Rocking The State

Rock Music And Politics In Eastern Europe And Russia

Sabrina Petra Ramet, Sabrina P. Ramet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367286187
• eBook ISBN: 9781000310252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Most readers of this book will have had at most a fleeting acquaintancewith the music of some of the groups described in this book. Groupssuch as Laibach (from Slovenia), Borghesia (Slovenia), Pankow (theGDR), and Gorky Park (USSR) have concentrated on the Western marketand have acquired followings in the United States and Western Europe.Other artists and groups, such as Boris Grebenshikov and Aquarium(USSR), Sergei Kuryokhin (USSR), Goran Bregovic and White Button(Yugoslavia), and Plastic People of the Universe (Czechoslovakia), havealso seen some Western exposure. But for the most part, the rock musicof that part of the world is terra incognita to Westerners. So too is thestory of their uneasy coexistence with communist authorities from thetime that rock first ~ppeared until the collapse of communism in 1989.This book aims to fill that vacuum.

1
Rock: The Music of Revolution (and Political Conformity)

SABRINA PETRA RAMET

MUSIC IS NOT merely a cultural or diversionary phenomenon. It is also a political phenomenon. Its medium is suggestion. Its point of contact is the imagination. Its voice is that of the muse. All of this makes music an unexpectedly powerful force for social and political change. Music brings people together and evokes for them collective emotional experience to which common meanings are assigned (Woodstock is an obvious example of music bringing people together). It gives them common reference points, common idols, and often a common sense of "the enemy."

Every revolution has its music. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution all produced stirring and riveting music, usually marches. Political revolution, it seems, is a powerful progenitor of certain kinds of music. The uses of and role played by such music are clear enough. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that without music, there cannot be a revolution.

The East European revolution of 1989 likewise had its music, and that music was rock. Václav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia, even maintains that the revolution began in the rock scene.¹ And with the triumph of the anticommunist revolution, local rock stars were swept to positions of political responsibility in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere, and Frank Zappa was invited to Prague as an official guest of the Czechoslovak government. In Yugoslavia in 1990, a political party called the Rock and Roll Party was formed, albeit largely in jest.

Rock music produced its share of revolutionaries. This was not surprising given the strong antiauthoritarian sentiment that researchers find to be commonly associated with rock fans.² A Hungarian rock group, Coitus Punk Group, voiced this sentiment succinctly in a 1984 song:

Rotten, stinking communist gang,
Why has nobody hanged them yet?³

Bora Djordjević, the self-styled Bob Dylan of the Yugoslav rock scene, once compared the government of his native Yugoslavia to the apartheid regime in South Africa.⁴

And in the Soviet Union, the Leningrad group Televizor shook up the authorities with a 1986 song in which it sang:

We were watched from the days of kindergarten.
Some nice men and kind women
Beat us up. They chose the most painful places
And treated us like animals on the farm.
So we grew up like a disciplined herd.
We sing what they want and live how they want.
And we look at them downside up as if we're trapped.
We just watch how they hit us.
Get out of control!
Get out of control!
And sing what you want,
And not just what is allowed.
We have a right to yell!⁵

Thus rock musicians figured—in the Soviet and East European context of the 1980s—a bit like prophets. That is to say, they did not invent or create the ideas of revolution or the feelings of discontent and disaffection. But they were sensitive to the appearance and growth of these ideas and feelings and gave them articulation, and in this way they helped to reinforce the revolutionary tide.

The revolutionary destabilization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had roots in economic discontent, the disaffection of the intellectuals, the spread of corruption at high levels, the loss of confidence within the elite, and so forth.⁶ It was borne along by the sprouting of independent activist groups, the mobilization of churches into politics, and the transformation of the citizen's sense of self. Alongside these phenomena, rock music played a supportive role. 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 or rifles.

This is a book about the politics of rock music, or perhaps the sociology of rock music, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Its starting point is that rock music has proven to be a political phenomenon because rock artists themselves often choose to make political statements through their music, lyrics, attire, or performances and because regimes often make even politically innocent music political simply by reacting politically: As soon as something is censored or banned by political authorities, it becomes ipso facto politically charged.

There are many experiences shared by the national environments described herein. In all of them, the earliest phase was imitative, as the bedazzled local youngsters struggled to master the new idiom. This was followed by a second phase, in which emergent rock 'n' roll bands wrote their own material but always sang in English—the supposed obligatory language of rock 'n' roll. Eventually, a third phase ensued, in which local rock groups began to sing in their own languages and to develop their own musical styles.⁷ And more recently, there have been clear signs of a fourth phase, characterized by the turn to local and exotic folk idioms for material (the latter after the model of Paul Simon's "Graceland") and, perhaps ironically, by the return of some groups (such as Slovenia's Laibach and Borghesia, and Berlin's now-defunct Pankow) to English, in their quest for a world market.

In another pattern common to all of these national environments, rock music pitted the younger generation against the older generation, just as it did in the West—the difference being that in the East, the older generation was willing to go to greater lengths to use political power to repress the new contagion.

In all of these national environments—including even Yugoslavia—there were also experiences of censorship and politically motivated interference with the musical process.

But there were also differences from one national environment to another. In Yugoslavia, for example, the omnipresent "national question" exerted an influence even in rock music, resulting in the fragmentation of the rock scene into five regional rock markets. In Hungary, by contrast, the communist state in time warmed up to rock music and even allowed the staging of a mammoth rock opera, "Stephen the King," to commemorate the millennium of Stephen's coronation.

Symbolic Ambivalence and the Opaqueness of Lyrics

In a provocative essay published in 1979, Bernice Martin argued that "all culture simultaneously reinforces the existing order and offers alternative visions," and more specifically she suggested that rock music, reflecting both sides of this paradoxical formula, has routinely mixed ritualized symbols of "communitas" with those of "antistructure."⁸ In her view, thus, the use of rock alternatively for rebellion and for panegyrics is sown into the very nature of culture itself, which is always and necessarily ambivalent. At times, one aspect or the other may prevail—but such tendencies are inherently transitory and unstable, she argued. Taking up the connection between working-class solidarity and rock as rebellion, Martin continued,

What began as a symbiotic exchange between the tribal and the liberating elements in working class youth culture was stretched to an ultimately unresolvable tension when the middle classes, especially the anarchic radicals, moved in to elaborate the symbols of freedom, immediacy, and hostility to structures, and even to add an element of conscious political protest. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the 1960s, the contradictions did work as a symbiosis and united working and middle class wings of youth culture, the Underground and Rock into a powerful culture force. Yet ultimately—the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper" album was probably the symbolic turning point—both Pop and youth culture began to disintegrate back into constituent elements, into largely class homogeneous "markets" or groupings.... The progressive middle classes [for example] took Rock through the logic of anti-structure until for many it ceased to be recognizable as Rock and became indistinguishable from "serious" avant-garde music.⁹

Some of the "antistructure" messages sung to the accompaniment of a rock beat have been extreme. Take, for example, a song from Mike and the Mechanics, popular in 1987:

Take the children and yourself,
and hide out in the cellar.
By now the fighting will be close at hand.
Don't believe the Church and State,
and everything they tell you.
Believe me, I'm with the High Command.¹⁰

Then again, there is Leonard Cohen's "insurrectionary" song:

I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them;
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.¹¹

But it is quite another matter whether such messages are taken seriously. A 1987 study by James S. Leming found that only 12 percent of American young people polled said that they paid "a great deal of attention" to the lyrics, whereas 58 percent indicated that the content of the lyrics was, as far as they were concerned, irrelevant.¹² Moreover, even among those who paid attention to the lyrics, there was some disagreement as to what they meant. In a striking example, Leming found no consensus among the fifty-eight persons sampled as to the meaning of Olivia Newton-John's 1981 song "Physical":

Let's get physical, physical,
Let me hear your body talk.¹³

In Leming's sample, 36 percent interpreted the song to refer to sexual relations, whereas an equal percentage believed it referred to physical exercise and conditioning; fully 28 percent asserted that they were unsure as to the song's meaning.

Does this suggest that we should write off rock music as socially marginal after all, on the argument that the fans are either not listening to or not understanding what is being sung? My answer is no—for a rather simple reason: The social functions performed by rock music necessarily vary across social systems and over time. Certain societies have more deeply rooted traditions of bard poets, and these traditions can sometimes be translated into a rock idiom. But more particularly, there is a world of difference in the social needs that rock musicians have wanted to address in collectivist societies as opposed to the more restricted ambitions of rock musicians in pluralist societies. As Goran Bregović, the leader of the Sarajevo rock group White Button, put it to me in 1989,

Rock 'n' roll in communist countries has much more importance than rock 'n' roll in the West. We can't have any alternative parties or any alternative organized politics. So there are not too many places where you can gather large groups of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Rock: The Music of Revolution (and Political Conformity)
• ONE Eastern Europe
• TWO The Soviet Union
• About the Book
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index