Made in Poland

Studies in Popular Music

Patryk Galuszka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351119207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Polish popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Polish music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Poland and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Poland, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Popular Music in the People's Republic of Poland; Documenting Change and Continuity in Music Scenes and Institutions; and Music, Identity, and Critique.

PART I

Born in the PRL: Popular Music in the People’s Republic of Poland

Patryk Galuszka

Someone once said that Poles are moving forward, but with their heads turned backward, which was supposed to refer to the place that history has in the Polish public debate. Looking at how this debate has taken shape over the last thirty years, one can say that there is a lot of truth in this statement. Fierce disputes have raged about whether the People’s Republic of Poland (hereinafter: PRL) was an independent state or only a colony of the USSR, or whether to hold politicians responsible for the introduction of martial law in 1981. Although many Poles do not remember the PRL at all or remember it only from childhood, this period is still the reference point for today’s politics.

The PRL as a subject of reflection or criticism is also present in Polish popular music, and how artists relate to it depends on when their works were created and what genre of music they represent. For authors of texts written before 1989, the PRL was simply a surrounding reality, so a substantial part of the criticism expressed in such lyrics is only an indirect critique of the prevailing system or the effects of its influence. The genre of music is important in this context because, before 1989, rock music was the main medium of critical content toward the PRL. In the case of mainstream rock, this criticism had to be deeply disguised; otherwise, the text would not have got through censorship. In the case of so-called third circuit music (punk, new wave), this criticism could be sharp and was often expressed directly. Works created after 1989 may refer to the PRL as a historical entity, and any criticism – due to the lack of censorship – may be expressed directly. What is interesting, however, is that the subject is relatively rarely present in contemporary lyrics, contrary to how passionately politicians return to the times of the PRL today. From time to time a nostalgic text appears, especially in the case of musicians who started their careers in the PRL (e.g. Kult – “Parada Wspomnień” (Parade of Memories)), but young artists write lyrics mainly about the reality around them.

Although a separate book could – and should! – be written about popular music in the PRL, only a few chapters have been directly devoted to it in this book. In the first section there are three texts that are thematically closest to the issues related to the history and politics of Poland in 1945–1989.

In Chapter 1, “No Country for Sheer Entertainment: Cultural Politics of Socialist Poland, its Conceptual Scheme, and Vision of Popular Music,” Renata Pasternak-Mazur explains the ideological and administrative foundations of musical life during the PRL. Understanding cultural politics in post-war Poland is important if one wants to understand the organizational framework of today’s Polish culture as, despite everything that distinguishes state socialism from capitalism, some strands of continuity in the ways in which culture is managed can be found. Pasternak-Mazur also writes about long-gone, yet fascinating, peculiarities of cultural policy in socialist Poland, such as categories that were granted to musicians by the Verification Committee of the Ministry of Culture. These categories determined rates paid to musicians for live performances. Since artists’ remunerations did not depend on the size of the audience but on the number of concerts played and the category to which a musician was assigned by the aforementioned committee, having the highest category was crucial from a financial point of view. In her chapter, the concept of Polish Messianism is used for the first time in this volume – an idea that is an important part of Polish culture and is returned to in other chapters in this work. Pasternak-Mazur goes beyond popular music and discusses its place next to folk and “serious music” in the PRL, but this is necessary to show the complexity of the cultural policy of socialist Poland.

In Chapter 2, “Rock and Politics in the People’s Republic of Poland,” Anna Idzikowska-Czubaj discusses attitudes of the socialist state toward rock music as well as rock musicians’ interests in the state and its politics. She shows that the relationship between rock musicians and the state was more complex than the well-worn clichés of oppositional rockers vs an authoritarian regime suggest. At the same time, she perceptively notes that the communist state was not the only opponent of rock, and the same can be said about a large part of the society which was conservative and protested against anything that looked or sounded different, alternative, or flamboyant. This thought also returns in the second part of this work in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 3, “Against the Mainstream: Music and the Polish Alternative Culture of the 1980s,” Marek Jeziński extends the discussion conducted in the two previous chapters by showing the development of the alternative music scene in the 1980s. He concentrates on the third circuit of culture, which is composed mostly of the various punk rock and new wave youth bands which were absent from the mainstream media and, in most cases, had minimal chances of releasing professionally recorded albums. These artists opposed not only the pop and middle-of-the-road music stars from the 1960s and 1970s (we can call them “estrada artists”), but also rock stars such as Perfect, Maanam, and Lady Pank, who were cooperating with the mainstream media and state-owned record labels.

1

No Country for Sheer Entertainment

Cultural Politics of Socialist Poland, its Conceptual Scheme, and Vision of Popular Music

Renata Pasternak-Mazur

We Say Music, But We Mean …

What was, and is, meant if we say music? The answer to this seemingly simple question is not always that easy. First, there are two different perspectives, which can be called a “musicologist’s perspective” and a “non-musicologist’s perspective,” which can be illustrated as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1Musicologist’s perspective vs non-musicologist’s perspective

Although, like in the Western countries, the non-musicologist’s perspective prevails in Polish society, the narrative about music has been written from the musicologist’s perspective. Thus, it should be remembered that the unmarked term “music” in the discussion of cultural politics presumes the musicologist’s perspective.

Second, in Poland, as in other Central and Eastern European countries, terms such as “classical music” (muzyka klasyczna), or “serious music” (muzyka poważna) are in use instead of “Western music,” and instead of the “history of Western music,” a notional “history of music” is discussed. Still “history of music” embraces only selected music categories and the unmarked term “music” implies “classical” or “art” music for Polish musicologists, or for musicologists writing on Polish music.¹

Moreover, Polish musicology, since its origin, has been linked to and strongly influenced by German musicology, following its range of musicological enquiry and methods. This is why, as Maja Trochimczyk (2002, 138) has observed, it embraces serious and folk music but not popular music, and has been focused on the music that is regarded as representative of high culture in Germany.² In consequence, this was (and still is) the assumed field of musicological inquiry and music education.

Furthermore, although muzyka rozrywkowa (“music for entertainment”) is usually translated into English as popular music, these terms are hardly synonymous. The adjective popularny (“popular”) in the Polish language means “widely known” and does not necessarily carry the connotation of “widely liked.” Besides, the assumption that popular music is synonymous with genres whose styles have evolved in an inextricable relationship with their dissemination via the mass media and their marketing and sale on a mass-commodity basis, a model which dominates currently in Anglo-American scholarship, is inadequate to the Polish experience.

Polish genres such as poezja śpiewana (“sung poetry”) or piosenka turystyczna (“tourists’ song”) were non-commercial by their nature (meant to be sung and not to be sold). They circulated widely (mostly through oral transmission and songbooks with lyrics and guitar chords), were sung at unofficial gatherings, and, when cassette recorders became widely available, became a part of the “cassette culture.” Moreover, even rock music in the 1980s was disseminated more through live performances and radio broadcasting than through sales of records (Patton 2012). Understanding what is implied when Polish music is being discussed is thus as important as understanding the cultural context in which it originated and exists.

Just as the post-socialist present cannot be fully understood without reference to the socialist past, so the current functioning of music in Poland cannot be addressed without first considering the cultural policy of the socialist state. Not only the organizational framework of contemporary Polish culture and its perceived mission and purpose, but also divisions and hierarchies in music, are deeply rooted in conceptualizations formulated in the previous system or earlier (in the nineteenth century). This chapter will highlight such aspects of cultural policy in the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, hereinafter PRL) as the separation of culture from market laws, the exclusion of sheer entertainment from the functions of culture envisioned by policy makers as well as assumptions regarding folk culture and popular art. Special emphasis will be put on the Polish Messianism, as a key concept in understanding specificity of the Polish culture from the nineteenth century on. It still strongly resonates in many contemporary works, either directly or in opposition to it.

Cultural policy is understood as the sum of governmental strategies and activities which are intended to satisfy spiritual, aesthetic, and leisure needs, or enhance the identity of the citizens of a given territorial unit, and which are implemented in the fields of the arts, heritage, humanities, and cultural industries in order to support the creation, production, dissemination, and distribution as well as consumption of goods and services in those fields (Murzyn-Kupisz 2010, 65). Cultural policy of the socialist state involved a set of ideological principles and values that the state sought to promote as well as a system that served “to translate these principles into the language of everyday institutional activity and into the training of cultural organizers” (Balicki, Kossak, and Żuławski 1973, 15).

On the one hand, the overriding attention of Marxist-Leninist thinking was not on art, or even on culture, but on economics and political control, so music and other arts were discussed only insofar as they could serve the revolution. Moreover, neither Marx nor Lenin developed a systematic policy for the arts in their writings (Perris 1985, 69). On the other hand, the establishment in Poland, as in all socialist countries, considered music a powerful tool in its social management schemes and in shaping the “new socialist person” in spite of the lack of the Party’s official stance toward it.

The most comprehensive statement on cultural policy in Poland was prepared for UNESCO in 1973 by Witold Balicki, Jerzy Kossak, and Mirosław Żuławski.³ According to that survey, the goal of cultural policy in Poland was “to create a system of public and social institutions that would give an impulse to the process of forming a new socialist artistic culture – one that was democratic, secular and open” (Balicki, Kossak and Żuławski 1973, 29; emphasis RPM). “The spread of culture” was considered “a major factor in the advancement of the working class and peasantry” (ibid., 22). Based “on the system of Marxist-Leninist values and on the experience of the Polish revolutionary movement,” it was governed by principles which were summarized as follows:

There is an indissoluble link between politics, economics and culture; development in these three areas of social life must be subject to the single control of the Party …

Education is a major factor in ensuring that culture is truly democratic; a cultural idiom must be evolved that is common to the whole population and everyone must be given the opportunity to play an effective part in national and world culture and in the continuing cultural development of society as a whole …

The new socialist culture is not a by-product of the revolution, but one of the essential goals in the building of socialism …

In creating a new culture the working class and its vanguard do not reject the national cultural heritage nor the world heritage, but approach them in a new way, submitting intellectual and artistic traditions to a critical analysis and interpreting them from an ideological viewpoint. In new works of art not tied to the communist ideology they also look for humanist values and reject only ideas that are inimical to revolution and social justice.

State institutions and social organizations do not confine themselves to the task of elaborating a prices policy for cultural goods and services; they also seek to rouse interest in intellectual pursuits and culture.

(ibid., 14–15)

As seen in the above statement, cultural matters were taken very seriously and subordinated to socialist ideology. After several years of establishing political control in the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party around 1948 sought to influ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Series Foreword
• Introduction: Polish Popular Music and its Research: Filling the Gaps
• PART I Born in the PRL: Popular Music in the People’s Republic of Poland
• PART II Documenting Change and Continuity in Music Scenes and Institutions
• PART III Polishness and its Discontents: Music, Identity, and Critique
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index