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 āworld musicā. 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: 120ā21), due to the fact that rock 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 Rybackās 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 Lennonās 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 stateās 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: āA 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 MiloÅ”eviÄ.ā Later she adds, āThere is one figure who casts a long shadow over the entire East European (and Russian) rock scene and who served as an inspiration to an entire generation: former Beatle John Lennonā (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 Gorbachevsā 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 Onoās visit. Claptonās greater popularity among young Serbians than MiloÅ”eviÄ, 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, ārocking the stateā, as the title of Rametās collection announces, fighting with the Leninist ideologues and politicians. In the most extreme version of this view, as proposed by Ramet, āthe 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 riflesā (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 āself-colonisationā and āpolitical subversion versus state propagandaā. The argument in this book is not that they are false, but that they are simplistic and prevent us from appreciating 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 āthe vast majority of teenage listeners are unaware of what the lyrics of hit protest songs are aboutā (Robinson and Hirsch, quoted in Frith 2007: 95). If listeners in Eastern Europe were similar in this respect to their American peers, then the researchersā 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 āself-colonisationā 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 authorās own work (2015) are followed. These authors propose to divert from the colonial discourse or even its specific form, ācultural imperialismā, according to which Anglo-American pop-rock ādisplace and appropriate authentic representations of local and indigenous music into packed commercial music commodified for ethnically indeterminate, but predominantly Anglocentric and Eurocentricā markets (Mitchell 1996: 1). Instead, they suggest that the āimperialā 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 ācultural imperialismā 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 āself-colonisationā reflects. However, what the proponents of the ācultural imperialismā thesis and the advocates of āself-colonisationā 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 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 Omegaās 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: 6ā7). Rather socialist culture and art were meant to accommodate and build on progressive elements from all previous styles, being a logical culmination of history. As Boris Groys put it, āThe 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 ābestā and āuseful to the proletariatā and use it in the socialist revolution and construction of the new worldā (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 Balzacās 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 āon the moveā, 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 āself-colonisationā 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: āLeninism versus Lennonismā (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: 252ā53).4 In some countries, most importantly East Germany, they were also involved in producing state policy concerning popular music (Wicke and Shepherd 1993; Robbās 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 CzesÅaw 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, āthe State is a āmachineā of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the āclassā of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class. The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) encompasses the police, courts, prisons, ...