![]()
Part I
Scenes, Cultures and Identities
Tamás Tófalvy
“Scene” has become a key concept of popular music studies during the last few decades. The success of this perspective—foregrounding the creation of boundaries instead of communities with fixed borders, the network of attachments and relationships instead of a monolithic view of groups, the process of construction instead of essential characteristics—is most likely the result of a number of parallel factors.
On the one hand, it can be considered a consequence of the transformation, during the second half of the twentieth century, of the nature of the large spectrum of collectivities related to popular music, such as taste and knowledge communities, audiences, artists and industry participants. The social sciences began to reflect on this transformation. Some of the social patterns related to popular music gradually disintegrated, while novel patterns required redefined explanatory models.
On the other hand, a strong demand has arisen within the social sciences—and this also applies to the relevant areas of popular music studies—for the interpretation of social and cultural meanings primarily from the direction of their creation or production. The meeting of this broader direction of social constructionism and the processes that partly induced the turn in perspective was productive. The concept of the scene has gained a central role in this process as an adequately malleable framework, offering sufficient elbow-room for a variety of methodological tools, while also functioning as a clear, comprehensible and revelatory concept.
When speaking about music scenes, we usually also speak about cultures and identities. We speak about how systems of surrounding values, norms, and traditions determine the changing of individual scenes. About how various music scenes interact with each another, and how they mutually affect each other's life cycles, values, and ideas. About how the inner logics, relation systems, canons, hierarchies come into being and are subsequently shaped, how individuals are socialized, and how their motivations, ideas, careers, and tastes form in various popular music scenes. The researcher looking at the interactions of cultural values, identities, and scenes wants to reach a better understanding, explanation, and description of the construction of cultural meanings emerging along the power axes of various scenes.
This perspective is present in this first part through various case studies and conceptions of music scenes. In Chapter 1, “Setting Up a Tent in the ‘New Europe:’ The Sziget Festival of Budapest,” Anna Szemere and Kata Márta Nagy show how cultural meanings relating to the Sziget Festival have transformed along with the changing of the associated cultural groups, as well as how a particular experience of “Europeanness” attached to this festival has come into being within this complex space of communication.
The rest of the chapters in the section look at the construction of cultural meanings of scenes organizing around particular genres, or examine conflicts within or between scenes related to opposing meanings. Attila Gyulai's “Taming the Extreme: Hungarian Black Metal in the Mainstream Publicity” (Chapter 2) presents the conflicts around interpretation between the black metal scene and the mainstream media surrounding it. It shows how the visual codes and representations important for the scene as authenticity markers can be taken from their original context to be turned into ironic representations in the use of mainstream media looking at the scene from the outside, which ultimately question authenticity.
In Chapter 3, “Learned Helplessness of a Cultural Scene: The Hungarian Contemporary Jazz Scene through the Eyes of Its Participants,” Réka Szabó analyzes the cultural meanings producing systems of hierarchy within the scene and their effects resulting in conflict. According to her analysis, the tension-filled inner dynamics of the Hungarian contemporary jazz scene is best described by the concept of learned helplessness. Jazz in Hungary can be said to be a scene with extensive traditions, which means its researcher is faced with the according challenges. Emília Barna (Chapter 4) meanwhile met with challenges quite different when immersing herself in a newly emerging scene. “A Translocal Music Room of One's Own: Female Musicians within the Budapest Lo-Fi Music Scene” shows how mainstream, established meanings of technology, sound, femininity, and the music industry are reinterpreted in the inner world of the newly forming bedroom music scene.
![]()
1
Setting Up a Tent in the “New Europe”
The Sziget Festival of Budapest
Anna Szemere and Kata Márta Nagy
Going strong since 1993, Budapest's Sziget has grown into one of Europe's biggest festivals. This year, Roma and Hungarian folk comes to the World Village stage while amateurs and professionals alike go acoustic at the Campfire Stage. Some of the big names to rock Óbuda Island on the Danube in 2014 include Queens of the Stone Age, Placebo, Lily Allen and Macklemore. But the party extends beyond the Island of Freedom—explore the city's hip “ruin pubs” and “garden clubs” brimming throughout summer, then travel 90 km southwest to the shores of Lake Balaton for Sziget's official electronic music afterparty, B.my.Lake (voted Europe's “Best New Festival” for 2013).
(Lonely Planet 2014)
This is how Lonely Planet advertised the week-long Sziget along with one of its satellite outfits, listing it among the most appealing summer fests of Europe. At a time when, thanks to Viktor Orbán's regime (2010 to present), Hungary makes global headlines as the European Union's autocratic and xenophobic renegade (Guardian 2015; Chastand and Stolz 2015), this festival continues to exude the aura of diversity and cosmopolitanism. In rock critic Barna Braun's (2015) words:
I felt that Sziget is precisely one of those things that tie our lovely country to Europe. However strong the lineup [of performers] is every year, it's not the international stars that make Sziget what it is but the partying “western” (and non-western) young (and no longer young) people that caused me to feel what I've never felt before: We—Hungarians, Portuguese, Germans, Brits and even Swedes, Swiss, Croats and Estonians—well, we belong together.
Indeed, the most consistently upheld value of the festival has been an appreciation of cultural and artistic, national and ethnic diversity. Although not expressly political, Sziget was not merely envisioned as a place of freedom but an altogether different country. Recently, its advertisers have lured domestic and foreign visitors alike to “emigrate to the Sziget Festival Republic for a week” and become its “szitizen.”1
In this chapter we explore the trajectory of the Sziget Festival as a cultural institution and an “experience” which has been shaped by the imagined community of “Europe” (analogously to the imagined national community, Anderson 1983), a pan-European sentiment associated with the formation of the “New Europe” starting after the fall of the Wall and culminating in the successive waves of the European Union's enlargement. (Hungary was admitted to its ranks in 2004, along with nine other candidates.) A long-standing trope in east and central European discourse had been an aspiration “to return to Europe.” The idea involving countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary hinged on the argument that, as opposed to Russia or the Balkans, this region now emphatically distinguished as Central Europe had historically and culturally formed part of Europe proper.2
The vision of the Sziget Festival as a mega-event bringing together the youths of Europe and beyond was spawned and realized in the context of this large-scale discursive and institutional realignment of the continent. Sziget fell into line with other cultural projects to stimulate and demonstrate a sense of unity and pride in the reconstituted Europe, such as the Eurovision Song Contest.
From its start as a modest enterprise to its present incarnation as a culture industrial monopoly, Sziget's directors have been navigating a number of conflicting demands:
- seeking to capture the interest of foreign, mostly western European visitors without alienating local music fans of different tastes and lesser means;
- continuing to grow as a business yet not giving up some cultural political commitments; and
- championing progressive values without involvement in party politics.
In our study we relied on Sziget's promotional materials, a variety of outside media reports and reviews, and in-depth interviews with local festival goers with diverse social and demographic backgrounds. First, however, a brief survey of the festival as a specific format is in order.
Theorizing Festivals
Festivals have become ubiquitous over the past decade (Bennett et al. 2014; McKay 2015; Frith 2015). Viewed as an antidote to the wide-ranging social experience of instability, displacement, and fast-paced change, festivals foster a sense of belonging and community. The omnipresent digital, portable media as a central aspect of twenty- first-century lifestyle is also blamed for exacerbating isolation and privatization. As Frith (2015) has pointed out, with every technological innovation in the music industry, listening has become a bit more of an individual and private experience, and that a flare-up of interest in live music—from the American Idol-type contests to karaoke—is a reaction to aspects of technology-induced atomization. Thus the proliferation of festivals worldwide points to a psychosocial need for intensity, effervescence, and a carnival-like suspension of routine everyday life.
The economic imperative underlying the festival boom goes back to the shifting status of live music in the era of digitized production and distribution: music consumers enjoy an infinite supply and range of recorded music without paying for it. This circumstance compels musicians of any stature or age to take to the road. The festival is an economically and logistically optimal format for concert organizers, enabling the production of multiple performances cost-effectively.
Dowd et al. (2014: 149) liken festivals to musical scenes “as they occur in a delimited space, offering a collective opportunity for performers and fans to experience music and other lifestyle elements.” Three specific features distinguish festivals from scenes:
- a kind of intensity that often leaves participants transformed;
- boundary work guiding the selection of performers in accordance with the character of the festival; and, finally,
- the impact on the larger environment.
Boundary work may be crucial to the identity of smaller festivals but not that of mega-events. Major festivals such as Sziget or Lollapalooza with their hundreds of thousand visitors place more emphasis on the breakdown of the boundaries between genres and scenes in order to allow for fans of different age groups, tastes, educational levels, race, and nationality to mingle and interact.
But even vast festivals need to promote themselves as unique. In the cut-throat competition within the reconstituted music industry, the “branding” of a festival is about as necessary as that of the music (regarding the latter, see Barfoot Christian 2011). A legendary and less commercialized fest, Glastonbury, for instance, is dubbed by McKay (2000) as “a very English fair” faithful to the English Left tradition: respect for the past and the “green lands” is linked with support of alternative social movements. In contrast, the Love Parade of Berlin (1989–2010) would not be characterized as a “very German Parade,” even though it set out as a celebration of the reunified Berlin. Instead it was a carnival to stand for—or rather dance for—international peace. As for Sziget, it should be branded as “a Very European Fair.”
Gesturing toward the Counterculture in the Era of Transition
Growing up in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, many young people felt they were missing out on the cultural and political freedom of their Western counterparts. Those freedoms, however, were often exaggerated or misconstrued. For example, the official policy in the USA to embrace modernist art in the ‘50s and rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘60s and ‘70s formed part of a clever political strategy to gain unreserved sympathy from Eastern Bloc intellectuals and youths towards the so called “free world” (György 2003). Czech pop/rock fans surely owed a great deal to John Lennon, or the Velvet Underground; rock fans in Poland looked quite similar to, say, Swedish ones. Nevertheless, pop festivals—when and where they transpired—were held or supervised by the communist youth leagues—and surveilled by secret agents—therefore became memorable as much for scandals and mayhem as for the musical entertainment.
The Sziget project materialized in 1993, four years after the fall of the Wall and one year before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock, the emblematic event of the 1960s counterculture. Infused with the hopes of a generation jolted into economic and political power by the regime change, the creators dreamed up a weeklong trip to “culture land” (“kultúra ország”). Sziget celebrated two aspects of the transition:
- the exodus from communism to liberal democracy; from the dissolved Soviet Bloc to “Europe,” an idealized, almost mythical concept whose ultimate ideological effect was to integrate the central and eastern European countries into the European Union; and
- the brainchild of Péter Müller, a key figure of the 1980s rock underground and particularly adept at converting his countercultural capital into postsocialist entrepreneurship (Szemere 2001), the Festival was to promulgate the emancipation of rock (especially its fringes), a move from the grey zone of semi-legality in the former Eastern Bloc to the open daylight, from a nihilistic to a more life affirming youth music culture.
Müller and the more business-oriented future director of the enterprise, Sziget Ltd., Károly Gerendai began to talk about a new Woodstock-on-the-Danube, “where everyone would find what they want, be they raggedy-ass punks, navel-gazing philosophy majors or bank managers out to party” (Jávorszky 2012: 9) (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Sziget festival poster with the name of the then title sponsor Pepsi, from 1997
The first summers of the Sziget Festival paid tribute to its roots by screening hippie movies such as Hair, Easy Rider, and Woodstock; concert films on icons such as Frank Zappa, The Doors and many others. The US fare was complemented with exemplars of the European cinema of the 1960s, and notable Hungarian movies from the 1980s. The main attraction, however, was a dizzying number and spectrum of live musical performances from rock to alternative, from folk and world music to blues and punk. On Woodstock's twenty-fifth anniversary Sziget hosted many of its veterans, such as Jethro Tull, Alvin Lee, and the Grandmothers of Invention (Szigetfestival.com 2015a).
Yet the organizers were cautious not to overemphasize the analogy between the ‘60s counterculture and Sziget, since the latter did not take a rebellious stance against the system. First, its organizers relied heavily on their connections with the new political elite. The ...
