores in London where supplies were plentiful and more diverse, which became important as demand expanded. Finally, the Yugoslav record industry was another significant source, with its network of record companies dispersed across the country, where each republican capital had one to two labels. By the late 1970s, production was abundant and customers could acquire extensive domestic editions and licensed records from major western labels covering a variety of genres. In the early days of this practice, the head of the Jugoton label,

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the biggest in the country, acknowledged the authority of Zagreb’s best disc jockeys, his son included. He invited them to a meeting to hear complaints about the poor sound quality of the first home presses in comparison to western originals. Well-known disc jockeys would receive promotional editions from record companies and domestic bands eager to have their songs played in discos. And yet, despite such unprecedented availability and abundance, records were extremely valuable and a good collection was the ticket into the world of the disc jockey. In the early days of scarcity, disc jockeys even worked in pairs. They would borrow records from each other, sometimes in the same night as couriers transported records from one club to another. The precise type of music to be played depended on the actual disc jockey and the discotheque in question. In accordance with the musical background of the early disc jockeys, rock dominated at first, but it was soon enriched by soul, rhythm and blues. Later on also came funk and disco as a younger generation of disc jockeys diversified their repertoire. Emulating dance halls, disc jockeys typically organised their playlists around blocks of songs, carefully building the right momentum. After slow beginnings came faster beats until the atmosphere would reach a climax, followed by an obligatory set of slow songs, at times accompanied by recitals. This was done carefully so as not to spoil the created mood. Motown classic Papa was a Rolling Stone became an informal anthem at Belgrade’s Cepelin discotheque, underlining that its prime function was to promote dancing. And, indeed, people danced, including Lokica Stefanović, a Yugoslav pioneer of contemporary free dance, who first garnered attention on the clubs’ dance floors (Vukadinović 2011). On the other hand, disc jockeys often played more complex songs, not necessarily appropriate for dancing during the early hours of the evening when people were still arriving at the club. Another time to appreciate the widest range of newest hits was during the so-called disco-matinee. This was a unique local institution specially intended for high schoolers to go to a club and enjoy the music during afternoon hours (Kožul 1971: 19). There were disc jockeys who played strictly western music, but generally, local pop was not ostracised, particularly once it reached certain standards. Disc jockeys carefully balanced their selections between their own acquired tastes and the demands of the masses. Veršić remembers how amidst the rock craze, visitors of Arkada would go totally crazy when he played the Russian dance kazachok, something that was inconceivable to a rock addict like himself.

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MAN

MANY TALENTS: ALL-ROUNDER, CELEBRITY AND TRAVELLER

OF

While essential, knowledge of pop-music was not enough. Especially in the early days, the profession shared many similarities with radio disc jockeys. Famous hosts from Radio Luxembourg represented the first role models to local disc jockeys who emulated their dynamic hosting and screaming announcements. They clapped non-stop to the rhythm, sang along and incited audiences to join in while dancing and jumping on the stage and the loudspeakers. Interaction with the crowds was highly appreciated: ‘I would never leave the club precisely for this atmosphere and direct contact with the audience. The crowd will boo you the moment you make a mistake, or applaud you if you do good; you can best feel their taste in the club’ (‘Afirmacija’ 1970: 18). Indeed, the disc jockey had to be a man of many talents: ‘Not everyone could be a disc jockey,’ they kept repeating: A good disc jockey needs to be a natural showman, he must be a good dancer, a big charmer, a decent reciter, and above all have a feeling to know what to do and what to say, with which music to illustrate all this: in short, he must balance on an invisible string that connects good taste and the wishes of the masses’ (Novak 1970: 281).

It was an intellectual job which demanded certain psychological features, most especially an ability to entertain the masses and impose one’s taste upon them, while mixing songs and coordinating the lights, all at the same time. Both in retrospect and at the time, many disc jockeys emphasise a singular feature that stood out: versatility. ‘It is not a small thing to choose records for dancing,’ wrote a local chronicler of disc jockeys, testifying that entertainment was not something that should be taken lightly (Kosanović 1970: 30). It was a proper job just like any other, requiring talent, devotion and professionalism. And one that deserved respect; the best disc jockeys became celebrities, popular among their audience, their peers and the media. A variety of media outlets embraced the new profession along with the whole lifestyle. TV magazines such as Zagreb’s Studio or local radio stations like Beograd 202 began sponsoring different discotheques. Up-and-coming actor Dragan Nikolić hosted a TV show where he acted as a disc jockey in an improvised discotheque in a Belgrade TV studio (Maksimetar 1970). Gordan Novak, one of the founders of Zagreb’s disco

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club Jabuka, wrote a weekly column for the popular entertainment weekly Arena, where he introduced the best disc jockeys who talked about the profession and gave advice and music reviews (Novak 1970: 28). The youth journal Pop-Express organised and extensively covered the first Yugoslav disc jockey contest, held in early 1970 in the Zagreb youth club Kulušić. After eight preliminary rounds with competitors from all over the country, a jury made up of music professionals among the six finalists proclaimed a young disc jockey from Ljubljana Milan Pibernik as a winner. ‘He was phenomenal. If only our disco clubs would have such go-go dancers and lighting effects, it would be something that doesn’t exist in Europe.’ Novak was enthusiastic, ignoring the disappointment of established Zagreb disc jockeys who surprisingly lost (Kosanović 1970: 30). Pibernik never collected the substantial prize money as Pop-Express suddenly folded, but nevertheless went on to found his own discotheque in Bled, Slovenia. A few similar events followed, culminating with the ‘DJ International Review’ convened in the mid-1970s in Zagreb’s main sports hall, which gathered famous Yugoslav disc jockeys along with their former idol and a special guest star, Radio Luxembourg’s Tony Prince (Vrdoljak 1976: 22). The event was both a testament to the growth of the profession as well as the high point of a new fashion of travelling disc jockeys. To cash in on their newly acquired fame, a few of the best-known disc jockeys began to tour around the country. The most popular among them was Zoran Modli, who made his name at the newly founded Belgrade’s ‘Radio Studio B’, where he auditioned with a reel-to-reel tape recording of his own disc jockey show at the club he founded in the Belgrade suburbs.6 Modli’s ‘Disco Caravan’, later renamed the ‘Flying Discotheque’ once Modli became a professional pilot, was a complex venture, sponsored by a domestic amplifier manufacturer and promoted by an aspiring manager whose innovative advertising included big posters and film trailers played in local cinemas ahead of Modli’s gigs (Fig. 10.2). Modli staged his improvised disco shows with dazzling light effects in places ranging from school playgrounds and houses of culture to smaller football stadiums and city sports halls, at times accompanied by live musicians and dancers. At the time when discotheques were still limited to urban centres and coastal areas, he and other mobile disc jockeys introduced new behaviour patterns to remote parts of the country. As the discotheque network spread across the whole country, this type of mobile disco was no longer necessary and faded in importance.

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Fig. 10.2 A 1975 self-made promotional poster for Zoran Modli’s travelling disco show

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The confidence that was accumulated in the meantime became evident when the newly born disco fever in the late 1970s prompted another wave of competitions that aimed higher than previously, now seeking to compete with the wider world. In 1979, in the provincial city of Karlovac, Branko Obradović Kina, a hobby disc jockey, played records for 76 straight hours. The feat, one of several similar marathons, was well documented by the media whose ecstatic reports are worth citing in detail: 23.00: Kina opens his eyes, stands, falls back, then stands up again. The Committee is considering whether to allow him to continue. His health is in jeopardy . . . ; 05.00: Kina has a fever. He is conscious and awake, yet cold. He is covered with jackets and coats, but shakes nonetheless. Physiotherapist gives him glucose . . . ; 20.00: There are 1200 youths in the hall..; 22.00: Kina is declared Yugoslav and European record holder. . . . He opens champagne. Thousands scream. . . . He is removed from the stage, carried through the hall. He made it. . . . (No Sleep for Kina, Disco Marathon in Karlovac, Zdravo magazine 1979)

AMATEUR TECHNICIAN: BETWEEN SELF-MADE INNOVATIONS AND IMPORTS Humorous episodes like the one described illustrate the constant pressure disc jockeys felt to innovate and improvise. These pressures reached far beyond the music itself. Disc jockeys had to be well-versed in an impressive array of technical devices, which they simultaneously manipulated for their own purposes. Those who had electricians and engineers around them had a much easier time. If not, they had to personally install, connect and service their equipment. Moreover, if investment in hardware was beyond the club’s budget, disc jockeys would be expected to bring their own gear as well. Proper disco technology was both expensive and hard to acquire. To get their hands on the necessary equipment disc jockeys had to be creative. Disc jockeys used self-made amplifiers, mixers and equalisers, which local engineers assembled on their own accord or copied from the schematics of the few originals available. More skilled disc jockeys even skimmed through used radio dumps in search of discarded transformers and transistors, which they refurbished and reused in their own DIY equipment. While not always reliable they were frequently more powerful than lowquality Yugoslav products.

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The same spirit of improvisation was responsible for the creative lighting which became a major part of the clubs’ interiors and was among the reasons for their initial mysterious appeal. The psychedelic light show in Zagreb’s Jabuka prompted erratic moral panic attacks while being made out of simple Christmas lamps (Goluža 1968: 10). Disc jockeys painted ordinary light bulbs with industrial colours resistant to high temperatures or placed them in neon lamps to induce random flashing. School globes were turned into rotating disco balls with the help of glue, broken mirrors and primitive electro-motors taken from kitchen oven grills. In slightly over a decade a gradual shift occurred in the record players, from domestic brands like RIZ Toscas or Iskra Garrard Belt Drive to expensive Technics 1210 MK2 turntables, acquired in 1981 by a former disc jockey turned manager Janoš Kern for his Turist discotheque in Ljubljana. By then simple amplifiers, loudspeakers or tape-recorders could even be bought in local commission stores. For more complex pieces one had to go abroad. Small items like microphones or headphones were usually smuggled in to avoid paying customs duties, while larger ones could be left to relatives to bring them into the country. Music agencies issued special permits with which disc jockeys could legally import the necessary devices. Outdated custom regulations barely kept up with the technological developments in the industry, forcing disc jockeys to creatively use the terms. For example, the first imported video recorders were referred to as special tape-recorders. Stiers Effects, a company which specialised in disco equipment, found it worthwhile to advertise their newly opened Munich branch in the main Yugoslavian music magazine Džuboks (‘Stiers’ 1979: 52). The outlet eventually became an important source for the purchase of professional fog machines, laser headlights and LED effects. Yet, the enterprising spirit survived. Once obtained, these objects were often taken apart to serve as a template for self-manufacture, and later rented out to other clubs. From early on, disc jockeys also included video clips in their routines. Moving images were projected onto the walls with 8 mm and 16 mm film projectors. Synchronised with music, these displays left the audience mesmerised in a collective gaze. Mirko Sobota, another ex-disc jockey who, along with his brother, would specialise in spreading his disco business in the late 1970s, bought two big video screens in Germany, leaving a couple of video recorders with his relatives abroad to tape him shows like ‘Top of the Pops’ and ‘Musikladen’ and send them back by plane for re-editing. Sobota effectively became a video jockey pioneer, playing

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clips which fascinated visitors at his discotheque Brezovica in the old castle near Zagreb so much that they initially preferred to watch the programmes rather than dance.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter the complexities of translating a relatively new pop-cultural profession into a new Yugoslav socialist environment have been examined. This specific context pushed local club disc jockeys to develop more diverse skills than their western counterparts. The birth of their natural habitat, the discotheque, in all its local varieties, from the refurbished youth union clubs to fully-fledged private businesses, signalled the birth of market socialism. Early socialist disc jockeys were forced to combine spinning records with other executive tasks, turning into proto-entrepreneurs in a society where few understood how to set up and run a profitable business. Faced with high expectations on one side and a limited supply of commodities on the other, they were inclined to improvise in order to secure the needed musical and technical assets through various semi-legal channels, taking advantage of the growing cross-border travel in the process. Above all, socialist disc jockeys were cultural mediators who invented and accumulated a new kind of capital, foreign to official cultural ideologists, yet valued in their own world. These pop-cultural gatekeepers spread pop-rock music with its whole Gesamtkunstwerk and worldview, shaping the musical tastes of the socialist youth. As demonstrated by numerous accounts, the job was not an easy one. Disc jockeys had to be multitalented musical cyborgs capable of doing different things at the same time. In this way, they epitomised many features of late socialism, from ideological and cultural relaxation, to fluid borders and private entrepreneurship that emulated capitalistic practices, all of which defied dated Cold War schemes of repression and dissent, official cultures and youth subcultures.

NOTES 1. While beyond the scope of this essay, equally unexplored is radio disc jockeys’ impact on the growth of the medium which presents the second stream in the scholarship on disc jockeys (Shuker 1998: 101).

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2. Spurred on by early translations of subcultural classics such as Hebdige or Frith, a couple of relevant ethnographic and semiotic analysis of late Yugoslav youth (music) subcultures were published, but failed to leave deeper traces in the field: Tomc (1989), Prica (1991), Perasović (2001). 3. I wish to express my appreciation to the former disc jockeys and club owners who shared with me their experiences and testimonies which are at the core of this text. These include (in alphabetical order): Slavin Balen, Ciril Cerar, Duško Cvetojević, Miroslav Gregurek, Janoš Kern, Zoran Modli, Gordan Novak, Vladimir Satarić, Mirko Sobota, Domagoj Veršić, Željko Vodušek. I am especially indebted to Domagoj Veršić, Mirko Sobota, Dušan Cvetojević and Zoran Modli who kindly offered their own private collections. I also wish to express my gratitude to the director and the writer of the documentary film ‘Half a Century of Disco’, namely Zvonimir Rumboldt and Toni Faver, who allowed me access to their research. Finally, the writing of this chapter was helped by the Croatian Science Foundation’s project ‘Croatia in the 20th century: Modernization in the context of pluralism and monism.’ 4. In his excellent book on Rijeka’s early rock scene Velid Đekić identifies the city’s youth club Husar which opened in 1957 and was run by the newly founded Association of Popular Music Enthusiasts, as the first Yugoslav discotheque. Again the question of unclear definitions and taxonomy is crucial here since the club had many but not all the defining elements of the discotheque. Still, Đekić’s book is exceptional as it is the only local monograph that devotes significant attention to disc jockeys and acknowledges their place in the birth of the city’s rock scene. (Đekić 2013: 38–49; 350–359). 5. Having been involved in the forming of Gusar, Veršić spent the next summer at an improvised discotheque in a small seaside state hotel. Later that autumn he began working in Arkada, arguably the most exclusive Yugoslav discotheque of the time. Located near Split, Arkada was owned by the local Gastarbeiter whose brother was part of Yugoslav’s economic establishment and secured the needed support. Veršić eventually moved to Zagreb where he finished his short but eventful disc jockey career. There he worked in a few clubs under the auspices of the city’s cultural youth organization which was an important provider of disc jockey gigs, managing as much as six clubs. While these youth union clubs usually closed at 11 or midnight, private night bars or summer discotheques typically had longer working hours and more affluent guests who would arrive by car (author’s interview with Veršić). 6. Modli was somewhat of an exception in this respect. Early Yugoslav club disc jockeys rarely worked in radio, which was still conservative to a large extent. Unorthodox progress was noticed at the time by one of the first Zagreb disc jockeys Ranko Antonić: ‘Whereas abroad disc jockeys are linked to radio and famous disc jockeys such as Tony Prince, Jimmy Saville or John Peel only occasionally played at clubs, here it was the reverse. We began in the clubs,

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defending the profession and proving its worth.’ Only the second generation of disc jockeys from the late 1970s and early 1980s, firmly embraced radio, seeing in it another way of promotion (‘Afirmacija jedne profesije’ 1970: 18).

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Rumoboldt, Zvonimir, dir. (2015). Pola stoljeća diska. Croatia: Kad Tad Production. Shuker, Roy (1998). Key concepts in popular music. London: Routledge. Škarica, Siniša (2005). Kad je rock bio mlad. Priča s istočne strane (1956-1970). Zagreb: VBZ. ‘Stiers Effects’. Džuboks, 79 (1979), p. 52. Thornton, Sarah (1995). Club cultures: Music, media and subcultural capital. London: Polity Press. Tomc, Gregor (1989). Druga Slovenija: zgodovina mladinskih gibanj na Slovenskem v 20. stoletju. Ljubljana: UKZSMS. Vrdoljak, Dražen (1976). Disk-džokeji kao ribe na suhom. Tina, 17, 22. Vučetić, Radina (2010). ‘Džuboks (Jukebox)’: The First Rock’n’roll Magazine in Socialist Yugoslavia. In Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik (Eds.), Remembering Utopia: The culture of everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia (pp. 145–64). Washington: New Academia Publishing. Vukadinović, Maja (2001). Feljton delovi; Diskoteka kod Laze Šećera; Disk džokej je bio zvezda. http://majavukadinovic.com/feljton_delovi.htm. Retrieved 2 September 2014. Vuletic, Dean (2011). The making of a Yugoslav popular music industry. Popular Music History, 6, 269–85. Žikić, Aleksandar (1999). Fatalni ringišpil: Hronika Beogradskog Rokenrola 1959–1979. Beograd: Geopolitika. Zubak, Marko (2012). Pop-Express (1969–1970.): Rock-kultura u političkom omladinskom tisku. Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 1, 23–35. Marko Zubak received his PhD at the Central European University in Budapest with a thesis on Yugoslav youth communist press. He is currently a researcher at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb. His interests focus on social movements, youth subcultures, popular culture, media and late socialism at large. He has worked as a radio journalist, edited a literary anthology and curated several exhibitions. His publications include ‘The Croatian Spring 1967–1971: Testing the Pitfalls of the Croatian Historiography and Beyond’, in East Central Europe. Budapest: Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies, No.1, February 2006: 191–226’, and ‘Stayin’ Alive. Yugoslav Socialist Disco Culture’ (Zagreb: Galerija SC, 2015).

PART III

Eastern European Stars

CHAPTER 11

Karel Gott: The Ultimate Star of Czechoslovak Pop Music Petr A. Bílek

When Larry Rother wrote his review of the English translation of the book Gottland by the Polish journalist Mariusz Szczygieł, he felt obligated to explain the book’s title to readers of The New York Times: The book’s title, however, refers to Karel Gott, a pop singer nicknamed the Golden Nightingale who, like the majority of Czechs and Slovaks, played along with the communist system. He even signed an ‘anti-Charter’ petition; was unapologetic after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 for having done so, suggesting that the Charter ’77 movement was an Israeli plot; and, in 2006, opened a self-aggrandising museum, Gottland, just outside Prague, that seems modelled on Elvis Presley’s Graceland. ‘Getting inside Gottland is like obtaining a seal of approval: The past is O.K.,’ Mr. Szczygiel writes. Fans ‘loved Gott, and they made it through communism along with him,’ so visiting his shrine is a way ‘to confirm that their lives have been all right.’ Mr. Szczygiel’s larger point, of course, is that Czechoslovakia was also a kind of Gottland, full of people justifying the accommodations to evil they made so as not to become its victim themselves. (Rother 2014)

P.A. Bílek (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_11

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Szczygieł’s book was translated into several languages, and, in all its versions, the book bears the same title—Gottland. The proper name ‘Karel Gott’ also remains the same in all the translations, but its reference changes radically as it goes through the process of a cultural transfer. While Polish, Czech, or German readers have the name of Karel Gott in their cultural lexicon, readers from English- or French-speaking contexts have to be supplied with a definite description that can function as a definition. Szczygieł’s text caters to such a need explicitly: ‘Gott is the Czech Presley and Pavarotti rolled into one’ (Szczygieł 2014: 173). Writing a reportage book about the history and culture of a nation adjacent to his own, Szczygieł uses Gott as a motif rooted so deeply in Czech mentality and history that Gott keeps reappearing throughout the book. For the past fifty years, to most Czechs Gott has embodied an icon of the ‘sacred in a desacralized reality’ (Szczygieł 2014: 181). Such a pillar position, however, marks a sharp contrast to another international bestseller that has Karel Gott as a protagonist. In 1979, Milan Kundera published his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He wrote it in his French exile as his first piece of fiction meant for western readers.1 Musing about the way our lives have been determined by historical events, the narrator ponders on the decline of music; it reached a state of idiocy as it eliminated all thought and substituted it with a loud guitar. And it is at this point that the narrator tells a story: When Karel Gott, the Czech pop singer, went abroad in 1972, Husak2 got scared. He sat right down and wrote him a personal letter (it was August 1972 and Gott was in Frankfurt). The following is a verbatim quote from it. I have invented nothing: Dear Karel, We are not angry with you. Please, come back. We will do everything you ask. We will help you if you help us . . . Think it over. Without batting an eyelid Husak let doctors, scholars, astronomers, athletes, directors, cameramen, workers, engineers, architects, historians, journalists, writers, and painters go into emigration, but he could not stand the thought of Karel Gott leaving the country. Because Karel Gott represents music without memory [ . . . ] The president of forgetting and the idiot of music deserve one another. They are working for the same cause. (Kundera 1994: 181)3

In Szczygieł’s reportage book, Karel Gott represents the idol whose path to stardom has been based on an ability to adapt to changing political and

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social contexts. His life and career thus seem to offer compensation for ordinary people who behaved the same way but sans the halo of stardom. Szczygieł captures the play on words: ‘(der) Gott’ means ‘God’ in German, the language of which most Czechs would have had some partial knowledge. Elevated to stardom, which had been confirmed by his international success, Karel Gott implies the divine spirituality accessible by people who do not recognise any other divine power. In Kundera’s semi-autobiographical account, Gott appears for just two brief moments to be labelled as the ‘idiot of music’. Such a definite description carries, nevertheless, a large amount of universality, too. For Kundera’s narrator, Gott becomes the embodiment of kitsch, of the decline of the art of music, compromised by commercialism in the West and totalitarian political power in the East. Should such a strikingly contrastive image be assigned to the genre differences between a reportage and a novel? Do they perhaps come from the fact that Szczygieł is biased as an outsider and Kundera as an insider? Is it due to one point of view being biased in the 1970s and the other in the 2000s? Or is Gott’s career and music so rich, multi-layered and ambiguous that it allows for such highly contrastive interpretations? The contrast suggests that the meaning of ‘Karel Gott’ is not static. Changes will be focused upon, taking into account his records, TV performances, concerts, public appearances, PR outputs, media images and others’ books about him. Richard Dyer’s proposition that such an iconic star image as that of Gott functions on a larger temporal scale as a polysemic structure will be adopted: ‘some meanings and affects are foregrounded and others are masked or displaced’ (Dyer 1998: 3). The changes in Gott’s image against the background of a broader sociocultural and political history will be analysed. The approach will focus on the semiotics of both Gott’s music and his star image, taken as ‘texts’ since there are no representative sociological data that would allow for the meanings assigned by his audiences over more than five decades. Using the binary opposition of the authentic star versus the manufactured star widely applied to popular music (Shuker 2001: 7), Gott’s career as continuously varying between these two poles will be analysed.

BRINGING UP

A

STAR

IN THE

SHADOWS

OF

STALINISM

There are no precise data about the sales of Karel Gott’s records. A conservative estimate points to 30 million records, an optimistic estimate to 100 million records.4 Moreover, he has never been a typical studio artist

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and his impact has also been based on numerous concerts, TV appearances and a frequent presence in mainstream audience radio playlists. Though it is difficult to measure his impact quantitatively, his career spans nearly 55 years of holding a dominant position in Czech and Slovak popular music and an influential position in most of the former state socialist countries, as well as former West Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. His popularity not only survived shifts in music style and new generations but also the changing political climates and régimes in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern countries. At the same time, he never managed to reach beyond the space outlined geographically as more or less the borders of Eastern and Central Europe. His success in France, Spain or Italy could not stand in comparison to the impact he had in Germany. His fame never truly reached Great Britain or the USA. The main reason for his long career was Gott’s willingness to adapt to the norms of each era in both its fashions and its ideological precepts. He was able to wrap up his music production in a package that isolated him from the political agenda by stressing his music’s entertainment value and professionalism. Both his music performances and his media image would carefully avoid any potentially conflicting attitudes, mainly political messages or the subversion of mainstream values. His public performance has always been— both in time and space—based on the image of a ‘mere’ singer who has the talents to reproduce music that entertains, and who has no ambitions to challenge the status quo or to preach anti-establishment messages. Karel Gott entered Czech show business at the right time for breeding and feeding a future star. Born in 1939, he grew up in the Stalinist era that followed the communist takeover of 1948. He completed his education at an apprentice centre in 1957 and spent the next three years working as an electrician in a factory. Experiencing the toughness and roughness of ‘real’ life, he could easily appreciate the positive aspects of a freelance singer lifestyle. Starting in 1958 he took part in competitions for amateur singers; and that same year signed his first contract, singing with a small band in Prague cafés. The end of the 1950s provided a foundation for Czech popular music, mixing up the tradition of pre-WWII swing and pop music with the new trends slowly arriving through the Iron Curtain: the styles of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and post-WWII modern jazz. After ten years of cultural exchange having been reduced to state socialist countries only, towards the end of the 1950s Czech culture selectively opened up to incorporate elements from contemporary western culture. Based on the assumption that communist culture should avoid all types of

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elitism because such a culture stems from the people and is supposed to address the entire community, the culture embraced more popular forms. In popular music, both the tradition of folklore music and the music of bands with wind instruments seemed to be conservative and politically problematic as these types of music had been rooted in the pre-communist period. Neither could the Czech pre-WWII tradition of swing music provide a solid base upon which to build a new type of popular music. Thus the political thaw that came after the end of Stalinism granted a certain space in which to adapt and domesticate the impulses of American and British pop music of the 1950s, and to assuage generational conflicts by introducing a distinctive type of music meant for the youth. The young Karel Gott had enough talent and flexibility to adapt to the trial-and-error search for the Czechoslovak version of pop music. He adhered to the constantly changing criteria of the amateur competitions in which he took part. He demonstrated his readiness to switch between different music styles and genres while singing with bands that played in Prague cafés for late-afternoon dance parties.5 In 1960, he happily left his factory job as he entered the Prague Conservatory to study opera singing. And that same year he had his first television appearance in a programme celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia at the end of WWII. Accompanied by a jazz band, he also made his first studio recordings: cover versions of the songs Blues in the Night6 and Careless Love7. In that same year when the new big band Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra was established with official institutional support, he seized the opportunity and built a reputation as one of the orchestra’s solo singers. He participated in the orchestra programme ‘It was George Gershwin’, with which the orchestra toured Czechoslovakia in 1962. Since the Iron Curtain constrained a cultural exchange with the western world, cultural policy focused on the symbolic value of interactions within the Soviet bloc. The Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra—with Karel Gott as one of their singers—toured Poland in 1961 and the Soviet Union in 1962. While trips abroad required a repertoire of well-known jazz standards with lyrics in English, for domestic performances original new music with lyrics in Czech had been desired. To promote the production of new songs, the song contest ‘Hledáme písničku pro všední den’ (‘In Search of a Song for Any Old Day’) had been running annually since 1959. In 1962, Karel Gott won the contest, singing a jazz duet with Vlasta Průchová entitled Až nám bude dvakrát tolik (When We Are

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Twice as Old). The song appeared on the B side of an EP that would become Gott’s first released recording. The earliest jazz recordings of Gott’s required a style of singing that focused intentionally on imitating the original versions. As local cultural isolation did not allow any contact with the then recent pop and jazz music of the 1950s, be it via concerts or recordings8, cover versions functioned as originals in the local context. Singing the lyrics in English, a language Gott did not understand, he did not focus on a phrasing that stressed meaning. Instead, he added certain operatic character to his singing and sometimes also an unwitting dramatic effect caused by his struggle with the language. The end of the 1950s witnessed the growth in popularity of informal theatre scenes that combined improvised theatrical sketches with live music performance and talks with well-known people. The most famous theatre of this new trendy style, The Semafor, offered a position to Gott in 1963. The Semafor theatre’s creative duo, the composer Jiří Šlitr and the lyricist Jiří Suchý, wrote a few original songs for him. Two of them, Oči sněhem zaváté (Eyes Covered Over with Snow) and Zdvořilý Woody (Gallant Woody), became hits. Such success shifted Gott’s repertoire from traditional jazz towards mainstream pop and rock ‘n’ roll. He appropriated a style similar to Elvis Presley’s, one based on an oscillation between rich bel canto singing featuring sentimental emotions and a theatrical approach, mocking or even subverting the norms of mainstream singing. Thus the song Zdvořilý Woody parodied country music songs and especially their style of yodelling. The new repertoire elevated Gott to the position of a singer representing the younger generation. In 1963 he emerged as an original singer with his own style of music and his own image. The move from jazz to pop distanced him from the collective big band orchestra, rendering him a soloist. His position as a newly emerged star was reinforced by repeat appearances in TV programmes throughout 1963, including his victory in the contest ‘Písničky na zítra’ (‘Songs for Tomorrow’) with a slow pop song entitled Tam, kde šumí proud (The Place Where the Current Murmurs). The new pop songs allowed him to occupy a unique territory: while most other male singers of early 1960s Czech pop music sang in a baritone with rather unclear pronunciation, Gott offered a resounding tenor voice and careful pronunciation that allowed the audience to focus both on the music and the lyrics. In 1963, the monthly journal Melodie, which specialised in pop and jazz music, began circulating in the Czech context. Their poll asking music

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critics to name the best singer of the year brought Gott a victory. In the spring of 1964, Gott also won his first popularity contest—the ‘Zlatý slavík’ (‘Golden Nightingale’) annual poll for the most popular singer of 1963, organised by the weekly Mladý svět that targeted the younger generation. In 1964, Gott also appeared in his first two feature films, both singing and acting. One of them, Kdyby tisíc klarinetů (If a Thousand Clarinets, directed by Ján Roháč and Vladimír Svitáček), became popular mainly among the younger generation, raising controversies due to its strong anti-war stance. He also sang the songs featured in the musical comedy film Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera (Lemonade Joe, or, the Horse Opera, directed by Oldřich Lipský) that quickly gained cult status after it premiered in 1964. The film was a parody of the western movie genre and the presence of the voice clearly identified as Karel Gott’s spiced up his image as a rather subversive icon who challenged the mainstream values of propriety. The domestic image of a musical rebel, however, had been just one of the many faces he could offer. His international image appeared rather different. Also in 1964, he won 3rd prize in the contest at the Sopot International Song Festival in Poland where he sang the Polish folk song Czarny Kot (Black Cat). Having his first concerts in West Germany and Monte Carlo, he proved his ability to sing in English and German and to offer a contemporary international repertoire. His flexibility, that is, the broad scope of styles he could cover and his sensitivity to what was expected by different audiences and by different types of events became his most distinctive marker.

FREE FLOWING THROUGH THE 1960S TOWARDS AUTHENTICITY

AS A

TURN

The beginnings of Gott’s career lacked the phase of an independent ‘garage-like’ existence full of attempts in small club venues, private jamming or a search for some authentic approach that would come from within one’s soul. Since the beginning, his career had been one of professional engagements, cooperation with large professional orchestras, and pre-defined roles that one can either accept or refuse. Such a career starting point based on the demands of professionalism and a willingness to comply perhaps explains his growth to fame during the second half of the 1960s, including a fissure between his domestic image as a freeflowing young star and his international image as a ‘Sinatra from the Eastʼ. Gott has never been—with a few exceptions during the second half of his career—a songwriter. The split between authors and interpreters was,

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however, a standard during the early phases of Czechoslovak pop music. Around 1965, a few rock ‘n’ roll and eventually rock bands emerged in Czechoslovakia, but Gott continued with the practice of singing with different orchestras, tour bands and provisional ensembles that prevented him from coining a homogenous style and genre to which he would be tied. Concerts abroad, tours and LPs produced for export required singing in English and eventually also in other foreign languages, which minimalised the role of the lyrics within the song performance. Even songs he sang in Czech would never aim to deliver an urgent message, or communicate ideas and provoke certain attitudes held by his audience. When examined from the viewpoint of English-speaking music studies, he thus seems to lack the key characteristics of an authentic star. However, the concept of authenticity works differently in distinctive contexts. As the Czech pop music scene further developed thanks to the political thaw of the 1960s, it brought to the public’s attention the notion of distinctive genres. Most of the singers would develop their profiles via a distinctive subscription to only one genre, be it rock ‘n’ roll, rock, soul, blues, or mainstream pop music. Gott, on the contrary, proved his ability and willingness to cover a repertoire that spans opera arias, operetta songs, traditional jazz, soul music, chansons, rock ‘n’ roll, country music, folklore and folk songs and mainstream pop music. Geographically, he would sing music originating in the USA and Great Britain as well as Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary and several other countries. He would cover both old, traditional songs as well as new hits. The 1960s development of music in the western world brought the concept of authentic singing/playing/song-writing: the concept of a song as a personal statement, as illustrated most explicitly by the style of Bob Dylan. The messages of such songs seemed to be backed up by the person who wrote and sang them—they functioned like urgent expressions of the self. Looking at Karel Gott from such a perspective, he inevitably appears as the opposite of that, like the embodiment of mere role-playing. In contrast to the concept of authenticity, his singing style stressed the position of the mere interpreter who does not care about the content and renders the song in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. This pleasure seems not to be located within the songs but rather rests entirely in the process of singing. This is most apparent when he sings in foreign languages alien to him—like English—during the 1960s. On these occasions his English sounds like an artificial language; thus the form triumphs over the content.

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The Dylanesque concept of authenticity did not reach 1960s Czechoslovakia due to both language barriers and the lack of any chance of obtaining the records. Lacking in the local context, it offered space to coin a specific version of authenticity which was acquired by Gott. The lack of messages in his songs was, paradoxically, perceived as a positive feature because other cultural texts were loaded with heavy ideological messages. The empty, nonsense-based poetics of his lyrics thus offered an escape from state propaganda. Moreover, with the rapid growth of a TV audience during the 1960s9, Gott’s popularity grew not only via records and radio airplay but mainly due to his television appearances. In his ‘prehistoric’ music videos, he attempted to dance and move in the style of rock ‘n’ roll but with rather awkward bodily movements. It gave him the appearance of an amateur who has difficulty controlling his body—a contrast to the perfect control of his voice. Most television appearances offer the image of Gott as a shy person who feels uneasy in front of the camera. Such a lack of self-confidence maintained the notion of ordinariness disclosing itself behind the borrowed role of a star. It helped the local audiences identify with Gott and see him as authentic. Experiments with the newly emerging genre of the music video, however, denied another aspect of authenticity. They would present the song not as a recording of a real performance but as a theatrical act. Gott, in his casual attire, attempted to illustrate the lyrics of his songs with the help of dancing or body movements in the style of pantomime, creating an analogy to the lyrics. Watching these music videos today, one cannot fail to notice the features of a Foucaultian ‘docile body’, a body that has accepted the discipline and respected the rules of genre triumphing over the individual. These 1960s Gott music videos illustrate the processes of the natural stepping aside and giving space to the artificial.10 In 1965, the singer left the Semafor theatre and along with the Štaidl brothers, who armed him with a new repertoire, established a new scene, the Apollo theatre. This new institutional coverage allowed him to choose his own concert programme, to hire colleagues sharing similar tastes, and to travel abroad. He went on a concert tour of Belgium in 1965 and to Poland, Hungary, Austria and West Berlin in 1966. The slow but continuous reforms that loosened the political and ideological constraints of the day also brought popular music a new social position. Coined originally as a tool for reaching the younger generation, in the middle of the 1960s it proved to be a profitable commodity that could be imported to other countries. It was to

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function as an instrument of cultural ‘brotherhood’ within Soviet bloc countries and to bring in western currencies from countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In 1965, the Czechoslovak record company, Supraphon, also released Gott’s first LP11 album—‘Zpívá Karel Gott’ (‘Karel Gott Sings.’) It was composed as a mixture of cover versions and original songs written for Gott, all of them having been released as singles in 1963–1965. The cover versions spanned Mancini’s Moon River, Don Gibson’s Oh, Lonesome Me and From Me to You by the Beatles, all of which were sung in Czech. In just the following year, Supraphon released Gott for export, too. The LP ‘The Golden Voice from Prague’ was distributed by the Czechoslovak foreign trade company Artia and it offered only cover versions of songs sung in English. The LP repertoire gave space to the bel canto and jazz style of singing featuring rich orchestra arrangements. No numbers have been published that would account for Gott’s international success during this phase, but he received his first ‘Golden Record’ plaque from Supraphon in 1966; he was awarded this as the company’s most successful commodity. Gott’s three songs occupied the three top positions in the Czech poll for the most popular songs of the year, published by the youth weekly Mladý svět at the end of 1966. He definitively reached the top position of Czechoslovak pop music in terms of popularity and prestige, and he would not leave it for the next fifty years.

THE GOLDEN VOICE

OF

PRAGUE GOES ABROAD

In 1967, Gott recorded his second LP—‘Hlas můj nech tu znít’ (‘Let My Voice Sound Here’). In contrast to his debut LP, it had a coherent style, based on operatic performance, dramatic declamations and rich orchestra arrangements, including horn and string sections, however, it failed to produce hit singles. It shifted Gott to the position of a settled-down ‘serious’ singer on the border between operetta and pop music. His international career, on the other hand, opened wide. In January, he sang at the MIDEM music trade fair in Cannes, France. In April, he travelled to Canada to participate in Czechoslovakia’s 1967 World’s Fair Exposition (Expo 67) programme and appeared on Canadian TV. Beginning in June, he spent half a year in Las Vegas, USA, singing in the New Frontier Hotel bar with the band from his Apollo theatre project. The stay in Las Vegas probably revealed both his ability to make a living as a musician in the US and the limits of his talents and abilities, as he did not

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Fig. 11.1 Gottmania explodes in Prague: Karel Gott faces the crowd of people who welcome him after his return from Las Vegas at the Prague airport Copyright Czech News Agency / Jovan Dezort, 1967

proceed from playing night shifts to a studio recording offer. With no promotion and no publicity, he was just a standard bar singer. His career in Europe offered more prospects. Also in 1967, he signed with the German music company Polydor and recorded two songs for his German SP debut: Schiwago Melodie (Weißt du wohin?)12 and Bist du das Glück13. Then he recorded the material for his first Polydor LP—‘Die goldene Stimme aus Prag’ (‘The Golden Voice from Prague’)—which was released in 1968 (Fig. 11.1). Although political restrictions were loosened in Czechoslovakia as the political regime began to build their own version of ‘communism with a

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human face’, opportunities to travel to western countries and earn western money were still rare. Gott, therefore, tried to make the most of them. In 1968, he took part in the 13th Eurovision Song Contest, which took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London; its renown is due to the fact that it was the first Eurovision Song Contest to be broadcast on television in colour. Gott failed in a competition against Cliff Richard and similar stars from an all-European selection. The most interesting aspect of his appearance is the fact that he represented Austria in the contest, singing the chanson Tausend Fenster (A Thousand Windows)14 written by the Austrian pop music star Udo Jürgens. In April of 1968, Czechoslovak authorities were apparently dealing with the more burdening issues of the political reform labelled ‘the Prague Spring’; just two years earlier as well as later, such a substitution would not have been tolerated as the totalitarian discourse would have had the tendency to treat any type of representation (be it culture, sports, science, etc.) most seriously. For Gott’s part, the episode might illustrate his readiness to play the required role and to adapt to the demands of the context. Choosing Gott, on the part of Austria, can be interpreted as an attempt to refresh its participation: Jürgens had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1965 and Gott was merely a fresh new item spreading through German-speaking countries on the wings of Polydor. In 1968, he also participated in a song contest in Brazil, introducing the song Lady Carneval (Lady Carnival), which would turn out to be his biggest hit ever. The catchy music that allowed Gott to expose all the powers of his voice was written by Karel Svoboda, a former rock musician who had launched his career as a professional pop music songwriter with the help of this very song. During the next three decades, he penned the music of about 80 songs for Gott; he is the author of most of his hits in both Czech and German. Gott also published his first book Říkám to písní (Telling It with a Song)15 in 1968. The autobiographical account of his life was conceived of as a Cinderella story. He attributed his success to his devotion to music and his hard work. Gott devoted much of his time and energy to meet Polydor’s expectations of delivering a new, exotic brand star to the German-speaking world of popular music, which led to the nickname ‘Sinatra from the Eastʼ. Billboard offered a brief piece of news in its 6 May 1967 issue, under the headline ‘Czech “Frank” on Bon Disk’, mentioning the contract between Polydor and ‘the idol of Czechoslovak youth’. It stressed the historical aspect of the event: it was the first contract between a singer from an Eastern European country and a German label. The phrase ‘Eastern Frank Sinatra’ is also quoted, along with the

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information that Gott ‘has a big following throughout Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union.’ The label ‘Sinatra from the East’ mixed the familiar with the exotic. It was not a ‘Sinatra from the communist bloc’; the label referred to the geographical and cultural content, not to the political content. And the same orientation—deprived of any type of political agenda—became apparent also from the first LPs released by Polydor in 1968 and 1969. As Doctor Zhivago was the only Eastern (Soviet) novel published and mediated (also via the film version) in the western world, the ‘Sinatra from the East’ was smartly attached to the same vehicle—the song from the film version. The Zhivago song, so successful as a single, offered the name for one of the first of Gott’s two LPs released by Polydor in 1968—‘Weißt du wohin?’ (‘Do You Know Where?ʼ). The second album used another—more geographically specific—title: ‘Die Goldene Stimme aus Prag’ (‘The Golden Voice from Pragueʼ). Both Polydor albums had been composed as medleys. They offered a highly diversified repertoire ranking from classical music arias (Beethoven), traditional and folklore-like songs, musicals (West Side Story), country music (Ghost Riders in the Sky) and songs from Gott’s Czech repertoire comprising new lyrics in German or—occasionally—in Czech. Most songs represented cover versions of songs that had originated in an English-speaking context and which were now delivered with lyrics in German by a Czech singer whose accent would have sounded rather exotic to a native German ear and yet also showed Gott’s willingness to assimilate a foreign culture. The growing popularity of Gott in both Czechoslovakia and other Eastern bloc countries, as well as in West Germany and other countries in western Europe, created the effect of communicating vessels; the information about his immense popularity in one context helped boost his fame and popularity in another. The equilibrium allowed for his image to be coined as the embodiment of success, using a syntagmatic arrangement of elements. He was popular both ‘here’ and ‘there’, based on his abilities to modify strategies and to respond to the specificities of each context—the Czechoslovak context, the contexts of other communist countries, western contexts of the German-speaking world and—potentially—also western contexts beyond the German-speaking world. Gott came across as a star with different identities, each suitable to a different cultural milieu. The political events of 1968 which culminated in Eastern Europe with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army changed the

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syntagmatic (‘both—and’) framework. The process of ‘normalisation’ of the state socialist system in Czechoslovakia brought back notions of a strong, stable and distinctive borderline manifested as the ‘either/or’ type of paradigmatic divide: either communism or capitalism, either Czech/Slavic or German, either an ideological culture representing the people or a commercial culture cheating people. Under such a new political framework, in 1968–1972 Gott repeatedly faced a certain dilemma: stay in Czechoslovakia and return to the ideological orthodoxy that threatened to eliminate popular culture, or move to exile and run the risk of losing popularity by being deprived of the connotations of the miraculous ‘communist Sinatra’?16 It was also during these years that his fame and success culminated in both a Czechoslovak as well as German/Austrian context. In 1969, he recorded the LP ‘Weihnachten in der goldenen Stadt’ (‘Christmas in the Golden Cityʼ) for Polydor, which was released successfully on the pre-Christmas market. His Czechoslovak record company, Supraphon, took the album to be a new type of symbiosis; they released the medley of traditional Christmas folklore songs and carols alongside Christmas songs from classical music composers in their own edition on the Czechoslovak market. Albums with songs in German and English were also bought from Polydor and released by Supraphon for the Czechoslovak Artia foreign trading company that tried to sell them to countries that Polydor and other collaborating labels (Bertelsmann Club) did not reach.17 A rich production of further LPs followed. Polydor evidently explored the potential of variability, typical for Gott’s repertoire. They focused on songs that paired well with their conventional pop music: songs based on a pompous richness of orchestral arrangements and on an exclusive operatic leading voice, performed in the style of a cabaret or festival. Along with other medley albums, they produced more theme records in wide variety—from Czech folklore and classical songs by Czech composers (‘Von Böhmen in die Welt’, ‘From the Czech Lands into the World’, 1971) to albums of love songs (‘Von Romeo an Julia’, ‘From Romeo and Juliet’, 1971); with songs ranging from Liszt via Bacharach to George Harrison’s Something with lyrics in German), or to the Italian canzone style (‘La Canzone’, 1973). Gott’s Czech production for Supraphon also increased in terms of both quantity and success. In addition to the albums licensed from Polydor, they released the album ‘Poslouchejte! Karel Gott zpívá Lásku bláznivou a další hity’ (‘Listen Up! Karel Gott Sings Insane Love and Other Hits’,

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Fig. 11.2 Karel Gott posing as a star before his departure for Rio de Janiero festival in 1968 Copyright Czech News Agency / Jovan Dezort, 1968

1969), ‘Hity ´71’ (‘Hits ´71’, 1971) or ‘Má píseň’ (‘My Song’, 1972). The titles of these LPs promoted the status of the songs as hits, as items of an almost sacred status, since they came from such an international star. Most of the hit songs were written by Karel Svoboda, who was then enjoying the peak of his creativity. He penned the music for songs like Hey Hey Baby, Láska bláznivá (Insane Love), or Mistrál (Mistral), combining catchy melodic patterns with arrangements that allowed for all of the potential of Gott’s voice (Fig. 11.2). The quantity of records released by both Polydor and Supraphon towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s also established a

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pattern for Gott’s reception. The medley character of LPs with songs transferred from SPs released years before, or songs transferred from previous LPs, made the listeners eliminate any type of perception based on linear development. Gott’s career did not seem to have a narrative, a developmental ‘logic’ of searching for something, of steps that clearly aim somewhere and move to construct a story. His career appeared to move in a circular pattern, based on a continuous worship of the ‘Beauty of Music’. Its constant centre was the search for success, the ability to expose the listeners to a petrified notion of happiness and a harmony with the surrounding world, whatever that world might be like.

RISING FROM

THE

ASHES

When in his famous essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ Václav Havel writes explicitly about music, he refers to the persecuted rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. However, he offers a concept that could help explain the situation Karel Gott found himself in during the ‘normalisation’ period of the 1970s and 1980s. Havel talks about this era as a post-totalitarian phase, built upon ‘foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society’ (Havel 2009: 20). He talks about the split identities caused by the ‘social autototality at work. Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favour of the identity of the system, that is, so they may become agents of the system’s general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it’ (Havel 2009: 19). Gott had his identity split even more explicitly: having had the Las Vegas bar singing experience, he had to be happy about large crowds during concert tours in West Germany as well as successful sales of his Polydor records. This part of his activities gave him financial comfort and living standards that would not stand in comparison to his fellow Czechoslovak citizens. He was merely a professional entertainer in German-speaking countries. He sang more and more songs supplied by the Polydor team, without any chance to express any type of subjectivity. By contrast, his domestic context granted him the position of a unique star whose fame had been certified by reports of his foreign success. However, in Czechoslovakia, he had to cope with what Havel called ‘the system’s

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general automatism’, that is, the mechanisms that threatened to pull and ensnare him into the system. At the beginning of this chapter a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was quoted, which includes the story of how Gustáv Husák wrote a letter to Gott begging him to come back from West Germany. It might have spread as a hoax in the early 1970s, but there is no evidence for the existence of such a letter. However, in 2009 the Czech media (Bártová 2009) published a two-page typed letter from Gott addressing Husák on July 21, 1971. In the letter, Gott explained that after the process of political ‘normalisation’ began, he felt there were restrictions placed on his music played on radio playlists and in public spaces. He stressed that even in West Germany he would remain a Czechoslovak citizen representing Czech culture; that he never planned to engage in politics and that his only concern was within the realm of aesthetic values. If the circumstances returned to the conditions he used to enjoy earlier, he was willing to move back to Czechoslovakia. The letter demonstrates that between 1968 and 1971, as Gott hesitated over whether to emigrate or not, his symbolic value for the Czechoslovak audience was boosted by information concerning his success abroad, mainly in Germany and Austria. And, vice versa, his mild exoticism added to his German image and popularity. He took advantage of the fact that he was not a part of the émigré community, attempting instead to assimilate fully into German culture and society. Gott moved back to Czechoslovakia and proved his flexibility once more. In 1972, he participated in music festivals in Bulgaria and Poland and had a long concert tour in the USSR. He appeared on Czechoslovak TV and on televisions in four other communist countries. His concert in Bulgaria was also released as a recording there. His politically correct choice of destinations paid off, as he was allowed to do another concert tour in West Germany. In 1973, he was awarded a TV show, ‘Karel Gott Singsʼ; he sang a hit song on the soundtrack of a blockbuster fairy-tale film, and he appeared in another film as an actor. His first album was released in the German Democratic Republic. His Czech fan club was established the same year. The show ‘Karel Gott Singsʼ became a major television event over its ten years on air. Broadcast from a theatre, it had the appeal of a glamorous event that bore certain features of a high mass product. Gott as the central protagonist was backed by his small orchestra, implying some parallelism with the scenario of a priest and his altar boys. The static microphone

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could be seen as a substitution for an altar, while the songs could be seen as altar bread for the new era. Instead of divine spirituality, the ‘Beauty of Music’ was worshipped. Within this context, his new nickname was coined: Maestro, referring to his ability to perform not only pop music but also opera arias. The new nickname also reflected the fact that he adopted the Italian glamour style of pop music and broadened his repertoire with international folklore—the wide range was covered on the LP ‘Zwischen Moldau, Don und Donauʼ (‘Between the Vltava, Don and Danube Riversʼ, Polydor 1972, licensed and released by Supraphon under the Czech title ‘Mezi Vltavou, Donem a Dunajemʼ, 1973). His Czech LP production after 1974 gave up the search for album titles that would specify each LP’s distinctive content. His annual number of new songs would bear just the year’s reference: ‘Karel Gott ’75ʼ, ‘Karel Gott ’76ʼ, etc., with the name of the interpreter standing in for the substantial sameness, each particular year referring to just the flow of time. His new LPs offered two or three songs as potential hits, while the rest of the songs filled in the audio space. Most of them would maintain obvious professional standards but they lacked the appeal needed to be striking hits. These ‘easy listening category’ songs would reach the minds of his domestic audience mainly due to the generous radio airplay time. In the 1980s, his singing style, as well as the explicit nature of the lyrics of his songs, would move him more towards topical songs. Their lyrics focused on an ability to stay the same, implying the theme of a James Bond-type mythical hero like Ulysses—he who does not age, thus allowing the audience to evoke nostalgic memories and feelings. His live concerts and TV programmes struck an even more nostalgic note as he performed mostly his 1960s hits, thus evoking the memories of the ‘good old days’. New songs with the potential of a breaking event that would offer some novelty came from a realm of curiosities. In 1977, he recorded the German song Die Biene Maja (SP, Polydor), a jingle theme for the animated TV series Maya the Honey Bee, which turned out to be his most iconic and popular song ever for the German-speaking audience. His Czechoslovak audience enjoyed the duet song Zvonky štěstí (The Bells of Happiness, SP 1984) which he sang with the twelve-year-old Slovak singer, Darina Rolincová. He sang in Czech while she sang in Slovak to illustrate the federal policy of two nations within one state. In the same year that Gott recorded the song for Maya the Honey Bee, the Czechoslovak government granted him the official title of Meritorious

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Artist18; and in 1985 President Husák granted him the title of National Artist. In both cases, he was the first artist from the sphere of popular culture to receive such an award. Gott’s presence backed not only ideologically loaded TV programmes celebrating anniversaries important for the communist calendar; his presence—as a symbol of not only official culture but also of public tastes and preferences—was required at political meetings and rallies, especially those manifesting the friendship of Czechoslovak and Soviet people.19 The communist regime used him as an index referring to an official culture that enjoyed authentic popularity across generational, class or gender divides. His career had been likewise recognised on the other side of the political scale. Even here they did not adorn mere commercial success but used Gott as a representation of balance between aesthetic quality and success. Polydor granted him the Golden Needle award in 1986 which had until then only been offered to Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan before. Gott’s popularity, however, began to fade during the 1980s. In the popularity contest ‘Zlatý slavíkʼ (‘Golden Nightingaleʼ), which he won consecutively from 1963 until 1981 with just one exception (in 1967), he failed to win in 1982 and again from 1985 to 1988. His audience, as evidenced by the faces of the people captured at his concerts on television, narrowed down to middle-aged women. To regain popularity, he exposed his private life to the media, introducing a few illegitimate children he had fathered. His public image moved towards a hybrid of star and tabloid celebrity (Fig. 11.3). However, during the Velvet Revolution that led to the collapse of state socialism, Gott appeared on a balcony in front of a rally of two hundred thousand anti-communist protesters and sang the Czechoslovak anthem along with the folk singer Karel Kryl, who had just returned from a twenty-year emigration in Germany. Later on, Kryl regretted his willingness to sing with Gott, while for Karel Gott it became another moment of stardom. He gained back his lead in different popularity polls, keeping it to this day. When searching for reasons why, one of them seems to rest on his position as a ‘stable column’; entering a new social and political system, people instinctively leaned towards symbols of stability. Though he kept recording new material in the 1990s and 2000s, his audience as well as radio stations—driven by a newly emerging nostalgia—preferred re-editions of his old songs. He decided to split his career once more. Besides music, he devoted his time to paintings. They attracted some attention and enjoyed commercial success, but it is difficult to say whether

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Fig. 11.3 Karel Gott receives the title of National Artist from president Husák in 1985 Copyright Czech News Agency, 1985

this is because of the inherent value of the paintings or the cultural capital of the painter. Moreover, Gott’s life became an everyday topic in the growing industry of tabloid journalism. Almost twenty titles20 have been published about him since 1990, all of them the product of tabloid journalism, none having any analytical ambitions. One of them, Posel dobrých zpráv (The Messenger of the Good News, 2004) published in celebration of his 65th birthday, contained a short preface by Václav Klaus, the then President of the Czech Republic, who labelled Gott as a living legend and an integral part of the people’s history. For an enlarged edition celebrating Gott’s 70th birthday, Klaus, still in the President’s office, wrote a longer version, interpreting Gott as a proper pioneer of capitalism, as someone doing so even under the unhelpful circumstances of communism. Gott was no longer a mere entertainer; the President of his country put him on a pedestal and presented him as a role model, one of a handful who had learnt the value system based on money.

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Granting him the official state Medal of Merit in 2009, the President cemented the chain of political awards. As the communist regime had put on display one image of Karel Gott as official ideological property, the same material could be reinterpreted to construct another image: that of a builder of capitalism.

CONCLUSIONS ‘There is no better known Czech (among Czechs that is) over the last forty years than Karel Gott’, states Andrew Roberts in 2005 (47). It is a true sentence if one reads the last two words as only a name without reference, as a static signifier. This essay tried to show that the image of Karel Gott functions as a polysemic structure. His career splits into domestic and international spheres. If the international career keeps its distinctive characteristics over the decades, his domestic career is divided into phases, each of them having its own distinctive features. While he functions as a memory trigger for the days of authentic youth for older generations, he is perceived as a mere artificial (dinosaur-like) celebrity by contemporary younger generations. The chapter attempts to argue that the early phase of his career offers some amount of authenticity; his decision to accept the role assigned to him by the political regime in the early 1970s denied such a notion of authenticity and made Gott’s music, as well as his public image, appear fabricated. It is rather easy to dismiss that decision as a wrong step, and in this essay it is argued that at that moment he hardly had another choice: all other eventual decisions (emigration, dissent) offered solutions aiming to be in extremis, with losses prevailing over potential gains. When Václav Havel talked about ‘social auto-totality at work’, he concluded with a reference to the story of Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles. Certain irony can be found in the fact that, had the legendary doctor refused the temptations, no one would remember such a blueprint story. The morally wrong decision brought him fame. In a way, such a paradox throws some light on the career of Karel Gott.

NOTES 1. Though written in Czech, the novel was only published in Czech by the exiled publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto in 1981. There had been no official Czech edition to this date. Having appeared originally in French, the novel had been quickly translated into dozens of other

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3.

4.

5.

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languages and reached bestseller status mainly after the success of Kundera’s subsequent novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1983). Earlier in the book, Gustav Husak is introduced as the president of Czechoslovakia following the Soviet occupation of 1968 and as the embodiment of a steep decline in hope for the narrator and his generation. Gott reappears once more in a later passage where the autobiographical narrator recalls an event where president Husak addressed children as the future of the country and, after his speech was delivered, Karel Gott stepped up to the podium and sang while he watched Husak, who was moved so much that the president’s tears streamed down his cheeks. In contrast to the previous episode of Husak’s letter which is narrated as a fact, here the narrator admits that this event is based on hearsay evidence, since he deliberately closed the apartment window as the event began. Karel Gott appeared in French editions, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli, between 1979 and 1985 (and their later reprints) and in English editions, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, between 1980 and 1996. Then Kundera changed his translation policy and had even his Czech novels newly translated from the French editions. Thus in the new translation by Aaron Asher the name of Karel Gott has been changed to Karel Klos. All the other items, including the proper name of the president Husak and the label of the Idiot of Music, remained the same. One can only speculate about the motivation for such a substitution; instead of a name that refers to the actual world, there is a fictional name, and the original one remains only in the memory of those who read the previous editions. Such a number is offered by Pauer (2014). In 1992, Gott’s Czech publisher Supraphon rewarded him for selling more than 13 million copies. Internationally, however, his records have been produced and distributed by Polydor since the late 1960s; the company never released any official information concerning Gott’s sales. He sang on a regular basis in the Vltava and Reduta cafés in Prague starting in 1958. Singing with orchestras or bands of freelance musicians probably gave birth to his key defining feature—that of a serious professional who never threatens the norms and standards raised by those who have paid for the performance. The pop standard song based on a blues pattern from 1941 had been recorded by Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald in the late 1950s. An early 20th century traditional recorded many times in jazz, blues, pop or country form. Elvis Presley recorded it in 1954, Shirley Bassey in 1957 and Ray Charles in 1962.Gott’s renditions of both songs appeared on an EP produced for export in 1963.

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8. The only channel that allowed gaining insight into fresh, recent productions had been the broadcasting of Radio Luxembourg. Playing the role of the earliest pirate radio station, its transmitter (the medium wave frequency of 208 metres) delivered the signal into Czech and Slovak households under the slogan ‘208—Your station for the stars’. Just a small number of Czech listeners would have understood more than a few words of English, but they could have understood the music. 9. In 1961, the amount of people with a licence to watch TV reached more than one million in Czechoslovakia. In 1969, it reached more than three million (Bednařík 2011: 300). 10. Quite exemplary is perhaps the 1965 music video for the song Trezor (A Vault). 11. In the mid-1960s, the LP format still held a rather peripheral position in the Czech context. The vast majority of recordings had been released in SP or EP formats. With regard to the popularity of a song, its airtime on the radio and/ or the TV coverage of it were much more important than its sales success. 12. The song Lara’s Theme (developed eventually into a vocal recording as Somewhere, My Love in the English version) was written by Maurice Jarre for the film Doctor Zhivago (GB—USA, 1965, directed by David Lean). Gott sang the song, the lyrics in German. The success of the film among a German audience in 1966 probably helped promote the song. The fact that his first success in the Western world was due to a film based on a novel of the same title by Boris Pasternak which had been banned in the entire Communist bloc can be seen as the first instance of the ideological split typical of Gott’s later career. 13. Pošli to dál (Send It Along) is the title of the Czech version. Gott sang the song at the First International Festival of Dance Music in Bratislava in 1966 and received the jury award for it. The Polydor representatives saw him perform there for the first time. For the Polydor SP, they provided the lyrics in German. 14. Gott eventually also sang it in Czech as Vítám vítr v údolí (Greeting the Wind in the Valley). 15. The book was probably ghostwritten by Gott’s most productive author of lyrics in the 1960s, Jiří Štaidl. There is, however, no copyright notice anywhere in the book. 16. In interviews after 1989, he often talked about three ‘provisional’ or ‘tested’ emigrations during these years. 17. The LP ‘In mir klingt ein Lied’ (‘The Song Sounds Insideʼ, 1969) for instance. The music content was identical, but the Supraphon version has its own cover and a different sleeve note text, though published in German like the Polydor original.

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18. Symbolically, the title arrived just months after Gott participated actively in the regime campaign against the dissidents who signed the ‘Charter 77’ manifesto in January 1977. 19. Three months before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia, he was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples by the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union. Due to the political turmoil in both countries, Gott received the medal in 1997 from the hands of the Russian ambassador in the Czech Republic. 20. Some of the new titles offer, however, just updated versions of previously published books.

WORKS CITED Bártová, Eliška (2009). Gott psal Husákovi: Upřímně jsem si přál normalizaci. Aktuálně.cz. http://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/gott-psal-husakovi-uprimnejsem-si-pral-normalizaci/r~i:article:643546/. Accessed 12 November 2015. Bednařík, Petr, Jirák, Jan, Köpplová, Barbara (2011). Dějiny českých médií: Od počátku k do současnosti. Praha: Grada. Bolton, Jonathan (2012). Worlds of dissent: Charter 77, The plastic people of the universe, and Czech culture under communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dyer, Richard (1998). Stars. New. Ed. London: British Film Institute. Havel, Václav (2009). The power of the powerless. The power of the powerless (Routledge Revivals): Citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe. New York: Routledge. Kundera, Milan (1994 [1980]). The book of laughter and forgetting. New York: Harper Perennial. McDonald, Paul (1998). Reconceptualizing Stardom. In Richard Dyer (Ed.), Stars (pp. 175–211). New Ed. London: British Film Institute. Mitchell, Tony (1992). Mixing pop and politics: Rock music in Czechoslovakia before and after the Velvet Revolution. Popular Music, 11(2), A Changing Europe (May, 1992), 187–203. Negus, Keith (1996). Popular music theory: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pauer, Nina (2014). Karel Gott: ‘Die Heiterkeit des Seins’. Die Zeit, 22 May. http://www.zeit.de/2014/21/karel-gott. Accessed 5 November 2015. Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ed. (1994). Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press. Roberts, Andrew (2005). From good king Wenceslas to the good soldier Švejk: A dictionary of Czech popular culture. Budapest: Central European University Press.

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Rother, Larry (2014). Understanding the land where ‘Kafkaesque’ was born: Mariusz Szczygiel’s ‘Gottland’ sees a surreal Czechoslovakia. The New York Times, 22 June. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/books/mariusz-szczygiels-gottlandsees-a-surreal-czechoslovakia.html. Accessed 2 November 2015. Ryback, Timothy W. (1990). Rock around the Bloc: A history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press. Shuker, Roy (2001). Understanding popular music, second edition. New York: Routledge. Sinatra from the East. Billboard, May 6, 1967, p. 48. Szczygieł, Mariusz (2014). Gottland: Mostly true stories from half of Czechoslovakia. New York: Melville House. Petr A. Bílek is professor of Czech literature at Charles University, Prague, and chair of the Department of Cultural Studies, University of South Bohemia. He is the author of six books on literature and culture. He spent four years as a visiting professor and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Brown University. His publications in English include essays on Milan Kundera, the image of Prague, Communist versions of James Bond, and on Czech official culture of the late communist era. His essays written in English appeared in the book Models of Representation in Czech Literary History (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2010, with Vladimír Papoušek).

CHAPTER 12

Czesław Niemen: Between Enigma and Political Pragmatism Ewa Mazierska

Czesław Niemen (1939–2004) is regarded as the greatest Polish pop star. He was the first from his country to achieve the status of superstar and from his beginnings in the early 1960s to his death was continuously present in Polish cultural life and never lost his privileged position, even though in the later part of his career his fame was based mainly on his earlier successes.1 The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on some reasons why Niemen achieved such success, but also why he failed to become a global star. This will be done by first presenting the artist’s biography against the background of Polish political and cultural history and then focusing on three aspects: his attitude to politics, his turning to progressive rock in the second part of his career, and his attempts to achieve international fame.

FROM

A

CHILD OF NATURE TO KING OF BIG-BEAT AND BEYOND: NIEMEN’S CAREER

Niemen was born Czesław Wydrzycki in Stare Wasiliszki, in what is currently Belarus, but what in Poland is usually described as Kresy E. Mazierska (*) School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_12

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(Borders). Kresy are not seen as peripheral, but central to Polish culture because this region is imbued with the memory of a Polish imperial past and the homeland of the most revered Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Niemen’s subsequent posture as a poet-prophet for the new generation of Poles can be reinforced by coming from this ‘heart of Poland’. The most conspicuous sign of the artist’s identification with his homeland was adopting the artistic pseudonym Niemen, from the river which passes through his home village, although this happened not on Czesław’s own initiative, but on the advice of the wife of his first manager, Franciszek Walicki (Michalski 2009: 21). In 1958 the future pop star moved to Poland with his family in the last cohort of Polish repatriates. His move coincided with the beginning of what is termed ‘small stabilisation’. This was a time after the political thaw of 1956–57 when Poland entered a period of political and economic stability, marked by easing ideological pressure to adjust to communist ideals. The emergence of a vernacular version of the youth culture, including pop-rock, named in Poland ‘big-beat’, reflected this change (Idzikowska-Czubaj 2011). Young Czesław found himself on the Baltic coast, the best place to absorb foreign influences, as sailors coming to the Polish ports were a source of foreign records, unavailable elsewhere.2 At first the decision of the Wydrzyckis to move to Poland appeared to be a bad one, given that they found it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances, as confirmed by Wydrzycki senior’s death only two years after their repatriation. But they were conducive for Niemen’s career, as he was forced to play commercial music to support himself and his family, rather than pursue a career as a classical musician. In the early 1960s he performed in student cabarets in Gdańsk, first singing in foreign languages and later in Polish. Switching to Polish was encouraged by the popular music establishment of this period, especially Franciszek Walicki, who coined the slogan ‘Polish Youth Sings Polish Songs’. Such a move reflected a desire on the part of those who made their living from pop-rock to present big-beat as a Polish movement, as opposed to being an import from the West (Idzikowska-Czubaj: 137; Tompkins 2015) and a wider trend of Polonisation of state socialism (Machalica 2010). The drive towards creating Polish songs was beneficial for the future star. By moving from English to Polish he demonstrated that he was not an imitator, but a creator. Moreover, singing in Polish allowed him to develop deeper contact with his audience because language plays a major role in the way a song is received. This was particularly true of Poland,

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where in the 1960s few people knew English.3 Another development in Poland which benefitted Niemen, was the shift in the status of jazz of the 1960s from the hegemonic style of youth to the music of the metropolitan elite (Wilczko 1969: 8–9). The void left by jazz was filled by big-beat. Niemen found himself in the first group of Polish musicians who were identified with this style, thanks to being among 15 winners of a festival for young performers in Szczecin in 1962. This victory allowed him to join the band Niebiesko-Czarni (The Blue-Blacks), one of the first professional pop-rock bands in Poland, operating as a kind of super-band, with a number of leading vocalists performing one after another during the concerts. Franciszek Walicki, who was Niebiesko-Czarni’s creator and manager, wanted it to be a training ground for future stars. This was the case with Niemen, who at the end of the 1960s, while still playing with Niebiesko-Czarni, set up his own band, Akwarele (Watercolours); the name possibly suggesting a more nuanced approach to music than that offered by Niebiesko-Czarni. In the 1960s, Niemen recorded three LPs: ‘Dziwny jest ten świat’ (Strange Is This World, 1967), ‘Sukces’ (Success, 1968) and ‘Czy mnie jeszcze pamiętasz?’ (Do You Still Remember Me?, 1968). ‘Strange Is This World’ became the first Golden Record in Poland, selling over 100,000 copies. ‘Success’ also became a Golden Record, selling about 200,000 copies, establishing Niemen as the best-selling pop-rock artist of the decade. Niemen’s transition from his first public appearances, through NiebieskoCzarni, to eventually becoming the leader of his own band, was also marked by a change in his image. At first he looked unremarkable, in a shirt, tie or bowtie and short hair, which projected the image of a provincial putting on his Sunday clothes to make an impression on his audience. Gradually his hair became longer and his clothes more colourful and fancy, reflecting the influences of folk, psychedelic and romantic music. Niemen was probably the first Polish male rock star who understood the importance of appearance in creating star quality. His distinctive look was the subject of public debate, being read as an aspect of his posture as a rebel (Fig. 12.1). In the late 1960s Niemen turned to progressive rock. He started to write longer compositions approaching twenty minutes and using different instruments. Niemen’s favourite instrument in the 1970s was the Hammond organ. The shift was also reflected in the changing cast of the band, from pop to jazz players, as well as the name, from Akwarele to Niemen Enigmatic. In this decade he was particularly affected by three artists, the jazzman Zbigniew Namysłowski, who was the leader of his

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Fig. 12.1 Flamboyant Niemen at the peak of his career Screen grab from the film Sen o Warszawie (Dream about Warsaw, 2014), directed by Krzysztof Magowski

band, Helmut Nadolski, who played experimental music on double bass and Józef Skrzek, who came from a blues tradition. Niemen’s physical appearance also changed—he grew his hair and beard, losing his ‘neat’ image. His clothes also became less flamboyant, giving the impression of a man who does not care how others perceive him, as was often the case with progressive and heavy metal rock musicians. In the 1980s and 1990s, Niemen released only two records with new material: ‘Terra Deflorata’ (1989), and ‘Spodchmurykapelusza’ (2001), which attracted relatively little attention. However, re-releasing his back catalogue, the interest of the younger generation of Polish musicians in his work, and his writing for a leading Polish rock magazine ‘Tylko Rock’ ensured Niemen’s continuous presence in the media, up to his death from cancer in 2004.

NIEMEN

AND

POLITICS

In his essay entitled ‘Rock, pop and politics’ John Street points to the belief that pop music is seen as politically dangerous: ‘Under communism and capitalism, in the name of apartheid and Islam, pop music has been

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banned and musicians punished’ (Street 2001: 243). But Street aptly adds that musicians under state socialism were not only imprisoned and exiled, but also feted and promoted by the state, although this fact tends to be played down in the prevailing narratives of Eastern European rock (see Introduction). It is not always easy to establish the political character of specific music phenomena. Street uses as an example Live Aid, which for some ‘promoted a bland, universal humanism, no different from (and little better than) the mass marketing of a commercial product like Coke. For others, Live Aid provided a site from within which it was possible to challenge the (a)moralistic hegemony of Thatcherism’ (Street 2001: 250). When discussing rock and politics the political activities of musicians can be considered, textual analysis of their productions offered, and reference made to the way audiences (re)construct political messages transmitted in songs. It is well-known that under state socialism audiences developed the skill of ‘Aesopian reading’, by deciphering ‘dissident’ messages planted by the writers, filmmakers and musicians, constrained by censorship, as well as finding them where they were not intended. In this part, Niemen’s politics will be considered from these three perspectives. For this purpose, it is worth dividing his career into the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the period after the fall of state socialism. In the West, the 1960s are remembered as a period of politicisation of young people (Roszak 1995). Rock music both reflected and added to the countercultural climate, as testified by Bob Dylan’s songs which broached such subjects as racism and the Vietnam War. In the socialist East, and Poland in particular, an opposite process can be observed: towards the depoliticisation of private lives when compared with the period of Stalinism preceding it. During this decade the authorities still attempted to guide young people, expecting from them a certain asceticism and uniformity, but they interfered less in their private affairs and it became possible for them to carve out a space for autonomous activities. Niemen’s work and his behaviour off-stage reflect this shift towards privatisation. In the 1960s Niemen sang predominantly about love, as exemplified by Wiem, że nie wrócisz (I Know that You Will not Return), Nie dla mnie taka dziewczyna (Not For Me Such a Girl) or Sukces (Success). As he put it himself, ‘he did not know and did not want to know what was going on in Polish politics’ (quoted in Michalski 2009: 92). Even in the momentous year of 1968, when a large proportion of Polish students protested against the closure of Mickiewicz’s play Dziady (Forefather’s Eve) at the National Theatre in Warsaw, allegedly at the request of the Russian Embassy, he

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showed no interest in anti-communist protest. Such ‘cultivated political ignorance’ can be explained in two ways: one pertains to the artist’s desire to progress his career, which was possible only at the price of staying away from politics, the second explanation is that from early on Niemen regarded politics as unworthy of artistic pursuit. He points to such a reading by smirking at those western rock artists who were singing about the Vietnam War or, like another Polish popular musician of the 1960s, Stan Borys, about ‘bombs falling on our house’ (Michalski 2009: 81).4 Irrespective of his intentions, such a strategy worked perfectly for Niemen, because on the one hand he succeeded in staying out of trouble with the authorities (even if in his later career he tried to present himself as a victim of political oppression) and, on the other, he presented himself as somebody who does not follow fashion, but creates his own idiom of expression. Niemen’s stance is reflected in his greatest hit from the 1960s and the song with which he is most identified to this day, Dziwny jest ten świat (Strange Is This World), despite it being inspired by James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.5 Niemen singing this song at the Festival of Polish Songs in Opole in 1967 constituted a pivotal moment in Polish cultural history, proving, at least to the Polish audience, that Polish rock, big-beat or youth music (whatever term is used to describe the music of this period), achieved the standard of high art. This has largely to do with the perception that in this song Niemen engages with reality at a deeper level, not unlike the celebrated popular artists in the West, such as Bob Dylan. But is this song political? No, not if one regards as political only those songs which through their lyrics advocate a specific ideology, such as capitalism, socialism, feminism, racism or anti-racism, as for example Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which expresses the singer’s protest against racism in America. By contrast, in Strange Is This World, Niemen’s protests against such general human vices as hatred and lack of respect for other people’s dignity can be embraced by practically everybody, irrespective of his or her political loyalty. The same goes for its positive message, according to which now is the time to destroy these negative feelings in our hearts, and human kindness will ultimately save the world from extinction. Who would disagree with such a message of hope? It can be regarded as Christian, but also atheist-humanist; such discourse permeated in, for example, anti-war films of the committed Polish communist Wanda Jakubowska. From this perspective, Strange Is This World can be compared to John Lennon’s song Imagine. As Keith Negus

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observes, for many interpreters this song reveals Lennon’s socialist sympathies or even offers a vision of global communism, but it was also collectively sung at a Conservative party conference in Britain in 1987 to greet Margaret Thatcher (Negus 1996: 193–95). The universal message, combined with Niemen’s dramatic performance, which included shouting, made his fans enthusiastic. But not everybody was impressed. The famous Polish poet, Stanisław Grochowiak, accused Niemen of faking engagement in politics through peddling slogans (quoted in Panek 1974: 23–4). What Grochowiak specifically objects to is that Niemen appropriated a certain well established form (that of a protest song) and filled it with ‘fluff’ or, to put it differently, emptied a protest song of its substance, leaving only its shell. Such a reading of Strange Is This World is in fact in accordance with Niemen’s own confession that the song’s root was his irritation at the fashion for protest songs and that it is even a protest song against protest songs (Michalski 2009: 81). In this context, it is worth mentioning a documentary film about Niemen, Sukces (Success, 1968), directed by Marek Piwowski, at the time already an outstanding documentarist and subsequently author of the ultimate Polish cult film, Rejs (Cruise, 1969). Piwowski’s specialism was capturing on camera the gulf between the way people see themselves and how they are seen by others. Success is based on such a premise. The director allows Niemen to talk about himself, but what we hear is somewhat inconsistent, pointing to two features of Niemen, which no doubt he would like to hide from his fans: his conceit and hypocrisy. We hear Niemen mocking Poles trying to look elegant by wearing ties on elastic bands and saying that everybody should dress like him. At the same time he claims that people should be true to their individual identity. He also claims that he ‘feels life deeper’ than ordinary people, therefore he tends to be misunderstood and muses on the privileges he enjoys thanks to his fame, such as being allowed into crowded restaurants, which he shuns because he wants to be treated like everybody else. However, the very fact that he ponders on his fame suggests that he is not immune to its pleasures.6 Although in the 1960s Niemen stayed away from ‘grand politics’, performed in the Party headquarters and during riots, he was not immune from micro-politics by developing links with people who constituted what can be described as ‘establishment’ in the field of popular music. This can be seen by his choice of collaborators. One of Niemen’s first original songs (as opposed to cover versions of foreign songs), Pod papugami (Under Parrots, 1963), was written by Mateusz Święcicki, the first chairman of the

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Polish Radio Programme Three and one of the organisers of the Polish Songs Contest in Opole. According to Michalski, Under Parrots, which was a gentle bossa nova, was not really Niemen’s style, but Niemen agreed to sing it because he did not dare to refuse Święciki. Luckily for Niemen, the song turned out to be a hit and until now is among Niemen’s favourites. Elsewhere Niemen’s biographer mentions that in the 1960s the singer was approached by many lyricists who wanted to collaborate with him but rejected their offers, however, accepted such proposals from Zbigniew Adrjański, Włodzimierz Patuszyński and Edward Fiszer, because all of them hold positions of influence in the music establishment (Michalski 2009: 41). Such behaviour confirms Street’s observation that while publicly popular musicians present themselves as idealists, in private their behaviour is typically governed by self-interest. Such a pragmatic approach on Niemen’s part became easier to discern in the 1970s when the authorities realised that youth culture can be an asset for the state and artists were wooed to give tacit support to the authorities. Niemen was not immune to such friendly gestures. This is reflected in the events in which he participated during this decade. In 1977 he took part in the Soviet Song Contest in Zielona Góra, regarded as the most pro-regime music event in Poland. The next year he accepted an invitation to participate in the World Youth Festival in Havana, again an event of distinct political connotation. In 1976 he accepted two high state awards for cultural achievements (Zasłużony Działacz Kultury and Złoty Krzyż Zasługi) (Wąs 2014). Contrary to Niemen’s later pronouncements, according to which he was harassed by the political authorities, one gets the impression that the opposite was true—he was their darling. From the late 1960s, a large proportion of Niemen’s songs were written to the classic poems of Polish literature, authored by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Adam Asnyk. Such choice, apart from dignifying popular music as a form of adaptation of high art, again implied Niemen’s aloof attitude to politics. It is worth mentioning here that in Polish post-war history, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the classics were appropriated both from the left and from the right. After the war both the East and West shared the view that classics denazified but in different ways. The Americans believed that they inculcated not only foundational anti-Hitlerist values but also anti-communist ones through explaining the basic concepts of democracy as opposed to the communist system’ (Caute 2005: 253). For the ideologues of state socialism, on the other hand, the classics were instrumental in forging an anti-capitalist humanist ethos because they

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fostered the belief in the equality of human beings and peoples (Nothnagle 1999: 47). In 1960s Poland the classics were presented in schoolbooks as ‘friends of the people’ and patriots, which from the 1960s was a good thing (Machalica 2010)7. However, in 1968, as already mentioned, the staging of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve was interpreted both by the audience and the authorities as anti-Russian and anti-communist. Subsequently, Niemen claimed that his choice of Norwid was dictated by his desire to criticise the political establishment. Even if this was the case, one had to be very proficient in Aesopian reading to regard Niemen’s interpretation of Norwid’s poetry as an attack on Gomułka or Gierek’s governments. For the bulk of the audience, the effect of using high poetry did not lie in conveying any specific messages, but a mood of seriousness, elevation and melancholy, which could be embraced by those advocating different political positions. Although Niemen confessed on many occasions that there is a particular fit between Norwid’s poetry and his music, he never elaborated on what he took from Norwid’s ideology. Niemen’s attitude to politics exemplifies a wider trend in Polish pop-rock of the 1960s and 1970s, well captured by Alex Kan and Nick Hates: it was ‘ideologically sterile compared to its neighbours in both the East and the West’ (Kan and Hayes 1994: 41). In 1980, ‘Solidarity year’, in the Sopot song contest Niemen sang Nim przyjdzie wiosna (Before Spring Comes) to a poem by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, for which he received the Grand Prix. Again, the choice was poignant, as Iwaszkiewicz was one of the best Polish 20th century writers, but also one of the most loyal supporters of the state socialist regime. However, Iwaszkiewicz’s artistic reputation did not suffer thanks to maintaining high artistic quality (as confirmed by adapting of his works by Andrzej Wajda) and avoiding direct engagement with politics in his works. Again, from the perspective of politics, the choice of his poem can be seen as a safe bet. Thanks to that Niemen can be seen as tacitly supporting the regime or simply ‘joining forces’ with one of the best Polish poets, with whom he shared Weltanschauung. Before Spring Comes concerns the beauty of nature in winter, which has such an effect on its protagonist that he feels connected with the universe, as well as being filled with love for the whole of humanity. Due to its universal message Before Spring Comes bears similarity to Strange Is This World, even though its manner of performance is different. Strange Is This World conveys anger, like a protest song, while Before

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Spring Comes serenity, an emotion more appropriate to a mature man, whom Niemen had become by this point. In this sense, it is also in tune with Niemen’s other productions from the 1970s and especially the 1980s, as their subject is usually the beauty of the world. The message is that contemplation of nature makes one a better human being. Nature is fragile; the world is at risk of being destroyed by people, as conveyed by the title of Niemen’s sole record from the 1980s, ‘Terra Deflorata’. Again, few people would disagree that there should be respect for our planet. Disagreement might appear if the artist becomes more specific, for example by voicing his protest against building a nuclear plant. This was not the case with Niemen; his green credentials were restricted to passing the most general statements about Earth. In summary, during the period of state socialism Niemen kept his distance from politics and such an attitude helped his career. Had he been overtly anti-communist, he would have lost the support of the authorities and even his job. Had he praised socialism more overtly, he might lose a large chunk of his audience, who since the 1970s were increasingly critical of the system and expected rock music to be rebellious. At the same time his universal messages, combined with dramatic performance, gave the impression of an ‘engaged’ artist: a ‘grandson’ of great Polish Romantic poets. After the fall of state socialism, Niemen was engaged in politics in a less subtle way, publicly supporting one of the post-Solidarity parties, Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność (AWS), the Solidarity Electoral Action. Such conspicuous engagement could be seen as making up for the times when he was politically neutral, proving that deep down he was always on the ‘right side’, namely against state socialist rulers. At the same time, it awakened suspicion that if he did not engage in politics before, it was due to his conformity, rather than due to being locked in his own refined world. Niemen’s political choice in part invalidated his pretensions to being a follower of Norwid. This is because one of the most distinct values promoted in Norwid’s poetry is internationalism. By contrast, the AWS was a party of a distinctly nationalist inflection, and one supporting Catholic values and criticising cosmopolitanism. Niemen’s case demonstrates that with few exceptions it is difficult to assign popular artists operating within the system of state socialism to the category of ‘dissident art’ and ‘conformist art’. The vast majority of them tried not to upset the authorities, as the state was their principal employer, and not to praise them too ostentatiously either because this would alienate the audience who wanted to see their idols as rebels rather than

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conformists. The authorities, on their part, at least in Poland, left the artists much freedom and provided them with perks which were beyond the reach of ‘common people’, such as access to foreign travel, including to countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Niemen used strategies which did not place him in a grey zone between conformism and dissent but rather made him appear to be an asset for either side of the political divide.

NIEMEN

AND THE

DISCOURSE

OF

ROCK

AS

HIGH ART

An important reason why Niemen achieved a privileged position in Polish culture is the attitude to pop-rock which developed in Poland in the 1970s and lingers to this day. In order to understand it, some comments by Keir Keightley on the division between pop and rock are noted; he observes that, The idea of rock involves a rejection of those aspects of mass-distributed music which are believed to be soft, safe or trivial, those which may be dismissed as worthless ‘pop—the very opposite of rock. Instead, the styles, genres and performers that are thought to merit the name ‘rock’ must be seen as serious, significant and legitimate in some way’ (Keightley 2001: 109).

Later he adds, Negotiating the relationship between the ‘mass’ and ‘art’ in mass art has been the distinguishing ideological project of rock culture since the 1960s. Rock involves the making of distinctions within mass culture, rather than the older problem of distinguishing mass from elite or vernacular cultures (Keightley 2001: 109–10).

On occasion rockers looked at the strategies of elite culture to increase their distance from pop musicians. One such strategy was progressive rock (known also as ‘classical rock’, ‘art rock’, ‘symphonic rock’), a style developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, primarily by British musicians, such as the bands King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Genesis, Yes, Jethro Tull, Van der Graaf Generator and Deep Purple, which attempted to blend rock and pop with elements drawn from western art-music traditions. These art-music elements included using ‘non-rock’ instruments, such as harpsichord, writing pieces of extended length, which allowed the showcasing of

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instrumental virtuosity by the musicians, as well as exploring complex metrical schemes, atonality and free-form improvisations (Covach 1997: 4). Progressive rock was not only about stylistic innovation. Equally important was, an attitude of ‘seriousness’—critics often called it pretentiousness—that many of these musicians brought to their music making. Among the most ardent fans of progressive rock at the time, there was the perception that these musicians were attempting to shape a new kind of classical music—a body of music that would not disappear after a few weeks on the pop charts, but would instead be listened to (and perhaps even studied) like the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, for years to come. (Covach 1997: 4)

Progressive rock also reached Poland. However, there its discourse was shaped in a different way from that in Britain. In Britain, even in its heyday, it shared the stage with other types of pop-rock. Its status was never hegemonic and it could not claim exclusive rights to some of the values it espoused. The early 1970s was also the period of development of glam rock, represented by David Bowie, who came across as no less highbrow than Procol Harum or Yes, and achieved this position without shameless borrowing from Bach or Brahms. In the late 1970s and 1980s the status of progressive rock moved to marginal, being replaced by punk and new wave, which called for a return to simplicity, and started to be seen as derivative and regressive, in the same way, adaptations of literary masterpieces are often seen as being below films based on original scripts. In Poland, the perceived artistic distance between progressive rock and other genres was greater than in Britain, and the dominance of this type of music lasted well into the 1980s. This resulted from greater value being attached to high art in the socialist world than under the conditions of capitalism. Even if Polish pop musicians and journalists were in opposition to the socialist ideology (as later almost all of them claimed to be), they assimilated its approach to art. Another factor ensuring the high position of progressive rock had to do with the fact that, unlike in the West, where music was reaching its audience through many channels, including concerts and record shops, Polish consumers relied predominantly on the radio. There a narrow group of music journalists and DJs, such as Piotr Kaczkowski, working on Polish Radio Programme Three, presented their favourite western records as if they were representative of

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the ‘best of the West’. They adopted the style of gentle preachers, promising transcendence to those who (metaphorically and literally) tuned into their programmes. These influential journalists were ardent admirers of progressive rock and edified it at the expense of other genres of popular music, such as punk, new wave, rap or disco, which they either ignored altogether or denigrated as being non-art. Their taste remained stable, as was their position as trendsetters accounting for progressive rock’s high position lasting in Poland longer than in Britain and the West at large. 8 Niemen benefitted from the high status of progressive rock thanks to being the first and chief representative of this genre in Poland, as reflected in his record ‘Enigmatic’ (1970), which has only four tracks, including Bema pamięci rapsod żałobny (Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem), which lasts over sixteen minutes and bears many similarities with the precursor of this genre, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968) by Iron Butterfly. On this record, Niemen went even further than British progressive rock musicians because he dignified rock not only by bringing it close to symphonic music but also serious poetry. All four tracks were composed to the works of distinguished Polish poets. Apart from Mournful Rhapsody, which used a verse of Cyprian Kamil Norwid, we find here Jednego serca (Of One Heart) composed to the poem of Adam Asnyk, Kwiaty ojczyste (Flowers from My Country) to the poem of Tadeusz Kubiak, and Mów do mnie jeszcze (Talk to Me More) to the poem by Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. Furthermore, Niemen collaborated with renowned jazz musicians, such as Zbigniew Namysłowski and Michał Urbaniak, which added to the highbrow character of this album because by this point jazz functioned in Poland as modern serious music. The belief that progressive rock is the highest form of popular music even now informs evaluations of Niemen’s music (Fig. 12.2). As an example a recent essay by Piotr Chlebowski, devoted to Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem, argues that recording this piece by Niemen was a breakthrough in Polish popular music, because it ‘moved popular music from a song to artwork, from a simple to a complex form… Since 1969 in Poland a rock record became a coherent whole, as opposed to being a collection of banal songs’ (Chlebowski 2010: 61). Niemen’s works throughout the 1970s and later decades were also produced under the sign of ‘progressive rock’. His records ‘Niemen vol. 1’ and ‘Niemen vol. 2’ (1973) include tracks written to poems by classic Polish poets; Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz,

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Fig. 12.2 Niemen performing Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem Screen grab from the film Sen o Warszawie (Dream about Warsaw, 2014), directed by Krzysztof Magowski

Leszek Aleksander Moczulski, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska and Bolesław Leśmian. The only track whose lyrics were written specially for this record, Requiem dla Van Gogha (Requiem for Van Gogh) has arty connotations due to the status of its composer, Helmut Nadolski, a musician and performance artist, whose work is closely linked with the avant-garde, its subject, which is the demise of Van Gogh, and even its title, ‘requiem’, which is normally used for serious music. Some of the music released on subsequent records was produced for theatre, for example, one of three records comprising ‘Idee Fixe’ (1978) includes music from the performance of Sen srebrny Salomei (Salomea’s Silver Dream), a play written by another Polish Romantic poet, Juliusz Słowacki. Working for the theatre (apart from helping Niemen’s finances at the time when he stopped producing hits), increased his cultural

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capital as an artist who moved from popular to elitist art. The titles of some of his later records, such as ‘Terra deflorata’, which uses Latin, were also taken from the discourse of high art. While ‘Enigmatic’ received excellent reviews and was regarded as a breakthrough in Polish music, Niemen’s later records were received with at best mixed reviews. Most critics complained that they lacked a clear concept (even if, ironically, they presented themselves as ‘concept albums’) because the multiple sources on which the artist drew did not add up. Not surprisingly, after ‘Enigmatic’ interest in Niemen’s new productions diminished. This, however, did not negatively affect Niemen’s standing among the general public, because after the 1970s he was seen not as a man who ‘lost track’, but rather as a sage, who produces music too complicated to be appreciated by ‘common people’, not unlike painters who moved from realistic to abstract art. This status was further augmented by the fact that his last records were produced entirely by himself: he wrote his own lyrics, composed and recorded music and, of course, sang on them. This approach, betraying the temperament of not only a star-auteur, but a solitary figure, was also conveyed by the lyrics, such as Spojrzenie za siebie (Looking behind Oneself) or Status mojego ja (The Status of My Identity) on ‘Terra Deflorata’, about solitude chosen by somebody disappointed with the trivial and materialistic world. By this point, Niemen was seen by many younger musicians as a fatherly figure and he seemed to enjoy this role, performing with many of them. He took part in the concert of Perfect in 1995, one of the most popular Polish bands of the 1980s, and recorded the song Pieśń ocalenia (A Song of Salvation) with Kayah, a singer over 20 years younger than he, who received international recognition thanks to making a successful record with Goran Bregović. Teaming up with these younger artists was seen as a way of bestowing on them a high art status by ‘Sage Czesław’ rather than a means of reviving his career. Paradoxically, Niemen’s posthumous high status is augmented by legal battles that his widow, Małgorzata, fights with everybody who illegally, in her opinion, tries to capitalise on her husband’s fame, releasing material which did not reach the public domain during the artist’s life. Whatever her ultimate motif, it has the effect of rendering ‘Niemen’ as an exclusive good, which has to be approached with special care. It helps to preserve Niemen’s myth, because myths are based on gaps in human knowledge rather than its surplus.

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NIEMEN’S INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS In Polish literature on Niemen there are comments that Niemen deserved worldwide fame. Even a fellow pop star from Eastern Europe, Karel Gott, is quoted as saying that Niemen was the best voice in the region and should become a global star (Gott, quoted in Panek 1974: 23). This did not happen, but neither was his career confined to Poland. He gave concerts and made records in France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. He was the first Eastern European musician broadcast on the famous Radio Luxemburg. One of his songs, Czy mnie jeszcze pamiętasz (Do You Still Remember Me?) was covered by Marlene Dietrich. In the late 1960s- early 1970s, Niemen was probably the greatest Eastern European star in the whole of Eastern Europe, alongside Gott, before being eclipsed by Omega and Bijelo Dugme. The issue of Niemen’s international career can be approached by asking two contrasting questions: why did he achieve so little in the West, given his talent or so much, given that he upstaged many Eastern European artists of his generation. To answer them, it should be realised that an important factor in an artist reaching international fame is his/her proximity to the Anglo-Saxon centre, given the rule that pop-rock is exported from there to the periphery. The opposite direction constitutes an exception, suggesting that the ‘gates’ dividing the centre and the periphery loosen. An attempt to explore this porous border can be found in the author’s monograph on the Austrian singer Falco, who achieved global success in 1985–86, largely thanks to one song, Rock Me Amadeus. Then the situation in global pop-rock in the 1980s—marked by increased speed of turnover of musical acts—is noted, as it allowed outsiders to usurp positions occupied earlier by bands from the centre, especially Britain.9 If Falco tried to do it in the 1960s or the 1970s, most likely he would fail. Moreover, while recording Rock Me Amadeus the Austrian artist was ahead of the game, so to speak, using some traits which were not common at the time, such as including extraneous material in a song (the voice of the speaker presenting the history of Mozart) and hybridising several styles in one piece, such as rock and rap. The song also capitalised on the global popularity of Mozart, following the success of Milos Forman’s film, Amadeus (1984) (Mazierska 2014: 88–95). Niemen’s greatest chance to make a career abroad was in the heyday of his Polish popularity, which was in the early 1970s. By this time he had

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recorded a number of hits and moved to the terrain of progressive rock. If his biographer is to be believed, he made this transition as early as 1967, when he played the first version of Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem, hence one year before Iron Butterfly recorded their most famous piece. If Niemen had acted earlier, he might be recognised as a forerunner of progressive rock. However, three years passed before he recorded this song and by then he was just one of many musicians identified with this genre. Moreover, while Falco’s international strategy was to offer himself at his most commercial, and in versions suitable for specific national audiences, creating many versions of the same songs for specific markets, Niemen did not have any strategy worth its name. This is demonstrated by his making a record for Columbia in early 1974 with a group of American musicians. Rather than recording American versions of his most accessible songs, he used the resources provided by Columbia to experiment and offer his work at its most difficult (Michalski 2009: 225–26). Not surprisingly, Columbia postponed the release of this record and when it eventually reached the audience in 1975, it was a very low-key affair. Another difference between Falco and Niemen’s approach to international career pertains to the way they presented their own culture to foreigners. Falco sold his national culture by creating its ‘touristy versions’, condensed to its landmarks. Niemen, by contrast, made little effort to repackage Polish Romanticism in a way that would be comprehended by foreigners. For example, he insisted on including on his American record Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem, although such a song was difficult for foreigners to comprehend. Another factor in Niemen’s failure to conquer the world reflects the fact that in the 1960s and the 1970s, the global scene was less welcoming to newcomers from the periphery than in the 1980s. The same applies to the attitude of the musical establishment in one peripheral country towards outsiders from another peripheral country, reflecting on the period of embedded liberalism in the West, marked by strong unions and the protection of national markets. Niemen’s failed attempt to make a career in Italy illustrates this point very well. Although he spent more than a year in Italy at the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, and there achieved some popularity and even became romantically involved with Italian singer Farida, on several occasions his attempts to move up were cut short by local politics of pop music. He was not selected to perform in the main Italian festival, San Remo, in favour of an artist from Turkey, as such a choice was supported by Italian trade unions of musicians, who did not

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want to upset their Turkish partner and jeopardise the chances of Italian musicians to perform in this country (Michalski 2009: 128). Niemen also frequently failed to tune into the expectations of specific audiences. A case in point is inviting jazzman Zbigniew Namysłowski, to dominate his performance in German clubs by prolonged saxophone solos or singing Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem in Italian discos (Michalski 2009: 127). The fact that Polish musicians overindulged in alcohol when touring in Italy was another factor which diminished his chances in Italy and possibly elsewhere. In the 1980s, on the other hand, where some of the barriers erected to prevent incomers attempting to move to the centre of pop-rock were torn down, Niemen was out of kilter not only with global musical trends but even national ones. Despite lacking a sophisticated strategy to attract foreign listeners, Niemen made a mark abroad. This was in part because he got a lot of help from Polish state institutions and specific individuals with contacts in the West, such as expatriates living in France or Germany. What is also interesting from this perspective is the map of his journeys and his connections with foreigners. Its logic can be compared to that invented by Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, known as the ‘movement of non-aligned countries’: countries peripheral to the global political system who attempted to gain in strength by collaborating with each other. By analogy, Niemen did well in countries marginal from the perspective of global popular music with whom Poland was on good terms. His first foreign trip was to France where with Niebiesko-Czarni he performed in Olympia, a legendary venue, along with such future stars as Stevie Wonder. Later he travelled extensively in Eastern and Western Europe, but relatively little in the United Kingdom and the USA, despite the fact that these two countries are traditionally of great importance for musicians from all over the world. In the 1970s his main target was West Germany. Not only was this country closer to Poland making travelling there much cheaper than to the USA, but it also had a thriving music scene—in part reflecting its overall prosperity in this period—and a strong students’ culture. The 1970s was a period of krautrock and cosmic rock, as reflected by the work of such bands as Can, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Faust and Neu!. Niemen’s music in this period had much in common with the productions of these bands, as he also went electronic, and ‘cosmos’ rather an earthly existence became his main preoccupation. However, Niemen never sought contact with these potentially brotherly souls, despite the fact that some of them were keen to collaborate with musicians from different cultures (Can was

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interested in Gypsy music). He was waiting to be ‘discovered’ by the world, rather than actively fighting for a place in the American, British and German charts. At the same time, he was aware that he had more to lose than to gain by prioritising his career abroad, because being a superstar in a country of over 35 million people ensured much prestige and material rewards. If Niemen failed to conquer the West, this was not because the totalitarian state confined him in his borders, but because he did not make the most of its help.

CONCLUSIONS Niemen’s career demonstrates well that success in popular music does not depend only on the talent of musicians but also on a specific fit between their music and audiences, including the ‘gatekeepers’, such as in the case of Poland’s influential music journalists and the authorities. Such a fit existed between Niemen’s music and the tastes and values of these gatekeepers, thanks to him avoiding political topics and using the strategies of high art. Abroad such a strategy was insufficient and indeed Niemen lacked any distinct strategy for conquering foreign markets, except recording his songs in local languages.

NOTES 1. The high status of Niemen is reflected not only in the fact that there are more books devoted to him in Polish than to any other rock-pop musician, but also his presence in foreign literature. His career occupies a large part of the chapter ‘Big Beat in Poland’ in the collection Rocking the State (Kan and Hayes 1994) and a whole chapter is devoted to him in a German book, Rock Stories (Wawerzinek 2009). He is also frequently mentioned in Timothy Ryback’s Rock Around the Bloc (1990). 2. One can see a parallel between the career of Niemen and the Beatles, as these artists came from coastal towns, where foreign records were easier to obtain than elsewhere. 3. This opinion is somewhat at odds with the views quoted in the most comprehensive monograph on Polish rock culture, authored by Anna Idzikowska-Czubaj, who argues that in the 1960s texts of the songs mattered little (Idzikowska-Czubaj 2011: 142–43). This might be true in the sense that foreign language did not put off the audience, but understanding the lyrics of a song is always a bonus and accounts for the popularity of many songs.

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4. After the 1960s in the 1970s artists who take pride in not being engaged in politics can also be found, for example German Can, whose leader, Holger Czukay, argued that Can was revolutionary due to rejecting politics and focusing on music. 5. Some authors go as far as claiming that Niemen plagiarised Brown’s song (Michalski 2009: 88–9). 6. In the subsequent years Piwowski was accused of breaking artist trust by not involving him in editing his film (Michalski 2009: 109). This fact his biographer, Dariusz Michalski, regards as proof that the documentary was manipulated. He also mentions a rumour that it was made on the request of the political authorities, who wanted Piwowski to present the singer in a negative light (Michalski 2009: 101). When Success was discussed with its director, he claimed that he did not embark on making a film discrediting Niemen and he involved the singer by sending him in advance his questions so that he could prepare his answers in advance. These often condescending or silly statements are Niemen’s, not Piwowski’s. Ultimately, claimed Piwowski, no matter how he would edit his film, the result would be similar. Piwowski’s take on Niemen as a vein man, whose pose of a prophet hides vacuum, was not unique, but concurred with that offered by the previously mentioned Stanisław Grochowiak. For a more extensive analysis of the film and its reception see Pławuszewski 2015: 111–13. 7. The importance attached by the state to the classics in the 1960s is well captured in the film Dwa żebra Adama (Adam’s Two Ribs, 1963), directed by Janusz Morgenstern. We find there a leader of the local council, somewhere in the province, who proposes to name a street in his town after a local engineer who had achieved success working in Africa. This idea, however, is opposed by other members of the council who want the street to be named after Adam Mickiewicz, which in this context reflects both the nationalistic bias of Gomułka’s regime and a desire for stabilisation, for returning to a ‘safe’, depoliticised tradition. 8. These ‘dinosaurs’ of music journalism, such as Piotr Kaczkowski, are still active and occupy prominent positions in the media, contributing to the high position of progressive rock in Poland even now. More importantly, this approach is inherited by younger generations, critics and historians. For example, Przemysław Zieliński in his short history of pop-rock in Poland, Scena rockowa w PRL-u: Historia, organizacja, znaczenie, published in 2005, regards progressive rock as the breakthrough in the development of rock music and by the same token regards Niemen as the greatest Polish rock artist, an author who breaks with the banality pertaining to earlier forms of pop-rock (Zieliński 2005: 87–8). 9. The 1980s is seen as a period when Britain lost its central position in global pop (Frith 1991).

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WORKS CITED Caute, David (2005). The dancer defects: The struggle for cultural supremacy during the cold war. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chlebowski, Piotr (2010). Norwidowy Rapsod w interpretacji Niemena. In Radosław Marcinkiewicz (Ed.), Unisono na pomieszane języki: O rocku, jego twórcach i dziełach (w 70-lecie Czesława Niemena) (pp. 60–73). Sosnowiec: Gad Records. Covach, John (1997). Progressive rock, ‘close to the edge’, and the boundaries of style. In John Covach, & Graeme M. Boone (Eds.), Understanding rock: Essays in musical analysis (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frith, Simon (1991). Anglo-America and its discontents. Cultural Studies, 3, 263–69. Idzikowska-Czubaj, Anna (2011). Rock w PRL-u: O paradoksach współistnienia. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Kan, Alex, & Nick Hayes (1994). Big beat in Poland. In Sabrina Petra Ramet (Ed.), Rocking the state: Rock music and politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 41–53). Oxford: Westview Press. Keightley, Keir (2001). Reconsidering rock. In Simon Frith, Will Straw, John Street (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 109–42). Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machalica, Bartosz (2010). Polityka historyczna PRL-u. Tezy o zmienności i niezmienności. In Jakub Majmurek, & Piotr Szumlewicz (Eds.), PRL bez uprzedzeń (pp. 89–101). Warszawa: Książka i Prasa. Michalski, Dariusz (2009). Czesław Niemen: Czy go jeszcze pamiętasz? Warszawa: MG. Negus, Keith (1996). Popular music in theory: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Nothnagle, Alan Lloyd (1999). Building the East German myth: Historical mythology and youth propaganda in the German democratic republic, 1945–1989. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Panek, Ryszard (1974). Niemen (Kształty mitu). Wrocław-Brzeg: Socjalistyczny Związek Studentów Polskich. Pławuszewski, Piotr (2015). Kino mocnego uderzenia: Polska muzyka rockowa w polskim kinie dokumentalnym lat 60. i 70. Kwartalnik Filmowy, 91, 105–20. Regev, Motti (2002). The pop-rockization of popular music. In David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (Eds.), Popular music studies (pp. 251–64). London: Arnold). Roszak, Theodore (1995) [1968]. The making of counter-culture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Ryback, Timothy (1990). Rock around the Bloc: A history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Street, John (2001). Rock, pop and politics. In Simon Frith, Will Straw, John Street (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 243–55). Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tompkins, David G. (2015). Against ‘Pop-Song’ Poison from the West: Early cold war attempts to develop a socialist popular music in Poland and the GDR. In William Jay Risch (Ed.), Youth and rock in the soviet bloc: Youth cultures, music, and the state in Russia and Eastern Europe (pp. 43–53). New York: Lexington Books. Wąs, Marek (2014). Czesław Niemen: Z podniesionym czołem. Wyborcza.pl, 18 November, http://wyborcza.pl/1,87648,16985749,Czeslaw_Niemen__Z_ podniesionym_czolem__CYKL__WYBORCZEJ_.html, Accessed 16 January 2015. Wawerzinek, Peter (2009). Dorfschule (Czeslaw Niemen). In Thomas Kraft (Ed.), Rock stories (pp. 111–20). Munchen: Langen Muller. Wilczko, Jerzy (1969). Dziesięć lat muzyki młodzieżowej. Pomorze, 24, 8–9. Zieliński Przemysław (2005). Scena rockowa w PRL-u: Historia, organizacja, znaczenie. Warszawa: Trio. Ewa Mazierska is professor of film studies at the School of Humanities and the Social Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include Relocating Popular Music, co-edited with Georgina Gregory (Palgrave, 2015), From Self-Fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema (Berghahn, 2015), Falco and Beyond: Neo Nothing Post of All (Equinox, 2014), European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and with Laura Rascaroli Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (Wallflower, 2006). She is currently working on the representation of the North of England in film, television and popular music. Mazierska’s work has been translated into nearly twenty languages. She is principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

CHAPTER 13

Omega: Red Star from Hungary Bence Csatári and Béla Szilárd Jávorszky

Omega brought a lot of firsts to the history of Hungarian pop. The band recorded the very first Hungarian beat LP featuring one single band (‘Trombitás Frédi és a rettenetes emberek’ (Trumpeter Charlie and the Terrible People) in 1968 and released the first album with a foldout cover the following year.1 The album’s music was made into the first Hungarian pop TV show dedicated to a band’s music, ‘Tízezer lépés’ (10,000 Steps— Omega Show 1969). They were the first Hungarian band to visit the UK (in 1968), and the first band with an LP released abroad (by Decca in the UK).2 Omega holds the record of the best-selling copies abroad (‘Time Robber’, 1977). They were the first to have their own studio, and later the first digital studio. They released the very first Hungarian CD (‘Platina’, 1988) and DVD (‘OmegakonceRT Népstadion 1999’, 2000). Omega’s members were the first to wear matching outfits on stage and the first to feature fog generators, laser shows and projectors to enhance their live performances. Singularly, they performed four times, including three times as the headliner, in the Népstadion arena (subsequently renamed to Ferenc Puskás Stadium and currently being demolished), a venue with

With the support of the Cseh Tamás Program. B. Csatári (*)
B.S. Jávorszky Magyar, Hungary © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_13

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an audience capacity of 80,000 in its heyday. Last but not least, Omega was the closest any pop band ever got to world fame from Hungary or indeed, even from the whole former Eastern bloc.

THE APPEARANCE OF NEW WESTERN MUSIC INFLUENCES IN HUNGARY

AND

LIFESTYLE

In the United Kingdom, the beginning of the beat era is considered to be 5th October 1962, the release date of the single Love Me Do by the Beatles. There is no such emblematic date in Hungary, but from 1964 onwards, many signs pointed to a change of times. Teenagers dressed in the latest fashion started to appear on the streets, and the first beat bands emerged in the clubs, each quickly gathering a small or larger group of passionate fans. These phenomena, however, emanated from below rather than coming from above, which was unusual for the Kádár regime, and the patterns were set by Western European countries, which indicated that the era’s cultural politics and official entertainment institutions regarded beat music with dismissal or suspicion. By the first half of the 1960s, the concept of a ‘teenager’ appeared in Hungary as well. (The Hungarian word ‘tinédzser’ itself is a phonetic version of its English counterpart). Prolonged school education, financial independence, increased free time, and the industrial and electronic revolution created a social group of young people—growing larger and larger both in number and in purchase power—who were getting more independent and had their own agenda regarding values and expectations as they were entering the society. By the mid-1960s, the proportion of young people had increased dramatically: 40 percent of the Hungarian population was under the age of 20. In Budapest alone, half a million people were under age; what is more, half of the country’s populace was under 30 according to the 1971 census (Csatári 2015: 148). And these Hungarians were trying to find their own place, looking for new forms of leisure and new ideals and new idols. In the words of János Bródy, the member of Illés: It wasn’t being rootless, being misunderstood, or rejecting our home and our parents which led us to the enticing world of beat and rock. It was rather a desire, an inner drive to find some sort of a common language, sounds, words to express ourselves in the most straightforward way. In this music, we found the emotional bond and the feeling of freedom we needed. We

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wanted to escape the somewhat depressing atmosphere of our homes beyond the weekly routine of dancing, going out with girls, or simply hanging around. (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 55)

Beat was more than a music trend in Hungary. It represented a lifestyle, a way of thinking and behaving. According to the reports of the secret police, the Hungarian audience of foreign radio stations playing beat music—especially Radio Free Europe3—grew dramatically in 1964 (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 55). Inevitably, the regime viewed these new phenomena with alarm and blamed the musicians for the seemingly odd and taboo-breaking behaviour, the allegedly outrageous attire and the changing relationship between the sexes which threw away the morals of yore. Citing ‘good taste’ and ‘socialist morals’, the authorities kept harassing young men with long hair and anybody who chose the new lifestyle, and also banned certain concerts and clubs saying they were threatening tradition. The Communist Party’s youth department, the Hungarian Communist Youth League (the KISZ) played a special role in managing youth culture and music in Hungary. On the one hand, the KISZ had to represent the mainly dismissive stance of the highest authorities towards any subversive behaviour. On the other hand, the KISZ was wary of retaining its mass influence as an organisation in direct contact with a huge number of young people. From the mid-1960s, following music trends that attracted young people was the best way of keeping this influential position. Consequently, the KISZ took the ‘carrot and stick’ approach for the following decades, which can be clearly seen throughout its history. With some delay, they came to accept the most popular and most established new music trends, but they also actively filtered the developments of alternative and underground art and music. A telling statistic about the era: according to a contemporary study (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 55), out of the 62 most popular Hungarian bands, only six(!) could appear in all of the forums available at the time in the one-dimensional domestic institutional system, namely, performing on Hungarian National TV, having their song played on Hungarian National Radio, recording in a studio, releasing a single, and touring under the umbrella of the State Booking Agency. An additional seven bands could appear on radio and TV, and two more had the chance to record. The other 47 active and popular bands had no such opportunities

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except playing in clubs by their own initiative. At the time when there were 4,000 active beat bands in Hungary according to surveys (not taking solo performers into account), only 20 had the chance to release a single or an album. It does not come as a surprise, then, to learn that the golden age of Hungarian beat music between 1964 and 1969 was dominated by three bands (Illés, Metro & Omega) and three singers (Zsuzsa Koncz, Kati Kovács, Sarolta Zalatnay). The greatest achievement of Illés was the creation of beat music in their native Hungarian tongue. They were the first to realise among the initial wave of Hungarian bands playing the ‘Luxembourg style’4 that they would need to write their own material and sing in Hungarian in order to move forward. Metro could not add much to the international patterns in a creative sense, but managed to reach cult status with its interpretations and unique covers. Most of all, Metro deserves credit for popularising new venues for music and socialising, promoting the club format, and creating communities around it. The subject of this chapter, Omega, was the last of the so-called ‘Hungarian Beat Trinity’ (Illés, Metro, Omega) to leap to the top, but the first band on the Hungarian pop scene to incorporate a professional business approach and carry out a change of perspective and scale, all of which played a large part in enabling international fame that greatly overshadowed that of all other Hungarian bands.

THE ONE-DIMENSIONAL INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM To understand the circumstances in which Hungarian pop musicians had to navigate in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it is worth examining the monopolistic system of institutions which shaped the genre’s evolution in all respects. Beat was born in Britain in the 1960s as a minority music and culture. From its very beginning, it attacked the existing institutions, taste and social norms. Paradoxically, its existence depended on the very same environment of institutions and norms. The new music of the youth could only reach a wider audience and become part of popular culture if it used the institutional system it rejected, including its forums and outlets (the press, radio, television, and the record industry). The revolution that was taking shape in the spirit of rejection and renewal was forced to be integrated and commercialised right from the beginning. Since traditional frameworks had a hard time integrating these new endeavours, the process was usually full of conflict.

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Alongside old-school businessmen and pop tycoons who did not understand beat/pop music, the birth of the new genre saw a rapid emergence of young beat capitalists in the West—producers, managers, disc jockeys, booking agents, journalists, record publishers—who helped popularise beat music with their small businesses, creating alternative channels and opportunities to record and perform. They invested their money in music and record stores, created agencies, remodelled boutiques, clubs and discos, operated pirate radio (stations), and managed up-and-coming performers. Collectively, they created a business environment to fit this fledging genre parallel to (and later in place of) traditional music and entertainment business. In Hungary, the communists came to power in 1948 and eradicated the traditional forms and institutions of the entertainment industry. In the early 1960s, the increasingly popular beat/pop/rock music had to find its place in a heavily regulated single-channel institutional system. It had to fight ideological hostility (‘imperialist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’5 music coming from ‘the decadent West’), as well as the bureaucratic, monopolistic institutional environment. During Hungary’s decades of communism, no independent small studios, radio stations or private ventures could be formed, no pop magazines could be published, no booking agencies could operate, and no well-informed producers, managers, or journalists could emerge. The most important institutions of the genre—the Hungarian State Record Company (MHV)6, the State Booking Agency (ORI)7, the National Centre for Popular Music (OSZK)8, the International Concert Bureau (NKI)9, the Hungarian National Radio and Television—did not have and were not allowed to have any competitors or alternatives for decades. Above them, the political bodies of the Party controlled everything according to the famous tenets of cultural policy, the three Ps: Promote, Permit or Prohibit (Csatári 2015: 11–2). These bodies included the Scientific, Educational and Cultural Department and the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (the MSZMP), and the Music and Dance Arts Department of the Ministry of Culture. This one-channel, monolithic structure remained operational until the end of communism in Hungary in 1989, just as the leaders of the institutions kept their power and privileges. Since the strict bans could have created unnecessary political tensions, concessions were made to select artists time and again. From the large pool of musicians, only the songs of those who had been selected were played on the radio, the MHV only released their records, only they were covered in the news, and only they could go on tour or

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perform at festivals. This obviously created distortions in Hungarian beat music life. What’s worse, many ‘trusty comrades’, who originally came from the area of national security or military policy were appointed to the leadership of these institutions. Over time, many of them realised the great economic potential for corruption that came with their positions. That was the moment when a definite circle of people motivated by professional, political and business interests was born from the leadership of various institutions. This circle dominated and controlled the modern popular music scene in Hungary for over two decades.

THE 1960S: THE ERA

OF

OMEGA’S BEAT HITS

Omega, which started out as an amateur college band in September 1962, had to fight its way to success in this peculiar Eastern European institutional system. They, too, started as a cover band, playing the new songs they heard on western radio stations (Radio Luxembourg, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe) at their club performances, especially songs by The Shadows and The Hurricanes. The band’s members attended the Budapest University of Technology and performed regularly at the University’s Castle Club. They were originally called The Prophets, but one of the promoters decided to bill them as Omega on the posters, without even asking them, declaring that Omega had a better ring to it, and the Greek letter had its own symbolic meaning in technology and science. They stuck with the name ever since. Omega’s first years were not particularly successful. On the 1963 ‘Ki mit tud?’ talent show10, a military marching band11 knocked them out of competition, and their performance on the first large-scale beat concert in 1963 did not prove to be a success, either. The gig was followed by public disturbances, and the band’s keyboard player, László Benkő, was taken to a police station where he had to spend the whole night standing on one foot facing the wall, according to his recollections (Csatári 2015: 28). Consequently, Omega was forced to play in suburban clubs for a while. Then, in the summer of 1964, drummer József Laux joined the band. Laux also took on the role of the manager. No managers could operate officially in the Kádár era because the regime condemned managerial activity as generating income without actual work. Some musicians who also acted as booking agents were even temporarily banned from appearing on stage because of their illicit activity.12 Owing partially to Laux’s talents as an

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agent, Omega was able to perform regularly at the popular college clubs of the era, Eötvös and Kinizsi beginning from the mid-1960s. The band created unusual stage visuals for their cover of Still I’m Sad by The Yardbirds in 1965 on the University Stage (Egyetemi Színpad). That was the first time anybody used visual stage elements (scenery, special lighting) for a pop music performance in Hungary. The idea of a complex stage set accompanied the band’s history ever since. Omega was among the first bands to be allowed to record singles, but these were still covers of British pop songs (The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, Eleanor Rigby; Sonny and Cher’s Little Man, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s Bend It, Screaming Jay Hawkins’ I Put A Spell On You and Herman's Hermits’ No Milk Today). Their cover period continued even while Omega’s main competitor, Illés, was already playing their own songs everywhere: in clubs, in festivals and on records. Omega only had a small role in the first Hungarian beat movie, Ezek a fiatalok (Oh, These Young People!, 1967) in which they accompanied the popular singer Zsuzsa Koncz. They could only move forward after keyboardist and composer Gábor Presser joined them. At first, Presser co-authored the songs of Omega’s own new repertoire with István Verebes (who later became a famous actor) and István S. Nagy (who was trusted as a good ‘comrade’ by the authorities). These songs were still very strongly influenced by British music. Then, Presser created a whole new era in the history of Hungarian pop when he was joined by lyricist Anna Adamis, who was Laux’s wife at that time. These beat smash hits13 were mostly responsible for Omega’s march to fame in Hungary in the following two years. In a short period of time, they published three successful beat LPs (‘Trombitás Frédi és a rettenetes emberek’, 1968, ‘Tízezer lépés’, 1969, and ‘Éjszakai országúton’, 1970), which made it possible to reach and even overtake the popularity of Illés14, helped by the fact the Illés were banned from appearing in Budapest or on television after a fall-out with the government. The government’s representatives supported the idea of using Hungarian lyrics so that young people would finally sing songs written in their homeland in a socialist milieu instead of the western ‘rebellious and imperialist’ songs. Of course, this was a double-edged sword, since Hungarian lyrics could carry criticisms of the regime. The new songs could, therefore, appear on albums, on the radio, and on TV only after the Dance Tune and Chanson Committee15 (overseen by the Party) gave its official blessing.

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Omega tried to steer clear of trouble by having band member László Benkő consult in advance with József Romhányi who led the assessment of the lyrics. They also listed István S. Nagy as the lyricist instead of Anna Adamis multiple times, since S. Nagy was deemed acceptable by the authorities. László Benkő remembers (Benkő 2013) the bi-weekly lyrics committee meetings vividly, saying that beat musicians were waiting in the corridor as nervously ‘as if they were fathers waiting in front of the delivery room’ (Benkő 2013). After all, it was this committee that decided if the newest compositions could be recorded at the MHV or on Hungarian National Radio. Yet even those two institutions had the right to deny the recording regardless of the lyrics committee’s permission. It goes without saying that any decision to reject the lyrics was always supported by professional rather than political reasons, at least officially, stating reasons for denial such as ‘rudimentary’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘not witty enough’, ‘not characteristic enough’, ‘not good enough’, or simply ‘the lyrics are not suitable for dance music’.16 In 1967, Omega were given a big opportunity to enter the British music market when they were selected for a 1968 UK tour as compensation for the Spencer Davis Group’s Budapest concert in July 1967. The British trade union of musicians only allowed Hungarian bands to perform if the corresponding number of British bands could play in Hungary. This was a common arrangement serving protectionism in the UK. Consequently, the first beat LP featuring the music of a single band was born in the history of Hungarian rock. László Benkő reminisced to one of the authors of this essay: To us, it was unbelievable. We haven’t even been to Czechoslovakia, let alone London! John Martin and the roadie of Animals were waiting for us at the airport, then we played at the Marquee Club where Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker were in attendance. They, too, were surprised to realize that talented bands existed east of the Iron Curtain, and they particularly liked our zither playing. We toured England and Scotland for a month, and on the remaining four free days, they had us record an album’s worth of songs in a studio. The Hungarian cultural diplomacy in London was very happy about it. Then, in September, they would not let us travel back to the UK to do a promotional tour for the album. That meant that we missed the chance of entering the London music charts—that was impossible without a local concert tour. Back home, all this started a stampede, as other bands could rightfully ask why they did not get their LP released. (Csatári 2016: 162)

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In 1968, Omega performed at such famous clubs as the Marquee, the Speakeasy and the Sibillas. Based on their success there, they were invited back to the UK. But when the time came, the decision-makers of Hungarian cultural policy sent Illés to London instead of Omega, despite the fact that the band’s debut LP at Decca, ‘Omega Red Star from Hungary’, received very favourable press reviews. The replacement of Omega by Illés was done in the name of ‘socialist equality’, meaning that the authorities wanted to give other bands a chance. According to the influential music newspaper, Melody Maker, ‘Songs like Once I Had a Girl, and The Dead Flowers are so amazing with their surprising rhythm changes that they could reach top spots on British charts as well (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 165).’ Why thus did Omega fail to achieve a lasting success in the UK? Several possible reasons can be listed. One concerns the way Hungary’s one-party state bureaucracy worked, which could block Hungarian bands travelling abroad any time it wished to do so. The state-run International Concert Bureau (NKI) had a monopoly over managing Hungarian artists abroad. The NKI had the authority to decide whether or not to validate musicians’ passports for travel to western countries. If the NKI thought that certain performers did not measure up to the ideals of the ‘socialist personality’, it could prevent them from signing deals abroad. That was the case in the summer of 1970 when Omega was not allowed to travel to Paris for the Palma de Mallorca festival to record their most popular song of the time (and of all time), Gyöngyhajú lány (Pearls in her Hair). Instead, they were summoned home to play in a Hungarian small town, Makó, even though the majority owner of the Radio and Television of Monte Carlo believed that the song could have been the summer’s smash hit in Europe. Indeed, this love song, with its simple and catchy melody and romantic, dream-like lyrics had every chance to be a hit, since it matched the era’s hippie spirit perfectly. At the same time, it expressed timeless feelings, as demonstrated by the fact that it inspired American hip-hop superstar Kanye West, who used its sample in his song New Slaves in 2013. In November 1970 Omega entered the Yamaha Music Festival in Tokyo, again with Pearls in her Hair (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 75). The song won the Grand Prix, and the American record company, RCA released it as a single along with Petróleumlámpa (Petroleum Lantern). However, the anticipated world fame did not materialise, owing not only to the one-party state bureaucracy but also a lack of funds which stifled promotion, the impossibility of the musicians’ recurring presence in

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western countries, and not speaking English. Meanwhile, Omega clearly had a head start on the Hungarian pop scene at the beginning of the new decade.

THE 1970S

AND

1980S: HARD ROCK ROCK PERIOD

AND

SPACE

The news that József Laux, the manager, and Gábor Presser, the composer quit Omega and started a new band (Locomotiv GT) came as a bombshell in April 1971. After their departure, the rest of the band found themselves in the same place as they were in 1967, but their international experience helped them to overcome the crisis quickly. They knew well that their instrumental skills and creative force could not match that of their competitors, but their business prowess, gear and connections provided a unique potential. At this point, the classic line-up of Omega—János Kóbor (vocals), László Benkő (keyboards), György Molnár (guitar), Tamás Mihály (bass), Ferenc Debreczeni (drums)—was formed, which lasted through the end of the Kádár era up until just about the present day. With Presser and Laux leaving Omega, the band lost not only their composer and manager but also the sympathy of the Hungarian State Record Company (MHV), which favoured Locomotiv GT instead of Omega, jeopardising their chance to release records. That was when the idea hit them: if they could not get studio time, they would make a live album. János Kóbor acquired an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder made originally for journalists and used it to tape their shows. According to Benkő’s recollections, they literally used scissors to splice together the songs recorded at various shows (Csatári 2015). The finalised ‘master tape’ was eventually released by the MHV under the title ‘Élő Omega’ (Omega Live). They were, however, forced to leave out the songs 200 évvel az utolsó háború után (200 Years After The Last War) and Szex apó (Sex Daddy)—because Péter Erdős17 purportedly took the latter as a personal insult (Mihály 2014: 88, Benkő 2013) In truth, Szex apó was inspired by a Hungarian photographer Tibor Hendrey. In the early 1970s Omega followed international (mainly British) formulas to grow their fan base with striking visuals, ecstatic performances with elaborate light and sound effects, and a harder sound. The rock music of the 1970s was driven by commercialisation, spectacular shows and sophisticated marketing techniques, and this proved to be familiar ground

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for Omega. By their own efforts, they managed to master the ins and outs of fabricating stardom, which gave them more than enough resilience to survive everyone and everything else around them with calm confidence, while trends came and went, and bands appeared and disappeared. Their six-part composition, Szvit (Suit) was recorded with the Hungarian State Orchestra in 1975 for the LP ‘Omega 5’—another first in Hungarian pop history. As an additional curiosity, this album was the first in Hungary to feature a synthesiser in the song Madár (Bird). Consequently, with the help of producer Peter Hauke and Bellaphon, a West German record company, Omega managed to permanently set foot on the international stage. On their international tours, they had the chance to play as a supporting act for several famous rock bands, and even had some upand-coming bands which gained international fame later as their supporting act, like (the) ‘Scorpions’ from West Germany (Fig. 13.1). From the mid-1970s, they gradually left their earlier hard rock sound and moved towards symphonic rock and trippy space rock, à la Pink Floyd, with matching lyrics that left the domain of the everyday for a world of imagination. Many people think that this was the apex of the so-called ‘Omega sound’, which was complemented by professional visual effects at

Fig. 13.1 Omega in its heyday in the mid-1970s Copyright Tamás Urbán / Fortepan

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their live shows. With their next three LPs released between 1977 and 1979, ‘Időrabló’ (Time Robber) (1977), ‘Csillagok útján’ (Skyrover) (1978), ‘Gammapolis’ (1979), Omega produced success after success. During this time, they were even more popular in German-speaking countries (West Germany, East Germany and Switzerland) than in Hungary. Omega’s victory march lasted until the early 1980s as with new wave and metal gathering ground, their prior momentum stalled. The perplexity is evidenced by the next two albums, ’Arc’ (Face, 1981) and ‘XI’ (1982), and even though their 20th anniversary concert, directed and adapted for television by world-famous director Miklós Jancsó was repeated four times at the largest indoor venue of the time, the Budapest Sport Stadium, with a capacity of 12,500 people, they were no longer able to move forward. The history of Omega ended then and there. Although they celebrated their 25th anniversary with a monumental concert, the band came to a standstill afterwards, with the members focusing on their business ventures and solo careers.

OMEGA’S ENCOUNTERS

WITH THE

SECRET POLICE

Before detailing the band’s career after the end of communism, it is worth exploring the relationship of Omega and the Kádárian one-party state in light of the fact that the regime’s secret police had considerable influence over musicians, even coercing some of them into collaboration. These informers were also used to create animosity among the members of certain bands. Even though it cannot be ascertained in the case of Omega (unlike with other bands) that the members who left the band did so under the secret police’s influence, it is certain that their massive popularity and far-reaching connections with the West put them in the crosshairs of the State Protection Authority permanently. The informers’ reports about Omega are wide-ranging: some are meaningless based on trivial information, while others are malicious and harmful, with some speaking about the whole Hungarian pop scene. Moreover, the Kádárian secret police not only eavesdropped on seemingly innocuous pub banter, they also held occasional house searches. Although the members of Omega did not experience such atrocities, this did happen to lyricist and guitarist János Bródy, the prime mover of Illés, their archrival. When searching Bródy’s flat, agents found the March 1972 edition of ‘Omegazin’, a short-lived 24-page magazine published by Omega, in which Bródy wrote quite disapprovingly about the pop music scene in Hungary (Csatári 2015:

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198-199). Among other things, he criticised how musicians could not have their occupation officially entered into their ID, which meant that they could be charged with social parasitism18 and sentenced to imprisonment. The history of János Bródy and Omega connected again at a later time, as Bródy penned most of the lyrics for the smash hit albums ‘Csillagok útján’ and ‘Gammapolis’ under the pseudonym Gábor Várszegi. Bródy is to be credited for the lyrics of the space rock era’s most popular Omega hit, Léna, which contained some lines that expressly criticised the system. The song tells the story of a Russian girl, Léna, who ‘disappeared one morning’, which was a clear reference to the Soviet secret police’s zealous activities. Omega’s western success19 cannot be detailed in this chapter (Sebők 1984: 50-58), but it is worth saying that even though the band was becoming more and more successful in Western Europe (they had no time to perform at home from 13 September 1975 to 14 February 1976) (Jávorszky–Sebők 2005: 260-65), the authorities never lost sight of them. This was particularly true in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Omega toured with the so-called ‘scandal bands’ (Hobo Blues Band and Beatrice) in Hungary. Omega had a strong reason to do so: they used the popularity of these up-and-coming bands to tour the country as the headliner. In socialist countries, Omega was greeted as a genuine western band in the 1970s. They performed particularly frequently in East Germany and Poland. Even Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the East Germany Socialist Unity Party had to face their popularity when, from the window of the Party Office Headquarters, he saw a line of people, hundreds of metres long, queuing up to buy the new Omega album. Omega also had close ties to the 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin. Already in 1972, they were booked to play a year’s worth of concerts in East Germany and prepare Germany’s youth for ‘modern’ entertainment. Additionally, Party functionaries requested and received 100,000 Omega LPs in order to spread modern rock music more effectively (Mihály 2014: 90). On another occasion, the employees of Gosconcert, the Soviet concert promoter agency, selected Omega for an extensive tour in Siberia, but they wanted to control every little detail, for example banning the singer from removing the microphone from the microphone stand. The Soviet delegation went to see Omega perform at the Kisstadion in Budapest, but when they saw János Kóbor, who deliberately exaggerated his stage act for

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Fig. 13.2 Band members celebrating the 25th anniversary of Omega in 1987 Copyright Tamás Urbán / Fortepan

shock value by rolling around on stage, they gave up on the idea of booking the band. This made Omega the only top Hungarian band never to visit the Soviet Union during communist times. They played their first—and so far only—concert in Moscow in May 2013. In Bulgaria, they could not leave the route their chaperones ‘recommended’ for reasons of national security, and in Timișoara, Romania, they were required to stay in hotel rooms on the 13th floor—as it turned out, those were the only rooms that were wiretapped (Mihály 2014: 116–17) (Fig. 13.2).

OMEGA AFTER

THE

END

OF

COMMUNISM: NOSTALGIA ROCK

Finding themselves in a hiatus in 1987, Omega returned to the music scene after seven years of inactivity in 1994 when they held a huge nostalgia concert in front of 70,000 people at the Népstadion. The show mostly featured hits from their beat period featuring the original members of the band as well as singer Klaus Meine and guitarist Rudolf Schenker of

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the German band Scorpions. Scorpions later made a cover version of Omega’s epochal smash hit, Gyöngyhajú lány in 1995, with the title White Dove. Following their return, Omega tried to adapt to the current trend, and turn to a guitar-driven sound instead of synthesisers for their new albums: ‘Trans and Dance’, 1995, ‘Egy életre szól’ (This Remains for a Lifetime, 1998), and ‘Égi jel: Omega 2006’ (Sign in the Sky: Omega 2006, 2006), but after that they realised that it would be sufficient to just play nostalgia concerts and allow themselves to be celebrated, much like their western rock idols. Almost exactly five years after their previous gig, they had a sell-out show on 4 September 1999, in Népstadion with young musicians joining them in several instances for a fuller sound. The Hungarian crusaders of visually striking rock music employed never-before-seen stage technology: the hits of the 1960s and 1970s could be heard on a 200,000-Watt PA system, supported by 1 million Watts of lighting, a 50-sqm projector, the inevitable laser show, and two fireworks. ‘We are here if you need us’, said János Kóbor in 1999 (Jávorszky 1999: 11), and the members of Omega stayed faithful to this slogan. Be that as it may, a whole generation’s dream came true when the three emblematic Hungarian beat bands of the 1960s, Illés, Metro and Omega gave a joint concert at the Népstadion on June 2, 2001, even if the musicians were not exactly kind to their peers and each other in the press. Omega started a tour in May 2004 and returned to the Ferenc Puskás Stadium for a huge gig in September. During the ten years that have passed since they have toured time and again. They performed in Romania, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Serbia, and also returned to Poland in 2009, the site of their former triumphs. Omega celebrated their 50th anniversary with a grandiose 12-stop Hungarian tour in 2012, and in 2013, the band’s five members received the state’s highest artistic award, the Kossuth Prize as an acknowledgement of their 50-year long career.

CONCLUSIONS This essay endeavoured to present the career of Omega against the background of social, economic, and most importantly, political forces which shaped popular music life in Hungary in the communist era before 1989. It is argued here that Omega’s career is a genuine Hungarian success story, despite the monopolistic system of the party-state with its crippling bureaucracy which shaped the pop music scene in every respect, the

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political and social prejudices of the era, the lack of funds which stifled promotion, the impossibility of the musicians’ recurring presence in western countries, and their lack of fluency in English. Even if Omega’s music proved to be outdated by the end of the 1980s, and their later albums were not nearly as successful as their earlier ones, neither did their spectacular stadium shows and representative performances outside Hungary add anything meaningful to their oeuvre, the band could not and would not want to retire, just like their role models, most importantly the Rolling Stones. Ultimately, Omega is the most successful band in the history of Hungarian rock and the closest any pop-rock band from Eastern Europe came to world fame.

NOTES 1. Omega: ‘Tízezer lépés’. Qualiton Records, 1969. Almost simultaneously, rival band Illés released the album ‘Illések és pofonok’ (Qualiton Records, 1969), also featuring a fold-out album cover. 2. The audio material on the LP titled ’Omega Red Star from Hungary’ (Decca, KL 4974)—featuring the vocals of Gábor Presser, Tamás Mihály, and László Benkő instead of János Kóbor—is slightly different from the Hungarian version which followed shortly (‘Trombitás Frédi és a rettenetes emberek’), both in its arrangement and its style: some of the songs are more progressive on the British LP, which also featured songs that were only released as singles in Hungary. 3. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a broadcasting organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East “where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed” (About RFE/RL—FAQs)] RFE/RL was a corporation that received US government funding and was supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an agency overseeing all US federal government international broadcasting services. 4. The “Luxembourg style” was not an actual musical style. It collectively refers to beat music that Radio Luxembourg played in the 60s which could be heard in Hungary as well. The Hungarian bands of the era heard the new songs on Radio Luxembourg first, transcribed them by ear, and played cover versions at their club performances. 5. These expressions appeared frequently in the press and in party resolutions. 6. The MHV (Hungaroton) was the one and only record and music publishing company in Hungary for about 35 years.

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7. The State Booking Agency was a monopolistic state organisation responsible for popular music and concert booking inside Hungary during the Kádár era. 8. The qualifying body for musicians working in the catering trade during the Kádár era. 9. The International Concert Bureau was a monopolistic company that managed Hungarian musicians abroad, and booked international artists to perform in Hungary during the Party’s rule. 10. The TV show “Ki mit tud?” (literally: Who knows what?) was instrumental in making the Hungarian party-state more accepted by the general public through the politics of entertainment. Started in 1962, the contest featured music and theatre groups, solo performers, and fledging actors. It was organised 10 times, with the last two contests held after the end of communism. 11. Military bands were supported by the authorities under communist rule to promote the fact that young people could play music during their mandatory time in the army. In reality, these bands existed mostly to accelerate the breaking-up of beat bands, since the enlistment of key members could disastrously weaken the bands. 12. Like Jenő Szikora, who booked many performances in the country for dance music singers. 13. Nem tilthatom meg, Kiabálj, énekelj, Trombitás Frédi, Ha én szél lehetnék, 1968, Naplemente, Régi csibészek, 1969 14. The most important and popular beat band of Hungary at that time. 15. The Chanson Committee was set up on 1 June 1959 by the decree of the Theatre and Music Council, under the Ministry of Culture’s authority. Its members were appointed by the Minister of Culture for musical institutions overseen by the government, and the president of the Hungarian Nation Radio and Television. National Archives of Hungary, XIX-I-4-ff (Records of the Theatre and Music Council, Ministry of Culture) 50. D. 49936/1959. 16. Artisjus Archives, Department of Documentation and Distribution, from the dossier titled “Report on the authorized compositions by the Chanson and Hungarian Song Committee”. 17. Péter Erdős (1925–1990) was the pop music manager of Hungaroton, the dreaded “pop tzar” of the era. In the Kádár era, no album could be published without his consent. 18. The party-state did not acknowledge popular music as a main career for the “socialist personality”. This explains how a ministerial decree qualified art forms to differentiate the income tax rate, and did not list writing lyrics, composing and performing dance music as having social worth. 19. The West German record company, Bellaphon signed a three-year agreement with Omega in April 1973, extended for another five years in 1975.

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Their most successful album, Time Robber sold 1 million copies worldwide. Their live shows enjoyed similar success: in 1973, they were so busy abroad that they only came to Hungary as visitors. In the West, they shared the stage with such famous names as Free, Golden Earring, Manfred Mann, Supertramp, The Troggs, and Uriah Heep.

WORKS CITED Benkő, László (2013). A Personal Interview by the authors. (Unpublished). Csatári, Bence (2015). Az ész a fontos, nem a haj. Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó. Csatári, Bence (2016). Jampecek a Pagodában. Budapest: Institute of National Remembrance. Jávorszky, Béla Szilárd (1999). We are here if you need us (Interview with János Kóbor). Budapest, In: Népszabadság, September 3, p. 11. Jávorszky, Béla Szilárd, & János Sebők (2005). A magyarock története 1. Budapest: Népszabadság Könyvek. Mihály, Tamás (2014). Basszus! Omega!—Ez egy életre szól (Omegától alfáig). Budapest, Noran Libro. Sebők, János (1984). Magyarock 2. (1973–1983). Budapest, Zeneműkiadó. Bence Csatári is a historian working in the Hungarian Committee of National Remembrance. He received his PhD at ELTE University summa cum laude with a dissertation entitled The Pop Music Policy of the Kádár era in 2008. He is the author of three books on this subject, including Az ész a fontos, nem a haj – A Kádár-rendszer könnyűzenei politikája (The pop music policy of Kádár regime, 2015), and co-author of a further twelve historical books. Bence has participated in many Hungarian and international conferences. He is also regularly invited as a history expert on Hungarian TV and radio programmes. Béla Szilárd Jávorszky is an author of several acclaimed books covering the history of Hungarian and international popular music, including Nagy Szigetkönyv (The Book of Island Festival, 2002), A rock története 1-3. (The History of Popular Music, with János Sebők, 2005, 2007, 2015) A magyarock története 1-2. (The History of Popular Music in Hungary, with János Sebők, 2005, 2006) and The Story of Hungarian folk (in English, 2015). Between 1990 and 2005 he was also the music columnist of Hungarian daily newspapers, Magyar Hírlap, Új Magyarország, and Népszabadság and wrote for magazines Magyar Narancs and Kritika, as well as various music journals (Muzsika, folkMAGazin, Wanted, Z Magazin, Rockinform). He earned a PhD in sociomusicology in 1991.

CHAPTER 14

Perverse Imperialism: Republika’s Phenomenon in the 1980s Piotr Fortuna

Republika was one of the most popular Polish rock bands in the 1980s, along with Maanam, Lady Pank, TSA and Perfect (Jeziński 2012a: 7). Its main characteristics were black and white costumes and stage design, and lyrics in which sociopolitical imagery was used to present personal issues. The band was founded in 1981 replacing Res Publica. The change from Res Publica to Republika was marked by a shift from art-rock to new wave and post-punk. Republika’s music was strongly rhythmic, anti-sentimental and moderate in means of expression. Consequently, it was considered as an antithesis of art-rock, which was a dominant style those days in Poland (Schulz 2012: 34–36). The group consisted of frontman Grzegorz Ciechowski (vocals, flute and keyboards), Paweł Kuczyński (bass), Sławomir Ciesielski (percussion) and Zbigniew Krzywański (guitar). They were disbanded in 1986, probably due to financial issues, and then reactivated in 1990 with enthusiastic acclaim during the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole. The career of the band ended irreversibly due to Ciechowski’s premature death in 2001. Republika’s charismatic leader became one of the greatest Polish

P. Fortuna (*) University of Warsaw, Warszawa, Poland © The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_14

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rock stars of all time. In terms of talent and significance Ciechowski can be compared to Czesław Niemen and Tadeusz Nalepa (Jeziński 2012: 8a). He proved his strong position in 1986 when he started a successful solo career as Obywatel G.C. (Citizen G.C.). After the fall of communism, he also contributed as a producer to the careers of the most celebrated female singers in the country: Justyna Steczkowska, Kasia Kowalska and Kayah. Republika released eight studio albums, including three in the first period of its activity (1981–1986) and one as a form of tribute after Ciechowski’s death, ‘Ostatnia płyta’ (The Last Album 2002). To this day, the band has held the record for the number of weeks at the top of the influential Polish Radio Three playlist (even taking foreign performers into account, they were several places ahead of Depeche Mode, U2 and Madonna). Republika was also one of the three Polish bands, along with Lady Pank and the heavy metal TSA, invited in 1984 by the British phonographic company Mega Organization to release a record for the Anglo-Saxon market. As part of the promotion for the album titled ‘1984’, the band was scheduled to perform on BBC2’s ‘The Tube’ Polish source (Stach, 1996) mentions “prestigious BBC programme” called “The Tubs”, and the support act is a separate event, actually series of events (=planned before concerts during U2 concert tour) in a support act for U2. However, these plans did not come to fruition because Ciechowski was drafted to the army after giving an irresponsible statement during an interview (Stach 1996: 41). In this chapter, the role of Republika in the Polish culture of the 1980s is examined, focusing on the motif of power present both in the image of the band and its music. In the first part selected songs from their debut album ‘Nowe Sytuacje’ (New Situations 1983) are analysed, outlining the most prevalent issues of domination and subordination. The psychoanalytic notion of perversion is used to explain the ideological ambiguities of Republika’s work. In the second part, the radio mockumentary Odlot (Trip) is analysed, produced by Zbigniew Ostrowski in cooperation with Ciechowski and broadcast by Polish Radio Three in 1983. This is achieved by presenting the most important themes of Trip within the context of Polish culture and its rock scene. The mockumentary reveals a number of issues crucial to understanding Republika’s phenomenon, being both a play on the image of the band and a satire on the entertainment industry in Poland under state socialism. Owing to the fact that it took a fictitious form, rather than a documentary or a serious interview, it opened up a space to the unconscious fantasy which structured Republika’s early works.

14

PERVERSE IMPERIALISM: REPUBLIKA’S PHENOMENON IN THE 1980S

MUSICAL IMPERIALISM: RELATIONS OF LOVE IN REPUBLIKA’S SONGS

AND

285

POWER

There are several similarities between Republika and postpunk or new wave bands such as the Stranglers, Magazine and Talking Heads, to the name which refers to the title of the song Gadające głowy (Talking Heads 1983) (Jeziński 2012b: 18). However, Ciechowski claimed that his most important source of inspiration was the dystopian literature of Kurt Vonnegut and George Orwell, as reflected in the title of Republika’s English-language album ‘1984’. The Trial by Franz Kafka (Mus 2012: 72) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (IdzikowskaCzubaj 2011: 297) are also mentioned as relevant reference points. It is the poetic character of the lyrics, inspired by world literature and immersed in the local context that makes the band unique among other Polish bands of the time. All of these literary inspirations, creating a story about the violence of the political system and helplessness of the individual, correspond to the so-called ‘demonic narration’ of Poland by state socialism (People’s Republic of Poland). According to Winicjusz Narojek, the political system was an incarnation of evil by forcing individuals to be totally subservient to the impersonal communist ideology, as well as the will of other people acting as decision-makers (Narojek 1991: 44). This way of thinking is reflected in Republika’s songs and often interpreted as a veiled criticism of the authorities imbued with irony (Stańcio and Gliński 2012: 146-155). However, it will be argued that Republika’s works were not essentially an expression of the band’s opposition to the totalitarian power of the state, but rather a perverse fantasy about domination. A romantic interpretation of Polish rock of the 1980s comes into the picture here, as presented in the documentary Zew wolności (Beats for Freedom, 2010), directed by Leszek Gnoiński and Wojciech Słota. Polish musicians are treated as freedom fighters and victims of the repressive system, as the title indicates.1 However, the most dramatic form of repression mentioned in the film is merely a ban on the playing of a song by Maanam, one of the most popular bands in the country2. Undoubtedly, censorship caused trouble for the Polish songwriters and led to a measure of self-censorship. Certain bands, especially those representing punk rock, were not accepted by authorities and thus forced to release their albums abroad. However, Republika was not harassed by the system. The band rather profited from its infrastructure and the media, making an

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outstanding career during a time of the state’s monopoly of entertainment. Their lyrics are also not overtly anti-regime. They might be subversive, but not in an obvious manner and it should be mentioned here that a certain level of subversion was admissible by the state as a ‘safety valve’. The ascribed role of the band was determined primarily by a dominant romantic discourse which is invariably difficult to resist and transgress in Polish culture. All the more, rock music, in general, is treated as a form of rebellion and the socialist authorities imposed by Soviets were naturally perceived as opponents (Fig. 14.1). Ciechowski described his approach to writing lyrics in the following manner: From the very beginning I was thinking of creating a concept of sort, maybe not exactly literary, but one that would create a certain atmosphere around the lyrics and the entire band. I knew from the beginning what those lyrics cannot be. They were born on the basis of elimination. (Ciechowski, quoted in Butrym 1982: 13)

Indeed, the songs of Republika are designed to differ from other products of Polish popular music. Polish rock bands of the 1980s confined themselves to representing ‘populist formulas describing problems of living in Poland, increasingly plagued by overwhelming crisis’ or ‘to make the recipients read between the lines’ (Dorobek 2012: 49). Republika stood out by proposing poetic stylisation and metaphorical lyrics. Contrary to the ascribed role of a freedom fighter, Ciechowski’s endeavours were preeminently of an artistic rather than political character. He was drawing on social and political reality to achieve aesthetic purposes, which was the exact opposite of socialist ‘engaged art’. Republika’s artistic strategy was also far from a mechanism of mass entertainment under state socialism, which, according to the renowned poet and literary critic Stanisław Barańczak, led to producing songs about a safe ‘here and now’ of home or the countryside (Barańczak 1983: 74–94). Those sentimental songs secretly conveyed the ideological influence as they lulled the audience by extinguishing their rebellious potential and independence of thinking. Republika’s songs poignantly divert from the model construed by Barańczak. They overtly present political language and images, but their purpose is to talk about personal issues, especially about eroticism. The sentimental vision of love is replaced here by fantasies of subordination and domination. Instead of presenting

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PERVERSE IMPERIALISM: REPUBLIKA’S PHENOMENON IN THE 1980S

287

Fig. 14.1 Grzegorz Ciechowski performing during Rockowisko festival in 1981 Frames from the documentary film Koncert (Concert, 1982), directed by Michał Tarkowski

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pleasures of nature and safe environments, Republika’s songs describe the world of technology and indoctrination. They abandon everyday life for the exploration of geopolitics and space, creating a world populated by perverts, sleepwalkers, pawns, phantoms and enemy agents. The best example is the song Mój imperializm (My Imperialism), in which the omnipresent term ‘imperialism’—mentioned in Polish media at the time in the context of hostile intentions of the western world—becomes a metaphor of a relation between a man and a woman, as indicated by such lines: my imperialism will eat you-you-you now you are all mine I’ll colonise your stomach in banks I’ll lock up your brain [ . . . ]

The man in the song is an aggressor, who intends to get the woman (‘my imperialism will eat you’), deprive her of the right to rebel (‘I’ll make you think that it’s a sin to revolt’), and pass a harsh sentence on her (‘every treason means death’). In the English version of the song, there is also a lyric about spying (‘my police will spy you out all your days’). The most powerful image comes from the description of sexual colonialism (‘I will colonise your stomach’, in the English version ‘colonise your hot breast’), which can be understood both as a metaphor for caressing or insemination. As a result, a vision of love as a hostile expansion instead of a consensual unification is received. Love, as rendered by Ciechowski, brings the threat of destruction, rather than a promise of mutual creation. Consequently, it is difficult to understand how this song could be interpreted in terms of the fight against communism. It is much easier to defend it from a state point of view since imperialism and capitalism are associated here with sadistic violence (‘foreign capital will eat you’). Będzie plan (There Will be a Plan) and Arktyka (Arctic) are considered as the two most anti-communist songs from the debut album of Republika. There will be a Plan also describes a relation between a man and a woman using the language of official propaganda, as in My Imperialism. Nevertheless, its protagonist does not use the future tense expressing his self-confidence, but the conditional mode, which indicates that all his actions depend on a plan imposed from above. It is an allusion to Poland’s economic plans under state socialism, as well as to the totalitarian aspirations of the authorities, which—according to the

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‘demonic’ interpretation of communism—aimed to control every aspect of people’s lives. Here a masochistic fantasy, in which an individual is slavishly subordinated to the decision-makers, replaces the sadistic vision from My Imperialism. The title Arctic was allegedly used to mislead censorship. Siberia symbolised the Soviet Union, the source of ‘cold ideology’ (Stańcio and Gliński 2012: 151). Indeed, in the English version of the song from the album ‘1984’ the title was changed to Siberia: the Arctic lies I guess in you in you you-you-you and snowflakes glisten on your frosted hair Siberia’s forced its way into our hearts I know these glaciers will defeat us

Political topics are again mixed with eroticism. A subversive interpretation of the song imposes indirect criticism of a political doctrine, which ‘controlled every aspect of life’, repressing passion and love just as it did in Orwell’s works (ibid.: 151). Independent of any specific political purposes, Republika created a vision of love replaced by silence, coldness and indifference, pervasive to the same level as totalitarianism. Death in Bikini was supposed to be the opposite of Arctic. Icebergs are replaced by the beach, referring to close contact between a man and a woman. However, even on the beach cold persists as an object of desire (‘I want to know how cold are the stars’). Still, tenderness turns out to be unbearable and leads to death. Most likely Bikini is an allusion to nuclear testing on atolls in the Marshall Islands. The song drives to the extremity the comparison between atomic bombing and the impression made by the female body in a swimsuit. In this context, death can be read almost literally as the result of a nuclear attack. Not every Republika song on the debut album ‘New Situations’ contains both erotic motives and political references. For example System nerwowy (Nervous System) confines itself to politics. However, it still serves the same fantasy. Nervous System shows the media as a neural network of the country. It refers to contemporary societies in general, not specifically to Poland under state socialism. In the Polish version of the song some local references can be found, such as ‘sputniks of brother nations’, but in the translation for the ‘1984’ LP these were easily adjusted to the Anglo-Saxon context (e.g. by using the phrase ‘Reuter. UPI. NB’). The lyrics imitate the rhythm of electric impulses:

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Antennas radio transmitters wave relays all-mains receivers TASS Reuter broadcasting stations e-electric news circulation a-announcements new information quick traceless communication send orders commands directives e-electric secret connectives

Enumerations, short sentences, discontinuities and repetitions create an image of a dehumanised, automated world, where people are only cogs in the machine, labouring as servants and recipients of orders. Propaganda seems omnipresent here and cannot be resisted. In this vision the listener is even more enslaved than in There Will be a Plan, as this time indoctrination happens unconsciously and the oppressors remain unknown. It reveals the masochistic fantasy of subjugation to a rigid, mechanical regime. The decade of the 1980s was marked by two key factors concerning Polish society. Firstly, it was the time of a return to privacy: young people were especially disappointed with the degraded public life and the lack of perspectives. Secondly, the Polish United Workers’ Party (the PZPR) was losing its symbolic power. The regime had never been less efficient, and authorities were forced to use violence in order to preserve their position, as proved by the imposition of martial law in 1981. These two factors can be traced in the early works of Republika, in which ideological clichés derive meaning from private life—the only area of life which still mattered. The omnipotent state from There Will be a Plan no longer existed and consequently was not a proper target for an attack. Thus Ciechowski’s lyrics bearing sadomasochistic fantasies were not a reflection of a political reality in Poland, but a fantasy compensating for the regime’s actual lack of power. The perverse character of Republika’s songs corresponds to a clinical definition of perversion in Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to Bruce Fink, perversion is a psychic reaction to a lack of symbolic power, and its role is to provide phantasmagorical support for the law (Fink 1997: 180). Indeed, in Poland of the 1980s the Polish United Workers’ Party had at its disposal only physical power and no symbolic authority, as official propaganda was not taken seriously by citizens. In response to this lack in the symbolic order, Republika created an imaginary substitute—a sadomasochistic, totalitarian vision where power was absolute and laws operated effectively. Consequently, at a conscious level of discourse the band conformed to the shared notions of the romantic role of the artist, but at the level of unconscious pleasure they secretly supported the law and offered

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to their listeners the kind of satisfaction which they could not find in the public sphere.

TRIP

AND THE

FANTASY

OF

DOMINATION

In 1983 Republika was at the peak of its popularity. Weary of the monotony of media relations, the bandleader Grzegorz Ciechowski refused to give an interview to Zbigniew Ostrowski, his friend and a journalist from the Polish Radio Three. Consequently, Ostrowski suggested a different format of a radio programme: a mockumentary in the form of journalistic social intervention (Sztuczka and Janiszewski 2015: 41). The result, titled Odlot (Trip), enjoyed much controversy. Despite its playful nature, many listeners treated it as an authentic record of events. In letters and phone calls to the editor, some of them expressed disappointment with Ciechowski’s behaviour, while others stood in his defence. The fictitious material not only influenced fans’ attitude to their idols but also significantly developed Ostrowski’s career as a journalist. The mockumentary presents Ciechowski as a self-important artist who terrorises his neighbours in the name of music. The matter is investigated by the journalist. On his journey, he meets disgruntled tenants and a janitor who does not want to answer any questions. After some time, Ciechowski appears with a bodyguard. He categorically refuses to talk outside on the street but agrees to a short interview at the headquarters of the radio station where the reporter works. There he explains: As an artist I need a certain standard of living [ . . . ] I think that the rules for the tenants have been arranged in the best possible way. I have determined the hours when my neighbours are allowed to come in and leave the building [ . . . ] Residents should understand that the imposed rhythm creates discipline in their lives, which is a creative discipline3.

The answer satisfies the journalist, so he tries to persuade Ciechowski to talk about his work. The singer points out that he has only a few minutes left and in a patronising tone tries to assess whether the interviewer is an expert on music. Unsatisfied with questions he decides to leave, but suddenly, the roles are reversed. The journalist threatens him to issue all the material without authorisation. He accuses Republika of conceit:

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You put too much trust in your lucky star. Unfortunately, it is already fading. We have many good bands in Poland, you are not the only one. From the beginning you treat me as an intruder. Nevertheless, you are the property of the entire nation, you are doing culture, national culture.

Afraid of being recognised by his fans as an unpleasant and arrogant person, the leader of Republika immediately relents and meekly begins to answer the ridiculous questions. At this point, the production of the mockumentary also changes. Ciechowski’s voice becomes dehumanised and technically distorted. His sermonising on rock takes the form of an abstract, mechanical reasoning: ‘Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music, music is everything.’ At this point, the answer becomes an infinite loop, but Ostrowski soon interrupts the speech, declaring Republika arrogant. He also alleges that the band is ‘cold on stage’ and has no rapport with its fans, who give them everything: ‘sneakers, guitars, drums . . . everything.’ In response, Ciechowski promises that he will do everything in his might to change the perception of the band and conform to the image of modest cultural workers. He also declares that he will enlist a new member to the band who will be responsible for maintaining warm relations with the public. At the end of the interview, Ostrowski expresses his contempt for the singer. On this occasion, it is him who has ‘no time’. Nevertheless, he allows Ciechowski to tell the audience about the future plans of the band: LPs and laser discs, films and performances, videos, press conferences at the top of Kilimanjaro, banquets in Las Vegas, Dior suits, hairstyles from Antoine, alone with Pola Negri, alone with Marilyn Monroe, duels with Rudolf Valentino . . .

The central and the most prominent motif of the mockumentary is the supposed arrogance of Republika. From the very beginning, this feature is visible in Ciechowski’s behaviour, and it is repeatedly indicated by Ostrowski who at one point even calls Republika the ‘most arrogant band’ (in Poland). In order to support this opinion, he mentions letters from fans, rather surprisingly, given that such letters are normally proof of popularity of musicians rather than their megalomania. The accusation of being arrogant can be read in two ways: either in the broad context of the culture of the state socialist era, or against the background of the Polish rock scene of the 1980s. Firstly, the recognition

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of artists as exceptional individuals was in contradiction to the official ideology of the state. Declared equality of all citizens justified knocking stars down from their pedestal, although the petty nobility ideal of ‘settling for modest’ rather than pursuing wealth and fame was deeply rooted in the Polish mentality long before the rise of communism (Kaczyńska 1999: 183). The rules of the planned economy actually levelled idols with the rest of the Poles, at least in financial terms. The compensation was based on the tariff system and completely independent of the popularity of the band. This is how the most popular Polish female rock singer of the time, Kora Jackowska, described the situation of communist rock stars in the film Zew wolności (Beats of Freedom, 2010), directed by Leszek Gnoiński and Wojciech Słota, ‘I lived in a 48 square meters flat and rode a small second-hand car. We were in fact very famous, adored poor people.’ Her experience is echoed by Andrzej Mogielnicki, a songwriter for one of the most popular bands of the 1980s, Lady Pank: ‘Musicians did not make money from their records. The money earned for one record was enough for a dinner [ . . . ]. You are a big star, but you live in a flat on the fourth floor and everyone knows your address.’ The tension between the star status of the band and its modest economic circumstances strongly resound in Trip. The leader of Republika tries to act like a star, but he is persistently pulled to the ground by the journalist. Lacking the right environment for creative work in the house where he is only one of many residents he resorts to forceful solutions and employs a security guard who blocks the entrance to the building. Theirs is also a contrast between the unrealistic vision of an international career with no limits of time and space (‘alone with Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘duels with Rudolf Valentino’) and the journalist’s reproach toward the artist supposedly having luxurious material goods. It is extremely difficult for Ostrowski to find any examples of prosperity, for which the band members should be grateful to their fans, unless foreign sports shoes are regarded as a sign of affluence. At one point Ostrowski makes fun of shortages in the centrally controlled economy struggling to meet the basic needs of citizens. The shortages contrasted with the dogmas of the system expecting full compliance, which was reflected in the literal interpretation of the cliché that ‘the artist is the property of the nation.’ However, it is no coincidence that the label of arrogance stuck to Republika more than to any other band. Ciechowski dismissively refers to the Polish music scene in one of his interviews:

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Already at the beginning of Republika’s activity, I got used to not making any reference [in Republika’s songs] to our [Polish] music. Here, we have nothing to relate it to. There is no music industry. Let’s assume that there is also no music competition [ . . . ]. This is what we have found [ . . . ] and it was not worth our attention. (Ciechowski, quoted in Butrym 1982: 13)

In this passage he sounds like a megalomaniac, but if we look at the Polish rock scene of the time, we can find some validation for these words. When Ostrowski says that Republika is not ‘the only one’, his voice sounds uneasy. In fact, this is an irony levelled at the other representatives of Polish music. Since the emergence of the greatest figures of rock in Poland, such as Czesław Niemen and Tadeusz Nalepa, over a decade had passed. Some new bands, such as Kombi, were still deeply embedded in the 1960s, in the music called big beat (Dorobek 2012: 48). At the beginning of the 1980s, punk brought no artistic achievements either, as the main feature of this genre in Poland was stylistic and ideological conservatism. However, the most popular were pop-rock bands like Lady Pank and Perfect, which apparently imitated The Police (Dorobek 2012: 49). The appearance of Republika was a breath of fresh air in the dusty rock scene in Poland. In the case of Republika, the artistic originality was translated into mass acclaim. Their debut album Nowe Sytuacje (New Situations, 1983) sold 250,000 copies, despite being more than four times a higher price than the average record (Stach 1996: 38–9). In 1982 the band won best singer, band of the year, best composer, best songwriter, best talent, best hit (Kombinat) and performer of new wave (Jaworska and Wadowska 2012: 208) in a poll by ‘Słowo Powszechne’ (popular Catholic daily with a music section). By 1986 Republika had also scored 14 Number Ones on the Polish Radio Three playlist, which was the only such playlist in Poland of the time and therefore an essential requisite to gain mass publicity. Still, the alleged arrogance of the band was something more than a tendency to gloat over its own success. From the very beginning, Republika’s music was written for a so-called demanding audience. As Ciechowski said in an interview: ‘We rely on a refined recipient, open not only to the music but also to the lyrics’ (Ciechowski, quoted in Grabowski 1983: 14). At the same time, it set them apart from other Polish bands: ‘Most of the bands play just to be on the stage, this is their primary objective.

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Republika was not founded for this reason. We go on stage because we have something to convey to people and concerts are our means of communication’, claimed the band’s leader (Ciechowski, quoted in Burtym 1982: 13). Ostrowski’s mockumentary suggests that Republika not only played for its fans but expected them to model their lives on lifestyles and ideas conveyed by Ciechowski. In such expectation a peculiar combination of traditional ideas about the role of the artist in Poland with the experience of life in a communist country full of absurdity can be found. Since the partitions of the country in the 18th century, especially in the period of Romanticism, Polish artists were afforded a unique role of maintaining the national identity, creating a vision of the community and giving hope for future independence. To a certain extent, artists in the Polish People’s Republic had a similar function. A characteristic feature of this mission was the elevation of an artist (this especially concerned national poets such as Słowacki, Mickiewicz, Norwid and Krasiński) above ordinary people to act as a ‘conscience of the nation’. The way Ciechowski talks about his music corresponds with the role of the poet in Polish culture. The very name of the band (‘Republic’) also suggests that the musician wanted to ‘govern the souls’ of his countrymen, as proclaimed by the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Republika’s 1982 manifesto declared: Republika [as a connotation of the name of the band] is a concocted country and metaphorical state. Thinking and landscapes are different here. The forests are made of machines whose original meaning has long been forgotten. There are seas and oceans, but instead of water we see the rows of desks put to the horizon. The actions of every citizen are meticulously defined, while rolls of perforated tapes contain detailed millennial plans. The pulse of all citizens is transmitted through an unspecified route by the main bureau. (Republika quoted in Jeziński 2012b: 20–21).

A lofty mission of ‘conveying the message’ combines here with the idea of propaganda. The country of Republika is an aesthetic enclave in the state socialist Poland, but at the same time, it is governed by very similar rules, although much more effective. The ‘main bureau’ clearly refers to the governance of the People’s Republic of Poland, especially in the founding period of Stalinism, which was most inspiring to Ciechowski due to its incisive, totalitarian character. The same fascination with centralised control in Trip can be seen. Nowadays it seems unbelievable that many people read this mockumentary

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as an authentic record of events. But the story was credible for an audience in the 1980s, as it reflected the undemocratic patterns of the behaviour and rhetoric of the authorities, starting with mass propaganda to the lowest levels of bureaucracy. Furthermore, the absurdities of life in Poland of the time were known not only from everyday life, but also from various cultural circuits, including jokes, cabarets and films, which blurred the boundary between fiction and reality, and facilitated the acceptance of the helplessness of the individual against the forces of politics. If the band is treated as the government of the mythical ‘Republic’, then Ciechowski as the president, had significant authority over his subordinate colleagues. He was not only the face of the band and a strong personality, who took key decisions and issued commands on the principle that ‘there is no democracy in art.’4 As a songwriter, he also had a huge economic advantage over other Republika members as in Poland only authors of songs received royalties, while performers of the songs were paid merely for concerts. The whole Republika ‘government’ had enormous power over their audience. The frontman recalled years later that Republika had an original strategy to cultivate boundless love from its fans, which far from spoiled them: It was not a compromise in the song writing, composing [ . . . ] concerts, which were only black and white, and devoid of colours. We had no experience in the relationship with the audience, and when I realized that the guitarist was doing tricks on stage, I told him: gentleman, do nothing, stand still, legs apart, eyes open. And the band stood still on stage, and suddenly this gave value and style to the band. (Ciechowski, quoted in Sałużanka 1997)

The audience loved Republika for the fact that they were ‘cold on stage’, and not in spite of it, as Ostrowski suggests in Trip. It was an uneven, almost masochistic love, offering hysterical gestures of worship without reply. In the documentary created many years later Ciechowski—ty to masz szczęście (Ciechowski—You Are Lucky, 1997) directed by Ewa Sałużanka, Ciechowski plays a scene with a young female fan who asks him: ‘Grzegorz, please give me something that belongs to you.’ The musician replies: ‘Well, what can I give you . . . I can give you my chewing gum, do you want it?’ Later he adds: ‘Just do not tell me that you love me, okay babe? Goodbye’. Some were delighted with Ciechowski’s sense of humour revealed in Trip, and a driving force for the re-issue of the mockumentary.

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However, there were also less enthusiastic voices. One listener called Ciechowski a ‘despicable boor’ and demanded punishment for his shameful behaviour: The greatest tragedy is that this guy is considered a pillar of the Polish culture. He hurts it so irrevocably, and I believe that from now on he should no longer perform in front of the Polish society. I despise such people [ . . . ]. For me it is nothing less than a hundred percent madman, he is dangerous and should be committed to a psychiatric facility. (Sztuczka and Janiszewski 2015: 30)

As Ostrowski mentioned, the following day the radio station broadcast an announcement saying that the programme was fake and Ciechowski was invited to the studio to talk seriously about the whole situation. The musician interpreted the listeners’ reactions in the context of the power of the media, which those days could easily convince an audience about the truth of any nonsense. However, ‘people did not believe, the next day there was another announcement. Listeners believed in the mockumentary but did not believe in the disclaimer’ (ibid.: 41). It was ironic, especially given that the media’s enslavement of the people was then one of the main themes of Republika’s music. The mockumentary also led to some comical situations, such as protests by pensioners and petitions calling for Ciechowski’s eviction, even though the address, which was featured in the mockumentary never existed. This is just one of many examples of extreme emotion aroused by Republika among Poles. Conflict between supporters and opponents of the band was legendary. It was connected with the so-called ‘Lublin affair’, when after a concert in Lublin the members of the technical team demolished a hotel. The damage, however, was assigned to Republika. The headline in ‘Sztandar Młodych’, a propaganda magazine for young people, was ‘Republika gave a concert of destruction’ (Jaworska and Wadowska 2012: 210). The jittery hotel staff commented that ‘the smaller the band, the more it is aggressive and arrogant.’ The most amazing events, however, seemed to happen during a rock festival in Jarocin in 1983. The festival attracted ‘such passionate fans’ that the organisers were forced to use a barrier to [ . . . ] keep apart supporters and enemies of Republika.’ This would be understandable if not for the fact that this particular year the band did not even appear at Jarocin. When in 1985 Republika arrived for the festival after a two-year break, they

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were bombarded with tomatoes and flowers at the same time (Kowalski 1985: 33). The musicians were accused of commercialisation and selling out to the state and media. However, this does not fully explain the tension, because a large part of Republika’s opponents identified with pop-rock band Lady Pank, which was even more present in the media. The intellectual character of Republika’s music could provoke both aspirational identification and class resentment of people from lower social backgrounds, given the fact that at first Republika was popular mostly among students and young representatives of the intelligentsia, while pop-rock bands like Lady Pank were more accessible to other groups of listeners. So Republika was in between (mostly punk rock) underground and the mainstream (with Lady Pank at the helm), and consequently it was attacked from both sides. A closer look at Trip reveals that it was a comprehensive expression of Ciechowski’s position as a star. Firstly, it proves that his position on the Polish rock scene was strong enough that presenting himself as selfish and ill-mannered was not a serious threat to his career. Secondly, the band was widely recognisable after only two years of activity, making possible complex manipulations of its image. What is more, the material intended as a humble joke provoked reactions similar to those during concerts and festivals, dividing people into groups of loving supporters and aggressive opponents. Thirdly, as a creative form it deeply corresponded with the vision conveyed by the music of the band, where relations between people were limited to the relations of power.

CONCLUSIONS Republika’s artistic strategy in the 1980s was based on the representation of tension between domination and submission. This was conveyed by the very name of the band and its explanation in the manifesto, the lyrics of the songs, as well as a presence in the media and relations with the audience. This tension is visible in the Trip mockumentary, which revealed strong emotions aroused by Republika in Polish society. However, the motif of power was not used as an overt attack on the socialist state. It was subversive mainly in the sense of taking over political ‘imaginarium’ and using it for their own, artistic purposes. Despite the demanding character of their songs Republika achieved great popularity in Poland. This was partly because the band offered an alternative to the lifeless, schematic and often conformist mass entertainment of Polish culture of the time, including pop-rock music. On a deeper, unconscious

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level the reason was the lack of political power in the society. Sadomasochistic visions were attractive to people living in a situation of chaos, where government had no symbolic authority and its words were deprived of meaning. There was a need to create an aesthetic enclave, a metaphorical country of Republika governed by a centralised, totalitarian power, similar to the Orwellian state or the Stalinist Poland of the 1950s. The cold, emotionless image of the band with Ciechowski as a strong leader supported this fantasy, arousing emotion among fans. Therefore, Republika’s role was ambiguous. At the level of discourse they corresponded with the romantic role of freedom fighters, widely accepted and deeply rooted in the Polish culture. However, they also offered a less acceptable fantasy about power, which appealed to the unconscious needs of the audience. Its specific appeal to Polish circumstances and mentality, together with a lack of promotion and concerts might be the reason why the band had no success in the Anglo-Saxon market, despite releasing an English-language album.

NOTES 1. The dramatic and simplified representation of the Polish rock scene might stem from the fact that the film was made for a western audience, as demonstrated by the fact that the role of the narrator was played by an English journalist Chris Salewicz. 2. The reason was unintended by the authors of the lyrics, yet alleged connotation with the war in Afghanistan, where elephants parade was associated with tanks, and fountains of sand connoted desert scenery where acts of war were taking place. 3. All translations in the chapter belong to the author, excluding the song Mój imperializm, where the lyrics from the English-language album ‘1984’ were adjusted to the meaning of the original version of the song. 4. Quoted from the documentary ‘Ciechowski – ty to masz szczęście’ (‘Ciechowski – you are lucky’, 1997), directed by Ewa Sałużanka.

WORKS CITED Barańczak, Stanisław (1983). Czytelnik ubezwłasnowolniony: perswazja w masowej kulturze literackiej PRL. Paris: Libella. Butrym, Marian (1982). Rock jako medium. Z Grzegorzem Ciechowskim rozmawia Marian Butrym. Razem, 36, 13.

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Dorobek, Andrzej (2012). Debiut Republiki w historycznym kontekście polskiego rocka. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 43–52). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Fink, Bruce (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanin psychoanalysis. Theory and technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Grabowski, Istvan (1983). Republika, Grzegorz Ciechowski: zwalniamy nieco tempo. Z Grzegorzem Ciechowskim rozmawia Istvan Grabowski. Non Stop, 1, 14. Idzikowska-Czubaj, Anna (2011). Rock w PRL-u: o paradoksach współistnienia. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. Janiszewski, Krzysztof, & Anna Sztuczka (2015). My lunatycy: rzecz o Republice. Warszawa: Muza SA. Jaworska, Alina, & Olga Wadowska (2012). Republika w prasie lokalnej, młodzieżowej i muzycznej pierwszej połowy lat 80. XX wieku. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 195–218). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Jeziński, Marek (2012a). Wstęp. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 7–16). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Jeziński, Marek (2012b). Chcę wiedzieć jak zimne są gwiazdy. Gwiazdy rocka i ich funkcja kulturowa. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 17–32). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Kaczyńska, Elżbieta (1993). Pejzaż miejski z zaściankiem w tle. Warszawa: Fundacja Res Publika. Kowalski, Mirosław (1985). Jarocin ’85. Nowy horyzont. Jazz Forum, 9, 33. Mus, Malwina (2012). Między Procesem a Kombinatem. Intermedialna propozycja interpretacji twórczości Grzegorza Ciechowskiego. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społecznokulturowy (pp. 72–90). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Narojek, Winicjusz (1991). Socjalistyczne “welfare state”: studium z psychologii społecznej Polski Ludowej. Warszawa: Wydaw. Naukowe PWN. Schulz, Winicjusz (2012). Od Jethro Tull do . . . Republiki, czyli przemiany stylistyczne zespołu Republika. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 34–40). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records. Stach, Alex (1996). Republika. Warszawa: Oficyna Litera. Stańcio, Alicja, & Tomasz Gliński (2012). Wątki polityczne w Nowych Sytuacjach Republiki. In Marek Jeziński (Ed.), Republika wrażeń: Grzegorz Ciechowski i Republika jako fenomen społeczno-kulturowy (pp. 146–154). Sosnowiec: Wydawnictwo GAD Records.

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Piotr Fortuna is a PhD student at the Institute of Polish Culture in Warsaw working on a thesis on Polish genre cinema in the communist era. He also teaches a course on film and psychoanalysis. He has published scholarly articles in Kwartalnik Filmowy, Kultura Popularna and Przegląd Humanistyczny on subjects such as Polish musicals and 3D technology, as well as many journalistic pieces. His research interests include psychoanalysis, popular culture and Polish culture under state socialism.

INDEX

A Aczél, György, 35, 42, 150 Adamis, Anna, 271, 272 Adorno, Theodor W., 8, 10, 70–71 Aesthetic cosmopolitanism, 5, 6, 90, 91 Akwarele, 245 Alia, Ramiz, 100 Althusser, Louis, 7 Amelio, Gianni, 96 Am Fenster (At the Window), 120 Amiga, 110, 113, 114, 120–123 Andrzej Mogielnicki, 186, 293 Animals, 63, 64 Apelsin, 16, 70, 77, 78, 81 Apollo Theatre, the, 225 Arkada [club], 205, 212n5 Armstrong, Louis, 91, 238n6 Asnyk, Adam, 250, 255

B Baker, Ginger, 272 Balcerzak, Józef, 184 Balzac, Honoré de, 6

Bano, Al, 100, 104n8 Barańczak, Stanisław, 286 Bártová, Eliška, 233 Bassey, Shirley, 238n7 Beatkiste, 114, 120 Beatlemania, 2 Beatles, The, 11, 55, 56, 58, 63, 74, 98–101, 104n7, 226n2, 266, 271 Beatrice, 163, 277 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 229 Bellaphon, 275, 281n19 Bema pamięci rapsod żałobny (Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem), 255 Bend It, 271 Benkó Dixieland Band, 40 Benkő, László (keyboards), 270, 272, 274n2 Bennett, Andy, 1, 4, 5n6 Bennett, Tony, 238n6 Berlin Wall, the, 15, 110, 116, 120 Bernstein, Leonard, 235 Bertelsmann Club, 230 Biermann, Wolf, 18, 110, 116, 119, 120, 121n2

© The Author(s) 2016 E. Mazierska (ed.), Popular Music in Eastern Europe, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6

303

304

INDEX

Big-beat, 13, 243–246, 248 Bijelo Dugme, 258 Billboard, The, 228 Bled, 207 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The, 218, 233n3 Borys, Stan, 248 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20, 172, 174, 175, 189 Bowie, David, 254 Bregović, Goran, 257 Brodacki, Krystian, 180 Bródy, János, 165n4, 266, 276, 277 Brown, James, 248 B. Tóth, László, 157, 161 Budapest Sport Stadium, 276 Butlers, The, 116, 132 Büttner, René, 114 Buxton, David, 9

C Can (band), 260 Castle Club (of Budapest University of Technology), 270 Caute, David, 73, 250 Ceaușescu, Nicolae, 16, 51–65 Celentano, Adriano, 57, 95, 101 Cenaclul Flacăra, Gheorghe, 60–62, 64 Censorship, 8, 14, 17, 18, 55, 63, 78, 91, 99, 109–126, 129–144, 173, 175, 181, 247, 285 Cepelin [club], 205 Charles, Ray, 238n7 Chiriac, Cornel, 57 Chojnacki, Jan, 184, 187 Ciechowski, Grzegorz, 20, 23, 189, 283, 284–288, 290–299 Ciesielski, Sławomir, 283

City, 18, 110, 111, 114, 117, 120, 121, 123–124, 138, 207, 209, 230 Clapton, Eric, 2, 3, 114 Classical music, 12–14, 21, 37, 39, 40, 46, 71, 72, 97, 130, 153, 229, 230, 244 Coates, Norma, 191n5 Cold War, the, 1–25, 32 Committee for Entertainment Art, 111–113 Connell, John, 1, 9 Covach, John, 254 Cpg, 162 Cruise (Rejs), 249 Cseke, László, 161 Csontos, Tibor, 150, 151, 162, 163 Csöves, 156–159, 166n15 Cultural imperialism, 4 Culture industry, 3, 8, 10, 11, 70–76, 82, 83, 92 Cvetojević, Duško, 202, 212n3 Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra, 221 Czippán, György, 151, 156, 161, 162

D Dance Tune and Chanson Committee, 271 Danz, Tamara, 116, 124n1 Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, 271 Debreczeni, Ferenc (drums), 274 Decoder (radio/television), 17 Deep Purple, 101, 114, 117, 253 Demarczyk, Ewa, 186 Demmler, Kurt, 117, 118, 120, 125n2 Dietrich, Marlene, 258

INDEX

Directory for Concerts and Guest Performances (KGD), 113 Disc jockey, 20–21, 57, 195–213, 269 Discotheque, 21, 179, 186, 196–200, 202, 203, 205–207, 210, 211n4, 212n5 Domány, András, 164 Drabarek, Stefan, 187 Dream about Warsaw (Sen o Warszawie), 246, 256 Drupi, 180 DT64, 113 Dyer, Richard, 219 Dylan, Bob, 9, 18, 62, 121, 224, 225, 247, 248 Dziwny jest ten świat (Strange Is This World), 245, 248 Džuboks, 210

E Eagleton, Terry, 7 Eleanor Rigby, 271 Electra, 111, 117 Electrecord, 54, 56–58 Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, 253 Eötvös Club, 271 Erdős, Péter, 149, 155, 161–164, 274n17 Estonian Philharmonic, 70 Estrada, 14, 16, 71, 73–75, 77, 80, 81, 84n6, 85n9, 97, 131, 190n2 Ethno-rock, 9, 14, 15 Ezek a fiatalok (Oh, These Young People!, 1967), (film) 271

F Falco, 258, 259 Familienpapa (Family Daddy), 122 Faust, 260

305

Festival of the Political Song, 116 Fischer, Veronika, 110 Fitzgerald, Ella, 238n6 Fix, 16, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82 Fogg, Mieczysław, 186 Folk music, 9, 12, 16, 18–19, 34, 37, 40n3, 55, 62, 97, 129–142, 185 Fortuna, Piotr, 23, 189, 283–298 Frąckowiak, Halina, 186 Free German Youth (FDJ), 112, 115, 116, 121, 123 Friedman, Perry, 70, 115 Frith, Simon, 4, 11, 13n3, 212n2

G Gaszyński, Marek, 184 GDR Youth Law, 112, 113 Genesis, 253 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 16, 54, 55 Gibson, Chris, 1, 9, 226 Gieraczyński, Bogdan, 185 Gjoka, Aleksander, 17, 89, 99, 101–103 Gläser, Peter ‘Cäsar’, 111, 112, 114, 116, 119, 126 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 2, 3, 110, 122 Gosconcert, 277 Gott, Karel, 9, 21, 22, 217–240, 258 Grądzka, Natalia, 181 Grochowiak, Stanisław, 249, 262n6 Grota [club], 202 Groys, Boris, 6, 32, 33 Gundermann, Gerhard, 116, 123, 124 Gusar [club], 200, 201n5 Gyöngyhajú lány (Pearls in her Hair), 273

306

INDEX

H Hagen, Nina, 110, 119, 126 Hammond organ, 245 Harrison, George, 230 Harron, Mary, 191n5 Hauke, Peter, 275 Havel, Václav, 232, 237 Hawkins, Screaming Jay, 271 Heavy metal, 246, 284 Hendrey, Tibor, 274 Herman’s Hermits, 271 Hippie movement, 55, 61 Hobo Blues Band, 277 Hofman, Ana, 8, 18, 19, 129–144 Hołdys, Zbigniew, 184–187 Honecker, Erich, 18, 116, 118, 277 (Hungarian) Communist Youth Association, 32, 36 Hungarian Communist Youth League (KISZ), 267 Hungarian National Radio, 267, 268, 272 Hungarian National TV, 267 Hungarian Record Manufacturing Company, 163, 164, 269, 272, 274n6 Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. (MSZMP), 36, 159, 269 Hungarian State Orchestra, 275 Hungarian State Record Company (MHV), 269, 274 Hurricanes, The, 270 Husák, Gustáv, 233, 238n2, 238n3 Husar [club], 212n4

I ‘Ibis’, Wróblewski, Andrzej, 177 Idzikowska-Czubaj, Anna, 182, 244n3, 285 Ifjúsági Magazin, 37, 151–153, 156–159, 161, 163n5, 166n9

Illés, 40, 44, 47n6, 47n9, 149, 151, 152, 165n1, 166n11, 266, 268, 271, 273, 276, 279, 280n1 Imagine, 100, 248 In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, 255 International Concert Bureau (NKI), 269, 273 Iron Butterfly, 255, 259 Italy and Albania, ties, 92, 93 It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, 248 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 251, 255

J Jabuka [club], 207, 210 Jackowski, Marek, 20, 189 Jancsó, Miklós, 276 Jarocin, rock festival, 298 Jarre, Jean Michel, 179 Jarre, Maurice, 239n12 Jazz, 8, 9, 13, 20, 21, 32–34, 40–41, 58, 70–72, 79, 114, 116, 131, 134, 172, 176–178, 182–187, 221, 222, 224, 226, 245, 255, 260 Jelsa, 199, 203 Jethro Tull, 117, 186, 189, 253 Joala, Jaak, 16, 69, 78–79 Jugoslavijo, 8, 129–131, 140n1 Jürgens, Udo, 57, 228

K Kaczkowski, Piotr, 254, 262n8 Kádár, János, 19, 24n2, 35, 36, 38, 150, 151, 153, 157, 158, 160–162, 164, 266, 270, 274n7 Karajan, Herbert von, 235 Karat, 110, 113, 120, 121 Karma, Werner, 117, 123, 124

INDEX

Karussell, 111, 113, 114 Kayah, 257, 284 Keightley, Keir, 13, 253 Kern, Janoš, 210, 212n3 King Crimson, 253 Kinizsi club, 271 Kisstadion, 277 Klauke, Frauke (Wolfgang Herzberg), 117, 121 Klaus, Václav, 236 Klosterbrüder, 113, 114 Kóbor, János (vocals), 274, 277, 279n2 Komjáthy, György, 161 Koncz, Zsuzsa, 268, 271 König, Hartmut, 115, 123 Kora (Olga Jackowska), 293 Kossuth Prize, 279 Kovács, Kati, 43, 268 Kraftwerk, 260 Krahl, Toni, 111, 120, 123–124 Królikowski, Wiesław, 177, 183, 184 Kryl, Karel, 21, 235 Kuczyński, Paweł, 283 Kulušić [club], 207 Kundera, Milan, 218, 219, 233n1, 238n3 Kunert, Christian, 110, 119 Kurtis, Milo, 189

L Ladarice, 130, 132 Lady Pank, 186, 189, 283, 284, 293, 294, 298 Laux, József (drums), 270, 271, 274 Lean, David, 239n12 Lendvai, Ildikó, 165n4 Lenin, Vladimir, 6, 55 Lennon, John, 2, 3, 6, 52, 62, 63, 100, 248, 249

307

Leśmian, Bolesław, 256 Light music, 10–15, 22, 32, 39, 73, 97–98, 130, 139 Lipský, Oldřich, 223 Liqeni bands, 99 Liszt, Franz, 230 Locomotiv GT, 46, 274 Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, The, 248

M Maanam, 20, 23, 189, 283, 285 Madisson, Alar, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83 Mägi, Tõnis, 69, 78, 80 Magowski, Krzysztof, 246, 256 Magyar Ifjúság, 37, 153n5, 166n9 Makedonijo, 129 Marquee Club, 273 Martin, John, 272 Marxism-Leninism, 198 Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 124 Matura, 72, 97, 98n6 Mazierska, Ewa, 1–25, 243–262 McLuhan, Marshall, 185 Mechanisz, Janusz, 184 Meine, Klaus, 278 Melodia, 71, 73 Melodie, The, 222 Melody Maker, 273 Metro, 43, 44, 47n6, 152, 268, 279 Michalski, Dariusz, 244, 247–250, 259, 260n6 Mickiewicz, Adam, 244, 247, 251n7, 295 Mihály, Tamás (bass), 274, 277, 278n2 Milošević, Slobodan, 2, 3 Mišina, Dalibor, 15, 136, 137, 196 Mitchell, Tony, 1, 4n1 Mladý svět, The, 223, 226

308

INDEX

Modli, Zoran, 207, 208n3, 212n6 Mogielnicki, Andrzej, 186, 293 Molnár, Gergely, 163, 274 Molnár, György (guitar), 274 Moody Blues, the, 253 Mournful Rhapsody in Memoriam of Bem (Bema pamięci rapsod żałobny), 255 Music and Dance Arts Department of the Ministry of Culture, 269

N Nadolski, Helmut, 246, 256 Nalepa, Tadeusz, 186, 284, 294 Namysłowski, Zbigniew, 245, 255, 260 Näripea, Eva, 7 National Centre for Popular Music (OSZK), 269 Negus, Keith, 71, 248–249 Népstadion, 265, 278, 279 Neu!, 260 Newly-composed folk music (novokomponovana muzika), 130 New Slaves, 5, 273 New wave, 123, 157, 164, 177, 182, 184–187, 189, 190, 196, 197, 254, 255, 276, 283, 285, 294 Niebiesko-Czarni, 245, 260 Niemen, Czesław, 7, 9, 11, 22, 179, 186, 243–262 Niemen, Czesław (Czesław Wydrzycki), 7, 9, 22, 179, 186, 243–262, 284, 294 Niemen Enigmatic, 245 Niemen, Małgorzata, 257 Nikolić, Dragan, 206 1984 (record), 284, 285, 289, 290n3 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 22, 250, 255 ‘Nowe Sytuacje’ (‘New Situations’) (album), 284

O Obywatel G.C., 284, 291 Odlot (Trip) (radio mockumentary), 284, 291 Oktoberklub, 113–116, 121n1 Omega, 5, 11, 22–23, 24n2, 40, 41, 43, 44, 152, 258, 265–282 ‘Omegazin’ (Omega fanzine), 276

P Palma de Mallorca Festival, 273 Panek, Ryszard, 249, 258 Pankow, 110, 111, 114, 117, 121–124 Pannach, Gerulf, 110, 117, 119 Panta Rhei, 117 Papa was a Rolling Stone, 205 Pâslaru, Margareta, 55 Pasternak, Boris, 239n12 Pauer, Nina, 238n4 Paule Panke, 114, 121, 122 Pauls, Raimonds, 76 Pavarotti, Luciano, 218 Pearls In Her Hair, 5, 23, 273 Phoenix, 54, 57, 59, 60 Pink Floyd, 53, 60, 101, 122, 185, 275 Piramis, 151, 159, 160n1, 166n12, 167n19 Piwowski, Marek, 249, 262n6 Plastic People of the Universe, the, 232 P. Mobil, 163 Polydor, The, 232, 239n13, 239n17 Pop-Express, 207 Popović-Zahar, Milutin, 129–131, 143n6 Pop-panoráma, 157, 165n2 Porter, John, 189 Power, Romina, 100 Presley, Elvis, 74, 220, 222n7

INDEX

Presser, Gábor (keyboards), 43, 271, 274n2 Prince, Tony, 207, 212n6 Procol Harum, 253, 254 Programme Structuring Order for Entertainment and Dance Music, 112 Progressive rock, 15, 22, 60, 178, 183, 184, 190, 243, 245, 253–255, 259n8 Protest song, 4, 45, 110, 249, 251 Průchová, Vlasta, 221 Puhdys, 18, 110, 113, 117, 118, 121 Punk, 15, 119, 155, 158, 160, 162–164, 166n12, 166n15, 176, 177, 182, 185, 189, 190, 254, 255, 283, 285, 294, 298

R Rachubińska, Klaudia, 20, 171–191 Radio Free Europe, 56, 161, 267, 270n3 Radio Luxembourg, 56, 203, 206, 207, 239n8, 270, 280n4 Radoszewski, Roman, 188 Rama, Edi, 101 Ramet, Sabrina Petra, 2–3, 23n1, 24n4, 51, 55, 136, 141 Ram, Uri, 91–92 Rauchfuß, Hildegard Maria, 120 Regev, Motti, 4, 5, 13, 14, 89–92, 96, 103 Rejs (Cruise), 249 Renft, 18, 110, 111, 114, 116–119 Révész, Sándor, 159, 167n19 Richard, Cliff, 228 Risch, William Jay, 5, 6, 15n4 RIZ Tosca, 210 Roberts, Andrew, 237 Rock Me Amadeus, 258 Roesler, Alfred, 117, 126n3

309

Rogowiecki, Roman, 184, 186, 187 Roháč, Ján, 223 Rolincová, Darina, 234 Rolling Stones, the, 38, 55, 74, 99, 101, 121, 280 Romanticism, 134, 259, 295 Romhányi, József, 272 Rother, Larry, 217 R. Székely, Julianna, 157–158 Ryback, Timothy W., 2, 6, 23n1, 24n4, 53, 90 Rzewuski, Jerzy A., 184

S San Remo Festival, 17, 95, 97 Sapoznin, Oleg, 79 Sarievski, Aleksandar, 129 Schenker, Rudolf, 278 Schund, 130, 135, 139n5 Scorpions, 275, 279 Sebők, János, 149, 152, 157, 158–164, 166n16, 267, 273, 277 Securitate, 56 Self-colonisation, 2–6 Self-management, 129, 136, 140, 141, 198 Semafor, The, 222, 225 Sen o Warszawie (Dream about Warsaw), 246, 256 Seroussi, Edwin, 91–92 Sfinx, 54, 57, 59, 60 Shadows, The, 74, 199, 219–223, 270 Shepherd, John, 1, 6, 8, 9, 111 Shuker, Roy, 11, 219 Sibillas (Club), 273 Silly, 110, 114, 116, 117, 121–126 Sinatra, Frank, 220, 223, 228–230, 238n6 Sincron, 54, 56 Sipińska, Urszula, 183 Skrzek, Józef, 246

310

INDEX

Šlitr, Jiří, 222 Słowacki, Juliusz, 256, 295 S. Nagy, István, 45, 271 Sobota, Mirko, 210, 212n3 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 112–116, 119 Sonny and Cher, 271 Soporek, Wojciech, 184, 185, 187 Sopot International Song Festival, 180, 223 Sound of Music, The, 14 Speakeasy (Club), 273 Spencer Davis Group, 272 Spions, 163 Štaidl, Jiří, 239n15 Štaidl, Ladislav, 225 Stalinism, 9, 15, 219–223 Stańczyk, Xawery, 20, 171–191 Stanek, Karin, 181 State Booking Agency (ORI), 269 State socialism, 1, 2, 5–10, 12, 14–16, 22–24, 24n4, 51–53, 56, 61, 173n1, 235, 244, 247, 250, 252, 284, 285, 287, 289, 290 Steineckert, Gisela, 113, 117 Stern Combo Meißen, 110, 117, 119–120 Stiers Effects, 210 Stokes, Martin, 4 Strange Is This World (Dziwny jest ten świat), 245, 248 Stranglers, the, 285 Street, John, 6, 246, 247, 250 Suchý, Jiří, 222 Sugarman, Jane, 27 Sukces (Success), 245, 247, 249 Supraphon, The, 239n17 Svitáček, Vladimír, 223 Svoboda, Karel, 228, 231 Święcicki, Mateusz, 249 Sylwin, Jacek, 181, 187

Symbolic power, 290 Symphonic rock, 253, 275 Szczygiel, Mariusz, 217 Szemere, Anna, 1, 15 Szörényi, Levente, 149, 166n12 Sztandar Młodych (magazine), 297

T Talking Heads, 285 Tangerine Dream, 260 Tardos, Péter, 156, 160, 161 Technics 1210 MK2, 210 Terpiłowski, Lech, 177, 180, 187 Thatcher, Margaret, 249 3T, 150, 167n22, 228, 278 Tilgner, Wolfgang, 117 Tito, Josip Broz, 8, 18, 19, 95, 130–131, 135, 139n4, 260 Tochka, Nicholas, 103 Tolstoy, Leo, 6 Top of the Pops, 210 Tóth, Dezső, 155 Trąbiński, Adam St, 182, 185 Troitskii, Artemii, 70, 74, 77 Turist [club], 210 200 évvel az utolsó háború után (200 Years After The Last War), 274 Tylczyński, Andrzej, 184, 187

U University Stage (Egyetemi Színpad), 271 Urbaniak, Michał, 255 Urbán, Tamás, 275, 278

V Väino Land, 74, 78, 79 Van der Graaf Generator, 253

INDEX

Várszegi, Gábor, 277 Ventsel, Aimar, 8, 14, 16, 17, 69–85, 178 Verebes, István, 271 Veršić, Domagoj, 200, 201, 203, 205n3, 212n5 Veski, Anne, 16, 69, 78–83 Vietnam War, the, 247–248 Világ Ifjúsága, 151, 153, 161, 163n9 Villas, Violetta, 186 Vocal-instrumental ensemble (vokal’no-instrumental’nyi ansambl’ or VIA), 74 Voice of America, 54, 270

W Wagnerowski, Rafał Szczęsny, 180, 186, 189 Wajda, Andrzej, 251 Walicki, Franciszek, 181–182, 244, 245 Waschko, Roman, 179, 185 Wegner, Bettina, 110, 116, 120 Weiss, Wiesław, 177, 179, 180, 184, 186 Wenzel, Hans-Eckardt, 123–125 Wernstein-Żuławski, Jerzy, 180 West, Kanye, 5, 24n2, 273 Wicke, Peter, 1, 6, 8, 111, 112, 116

311

Wiernik, Marek, 184, 187, 188 Wieroński, Marek, 182 Wilpert, Imre, 151, 162, 163 Wodniczak, Krzysztof, 181 Woodstock, 55 World Festival of Youth and Students, 116, 277 Wydrzycki, Czesław (Czesław Niemen), 243, 244

Y Yamaha Music Festival, 273 Yardbirds, the, 271 Yes, 60, 253, 254 Yoko Ono, 2, 3, 100 Yugoslavia, 8, 12, 14, 18–19, 25n5, 93, 95, 100, 129–144, 198, 199, 210, 258 Yurchak, Alexei, 6, 8, 70, 72, 76

Z Zagreb, 134, 143n12, 198, 204–207, 210, 211n5, 212n6 Zalatnay, Sarolta, 43, 268 Zew wolności (Beats for Freedom), film, 285, 293 Zieliński Przemysław, 9, 10, 14n8 Živković, Danilo, 129–131