Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm

By Ewa Mazierska

This book explores popular music in Eastern Europe during the period of state socialism, in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Estonia and Albania. It discusses the policy concerning music, the greatest Eastern European stars, such as Karel Gott, Czesław Niemen and Omega, as well as DJs and the music press. By conducting original research, including interviews and examining archival material, the authors take issue with certain assumptions prevailing in the existing studies on popular music in Eastern Europe, namely that it was largely based on imitation of western music and that this music had a distinctly anti-communist flavour. Instead, they argue that self-colonisation was accompanied with creating an original idiom, and that the state not only fought the artists, but also supported them. The collection also draws attention to the foreign successes of Eastern European stars, both within the socialist bloc and outside of it.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137592736

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© The Author(s) 2016

Ewa Mazierska (ed.)Popular Music in Eastern EuropePop Music, Culture and Identity10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_1

1. Introduction

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

Ewa Mazierska¹  

(1)

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

Ewa Mazierska

Email: [e-mail]

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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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’ Anglo-American 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; 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