Eastern European Popular Music in A Transnational Context

PALGRAVE EUROPEAN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES
Eastern European
Popular Music
in a Transnational Context
Beyond the Borders
Edited by Ewa Mazierska · Zsolt Győri
Palgrave European Film and Media Studies
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Ewa Mazierska · Zsolt Győri
Editors
Eastern European
Popular Music
in a Transnational
Context
Beyond the Borders
Editors
Ewa Mazierska Zsolt Győri
University of Central Lancashire University of Debrecen
Preston, Lancashire, UK Debrecen, Hungary
Palgrave European Film and Media Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-17033-2 ISBN 978-3-030-17034-9 (eBook)
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Contents
1 Introduction: Crossing National and Regional

Borders in Eastern European Popular Music 1
Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri
Part I Bringing Foreign Music to the European East
2 Loopholes in the Iron Curtain: Obtaining Western

Music in State Socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s
and 1980s 27
Adam Havlík
3 Quiet Fanaticism: The Phenomenon of Leonard

Cohen’s Popularity in Poland 49
Ewa Mazierska and Xawery Stańczyk
4 Authenticity and Orientalism: Cultural

Appropriations in the Polish Alternative
Music Scene in the 1970s and 1980s 75
Xawery Stańczyk
5 Eastern Europe as Punk Frontier 101

Aimar Ventsel
v
vi Contents
Part II Eastern European Music Crossing the Borders
6 Success, Failure, Splendid Isolation: Czesław Niemen’s

Career in Europe 119
Mariusz Gradowski
7 Yugo-Polish: The Uses of Yugoslav Music by Polish

Musicians 137
Ewa Mazierska
8 Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music Production

Between Hybridity and Class Struggle 155
Slobodan Karamanić and Manuela Unverdorben
Part III Liminal Spaces of Eastern European

Music Festivals
9 The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial

and Pan-European Alternative to the Eurovision
Song Contest 173
Dean Vuletic
10 Between Utopia and the Marketplace: The Case

of the Sziget Festival 191
Zsolt Győri
11 A Tale of Two (or #EverMore) Festivals: Electronic

Music in a Transylvanian Town 213
Ruxandra Trandafoiu
Index 239
Notes on Contributors
Mariusz Gradowski (1979) studied anthropology of culture and musi-

cology. In 2005, as a lecturer, he joined the Institute of Musicology at
the University of Warsaw. After the defence of his Ph.D. dissertation,
‘Styles and Genres of Polish Rock and Roll Music (1957–1973)’, he was
offered a position of assistant professor. He has published articles on the
reception of rock and roll styles and genres in Polish musical culture, his-
tory of rock, history of Polish jazz, theory of film music and anthropol-
ogy of music. He is also a radio journalist, hosting programmes on film
music and history of jazz standards on Polish Radio Channel 2.
Zsolt Győri is an assistant professor at the University of Debrecen,
Institute of English and American Studies. He edited a collection of
essays on British film history (2010) and is the co-editor of three vol-
umes dedicated to the relationship of body, subjectivity, ethnicity, gen-
der, space, and power in Hungarian cinema (Debrecen University Press,
2013, 2015, 2018). His monograph in Hungarian, offering a critical
introduction to Deleuzian film philosophy and analyses of selected films,
appeared in 2014 [Films, Auteurs, Critical-Clinical Readings]. He is the
co-editor of Travelling Around Cultures: Collected Essays on Literature
and Art (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), Popular Music and the Moving
Image in Eastern Europe with Ewa Mazierska (Bloomsbury, 2018), and
is the editor of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.
Adam Havlík is a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles University in Prague,
where he received his master’s degree in 2012. In his dissertation, he
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
analyzes the issue of the illegal money changers and the black market in
state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Since 2016, he has been a research asso-
ciate at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague,
where he currently is working on a project related to the history of the
Czechoslovak secret police after 1968. Other fields of his work include
the social and cultural history of postwar Czechoslovakia and the history
of subcultures.
Slobodan Karamanić is a researcher and theoretician based in Munich.
He defended his doctoral dissertation about Althusser’s conceptualis-
ation of subjectivity at Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis—Ljubljana
(2013). He has also studied and worked at universities in Belgrade,
Tromsø, New York, Konstanz, Munich and Edinburgh. He has authored
more than thirty articles that range from philosophical concepts of
political subjectivity, via Marxist critique of ideology and analysis of art
practice, to the historical legacy of Yugoslav socialist revolution and
postsocialism. With Daniel Šuber, he edited Retracing Images—Visual
Culture After Yugoslavia (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2012). He is a
co-founder of Prelom (Break)—Journal for Images and Politics (2001–
2006) and an active member of Edicija Jugoslavija.
Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, at the University of Central
Lancashire. She published over twenty monographs and edited collec-
tions on film and popular music. They include Popular Viennese Electronic
Music, 1990–2015: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2019), Contemporary
Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with
Lars Kristensen, Sounds Northern: Popular Music, Culture and Place
in England’s North (Equinox, 2018), Popular Music in Eastern Europe:
Breaking the Cold War Paradigm (Palgrave, 2016), Relocating Popular
Music (Palgrave, 2015), co-edited with Georgina Gregory. Mazierska’s
work has been translated into over twenty languages. She is also principal
editor of the Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Xawery Stańczyk is an assistant professor in the Institute of Philosophy
and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences where he participates in
the project Cultural Opposition—Understanding the Cultural Heritage of
Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries. He received his Ph.D. from the
Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University in 2015 for a thesis about
alternative culture in Poland in the years 1978–1996; it was published in
2018.
Notes on Contributors ix
Ruxandra Trandafoiu is Reader in Communication at Edge Hill

University. A former local news reporter for Transylvania, she now
researches identities, migration and creativity in postcommunist
Eastern Europe, in relation to music and visual arts. She is the author
of Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants and the
co-editor of The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Musical Migration
and Tourism and Media and Cosmopolitanism.
Manuela Unverdorben studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Munich, where she currently works as an academic assistant. She also
studied at Bauhaus Weimar and had residencies and fellowships in
Ljubljana, Stockholm, Tokyo, Graz and Helsinki. She produced and
collaborated on various projects in the field involving art, politics and
theory, which were exhibited in German and European cities. Selected
exhibitions/projects include: Haidhausen OnAir—Micro Radio, Public
Art Program City of Munich (2017 and 2018), “Piracy as a Business
Force”/Third Space Helsinki (2015), “Free Market Road Show
Istanbul”/Platform Munich (2014), “Liberty Café”/Academy of Media
Arts Cologne (2013).
Aimar Ventsel is a social anthropologist from the University of Tartu,
Estonia. He has studied music scenes and youth cultures in Russia,
Estonia, Kazakhstan and Germany. Currently he is working on a mon-
ograph on East German contemporary punk. His publications include:
Daniel Briggs, Ivan Gololobov, Aimar Ventsel, 2015, “Ethnographic
Research Among Drinking Youth Cultures: Reflections from Observing
Participants”, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, Vol. 61, pp. 157–
176; Ventsel, Aimar, 2008, “Punx and Skins United: One Law for Us
One Law for Them”, Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 57, pp. 45–100;
Ventsel, Aimar and Peers, Eleanor, 2017, “Rapping the Changes in
North-East Siberia: Hip-Hop, Urbanization, and Sakha Ethnicity”,
in Miszczynski, Milosz (ed.), Hip-Hop from the East of Europe, Indiana
University Press, pp. 228–242.
Dean Vuletic is an historian of contemporary Europe who works in the
Department of East European History at the University of Vienna. As a
Lise Meitner Fellow, he currently leads the research project, ‘Intervision:
Popular Music and Politics in Eastern Europe’, which focusses on the
Intervision Song Contest. He is the author of Postwar Europe and the
Eurovision Song Contest (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), the first scholarly
x Notes on Contributors
monograph on the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, which he

produced under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship.
Dr. Vuletic also regularly comments on the Eurovision Song Contest
in the international media. He holds a doctoral degree in history from
Columbia University, a master’s degree in East European studies from
Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in European studies from the
Australian National University. More information about his work can be
found on his personal website, www.deanvuletic.com.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Music market in Španělská Street, Prague, ca. 1974–1975

(private archive of Ivo Pospíšil) 43
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Leonard Cohen from his visit in Warsaw
in 1985 (Courtesy of Andrzej Kielbowicz) 59
Fig. 3.2 Photo of Leonard Cohen from his visit in Warsaw
in 1985 (Courtesy of Andrzej Kielbowicz) 60
Fig. 5.1 Russian punk band from Saint Petersburg 4Scums
in Anemooni, DIY club in Tallinn 107
Fig. 5.2 Huiabella Fantastica, the most touring Estonian
DIY punk band, performing in Saint Petersburg,
Russia in MOD Club 109
Fig. 5.3 Belurussian skinhead band Mister X performing
in Anemooni 109
Fig. 5.4 Russian band Kobra performing in Anemooni 111
Fig. 7.1 Cover of the record ‘Kayah i Bregović’ (1999) 143
Fig. 9.1 Helena Vondráčková, 1977 ISC 180
Fig. 9.2 Alla Pugacheva, 1978 ISC 182
Fig. 9.3 Boney M., 1979 ISC 186
Fig. 10.1 The promotional logo of the 2015 Sziget Festival 206
Fig. 11.1 Untold 2015 poster 217
Fig. 11.2 Untold 2016 poster 219
Fig. 11.3 Fans of Untold, Rareş, and Mihaela Lupu,
with the festival’s Dacian Draco T-shirts. The English
translation of the surname “Lupu” is “the Wolf”.
Reproduced with kind permission 221
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 11.4 Ursus sponsored T-shirt, with a modernized version

of the brand’s logo 223
Fig. 11.5 Armin van Buuren brandishing the Romanian flag
at Untold 2017 230
Fig. 11.6 Untold and Electric Castle 2016 posters in comparison 231
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Crossing National and Regional

Borders in Eastern European Popular Music
Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri
As early as the end of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Tappert described

songs as the ‘most indefatigable tourists of the earth’ (Tappert 1890: 5).
Bruno Nettl drew on this concept, underscoring the transnational quality
of popular songs: ‘Some of them behave as if they had lives of their own,
moving across national boundaries, rivers, mountain ranges, oceans, across
language and culture areas’ (Nettl 2005: 113). Of course, this assertion
is valid about music in general, but popular music is particularly adept at
crossing national borders. This reflects the fact that the market for pop-
ular music is more global than that for classical music, which tends to be
E. Mazierska (B)
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, UK
e-mail: ehmazierska@uclan.ac.uk
ZS. Győri
University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
© The Author(s) 2019 1

E. Mazierska and Zs. Győri (eds.), Eastern European Popular Music in a
Transnational Context, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_1
2 E. MAZIERSKA AND ZS. GYŐRI
protected by and embedded in national institutions, such as orchestras,

opera houses and music conservatoires. It is also more international than
folk music, which ostensibly reflects local culture and rarely reveals any
ambition to conquer the world.
The transnational character of popular music is further strengthened
by technological developments and changes in world politics. Cheap
production, immediate and practically cost-free dissemination of music
resulting from digitisation, as well as the availability of low-cost travel for
musicians—assisted by the neoliberal policy of free movement of labour
in some parts of the world—all facilitate the global flow of popular music.
And, despite digital recording, social media, the piracy of records on
the internet and, finally, the emergence of distribution platforms such
as Spotify, live popular music has increased its share within the music
industry and has made musicians ever more reliant on concerts, touring
and festival appearances to sustain their income (Williamson and Cloonan
2007; Aspray 2008; Curien and Moreau 2009). In today’s world of
weakened political and cultural borders, the popularity of performers and
songs are measured by international visibility and integration into globally
established styles and trends (Stokes 2012).
However, research into popular music in Eastern Europe shows that its
transnational character has been limited. First, it is usually acknowledged
how Eastern European popular music borrowed from western pop-rock
during the period of state socialism (Ryback 1990; Ramet 1994; Risch
2015), which is seen as an act of resistance against oppressive states; and sec-
ondly, exclusive mention of the crossing of national borders by certain gen-
res born in Eastern Europe—namely those regarded as particularly exotic or
oriental: ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Balkan’ (Silverman 2012)—which are of interest to
non-mainstream western musicians and audiences. Furthermore, the influ-
ence of Anglo-American music on Eastern European popular music during
the period of state socialism is discussed predominantly in political terms,
as a force challenging ideological principles and culture, promoted by state
institutions and, consequently, playing an important role in dismantling
state socialism and introducing a new system: that of market capitalism and
parliamentary democracy.
It would be difficult to argue that Eastern European pop-rock has been
immune to western influences or that the relationship between Anglo-
American and Eastern European pop-rock was symmetrical. For the major-
ity of musicians operating behind the Iron Curtain, music from Britain
and the United States constituted the dominant model. Almost every
1 INTRODUCTION: CROSSING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL … 3
popular rock musician from countries such as Hungary, Poland or

Yugoslavia started his or her career by covering songs of famous Anglo-
American artists and even when s/he did not, many of the local stars were
hailed as local versions of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. On the other
hand, it would be difficult to find a band from the United Kingdom or
the United States, which marketed itself as an act whose ambition was to
appeal to Eastern European audiences or which was inspired by music from
Eastern Europe. In cases where this did happen, inspiration coming from
the Soviet bloc was overlooked by audiences and critics. The most recent
case in point is the spectacular international career of Dua Lipa, a singer
born in London from Kosovo Albanian parents who quotes her musician
father as an important influence, yet who is not seen as being in any way
(musically or culturally) Albanian.
This collection does not argue that there was ‘no West in the East’ or that
popular music from Eastern Europe is more accomplished and influential
than is normally assumed. Its aim is rather to investigate the complex phe-
nomena that comprise the international dimensions of Eastern European
popular music.
Mapping the Field

The concept of the ‘international in Eastern European popular music’ is
problematic on several accounts. First, there is a question of the bound-
aries of Eastern, as well as Western Europe. Even during the Cold War
these terms were not straightforward, because between the (socialist) ‘East’
and the (capitalist) ‘West’ proper, there were countries which enjoyed hav-
ing one foot in each camp, such as Finland and Yugoslavia. The politics
of organizing the Eurovision and the Intervision Song Contests (ISC)
reflects this non-binary approach to the East and the West, as discussed
in the chapter by Dean Vuletic. Moreover, within specific political blocs
there were also hierarchies, reflecting the political leanings and economic
power of specific countries, as well as their music. For these reasons, again,
Yugoslav, as well as Hungarian and Polish pop-rock has traditionally been
valued more highly within the bloc than Romanian, Bulgarian and Alba-
nian pop-rock, which was presumed to be less developed due to their more
oppressive political regimes. Second, for consumers of popular music from
Eastern Europe, music produced in the English-speaking countries was val-
ued more highly than that coming from the rest of Western Europe; for
example, Belgium and Austria. In this case attitudes reflected more the
‘global core-periphery’ dynamics pertaining to popular music at large

(Azenha 2006; Stokes 2012) rather than a ‘West is best’ attitude,
widespread in Eastern Europe. The above claims are well-illustrated by
the emergence of special stores in the Soviet bloc countries, offering pre-
mium products. Under various names—Tuzex in Czechoslovakia, Pevex
in Poland, Konsumex in Hungary, Intershops in East-Germany, and Core-
com in Bulgaria—were ‘outposts of capitalism’ in state socialist countries
where, amongst others, recordings of western music could be bought for
hard currency.
Another problem with defining Eastern Europe has to do with the status
of Russia and its republics, which in some contexts is included in the inves-
tigations of Eastern Europe and in others is treated as a separate entity. For
pragmatic reasons we decided to exclude Russia from our investigation,
because its very size and specific relation to the rest of Eastern Europe
would result in marginalizing many countries we would like to cover and
add to the complexity of the investigation. We also omitted the majority of
ex-Soviet republics, leaving only Estonia. Timothy Ryback described Esto-
nia as the ‘California coast of the Soviet Union’ (Ryback 1990: 111) and
which, in the words of Aimar Ventsel, author of a chapter in this collection,
in the mind of many visitors functions as a frontier, dividing and connect-
ing the current ‘wild East’, epitomised by Russia with the allegedly more
democratic, gentler ex-Eastern Europe.
For some researchers the term ‘Eastern Europe’ is now obsolete, as
it recollects the Cold War with its relatively neat division between the
East and the West, which was overcome by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Consequently, they prefer terms such as ‘East-Central Europe’ or ‘Cen-
tral Europe,’ which includes much of the areas that once belonged to the
Austro-Hungarian Empire or pits the newly westernised part of the old
Eastern Europe, as demonstrated by its accession to such institutions as the
European Union and NATO, against those remnants of the old European
East, which have remained outside these structures, such as Serbia, Russia
and some ex-Soviet republics. Such change in terminology reflects what
Immanuel Wallerstein describes as a ‘game of geographical musical chairs’
(Wallerstein 1984: 9) in what he terms the ‘world-economy’, namely some
states moving upward, others downward, usually following a significant
political and economic upheaval. We opt for the term ‘Eastern Europe’ for
two reasons. One is the simple fact that this book covers both the period
of state socialism and the subsequent 30 or so years, a period labelled post-
communist or postsocialist. The second reason is our desire to account for
continuities and disruptions in the popular music produced and consumed

in Eastern Europe. In the existing histories of Eastern Europe, the dis-
continuities have attracted more attention: the end of state socialism was
a dramatic change, as symbolised by the spectacle of the fall of the Berlin
Wall, which opened a new and arguably happier era of freedom and pros-
perity. However, we believe that although much changed, much remained
the same.
It is worth evoking two categorisations of states: one proposed by Waller-
stein, concerning world economies at large and one by Lee Marshall, who
limits himself to the discussion of power within popular music. The main
idea we take from Wallerstein is that the world economy is dynamic. In
particular, the statuses of core and periphery are not fixed geographi-
cally, but are relative to each other. A zone defined as ‘semi-periphery’
acts as a periphery to the core and as a core to the periphery. Neverthe-
less, countries comprising Eastern Europe are seen by Wallerstein as ‘semi-
periphery’, along with countries such as Brazil and Mexico (Wallerstein
1984: 142–143).
According to Marshall, the global recording industry is made up of three
concentric circles, with the centre called ‘hegemonic mainstream’ located
in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France
and Japan. The next circle consists of ‘integrated countries,’ such as Canada
and Finland, which, although they take part in economic exchange with
central countries, they are the weaker partner; and the third and last circle
includes ‘periphery nations’, including territories in which global record
labels do not have a very strong position or are not present at all (Marshall
2013: 3).
The question which interests us is whether, since the early 1990s,
have Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech
Republic evolved from ‘periphery’ to ‘integrated countries’. The answer
to this question depends largely on whether we consider the position of
the creators or the consumers of music from these countries and whether
we take into account the position of Eastern European music within the
continent or globally.
Without doubt the fall of the Berlin Wall was an important factor in facil-
itating access to music from the West by Eastern European audiences. The
lifting of restrictions on importing western music and to travel, allowed,
for example Eastern European fans of electronic music to visit techno clubs
in Berlin or London. The same restrictions were lifted for Eastern Euro-
pean musicians, who were now allowed to knock on the doors of club
managers in Berlin or Brussels and approach foreign labels. Some artists

took advantage of this opportunity; for example, some Polish and Hun-
garian electronic musicians signed record deals with German labels. For
many others, however, the doors remained locked. By and large, the lifting
of barriers was not accompanied by an increased penetration of the West
by Eastern European music. It could even be argued that the position of
this music declined, because it lost its old protection on the domestic and
regional markets, as import embargos of western music were lifted. This
situation is well illustrated by the fate of recording companies in Eastern
Europe.
Having served the agenda of their governments, which prioritised prod-
ucts from the Eastern Bloc, while also specializing in producing and dis-
tributing music of local artists and those from ‘brotherly countries’, these
record companies were purchased by western companies, such as EMI or
Warner during the course of the 1990s. It was noticed that these sub-
sidiaries do not use their position to nurture local talent and promote it
abroad, but merely treat Eastern Europe as a market to sell music produced
in the centre, deemed more competitive (Elavsky 2011). Moreover, as these
companies became subjects of EU legislation, which often requires further
changes in ownership, one effect was weakening the agency of local actors.
Hence, we argue that joining the West by Eastern Europe resulted, on
some occasions, not in diminishing distance from the core, but increasing
it.
Wallerstein’s understanding of world economy as a dynamic system is
equally applicable to the popular music industry and its institutional actors.
We only need to remind ourselves of the 1990s, when declining record sales
were balanced by the increasing role of revenues generated through live
music. Within the industry, this change resulted in artists being less depen-
dent on producers and record company executives, radio programmers
and radio station personnel, while being increasingly reliant on personal
managers, talent agents, promoters, venue managers, and the creative and
operative staff involved in organising summer and other kinds of festivals.
While the infrastructure of the music industry came into being in Eastern
Europe with institutional actors serving as facilitators and gate-keepers for
performers and music genres, the political economy of popular music was
distorted by ideological premises and the constant search for the role of
popular culture in state socialist society. Such external restrictions posed on
Eastern Bloc music industries severely restricted them from following the
market principles of supply and demand and contributed to the peripheral
role of Eastern European music compared to the free-market—oriented

Anglo-American one. Beside the negligible market share of Eastern Europe
within global sales, which did not improve much post-1990, weak contacts
between industry actors from the West and the East further added to the
marginal status of the region’s popular music. Even those industrial actors
who joined and gained senior positions within major record companies
had little economic incentive to support local representatives of mainstream
genres which, given the linguistic barriers between Eastern Europe and the
rest of the world, were difficult to promote abroad.
Although not in a systematic and methodologically homogenous man-
ner, this volume maps up the transnational dimension of Eastern European
popular music by emphasising the role of institutional and non-institutional
actors of the music industry: performers, record companies, organisers
of megafestivals, booking agents, television and radio broadcasters, small
venue operators, smugglers and black-market racketeers. Besides factors
shaping the production, distribution and commodification of music,
authors of this volume also draw attention to the role of consumers,
such as fans, fellow artists and opinion-leaders of the music press, in
shaping trends and, ultimately, influencing what forms of international
contacts prove to be viable while others fail. Reflections on the consumers
of music emphasise the intermeshing of music and personal and group
identity, including class identity. Exploring the post-communist correlation
between market forces and consumer identity, Zsolt Győri’s chapter about
Hungary’s largest summer festival, the Sziget Festival, argues that the
business model of the event increasingly favoured the musical taste of afflu-
ent, Western European fans, even at the cost of marginalising local talent
and depriving them of the opportunity to internationalise their fan base.
This case study offers empirical testimony on the capitalist foundations of
the music industry, the centres of which lie where high purchase power
allows the realisation of higher profits. Therefore, this collection argues
for the importance of seeing not only discontinuities, but also continuities
between the circumstances of popular music in Eastern Europe before and
after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We believe that the changes in global
politics, the economy and technology did not fundamentally transform
the old hierarchies and structures in popular music of this region. After
1990, the popular music market in Eastern Europe remained dominated
by western products or easternised versions of western genres. Similarly,
making a career in the West is as difficult for the aspiring musician from
Eastern Europe as ever before, even if the reasons for that have changed.
Another problem encountered in discussion of the international dimen-

sion of popular music in Eastern Europe pertains to the concept of popu-
lar music. In its simplest terms, popular music is music with wide appeal,
distributed through the music industry and which can be performed and
enjoyed by people with little or no musical training (Middleton 1990: 3–7).
Popular musicians favour such pleasurable devices as tonality, melody and
simpler rhythms, which serious musicians tend to shun (Goodwin 2000:
223) and use the verse, chorus and bridge structure. Popular music is a
wider term than what Motti Regev labels ‘pop-rock’. As Regev himself
admits, the term ‘pop-rock’ is problematic on two counts. One is the rela-
tionship 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 between rock as
a more authentic and artistic sector of popular music and ‘pop’ as its more
commercial, ‘inauthentic’ and watered-down version (Regev 2002: 251;
on the division between pop and rock see also Frith 2001: 94–95; Keight-
ley 2001: 109). However, while not rejecting it altogether, Regev argues
that what connects pop and rock is more important than what divides these
categories; hence the use of the meta-category ‘pop-rock’. 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 commer-
cialism and avant-gardism (Regev 2002: 252–257). 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’ (ibid.: 253). This definition also suggests that
the division between pop-rock and art or academic music is not sharp.
Some pop-rock music, in common with art or serious music, requires a
certain training of the listener, even if only informal. Moreover, some pop-
rock musicians might operate in art, academic or non-commercial environ-
ments and ‘sell themselves as [high] artists’ (Frith and Savage 1998: 8).
On the other hand, some arthouse musicians achieve commercial success
and market themselves similar to pop-rock stars (Scott 2005: 124).
While in the West the problem of the division between popular and seri-
ous/academic music and between pop and rock was mostly academic and
cultural, in the socialist East it was also political. As Gregory Kveberg argues
in relation to the Soviet Union, but which is also valid in the rest of Eastern
Europe, in the absence of other markers of distinction, status in this region
became very closely tied to the acquisition of culture. The Soviet model
of culture demanded that cultural activity fostered personal growth, rather

than being merely a form of entertainment (Kveberg 2015: 213), and this
required maintaining a strict hierarchy of cultural products. In this hierar-
chy, ‘classical music was the most culturally valuable, followed by political
and agitational songs, with love songs, dance music and [Estrada] music
at the bottom’ (ibid.: 213). Although this hierarchy was imposed from
above, some of its aspects were in fact widely accepted and internalised
by the producers and consumers of popular music in Eastern Europe. As
Kveberg observes, the belief in the need to spread culture and raise the
cultural level of the audience linked conservative Soviet officials and many
key figures of the underground (ibid.: 217). This connection was reflected,
as Adam Havlik in this collection argues, in the politics of legal and illegal
import of western records to Czechoslovakia, in which rock was valued
higher than disco records; and as explained by Mariusz Gradowski in his
chapter, in the ambition of Czesław Niemen to free himself from the shack-
les of commercial music,. Similarly, one of the reasons why Leonard Cohen
had an elevated status in Poland was a perception that he was not merely a
singer-songwriter, but an author of serious poetry, as Ewa Mazierska and
Xawery Stańczyk argue in their joint contribution to this collection.
Kveberg’s arguments could be extended to serious but dissident artis-
tic practices and musical undertakings which refused to entertain and,
instead, voiced social and political critique. For instance, bands and fans
associated with genres such as punk, hardcore, and new wave regarded
the term ‘popular’ as a term of abuse, the very antithesis of authenticity.
Yet, these genres and the subcultures they arose from, just as much as the
DIY ethos these subscribed to, fell under strict political censorship. While
it is true that the state did not favour popular music, it did not act hostile
upon its representatives, unlike in the case of music voicing social criti-
cism and bands whose aesthetic expression was too ambiguous and did
not fit traditional categories of high art. Of this second group the Slove-
nian Laibach and the Hungarian Vágtázó halottkémek (Galloping Coro-
ners) were most relevant. Both formations had unique musical styles, stage
antics and their thought-provoking, ambiguous, high powered and visceral
performances appealed to the young intelligentsia. Yet, they were systemat-
ically banned, not necessarily because of their political nonconformity, but
rather for their non-compliance with the unvoiced official expectation of
popular music to be disciplined, easily digestible and undemanding. These
two bands (and potentially many others) are clearly relevant to the interna-
tional dimension of popular music in Eastern Europe, since they integrated
successfully into international circuits, regularly toured in Western Europe;

and Laibach released numerous albums for the much respected under-
ground label Mute Records, including experimental and ‘Balkanised’ cover
versions of Germanic and Anglo-American bands and their most popular
hits.
Admittedly, the old Eastern European disdain for the ‘popular’ in ‘pop-
ular music’ is a thing of the past. In particular, the recent flourishing of
festival culture in Eastern Europe has questioned the boundaries exist-
ing between musical genres, even those between academic and popular.
At many postmillennial mega festivals and other open air festivals, organ-
isers invite performers covering a wide variety of musical tastes and, in
this way, weaken the traditional hierarchies that exist between pop, rock,
folk, jazz, experimental and classical music. However, the double status of
some musicians and the all-arts focus of many festivals does not mean that
the split between serious and popular music is seen as obsolete in East-
ern Europe and by the authors of this volume. In this respect, we identify
with the position taken by Andrew Goodwin, who insists on retaining it
on account of the differences between textual characteristics of the bulk
of high/experimental and popular art and, even more so, on the different
modes of consuming them (Goodwin 2000). This split also plays a cru-
cial role in our selection of case studies. The collection covers what Motti
Regev describes as ‘pop-rock’ (Regev 2002: 25), as well as genres that do
not fit this definition well, such as folk and Estrada music, and the borders
between pop-rock and other genres.
The final problem refers to the concept of ‘international’. Given that all
pop-rock in Eastern Europe was influenced by music produced in English-
speaking countries, it can be argued that this genre and a fair share of other
subgenres of Eastern European popular music has a strong international
dimension. However, our purpose is to focus on examples of music that are
intentionally international due to the appeal to audiences in more than one
country or to acknowledge its debt to foreign sources. We are interested
in two-way traffic: from elsewhere to the Eastern European country and
from the Eastern European country to abroad. Most important are two
types of exchanges: between the European East and the West and within
the state socialist bloc. The first is covered by authors who are concerned
with the postwar period up to the end of state socialism, a period when,
admittedly, the eastern audiences were hungry for western music. Several
authors ask what exactly did eastern audiences want to listen to, how was
the music brought to their countries and their houses and adjusted to their
needs. Their work leads to several observations. First, the Iron Curtain was
not rigid, but porous—there were numerous ways to bring western music
to the East, from sending records by mail or via professional smugglers
to recording attractive programmes from radio and television. Moreover,
socialist countries positioned along the way between the ‘West’ and the
destination of a given music genre typically did not impede the transfer,
but facilitated it. For example, as Adam Havlik demonstrates, many records
with popular stars reached Czechoslovakia in its illiberal, post-1968 period
via Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland, whose regimes at the time were more
tolerant. Second, due to the difficulty of accessing western music, result-
ing from political orthodoxy, economic constraints and the high price of
western currency and western goods on the black market, buyers priori-
tized certain types of this music at the expense of others. Particularly well
regarded was Anglo-American rock, especially bands representing progres-
sive rock/art rock and rock ‘classics’, which were sustained over the passage
of time. This reflected the high prestige this genre enjoyed in the West and
the cherishing of high art in Eastern Europe, as we previously argued. It
is worth mentioning here that even in Polish discotheques of the 1970s it
was easier to spot recordings of bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin
than disco music because the early Polish DJs preferred music for listening
than music for dancing, as well as the conviction that it makes more sense
to invest money in LPs than singles, which cost almost as much as LPs,
while coming across as ephemeral (Danielewicz and Jacobson 2017: 77).
Third, governments of some Eastern European countries were not as hos-
tile towards western products, as many historians of Cold War want us to
believe, especially during the 1970s. The politics of the ISC demonstrates
this well, as argued by Dean Vuletic. This festival did not limit itself to
presenting singers from the Soviet bloc, but also extended its invitation to
those from the West, often granting them the status of stars. By and large,
the collection points to the fact that the ‘international’ is a dynamic concept
that pertains to all aspects of music: its production, textual characteristics
and consumption.
Dominant Approaches
The wide variety of themes and problems examined in this book encour-
ages a diversity of approaches, methods and theories. In particular, when
dealing with relationships between music genres from regions and coun-
tries which have hugely uneven political, economic and cultural power,
authors tend to favour one of two approaches. One is known as a the-

sis of ‘cultural imperialism’. According to this thesis, the music industry
reinforces marginality, inequality and asymmetrical flows along national
and cultural boundaries (Laing 1986; Stokes 2012). As Gustavo Azenha
observed in 2006, the ‘cultural imperialism’ paradigm attracted much crit-
icism from popular music scholars and by the time he wrote his article, it
looked obsolete. Azenha mentions two main criticisms. One concerns the
fact that it ignores diversification of popular music and the second, that
the core-periphery model is inadequate for understanding musical flows
in the increasingly transnational music industry (Azenha 2006). The sec-
ond approach, captured by the term ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, used by
Motti Regev, implies moving away from the core-periphery model and
seeing popular music developed in different countries as participating in
the global culture of late modernity, consisting of a process of intensified
aesthetic proximity, overlap, and connectivity between nations and ethnic-
ities or, at the very least, between prominent sectors within them (Regev
2013: 3; see also Stokes 2012). The ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ paradigm
sidelines the question of who affected whom, when, why and how, in a
postmodern fashion regarding pop-rock music as infinitely intertextual,
and seeing the task of the music historian as unravelling the rich tapestry.
While ‘cultural imperialism’ concerns international relations, ‘aesthetic cos-
mopolitanism’ is about transnationalism, expressing a desire to transcend
national and cultural boundaries.
It is worth considering these models in the light of the ideas proposed
by Wallerstein and Marshall. Proponents of the ‘cultural imperialism’ the-
sis accept that the music industry does not develop evenly—with stronger
countries and regions imposing their products, rules and values on weaker
ones. This influence does not necessarily happen through coercion, but
by subtler means, such as dominating the media and being able to invest
more in innovation than can weaker countries and regions (Laing 1986).
One effect of ‘cultural imperialism’ is a desire to self-colonise by the weaker
countries and regions by, in the case of music fans, striving to get hold of
products of the Anglo-American music industry and imitating the dom-
inant styles. This effect of ‘cultural imperialism’ is considered by Adam
Havlik, who in his chapter draws attention to the prestige accrued by East-
ern European fans who possessed western records or music journals.
Regev, on the other hand, who wrote some time after the thesis of
‘cultural imperialism’ was formed, points to the democratizing effect of
music flows. His thesis can be supported by such phenomena as the rise
of world music or the global success of the ‘Latino wave’. However, the
successes of bands such as Deep Forest, Enigma and singers such as Gloria
Estefan, Daddy Yankee or Luis Fonsi can be also regarded as supporting
the ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis, as they point, in the case of world music,
of the skill with which the centre absorbs or reworks the music created at
the periphery; and in the case of the Latino music, to the demographic
shifts in the United States (Tauberg 2018).
In this book we also see these two paradigms as complementary, rather
than opposing each other. Thus, certain phenomena can be regarded either
as a sign of domination of the centre over the Eastern European music or
of its participation in the cosmopolitan culture. Consider musical festivals
organized in Eastern Europe. From the perspective of audiences partici-
pating in such festivals, they constituted an opportunity to participate in
cosmopolitan events. However, for many Eastern European artists taking
part in them acted as a litmus test of their marginal position. For exam-
ple, a major Polish Estrada star, Urszula Sipińska, who in 1968 won the
Sopot Festival, in her memoir writes with bitterness about the Intervision
Music Festival in Sopot, where stars coming from the other side of the Iron
Curtain, such as Abba, were paid more for one concert than what Polish
Estrada stars earned throughout their entire life (Sipińska 2005: 136).
Authors of the majority of the chapters in this book lean towards a
certain version of the ‘cultural imperialism’ paradigm. In particular, they
recognize that during the period of state socialism, Anglo-American pop-
rock was regarded as a privileged model for Eastern European pop-rockers
and was highly valued by local audiences. This followed from the recog-
nition that rock originated in the United States and the United Kingdom
and from a widespread perception that the products of the capitalist system
were of a higher quality than those of the socialist East. However, while
‘cultural imperialism’ suggests imposing a certain culture against the will of
its recipients, on this occasion the ‘imperial music culture’ was sought after
and received with gratitude. Often it was embraced as a cultural toolkit
to express one’s dissatisfaction with state-subsidised and ideologically tai-
lored popular music that suited Soviet-style cultural imperialism. In several
chapters we find testimonies of various Eastern Europeans who went to
great lengths to acquire records of British or American bands and per-
formers. At the same time as being recipients of music, culture and ide-
ology coming from the West, the Eastern European producers and con-
sumers of popular music were also affected by pressures coming from the
East, most importantly by the Soviet Union, albeit usually indirectly, via
their political authorities that influenced the country’s cultural policy and
affected specific decisions made by institutions promoting popular music,
such as music festivals and record companies. There were also artists who,
dissatisfied with both types of cultural influences—from the capitalist West
and the socialist East—sought inspiration elsewhere, in oriental music and
culture, as Xawery Stańczyk argues in his chapter.
While the ‘cultural imperialism’ paradigm appears to be better suited
to the cold war period, the ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ approach seems
to be more suited to the time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when a
large part of Europe lost its internal borders. Music, thanks to the inter-
net, became practically borderless. Hence, Aimar Ventsel in his chapter
about the concerts of punk bands in Estonia points to the fact that punk
musicians from some Eastern European countries, such as Poland, shed
some of their old self-perception and see themselves as part of the global
scene. Similarly, Ruxandra Trandafoiu in her discussion of music festivals
in Transylvania points to their cosmopolitan feel, as well as an attempt to
capitalize on the touristy perceptions of this region. Other authors, such as
Ewa Mazierska and Slobodan Karamanić and Manuela Unverdorben, look
at the ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ not from the perspective of East-West
relations, but within Eastern Europe.
Structure and Chapter Description

Our book is divided into three parts. The first part follows most closely
the dominant approach to Eastern European popular music and recipi-
ents of popular music in this region, by focusing on the ways foreign music
crossed national borders and how it was translated by local consumers. The
first chapter, authored by Adam Havlik, examines the multitude of ways
through which western music entered Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and the
1980s. Czechoslovakia of this period is a particularly interesting case study,
because, following suppression of the Prague Spring, it became one of the
most authoritarian countries in the Eastern Bloc. Hence one can conjecture
that if western music managed to enter there legally or illegally, most likely
it could flow almost anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Havlik points to two
principle ways this music was transported into Czechoslovakia: legal and
illegal. The legal route was largely via other, more liberal Eastern Euro-
pean countries, such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The illegal
one consisted of smuggling LPs, cassettes, posters, magazines and to some
extent also articles in music magazines. The scale of this smuggling by fans
and professional smugglers was significant, demonstrating that the Iron

Curtain was far from impervious, in part reflecting the ambiguous official
discourse on western pop culture. Havlik also points to the privileged posi-
tion of Anglo-American rock in the unofficial market of western music in
Czechoslovakia. Such observation would also apply to other Eastern Euro-
pean countries, reflecting the status of rock as ‘high art within popular
music’.
The next chapter, written by Ewa Mazierska and Xawery Stańczyk, exam-
ines the phenomenon of Leonard Cohen’s popularity in Poland. In assess-
ing it, the authors treat it as a case of a ‘quiet fanaticism’: private, yet deep
fascination with Cohen’s songs, poems and his overall persona. The authors
of the chapter try to measure his popularity and identify reasons why the
Canadian poet and singer-songwriter achieved such an elevated status in
Poland. They draw attention to the fact that in the 1970s and the 1980s he
appealed to the tastes of the Polish intelligentsia, especially to intellectuals
and artists, who perceived themselves as trendsetters. They were attracted
by the high quality of his lyrics and their dark, foreboding tone, as well as
his edifying the position of the underdog, which was in tune with the ethos
of Polish Romanticism. Moreover, to understand Cohen, one did not need
particular proficiency in English, but rather a specific cultural education,
to understand and appreciate his metaphors. Furthermore, the fascination
was fuelled by the difficulty of accessing his work; his records had to be
brought from the West or borrowed and copied from those who had access
to them. Mazierska and Stańczyk also argue that after the fall of state social-
ism, Cohen lost his privileged position because western music was reduced
to an object of consumption.
The third chapter in this part also concerns Poland. In it, Xawery
Stańczyk argues that the use of orientalism in Polish popular music and
especially alternative rock of the 1980s was a way to gain authenticity.
This happened not by mechanical and superficial transporting of orien-
tal motifs into Polish songs, but by displaying genuine interest in exotic
cultures from the Polish perspective, actively seeking information about
them, promoting their ideas and values and reworking them for the benefit
of the Polish audience. Stańczyk links the proliferation of Orientalism in
this decade to the politicisation of Polish popular music by situating it in
one of two pigeonholes: either friendly towards the regime or oppositional.
Under these circumstances ‘going Oriental’ signified a desire to free oneself
from the shackles of such categories and emphasise one’s artistic autonomy.
Stańczyk also points to some additional factors why Orientalism penetrated
the Polish alternative rock scene, namely its popularity in other types of art
and cultural discourses, especially Polish theatre.
The last chapter in this part discusses the politics of attracting foreign
bands to Eastern Europe or, more precisely, to Estonia, construed by west-
erners as the ‘frontier’ (between the civilised West and the wild East). This
chapter is written by Aimar Ventsel, an anthropologist and historian of
popular music who also worked as a booking agent, organising concerts of
German, Finnish, Slovenian, French and Norwegian ska, punk and garage
bands, in a Rock’n’Roll Club in Tartu. In his chapter Ventsel shares with
the reader the tricks of his trade, mentioning that attracting a band to play
in the ‘frontier country’, particularly a punk band, was not so much a mat-
ter of offering it good financial conditions, as knowing its schedule and
being able to book it for a day when it has a break during the concert
tour. Ventsel also draws attention to the fact that the status of ‘frontier’ in
popular music is constantly shifting. He notices that during the last five or
so years, Poland had effectively been absorbed into the Western European
side of the punk world, and the punk frontier switched to the Baltics, Slo-
vakia and Bulgaria. Still, Eastern Europe’s popular music and its audience
are perceived as different than the West, being seen as ‘rougher’, yet also
more authentic.
Overall, this part demonstrates that, in contrast to Nick Hayes, who
in his investigation of the career of Dean Reed in Eastern Europe argues
that ‘Reed benefited from the starvation diet that had preceded his arrival
in Eastern Europe’ (Hayes 1994: 173); in fact, Eastern Europeans were
more choosy in their approach to western music than they are credited for,
especially in the last two decades of socialist rule. There was a preference
for music that could be regarded as serious, would withstand the passage
of time and be in tune with Eastern European sensibilities. Some of these
preferences can be explained by the sheer high cost of acquiring foreign
music by Eastern European music lovers. To get value for money, they had
to invest in music that would not lose its value quickly, but would age well;
classics of rock and Cohen’s music fulfilled this requirement perfectly.
While the first part of this collection concerns the movement of for-
eign music into Eastern Europe, the second focuses on this music mov-
ing abroad. The first chapter in this part, written by Mariusz Gradowski,
charts the efforts of the Polish rock star Czesław Niemen to make a
career abroad. Gradowski carefully recreates Niemen’s travels, participa-
tion in music events and foreign recordings, to conclude that ultimately
his achievements as an international star were modest. Gradowski attributes
this fact not so much to the hostility of foreign, especially western markets
to Eastern European musicians, but to the posture Niemen adopted as
an autonomous, non-commercial artist, willing to sacrifice international
popularity for the luxury of experimenting with electronic instruments in
his home studio in Poland and indulging his love of the works and ideas
of the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid. Tacitly, Gradowski
acknowledges that for those Eastern European musicians who cherished
independence and strove to transcend the boundaries of pop-rock, stay-
ing at home was the best strategy. He also acknowledges that for popular
musicians from Eastern Europe this region was the easiest to conquer.
This claim is developed by Ewa Mazierska in her chapter about col-
laboration between Polish and Yugoslav musicians in the post-communist
period, especially between Goran Bregović and two Polish singers, Kayah
and Krzysztof Krawczyk, as well as the projects ‘Yugoton’ and ‘Yugopolis’,
against the background of relations between Polish and Yugoslav music
during the period of state socialism. She points to the advantages of this col-
laboration, as measured in the large number of records sold, money earned,
and cultural capital accrued thanks to choosing a less obvious path to inter-
nationalisation than singing in English songs modelled on Anglo-American
pop-rock. She also demonstrates that the interest in ‘Yugo-Polish’ was
asymmetrical: Polish love of Yugoslav music was not reciprocated by a
surge of (post)Yugoslav artists covering Polish songs. This suggests that
Polish popular music is regarded as more parochial than its Yugoslav
counterpart. This imbalance might be explained by the fact that the size of
the Polish market for music encourages Polish musicians to address Polish
audiences, rather than seeking popularity abroad and the more western
outlook of Yugoslavia in comparison with Poland of state socialism.
The last chapter in this part, written by Slobodan Karamanić and
Manuela Unverdorben, considers two types of Balkan music that flour-
ished after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which the authors describe as ‘Balkan
high’ and ‘Balkan low’. The first type, regarded as a type of world music,
has been widely celebrated for its hybrid nature, because it fuses influences
from East and West, contemporary and traditional, urban and pastoral.
By contrast, the second type, pop-folk Balkan music, epitomised by Ser-
bian turbofolk, is derided by pro-western cultural elites in the Balkans and
elsewhere, perceiving it as excessive and aggressive: either as being too
modern, or too traditional, inauthentic or nationalist and, in essence, too
commercial and obscene. Karamanić and Unverdorben argue that there are
no essential reasons to treat Balkan low music as parochial, given that this
music conquered the entire region of the Balkans and ventured beyond, as
demonstrated by the international career of Lepa Brena. The true reason
that a different status is assigned to these two phenomena is, in the opinion
of the authors of this chapter, their different relation to class, with pop-folk
Balkan music being seen as pandering to the most vulgar taste. We shall
add that Karamanić and Unverdorben’s argument can also be applied to
pop-folk genres in several other Eastern European countries, such as disco
polo in Poland and mulatós in Hungary, which hybridise many influences,
yet are treated with derision by critics due to their allegedly bad taste.
The final part of the book concentrates on international song contests
and festivals. At such events, the transnational dimension of popular music
is most apparent, because they put into direct contact the professionals of
the music industry, the artists and the fans from different countries, allow-
ing them to engage with different facets of internationalism. Authors of
chapters in this part agree that these events of televised and live music offer
unique opportunities to explore both the relationship between politics, cul-
ture and entertainment and the inner workings of the international music
industry.
Dean Vuletic describes the parallel and interconnected histories of
the Intervision Song Contest (ISC) organized in the Eastern Bloc (in
Czechoslovakia and Poland, respectively) and the Eurovision Song Con-
test (ESC) held in Western European countries. Being a prestige project
of the International Organisation for Radio and Television, the ESC mir-
rored cultural, economic, political, social and technological changes across
postwar Europe and articulated national interests and identities. The struc-
ture and execution of the ISC was modelled after the ESC and, although
numerous innovations were introduced, Vuletic contends that it not only
failed to fulfil the aim to increase the visibility of state socialist popular
music in western liberal democracies, but reflected a sense of inferiority
felt towards Western Europe. The author regards the direct involvement
of political actors and bodies in the selection of national contestants as a
telling example of cultural diplomacy. In this light, the international dimen-
sion of popular music was not used primarily to advocate cultural openness
but used by organizers to promote themselves and their states. The close
ties the Czechoslovak and Polish governments forged with the contest (in
specific) and popular music (in general), suggests Vuletic, were part of a
calculated strategy to pose as champions of openness. The reform spirit
of Dubček’s and Gierek’s governments, however, made the ISC increas-
ingly dependent on the local political situation and eventually sacrificed the
contest for the sake of creating their liberal image. As the case of the ISC
suggests, popular music in communist Eastern Europe served as a symbol
of western cultural influences.
Zsolt Győri’s chapter, ‘Between Utopia and the Marketplace: The Case
of the Sziget Festival’, follows a similar narrative, only this time in a post-
socialist context. The history of Hungary’s largest summer music festival,
according to the author, should be written from the perspective of the
concerted efforts of organisers to brand it as a cosmopolitan event. Győri
explores the festival’s internationalisation and the challenges this brought
to its local fan-base of middle-class youth. Based on sociological surveys
conducted among festivalgoers and an overview of televisual marketing
campaigns, the chapter argues that the Sziget-brand—founded on the val-
ues of cultural openness, social tolerance, Eurocentrist liberalism and cos-
mopolitanism—was challenged, on the one hand, by the paternalist and
increasingly Eurosceptic public sphere in Hungary and, on the other hand,
the gradual commercialisation of the festival. The paradoxes addressed by
Vuletic’s chapter reverberate here as the conflicting perceptions about the
cultural value of internationalisation. While Hungarian bands and partici-
pants alike felt excluded at the event, organisers re-branded the festival for
the affluent European middle-class and integrated the cult of youth into
its cosmopolitan image.
In her chapter Ruxandra Trandafoiu explores how the fans of the Untold
festival, Romania’s leading music festival and one of the biggest electro-
dance music (EDM) festivals in Europe, taking place in Cluj, negotiate
their regional, national and global identities. The chapter overviews the
festival’s promotion through posters and videos and calls attention to how
organisers appropriate, adapt and express immediately recognisable univer-
sal symbols and cultural tropes. Emphasising the local flavour of primor-
dialism through featuring wolves, bears, vampires and other fantastic crea-
tures both in the promotional campaign and fairy tale–like venue, serve the
purpose of making local Transylvanian identities easily accessible to global
audiences. According to the author, the global mainstreaming of EDM,
which relocated these events from clubs into parks and other public places,
helped Untold to reach a more diverse and younger audience. Similar to
the Sziget Festival, Untold appeals to cosmopolitanism and authenticity
perceived as the possibility to participate in the same ephemeral experience
as audiences anywhere in the world. But unlike the Hungarian event, the
Cluj festival invented Transylvanian and Romanian identities that were will-
ingly internalised by locals. By blending received, inherited and adopted
identities—through the skillful use of technology—the international

dimension of popular music came into being, Trandafoiu argues, as a sym-
bolic and festivalised space of negotiation between the regional, the national
and the global.
The last three chapters of the volume bring to mind Tappert’s descrip-
tion of popular music as a relentless tourist, crossing borders, finding its way
into new communities and transforming them, but also transforming itself
through the new cultural, political, social and other stimuli it receives. Pop-
ular music not only connects but reveals the conditions of connectedness:
how different countries, regions, professional elites and music consumers
perceive themselves and each other.
The Avenues of Further Research

We offer this book to the reader with an awareness that it only scratches
the surface by omitting many facets and examples of international relations
of Eastern European music. It is worth mentioning some of them as an
encouragement for further investigation. One is the foreign ‘campaigns’
and successes of other Eastern European musicians to those mentioned
in this book and their possible influences on both Eastern European and
western music. We shall mention here the numerous foreign tours of the
band Omega and the subsequent covering and appropriation of their best
known song, ‘Pearls in Her Hair’ (‘Gyöngyhajú lány’) first by the West
German band Scorpions and later by hip hop singer Kanye West. Besides
Omega, many other Hungarian bands and singers gained international
success, including Illés-Együttes, Metro, Syrius, Locomotiv GT, Skorpió,
Kati Kovács, Zsuzsa Koncz, Zorán Sztevanovity, but similar lists could be
compiled for any country of the region. Such an inventory should also
include underground bands, like the already mentioned Galloping Coro-
ners, which stirred up the 1980s underground scene in Western Europe
with electric stage performances and made a lasting impression on such
icons of the underground/hardcore scene as Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra
and Iggy Pop. The Slovenian art collectives Laibach and Neue Slowenis-
che Kunst achieved even greater fame with worldwide concert tours since
the late 1980s and served as an inspiration for such highly acclaimed bands
as Rammstein and, as Marina Gržinić contends, located itself within the
“sociopolitical space of Europe, which simultaneously represents a west-
ern and an eastern phenomenon” (Gržinić 2003: 250). Special attention
should be made to the transfer of music and musical cultures between
Eastern Europe and Russia, given that, as we already noticed, the Soviet
market was particularly friendly towards musicians from the ‘brotherly’
countries and that some Russian stars, such as Alla Pugatschova, were gen-
uinely popular among the entire Eastern Bloc, especially in Poland.
It will be a fascinating project to write about the histories of those musi-
cians who not only toured in the West, but settled there, as exemplified by
many artists from Poland, such as Basia, Krzysztof Klenczon from Czer-
wone Gitary or Jerzy Grunwald from No To Co. Another unexplored area,
except for the case of Dean Reed, are the careers of western and southern
musicians who relocated to Eastern Europe, for example John Porter and
numerous Greeks, such as Milo Kurtis and Eleni, who settled in Poland and
became major stars in this country. An interesting question is how they
negotiated their identities to appeal to the Polish audience and whether
they tried to ‘travel further’, achieving international success and if so, why
they ultimately failed in this respect.
Apart from musicians, key professionals of the music industry also
deserve attention, especially since there are only a few Eastern Europeans
who, like the Polish Leonard Chess and the Hungarian Leslie Mandoki and
Charles Fisher, became world-renown record producers. Their perception
of popular music in their native countries and (lack of) interest in promoting
local talents might further illuminate the status of Eastern European per-
formers within the international context. A similar case could be made for
concert promoters from the region, such as László Hegedűs from Hungary,
whose experience of booking Western star acts stretch across many decades.
The history of state socialist record companies, including Amiga, Balkan-
ton, Diskoton, Hungaroton, Jugoton, Opus, Polskie Nagrania, Polton and
Supraphon, and especially the role these labels played in the popularisation
of western trends and the export of eastern music offers uncharted territory
for researchers of the international and transnational dimension of popular
music.
It will also be fruitful to look at internationalisation of Eastern Euro-
pean music from the perspective of different genres by, for example, com-
paring rock with electronic music and consider film music, where Eastern
composers seem to fare better than fellow musicians, to give examples of
such composers as Jan Kaczmarek or Abel Korzeniowski from Poland. An
interesting question is whether this is because the market for film music
is significantly different than that for the rest of popular music, given that
film musicians do not sell their music directly to fans.
However, there are numerous difficulties in conducting such investiga-

tion. The most important of them is the dominance of national frameworks
in the research of popular music in Eastern Europe and the lack of collab-
oration of researchers from different countries, Eastern and Western, as
well as within one country. As Patryk Galuszka writes in relation to state
socialist Poland, a claim that can be extended to practically all countries of
the Soviet bloc, ‘a significant impediment to the development of popular
music research during the People’s Republic of Poland was the isolation of
researchers from works carried out in the West, which was only to some
extent mitigated by the contacts within the Eastern Bloc. Insufficient coop-
eration between various national centres conducting research on popular
music was also a significant problem during the communist period. The
research was conducted as part of individual projects (e.g., doctoral dis-
sertations), but this did not translate into the integration of the research
community, undertaking joint research or continuation of analyses con-
ducted in one centre by researchers from outside such a centre’ (Galuszka
2020). After the fall of state socialism, contacts between the researchers
from Eastern Europe became more frequent, in part thanks to conferences
on popular music in Eastern Europe, organised in places such as Debrecen,
Budapest and Olomouc, but so far they lead merely to academics from dif-
ferent countries presenting their country-specific studies to international
audiences, rather than projects crossing national and regional borders.
The rise of nationalism in many of the previously socialist countries
might be an additional factor in promoting and reinforcing a country-
centred approach. Moreover, even those researchers who attempt to tran-
scend this approach encounter numerous obstacles, such as the need to
familiarise oneself with the culture of another country and the lack of data
about the successes or lack thereof of specific musicians; for example, the
number of records sold abroad. This situation is exacerbated by the fact
that many important musicians are no longer available, as is the case with
Czesław Niemen, examined in this book. Nevertheless, we hope that such
research will continue not only for the sake of exploring specific problem
areas but to find answers to wider questions related to popular music, con-
cerning issues of cultural hegemony, control of artistic creativity, authen-
ticity and identity formation of musicians and their fans.
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PART I
Bringing Foreign Music to the European

East
CHAPTER 2
Loopholes in the Iron Curtain: Obtaining

Western Music in State Socialist
Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s
Adam Havlík
‘The state borders are not a promenade for strolling!’ With these words,
the soon-to-be-appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husák, prefigured the change of tides regarding
the border traffic shortly after the Soviet-led invasion in summer 1968
(Husák 1968). After a brief period of relatively free traffic in the late
1960s, the borders were about to be sealed again. This was one of the
measures imposed by the new political elite in order to consolidate power
after a tumultuous period of political liberalisation known as the Prague
Spring (Tůma and Vilímek 2012). Under the new conditions, direct con-
tact with the West was curtailed as travelling abroad became one of the
most restricted areas (Rychlík 2007: 90). Official discourse on the West
mediated through the media also changed as the media came under close
A. Havlík (B)
Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague, Czech Republic
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_2
28 A. HAVLÍK
scrutiny and were heavily affected by the reinstatement of censorship and

drastic personnel changes within their ranks (Bren 2010: 35–36).
This chapter is partially based on my earlier research regarding western
music in socialist Czechoslovakia and the black market that evolved around
it (Havlík 2009, 2012). The chapter explores how the new political and
social circumstances after 1968 affected Czechoslovak citizens in terms of
getting into contact with western (predominantly British and American)
pop and rock music, which in the meantime gained a profound influence
in the Eastern Bloc, especially among the younger generation (Ryback
1990; Judt 2005: 348–349). I argue that even with tighter regulations
introduced in the wake of the Prague Spring, music fans in Czechoslovakia
had numerous strategies to get in touch with popular music from the West,
ranging from the official and state-sanctioned to the more informal, even
illegal ones. In some areas, especially in border regions, people had the
opportunity to listen to foreign radio stations and watch West German or
Austrian television programmes. Others would borrow or buy records from
the so-called cultural institutes of the brotherly socialist states located in
Prague. The local music industry also occasionally issued a limited amount
of licensed western albums, and foreign music records were on sale in local
hard-currency stores. Along with that, the hunger for western rock and
pop music led to the birth of so-called music markets, where smuggled
records would be sold in large numbers. In fact, smuggling of (western)
commodities was an inseparable part of everyday life across the Eastern
Bloc (Borodziej et al. 2010: 10–13) and smuggling of music records was
not an exception. Groups of traffickers brought in tons of LPs (later also
audio cassettes) through the Iron Curtain in inventive ways. After having
passed through border control, they could be sold very profitably as there
was an enormous demand for the smuggled LPs. Apart from organized
smuggling, many individuals developed alternative strategies to acquire the
much sought-after commodities. Some tried to bring in music records on
their own. Adept smugglers with bigger contrabands usually resorted to
corruption, bribes or the use of elaborate hiding spaces in cars and, in some
cases, trains. Others simply counted on the indulgence of customs officers
in order to get records to Czechoslovakia. Receiving records through the
post represented a certain strategy too, provided one had contacts abroad.
The main aim of this article is to analyse the above-mentioned ways of
obtaining specific goods and cultural artifacts, and their importance and
development over time in the 1970s and 1980s. I will also examine the
origin of the records carried across the borders as well as their ‘inland’
2 LOOPHOLES IN THE IRON CURTAIN: OBTAINING WESTERN MUSIC … 29
dissemination. Moreover, I will explain what the possession of precious

records actually meant to their owners within the specific context of state
socialist Czechoslovakia and how these records were used (be it consciously
or unconsciously) to generate different kinds of capital (Bourdieu 1986).
I will also discuss the motivations for participating in the smuggling and
selling of western records. The selection of sources essential for the text
consists of oral transmissions, as well as of police documents, documents
related to customs offices at the borders, memoirs and TV documentaries.
The Fetish of Foreign Music Records and Their

Symbolic Capital
No matter how one acquired them, foreign records—especially those of
western origin—had a high symbolic value for their owners in late social-
ist Czechoslovakia. Due to their unavailability and high price, some LPs
were worshipped as precious cultural artifacts. Besides their scarcity, the
adoration of foreign records was closely linked to the fascination with the
West. However, this fascination, as anthropologist Alexey Yurchak shows
(Yurchak 2006), did not necessarily mean automatic adoption of all val-
ues linked to the political West. According to him, many people inside
the USSR, for example members of the Soviet Communist Youth, could
consider themselves as good communist citizens and at the same time be
avid fans of British and American rock music. They formed their own rock
bands and adored artists like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or King Crimson,
who were publicly condemned as prime examples of decadent Western cul-
ture. Simultaneously, they honestly believed in the basic values of social-
ism. Therefore, it would be wrong to perceive the eastern fascination with
western pop culture and its domestication simply as a conscious form of
political opposition against the regime. Instead, Yurchak speaks of ‘hyper-
normalization’ of the ideological discourse, which enabled such ambiva-
lence. The absence of real contact also played a significant role. For many
people within the Eastern Bloc, the West represented a rather distant and
imaginary world. Yurchak demonstrates this argument focusing on Soviet
society, where common people had a minimal direct contact with the West
and the ideological regime enjoyed a higher level of acceptance than it did
in the satellite countries. Nevertheless, this thesis holds true even in those
Eastern Bloc countries that were geographically and historically closer to
the West.
30 A. HAVLÍK
When analysing the value of the precious pop cultural artifacts repre-
sented to people living in state-socialist Eastern Europe, we may draw on
Pierre Bourdieu, who maintains that the position of an individual in the
social field is determined by a combination of his own permanent dispo-
sitions (habitus) and the ‘quantity’ of the individual types of capital that
an individual can use for his or her own practice. In his work, Bourdieu
distinguishes between several types of capital: economic (financial, mate-
rial goods); cultural (including education, level of socialization, cultural
awareness, but also possession of cultural assets); social (network of rela-
tions formed by contacts and acquaintances that can be used to achieve
particular goals); and symbolic. Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as a pos-
sible combination of other types of capital, through which the individual
can gain recognition (Bourdieu 1986: 241–258).
As earlier research (Havlík 2016) indicates, in an environment affected
by ubiquitous scarcity, foreign music records had great potential as cul-
tural artifacts to generate cultural capital for their owners. Original LPs
and cassettes were proof of cultural distinction and represented an alterna-
tive to the Czechoslovak mainstream. Thanks to having access to certain
records, journalist Jan Čáp felt ‘like a boss’ in Příbram, a town in Cen-
tral Bohemia, and would despise Katapult (a Czechoslovak rock group)
fans ostentatiously (Diestler 2008: 22). Being informed about the newest
trends in rock and pop music was also a question of prestige. Whoever was
able to follow the latest global trends and get the news before the others
was always one step ahead. Jiří Černý claims that it was extremely important
to have a sense of individual discovery of a particular band, like discovering
Jethro Tull when his classmates were still celebrating the Rolling Stones
(Jiří Černý, in Bigbít 1998).
Social capital played an important role too. When searching for the
desired bands and singers on vinyl, tapes or CDs, people with their own for-
eign supply channels or people who were acquainted with ‘insiders’ simply
had a better starting position. Networks that boosted the social capital of
music fans could also be built through borrowing or exchanging records.
Through such transactions, not only pragmatic business partnerships were
forged, but also genuine friendships based on shared music taste. Last but
not least, economic capital also played a part here. Collecting precious
records was by no means a cheap hobby. For those fans with limited financial
resources, copying music to magnetic tapes offered an alternative: within
a community of friends, one purchased LP could be recorded on count-
less tapes (Tácha 2014). However, damaging such precious items would
have inauspicious consequences, especially for those who borrowed them

from others. As Vladimír Trojánek recalls, scratching or breaking much
treasured vinyl records was an unforgivable sin, which meant immediate
exclusion of individuals from the community. A person who damaged bor-
rowed records usually gained a bad reputation and would be stigmatized
as someone untrustworthy (i/v with Trojánek 2011).
Roman Laube recalls that the possession of precious records was a matter
of one’s status as it represented a certain value and prestige. For Laube, the
owners of up-to-date foreign LPs enjoyed respect in their community or at
school, not to mention the possible admiration of their female counterparts
(i/v with Laube 2009). However, in order to generate various kinds of
capital through music records, one had to know how to get them in the
first place. So, how did people actually get in contact with western music
in post-1968 Czechoslovakia?
The Role of Radio, TV Broadcasts and Cultural

Centres in Disseminating Western Music
One of the ways domestic music fans could come in direct contact with
western music was through radio broadcasts. Although foreign broadcasts
were partially jammed, especially programmes focused on politics (Tomek
2002), modest opportunities for listening to some music programmes
existed after 1968. Proximity to the border meant an advantage for those
who tuned into foreign radio stations, but it also made watching western
television programmes possible. Thanks to the abundance of music videos
in the 1980s, residents in the border regions had a decent knowledge of
western pop music stars and hits: not only thanks to Western TV stations,
but also, for example, because of Polish television (Vít Kučaj, in Bigbít
1998), which offered a larger selection of western music than Czechoslo-
vak TV. Thus, foreign radio and television broadcasts were often caught
on tape by listeners like Michal Dittrich, who, in the 1980s, used to visit
a friend in Pilsen with a video recorder and record the ‘Rockpalast’ music
sessions from West German TV, especially those starring his favourite band
The Police (Dittrich, in Bigbít 1998).
Czechoslovak Radio itself became a more thoroughly monitored media
platform in the 1970s and foreign influences would be regulated according
to a certain ratio: 50% of any played songs had to be of domestic origin,
25% of songs had to come from socialist countries and 25% from ‘the
rest’ (Ješutová 2003: 389). This proved to be a simple yet effective way to
32 A. HAVLÍK
regulate the influence of western music. However, western music was still
heard in a limited number of domestic broadcasts as part of programmes
like ‘Větrník’ (broadcast since 1973) or ‘Hvězda’.
The music-hungry youth in socialist Czechoslovakia were also able to
obtain western music through official institutions of other countries. The
US embassy offered movies, music, magazines or books for lending. But
since the embassy was under surveillance from the Czechoslovak secret
police, visiting it posed a considerable risk (Kouřil 1999: 25). Cultural cen-
tres of other Eastern Bloc countries, especially the Polish Cultural Centre
and the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Prague, enjoyed a decent reputa-
tion (Vaněk 2010: 179). Here, records of numerous Polish and Hungarian
bands were in stock. Aside from rock and pop artists from the Eastern
Bloc, the cultural centres sold, albeit in limited numbers, albums of West-
ern pop-rock bands. For example, in the 1980s, the Polish Cultural Centre
would occasionally sell Depeche Mode albums, which contributed to the
cult popularity of the British new wave band in the country. In 1988, when
Depeche Mode played in Czechoslovakia, the band performed in front of
a large and well-informed crowd. Writing about this colossal event, music
journalist Ivan Cafourek pointed out that local fans already knew their
albums, like Black Celebration, very well because, together with the com-
pilation Singles 81–85, it was sold by the Polish Cultural Centre (Cafourek
1988: 18).
Live Concerts and Official Press

Speaking of concerts of western stars, the 1988 Depeche Mode gig was
a ground-breaking event for socialist Czechoslovakia, which was (in this
respect) miles behind Poland or Hungary. Between 1969 and the second
half of the 1980s, local authorities did not organize any big concerts of
prominent rock or pop bands from the United Kingdom or the United
States. Later, bands like UB40, Duran Duran, Uriah Heep or the performer
Stevie Wonder and a few others appeared sporadically (Vaněk 2010: 201).
However, in terms of the fanbase and official publicity, the Depeche Mode
concert in March 1988 was outstanding. Aside from officially promoted
concerts, a few gigs were also organized by the Jazz Section of the Czech
Musician’s Union. From 1971 to its forced dissolution in 1986, the Jazz
Section managed to issue publications for its members, containing articles
about jazz and rock music from around the world and organized music
festivals, allowing numerous Czechoslovak alternative rock bands as well

as a few guests from abroad to perform on stage (see Kouřil 1999).
The state-controlled media also provided some information about West-
ern rock and pop stars. In this respect, the monthly magazine Melodie
played a crucial part. With hands partly tied by ideological constraints and
constant censorship, some of the music journalists from Melodie tried to
push through news and articles about leading bands from the United States,
the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The scope was quite limited, but some
of the authors managed to raise awareness about music scenes abroad and
played an important role in shaping the taste of the local audience (Vaněk
2010: 501–533). Melodie also featured an advertising section, which served
as a handy platform for trading, buying and selling of both domestic and
foreign records. These ads followed a common pattern; they were brief and
featured a list of famous names, followed by the address of the seller:
(Selling) LPs of the following bands: The Doors, The Kinks, The Hollies, The
Who, The Yardbirds, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, James Gang, Deep
Purple, Nazareth, L. Zeppelin, Wings and others. I can send a complete list if
needed. Miroslav Bláha, Red Army Street 3992, 430 03 Chomutov. (Melodie
1977: 220)
Licensed Albums, Cover Versions

and Hard-Currency Stores
The so-called licensed albums represented a specific commodity within
the socialist music market. In Czechoslovakia, these came either in the
form of actual albums of foreign artists with translated sleeve notes or
as compilations, assembled by experts or music journalists and issued by
official, state-controlled record companies such as Supraphon or Slovakian
Opus. Intended primarily for registered members of the so-called Gramo-
phone Club, such albums appeared as early as the 1960s and were released
throughout the ‘normalisation’ period in the 1970s and 1980s, despite
ideological and economic difficulties. According to international law, the
Czechoslovak Society for the Protection of the Rights of Music Authors
and Publishers had to pay in hard currency to their foreign business part-
ners for releasing such albums on the domestic market (Dorůžka 1978:
22).
Similar to licensed albums, cover versions of western hits were also
released occasionally. However, these differed from the usual definition
34 A. HAVLÍK
of cover songs where artists simply reinterpret a song in their own way,
leaving the lyrics intact. Instead of this well-established practice, lyrics
were remade in Czech while the music compositions remained unchanged,
a practice that first appeared in the 1960s. Many Czechoslovak cover
versions of western hits managed to climb to the top of the music charts in
the two subsequent decades. A large part of such cover versions comprised
catchy pop songs; however, the Czech industry even managed to produce
local versions of British hard rock songs from bands like Black Sabbath,
Deep Purple or Status Quo. Sometimes original songs with improper lyrics
were replaced in the cover version by more optimistic ones, compatible
with the ideological demands of the ‘socialist way of life’. This peculiarity
brought some unique results, such as Jiří Schelinger singing ‘Metro dobrý
den’ (translation: ‘Hello Subway’) to Black Sabbath’s ‘National Acrobat’.
A narrow variety of foreign records was occasionally also on sale in the
so-called Tuzex stores. Similar to Soviet Beryozkas, Polish Pewex shops or
East German Intershops, these stores offered luxury consumer goods for
hard currency or special Tuzex vouchers. Originally, customers of Tuzex
shops consisted of tourists, Czechoslovak citizens working abroad or those
who had relatives living outside Czechoslovakia. However, over time, a
vast black market for Tuzex vouchers and hard currencies emerged. Using
the services of illegal money changers called ‘veksláci’, ordinary citizens
could purchase the goods on offer in Tuzex (Havlík 2014: 26–31). Josef
Vlček, a music journalist, recollects the records he once bought from a
Tuzex shop. His first album was Abraxas by Carlos Santana, published
by the Indian company Dum Dum. According to him, the Dum Dums
were ‘the worst LPs of all time’, always crackling and rustling. However,
thanks to this Indian import, he managed to write his very first article
(Diestler 2008: 28). The fact that the state apparatus paid valuable for-
eign currencies for licensed albums, specific types of cover versions or even
for music available in hard-currency stores, serves as proof of a specific,
state-sanctioned cultural transfer (Espagne and Werner 1985). The fact
that socialist Czechoslovakia bought commodities of popular culture from
the West does not mean that the local music scenes did not have any signif-
icance. Despite the success of homegrown bands, singers and their records,
the demand for western rock and pop music was so immense that it could
not be met by the official production of cover versions or by issuing limited
numbers of licensed albums. Luckily for the music fans, there were other
ways to satisfy their demands.
Carrying Records Across the Border

One way to acquire western records was to take them personally across the
state border. Compared to the late 1960s, the opportunities for cross-
ing western borders were much more difficult for the vast majority of
Czechoslovak citizens. One was required to obtain an official permit with
an allowance for hard currency. After 1968, such permits were practically
unattainable for ordinary citizens (Rychlík 2007: 84–93). Nevertheless,
certain professionals, like scientists, athletes, artists, engineers or sales rep-
resentatives, had better prospects of travelling not only to the West, but also
to non-aligned countries of the world, like Yugoslavia (Vaněk and Krátká
2014). Another group with an opportunity to bring western music into
the country were international students (Hannová 2013: 50).
Individual import of music by most Czech citizens took place mostly
when visiting other socialist countries. States like Hungary, Poland and
Yugoslavia offered a bigger variety than the domestic music industry mar-
ket (Andrs 2015: 40–46). Whether it was on the borders with West or
East Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary or the Soviet Union, the actual
procedure was similar: at the particular border crossing, the transported
goods had to be listed on a customs declaration form and, if necessary, the
traveller paid a customs duty. These differed from time to time and from
country to country. With regards to the importing of music records, the
duty fee was 10 Czechoslovak Crowns per album in 1977 (ABS 1978: 2–3).
In 1980, it was duty free to import 10 LPs from Hungary (AMP 1980:
n.p.). In the same year, people travelling from Poland could bring goods
worth 1000 Zloties without paying a duty fee. According to the customs
law, undeclared goods were considered as contraband. Depending on the
amount and value of such concealed goods, a fine, confiscation or even the
possibility of criminal prosecution loomed over those who tried to avoid
the regulations.
Besides the economic aspects (duties and fees), transported goods were
also subject to ideological control at border crossings. Customs officers
were obliged to follow certain—albeit sometimes quite vague—ideological
guidelines. A 1983 directive intended for the customs authorities contained
a general guideline regarding imported goods that were harmless and goods
that posed a threat. Such directives required customs officers to prevent the
import of things that promoted ideas ‘incompatible with the interests of
the socialist society’ (AMP 1983: 2).
36 A. HAVLÍK
Strict as these guidelines appeared, the common practice at the state

borders would be somewhat different. The steadily growing number of
foreigners crossing the border each year was an important factor that con-
tributed to the failure to abide by the rules. Between 1970 and 1978,
the registered number of border transits grew from ca. 20 million to
66.4 million per year (SOA Plzeň 1976: 1; 1979: 16). In the following
years, this number dropped, mainly because of events like the imposition
of martial law in Poland and the new regulations imposed on the inter-
national trade with Hungary. However, in 1982, the number of people
annually crossing the borders was still around 40 million. Mostly, the tran-
sits comprised citizens from other Eastern Bloc countries, but the num-
ber of visitors from capitalist countries also grew over the years. While
foreign tourists added valuable foreign currencies to the national budget,
heavy border traffic caused concerns to the customs officers and the police,
whose responsibility was to be ‘on guard’ and at the same time to make
the traffic as smooth, swift and effective as possible. Therefore, the police
materials contain several complaints about the fact that more detailed con-
trols had to be carried out rather randomly and not in every single case
(Znamenáček 1982: 567). From time to time, the Ministry of the Interior
carried out large-scale operations in order to tighten the border controls.
In the late 1970s, one such operation under the codename ‘Hranice’ (‘Bor-
der’ in Czech) was concentrated on both drugs and other smuggled goods.
Although these operations brought some short-term results (ABS 1980), in
the long run they could not wipe out smuggling as such from the everyday
practice at the borders. To the best of our knowledge, exact and detailed
data such as how many foreign LPs were smuggled every year and which
artists and in what numbers were smuggled during the 1970s and 1980s
are virtually impossible to obtain.
When analysing the trafficking of foreign LPs, we should take into
account the motivation of individual actors and also the quantity of the
trafficked records. Music fans carrying just a few LPs would be treated
differently than professional smugglers. Apparent cases of smuggling hun-
dreds of LPs at once were clearly categorized as economic criminal offences
and smugglers were either given a suspended sentence and a fine or, at
worst, a prison sentence. On the other hand, the ambiguous approach of
the customs officers comes to light in interviews conducted with contem-
porary witnesses who used to bring just a few LPs across the border from
time to time. One of them was Vladimír Trojánek. In the 1980s, Tro-
jánek would buy records in Hungary which was ‘like the West’ to him. He
travelled there a lot because he could—unlike in Czechoslovakia—attend

some concerts of famous overseas bands. Trojánek does not remember any
particular problems when carrying a few LPs across the border. Accord-
ing to him, the customs officers occasionally examined one’s baggage, but
they were more likely to look for records of Czechoslovak protest songs
and politically ‘dangerous’ folk singers (i/v with Trojánek 2011).
Another respondent, Zdeněk Doubek, recalled more troublesome expe-
riences with customs officers. Doubek, visited Yugoslavia several times in
the first half of the 1980s and once returned with LPs of American coun-
try artists. On the Czechoslovak border the customs officers, probably in
cooperation with the police, confiscated his records, arguing that they were
not appropriate to bring into the country. Doubek, and his companion
were put in handcuffs, arrested and interrogated for several hours about
where they had bought the records and what they were planning to do with
them. Finally, the records were destroyed in front of them; officers broke
them one by one over the knee. Although Doubek, was not expelled from
school because of the incident, he claims that he got a record in his personal
dossier. He also recalls other memories: one time he witnessed his friend
successfully bribe a customs officer with a videotape during the customs
check. After discreetly receiving the bribe, the officer turned a blind eye on
the rest of the goods, which were not confiscated (i/v with Doubek 2011).
Besides music fans like Doubek or Trojánek, who occasionally brought
in a few LPs, large-scale traffickers and organized smuggling groups oper-
ated in Czechoslovakia. These people made money from bringing in a vast
number of records across the border on a regular basis. One of the best-
known traffickers to supply music fans with western records in Prague in
the 1980s was a certain Luboš, who on occasion was able to supply the local
black market with more than a thousand records at once. New records were
obtained in Hungary, where Luboš usually made a written order for LPs
from Austria and West Germany. After that, he smuggled the records across
the borders (using bribes) and sold them (Tácha 2015).
Apart from bribery, smugglers developed another ways to get the records
across the border. One of the gangs was run by a certain Ivan Novotný,
who found a very handy smuggling channel: the employees of the West
German embassy in Prague. This link was actually an official supply chan-
nel for the embassy itself, which meant that the consumer goods trans-
ported by trucks from West Germany to the embassy were not subject to
customs controls at the border. One part of the commodities in each deliv-
ery was destined for the Czechoslovak black market, including alcohol,
38 A. HAVLÍK
clothing, audiocassettes, cassette players, sunglasses, Indian scarves, digital

watches, calculators, video recorders and, of course, vinyl records, among
others. His group of smugglers was dispersed by the police in 1986 and
the interrogation protocols of the case allowed me to partially reconstruct
the business practice of a smuggling network. During an interrogation,
one of the accussed stated that he and his associate bought vinyl records
and other goods from Novotný, which they later sold. According to the
packaging, the LPs came from West Germany, because the price tags were
in Deutschmarks. Those two traffickers purchased a total of 150 LPs from
Novotný for a ‘wholesale’ price. They sold 40 of them to a dealer in Hradec
Králové and the remaining 110 pieces were sold on the black market in Brno
(ABS 1986: 52).
For Ivan Novotný and others in his line of business, truck drivers served
as useful middlemen. These ‘gasoline scented Sindbads’, as Ferenc Ham-
mer calls them (Hammer 2002), travelled regularly both within the Eastern
Bloc and beyond the Iron Curtain. As such, they often figured as the ‘usual
suspects’ and police and customs files contain numerous complaints about
their constant smuggling activities (ABS 1981: 6–7). The abovementioned
drivers working for the West German embassy were some sort of excep-
tion, because they could avoid the tiresome customs procedures. However,
drivers from the Eastern Bloc were in a different situation and, having to
endure long customs examinations, they developed additional smuggling
strategies. These included elaborate hiding places for the contraband in dif-
ferent parts of the car and the trailer. A particular case from the 1980s lists
an incredible amount of gramophone records confiscated from a Greek
truck driver in April 1983. The driver tried to cross the border with no
fewer than 1000 (!) records, which he did not declare at the customs office
at the border crossing Folmava on the West German/Czechoslovak border.
He was detained and later investigated by the police (ABS 1983: 1).
Mail Delivery
Some Czechoslovak citizens acquired western music via the postal service,
provided they were in touch with someone living abroad. Family members
and relatives living in a foreign country proved to be a vital source of records
for many young people. Their number grew dramatically after the invasion
of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, when tens of thousands of people chose
immigration over living under the new political leadership (Rychlík 2007:
112). Sending packages from abroad was not as troublefree as in other
Eastern Bloc countries (Döinghaus 2001: 65–66), since postal packets

coming from abroad were carefully monitored. Employees at post offices
opened them and checked their contents. However, records were not as
risky as samizdat, political literature or letters from people monitored by the
secret police. Václav Jahoda, an avid music fan, had a friend who emigrated
to the United States in 1969 and who would regularly send him records by
artists such as Neil Young, Pink Floyd or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
These packages were delivered unharmed and contributed significantly to
shaping his personal taste (i/v with Jahoda 2011).
Others, like Vladimír Pikora, even contacted official fan clubs across the
ocean. Pikora took pictures of himself and his country LPs bought on the
black market and would send the pictures to official fan clubs of various
American country singers. Since Pikora, as he puts it, was the ‘first ever’
Czech fan to actually write to these fan clubs, he would initially receive
a membership card along with magazines and newsletters, later even LPs
(i/v with Pikora 2017). But not everyone was so lucky with their foreign
shipments, since the content of packages was often stolen or deliberately
damaged. Doubek recalls a friend, also an avid collector of music, who used
to order LPs via mail, but, most of the time, the records did not arrive and
even if they did, the package would have been opened. For Doubek, it was
obvious that some kind of censorship was involved with the mail service
(i/v with Doubek 2011). Historian Miroslav Vaněk remembers how his
father’s colleague sent him the third album of Led Zeppelin in 1978, but
some envious customs officer left a hole from a hole-punch in the middle
of the vinyl record, so Vaněk could not enjoy two of the album’s songs
(Vaněk 2010: 180–181).
Illegal Music Markets

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the desire for foreign records among
Czechoslovak music fans gave birth to a specific phenomenon: the so-
called illegal music markets. In the following two decades, hundreds (if not
thousands) of people in Prague and other big cities would gather regularly
in public in order to exchange, buy or sell otherwise unattainable LPs of
British and American artists. In Prague, music markets emerged as early as
in 1969; the site for such gatherings was the Wenceslas Square at the heart
of the city. Later, they moved to other streets like Španělská or Italská in
the city centre. From the latter half of the 1970s until the latter half of
the 1980s, various parks and urban forests of the capital city usually hosted
40 A. HAVLÍK
the black market. In the ‘golden age’ of illegal music markets, as Karel
Knechtl calls the second half of the 1970s (Knechtl, in Bigbít 1998), this
was the Letná Park, where, ironically, a huge sculpture of Stalin had stood
until its demolition in 1962. Other notable places in Prague included parks
like Grébovka, Strahov or forests like Krčský les or Motol (Havlík 2009:
37–40).
Be it the city streets, parks or urban forests, music markets were, at least
until the late 1980s, unofficial events without any municipal support. In
fact, they represented a space of constant (re)negotiation about what was
still allowed and what was not allowed within the ‘dictatorship of borders’,
as historian Thomas Lindenberger labels late socialist societies (Linden-
berger 1999). This symbolic negotiation between the visitors and the state
power, embodied by the police, followed different formulas, ranging from
violent police raids to something we can call partial tolerance. As police doc-
uments reveal, the state power perceived its actions as a means to suppress
illegal economic activities and also to prevent the spread of undesirable ide-
ological influences. In practice, some police controls involved nothing more
than a talking-to by the police officers (ABS 1975: 1) or just an investiga-
tion of some apparent cases of profiteering. On other occasions there were
brutal crackdowns, with policemen using tear gas and guard dogs, arresting
several people and dispersing the gathering completely. Such actions most
likely occurred during communist anniversaries or state visits, when the
police force struggled to clean up the city from what they regarded as petty
crime. Nevertheless, in the meantime, music markets were usually left to
thrive (Volf 1984: unpaged), with several weeks and even months between
significant police involvement. The threat of being taken to a police station
or of losing precious records through confiscation did not scare off dealers
and music fans in Prague and other, bigger cities like Brno and Ostrava.
They simply learned to cope with the potential danger and take risks in
order to satisfy their need for music (i/v with Opekar 2009). After a big
police raid, the music markets simply moved to another place and contin-
ued with business as usual, even though the details of organizing the black
market for music remain partially a mystery to this day (Vaněk 2010: 182;
Opekar 2009).
When someone learned about the music markets and decided to visit
them, their perseverance was rewarded by having the opportunity to choose
from a wide and up-to-date selection of foreign music. One could find
almost everything at the music markets, from ABBA to ZZ Top, from
art rock to West Coast jazz. Experts craving for obscure genres or rarities
would be just as much satisfied as those looking for more mainstream artists
(Vlček, in Bigbít 1998). Albums of established stars released in the West
appeared at the music markets with a slight delay, ranging from a few weeks
to a couple of months. Aside from a flurry of albums that were sought
after because of the emergence of a particular music style (like punk rock,
new wave or heavy metal), the big guns of rock music were constantly in
demand. Records by bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin,
the Rolling Stones and The Doors were ever-present commodities of the
black market, especially in the 1970s. Recalling the popularity of these
bands among the visitors, musician Vlastimil Marek had laconically stated
that ‘everybody was after Led Zeppelin’ (i/v with Marek 2009).
This does not mean that other genres like pop or disco music were
completely absent from the music markets. But the dominance of rock and
its subgenres at the music markets had its own logic. Disco, pop music or
jazz were also in demand, but the demand for these genres could be met
through the Czechoslovak music industry, more open towards harmless
melodies and lyrics of disco or pop music than to rock, which was treated
with suspicion as something more ‘dangerous’. Some artists had a cult
following among devout fans, including the followers of Black Sabbath,
the orthodox ‘Deep Purplists’, ‘Velvetists’ or more avant-garde ‘Zappists’
(Vlček and Němec in Bigbít 1998). Cults surrounding particular bands
also took shape through the influence of local music journalists. Within the
limited space which the official music press and the state radio devoted to
western bands and singers, journalists like Jiří Černý promoted bands (in
his case, for example, Jethro Tull) that they personally appreciated (Rejžek,
in Bigbít 1998).
When analysing the reasons behind the great generic variety of LPs
offered for sale, we must take a closer look at the motivation of the par-
ticipants. Alongside enthusiastic collectors, various profiteers established
themselves gradually as a driving force of the music markets. Although
smugglers were not a common sight in the first years, over the next period
their numbers rose steadily. Despite being frowned upon by some visitors,
traffickers became practically indispensable, because they supplied the ‘hot
stuff’, sold in large quantities and with great profit (i/v with Laube 2009).
One of those profiteers was the abovementioned Luboš. The practices of
Luboš’s group were described in an interview with Mirek Vodička, one
of the traffickers. Luboš’s network usually consisted of four people. They
approached the site of the music market in two cars, fully loaded with
LPs. Two of them operated directly at the spot and the two others served
42 A. HAVLÍK
as couriers constantly en route between the cars parked nearby and the
music markets, supplying their customers with brand new records. This
way, Luboš and his companions could attend a number of music markets
over the weekend: ‘There were times when we showed up at four music
markets during one weekend. One in Prague, one in Brno, and then an
official one and an unofficial one in Ostrava. On our way home, we had up
to 250,000 crowns in our pockets. We sold about 600 LPs by Iron Maiden,
Metallica, Accept and other bands’ (Tácha 2015).
The majority of records sold at music markets came from West Ger-
many. Albums originally released in the United Kingdom were also avail-
able in large numbers. The origin of the records played an important role.
Generally, records pressed and issued in the West were considered to be
more exclusive, the reason being not only the undeniably higher quality of
materials used, but also the symbolic prestige western products generally
enjoyed. In general, a West German or British release of a Beatles album
was simply more in demand than one released by, for example, Yugoton
in Yugoslavia (i/v with Vlček 2009). The price of an imported LP was
quite high at that time, generally around 300 Czechoslovak crowns with
customers having little chance of bargaining. Prices were quite high, given
that the average salary between the early 1970s and late 1980s was approx-
imately 2000–3000 Czechoslovak crowns (Czech Statistical Office 2015).
The price of around 300 crowns for one LP was apparently derived
from the price of the record in the West, with an added commission for
the seller who bought it abroad and brought it into the country. In the
case of second-hand records, the price was usually lower (depending on
their condition) and the chance of bargaining between the seller and the
potential buyer was also greater. Besides bargaining or buying for fixed
prices, visitors would exchange records. This was the dominant practice in
the early days of the music markets (from 1969 to the early 1970s), which
later gave way (although not completely) to the profit motive (Fig. 2.1).
Although foreign vinyl records were by far the most sought-after com-
modity, other types of media also appeared at the music markets during
their existence: magnetic tapes, audiocassettes (both blank or with recorded
music) and, in the late 1980s, compact discs. Czechoslovak music was also
present but, besides records of artists from the official music scene, tapes
of censored alternative bands without the chance to issue an LP within the
state-controlled music industry were also offered for sale and exchanged,
especially in the 1980s. There were, however, limits regarding what was
too dangerous to offer openly on the music markets. Records of officially
Fig. 2.1 Music market in Španělská Street, Prague, ca. 1974–1975 (private
archive of Ivo Pospíšil)
blacklisted artists like Karel Kryl or underground bands such as the Plastic
People of the Universe would be sold privately, in a place away from the
music markets (Vlček 2001: 260).
In addition to the music itself, one could get hold of British or Ger-
man music magazines, fanzines from the local alternative scene, homemade
translations of English lyrics and things we call merchandise today: posters,
badges, accessories, amongst others. Several visitors of music markets recall
that well-known, respectable periodicals such as the New Musical Express
or Melody Maker were offered for sale alongside copies of teen magazines
like the West German Bravo. Coloured images of punk, hard rock, pop,
metal and other bands on the pages of Bravo helped shape the visual style of
music fans and influenced the non-musical aspects of various subcultures,
such as punk (Jonšta, in Bigbít 1998).
The second half of the 1980s brought fundamental changes to the music
markets and their participants. For a long time, they were considered illegal
by the state authorities; however, in the years of glasnost and perestroika,
resonating in Czechoslovakia as ‘přestavba’, these events started to be
44 A. HAVLÍK
organized officially by the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth, amongst

others (Vaněk 2010: 483–487). Being one of the more forward-looking
advocates of Gorbachev’s new policy of openness and democratization, the
communist youth organization arranged new spaces for music markets and
undertook organizational tasks, changing their form substantially.
Conclusion
Whether through illegal or official channels, the import of western music
into state-socialist Czechoslovakia was a specific form of cultural transfer
between two systems. Smuggled goods like LPs, cassettes, posters, maga-
zines; and also to some extent articles in music magazines, officially issued
licensed albums or cover versions, allowed local fans to—at least partially—
satisfy their hunger for western music. This shows that the Iron Curtain
was by no means an impervious wall. Instead, it had various loopholes
that enabled the circulation of cultural artifacts and ideas. This was partly
because of the ambiguous official discourse on western pop culture and
partly because of the activities of traffickers and fans themselves. These two
had one thing in common: both invented new ways to test the ‘limits’ of
the socialist dictatorship by doing what they craved: the former for profit,
the latter for personal satisfaction.
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Federální kriminální policie FPS.
CHAPTER 3
Quiet Fanaticism: The Phenomenon

of Leonard Cohen’s Popularity in Poland
Ewa Mazierska and Xawery Stańczyk
This chapter examines the phenomenon of Leonard Cohen’s popularity in

Poland. In assessing it, we take a cue from the poet and music journal-
ist Piotr Bratkowski, who in his essay about Cohen’s reception in Poland
described it as a ‘quiet fanaticism’ (Bratkowski 2003: 84). It was admit-
tedly quiet because it was private, even secret, as opposed to being publicly
displayed. At the same time, it was fanatical due to a deep internalisation
of Cohen’s songs, poems and sensibility by the artist’s fans.
We focus on two principal dimensions of Cohen’s Polish popularity. The
first concerns its measurable signs, such as the presence of Cohen’s music in
the Polish music press, radio and television, and its circulation in its original
form and in translation on records and cassettes. The second refers to the
dominant interpretations of Cohen’s music in Poland, as reflected in the
E. Mazierska (B)
X. Stańczyk
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw,
Poland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_3
50 E. MAZIERSKA AND X. STAŃCZYK
translation of his lyrics, the way it was represented in the media, reflected
in Polish poetry inspired by Cohen’s work and personal testimonies of his
fans. We draw on a number of popular and more serious texts dedicated to
this author and testimonies of his fans, including members of the cultural
elites who were inspired by Cohen and played an active role in promoting
his work in Poland. For this purpose, we interviewed several such impor-
tant ‘Cohenologists’ and ‘Cohenistas’, including Henryk Waniek, Piotr
Bratkowski, Antoni Pawlak and Katarzyna Boruń. Maciej Zembaty, prob-
ably the best known Polish propagator of Cohen, was, unfortunately, not
available to us, as he passed away in 2011.
Our research is based on the idea, linked to that of Walter Benjamin,
that the translator of a foreign text participates in its ‘afterlife’, enacting
an interpretation that is informed by a history of its reception (‘the age
of its fame’). This interpretation does more than transmit old messages; it
recreates the values that ‘accrued to the foreign text over time’ (Benjamin
2000; Venuti 2000). For this reason, many of the most popular transla-
tions are also the least faithful (Venuti 2000: 13). According to this view,
there are no ‘faithful’ or ‘correct’ translations; each reflects not only on
the original work, but also the cultural make-up of the translator and the
cultural environment in which the work is consumed. For this reason, our
principal context is the political and cultural history of Poland, especially of
the 1970s and the 1980s, when the quiet fanaticism about Cohen peaked
in this country. Ultimately, we would like to establish what is characteristic
of the ‘Polish Cohen’.
In our discussion of the ‘Polish Cohen’ we will also draw on the con-
cept of the ‘Imaginary West’ which, according to Alexei Yurchak, ‘was
produced locally and existed only at the time when the real West could
not be encountered’ (Yurchak 2013: 174). What Yurchak described about
late Soviet socialism could be found as well, with small differences, in other
Eastern Bloc countries in the same period. As he stated, the Imaginary West
was ‘a kind of space that was both internal and external to the Soviet reality,
the object created within the Foucaldian discursive formation of images,
music, products, statements and linguistic forms produced simultaneously
in diverse discourses on different topics’ (Yurchak 2013: 175). This discur-
sive formation of late socialism led to some seemingly incoherent or even
contradictory statements and images. The image of the ‘Polish Cohen’ has
to be reconstructed in the same way, from press comments and articles,
to the music performances on radio and TV, to quotations and references
in poetry, to written memories and oral history. Of course, it is impossible
3 QUIET FANATICISM: THE PHENOMENON OF LEONARD COHEN’S … 51
to do it in an essay of this size, so we privilege two types of documents:

cover songs and Polish poetry inspired by Cohen. However, before we
move to discussing this phenomenon, it is worth presenting some basic
information about Cohen’s life, career and his work. This part is largely
based on his biographies by Sylvie Simmons (2013) and to a smaller extent
Tim Footman (2009).
Leonard Cohen: From Love of a Woman to the Love

of Humanity
Cohen was born in 1934 in an upper-middle class family of Canadian Jews,
whose roots were in Eastern Europe. He started his career as a poet and
novelist, publishing his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in
1956 and his first novel, The Favourite Game, in 1963. Cohen moved to
recording songs only when it became obvious to him that, despite critical
recognition, it would be difficult for him to earn a decent living from
‘serious’ literature. His first album, ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’ was recorded
only in 1967, hence rather late for somebody aspiring to be a rock star. To
recognise this fact, his reputation was always as a poet who became a singer
or a poet singing his songs, rather than (merely) a singer-songwriter. This
aspect is captured by the frequent comparing of Cohen to another famous
singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, adding that Dylan is a singer whose lyrics
happened to be very good, while Cohen was a poet who added music
to his poems (Boucher 2004; Basu 2017; ‘Leonard Cohen – Bob Dylan
Interface’ 2018). We do not agree with this opinion, as it belittles the
musical dimension of Cohen’s work, but it captures well the respect granted
to Cohen’s lyrics. Subsequent records of Cohen attracted different levels
of attention. What is undisputed, however, is that the artist managed to
sustain his career till the very end. Paradoxically, Cohen was more famous
in his sixties and seventies than in his thirties.
The critics examining Cohen’s work draw attention to the fact that
it underwent a significant transformation when he moved from com-
posing his songs using guitar as the principal instrument to using
a cheap Casio keyboard. The latter instrument was first heard on
his album ‘Various Positions’ (1984), which marked the resurrec-
tion of Cohen’s career after a slump in the late 1970s, as well
as a personal recovery after a period of depression. On ‘Various Positions’
we find two of Cohen’s most popular songs: Dance Me to the End of Love
and Hallelujah. More important is the change in themes broached in the
two parts of Cohen’s career, as well as transformation of his stage persona.

To account for the former, Thomas Haslam conducted a text-mining study,
analysing songs from all of Cohen’s studio albums, from ‘Songs of Leonard
Cohen’ (1967) to ‘You Want It Darker’ (2016) (Haslam 2017), the last
recorded before his death in 2016. Haslam noticed that the ‘first six albums
have a robust core of continuous terms; the last eight do not… Moreover,
all of the last eight albums, unlike the first six, contain the evocative terms
“blood,” “cry,” “light,” and “fall.” In contrast, all of the first six albums
contain the evocative terms “lover,” “begin,” “yes,” and “high”’ (Haslam
2017: 4).
Haslam argues that ‘ although Cohen dealt with sexuality throughout
his work, on his earlier albums “lover” and “love” seem often conflated.
On his later albums, Cohen’s exploration of love has transitioned from the
thrills to the responsibilities, from seduction and romance to the myster-
ies of intimacy and the challenges of maintaining a relationship’ (ibid.).
Moreover, just as “lover” becomes comparatively less relevant to “love,”
the term “blood” (inclusive of the words “blood,” “bloody,” and “blood-
ied”) across the last eight albums likewise suggests a different direction.
In the lyrics where it occurs, the term is usually ‘associated with human
suffering, or references to the Judeo-Christian tradition, or Cohen’s own
genealogy and history. These associations show in part a larger trend in
the last eight albums: Cohen addressing matters more public and historical
than his personal affairs and those of his circle (ibid.)’. Haslam’s argument
confirms a widely held view, including by many of our interviewees, that
from the 1980s Cohen became a less private and more public speaker. His
voice remained intimate, but he used it to convey more public issues, as
exemplified by songs such as Hallelujah, Anthem and Future.
Abandoning a guitar, at least on stage, also meant that Cohen had more
freedom to use his body or, indeed, necessitated a different behaviour
on stage. From a withdrawn man, overwhelmed by stage fright, Cohen
changed into a self-confident entertainer, cracking jokes and even dancing
on stage. It became obvious that he was aware of his worldwide appeal and
was keen to cultivate it. The closer we come to the present day, the more
we can see Cohen as an entertainer, striving to have a mass appeal. This
is even conveyed by the titles of his records, such as ‘Various Positions’,
‘I’m Your Man’ or ‘Popular Problems’. In this chapter, however, what is of
specific interest are the possible consequences of these changes for Cohen’s
Polish fans.
Cohen’s Popularity in Poland: Facts and Figures

It is probably impossible to establish exactly when Cohen’s songs were
broadcast on Polish Radio for the first time, but most likely it was in the
late 1960s. A well-known journalist, Wojciech Mann, wrote in 2002 that
in 1968 he brought from London the album ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’,
and almost immediately started playing Suzanne and So Long, Marianne
on the Third Programme of the Polish Radio (Mann 2002). Our respon-
dents recalled their first encounters with Cohen’s music, transmitted in
the late evening and night hours on the radio in the early 1970s. The fact
that Cohen reached Poland so early after his debut as a singer should be
explained by the fact that in the 1960s and, especially, in the 1970s, Poland
opened itself to the West, first unofficially and then, under Edward Gierek’s
regime, officially. Western popular music was tolerated or even promoted
by Polish public cultural institutions in part because it pulled young people
away from the Catholic Church.
From 1977, Maciej Zembaty, a popular journalist, satirist, poet and
translator presented Cohen’s songs in his radio programme ‘Zgryz’ (Occlu-
sion). Zembaty broadcast Cohen’s original songs as well as his covers of
Cohen, with his own translations, with support from other musicians, such
as John Porter, an English guitarist living in Warsaw. In 1978, the TV show
Pieśni miłości i nienawiści (Songs of Love and Hate), directed by Tomasz
Zygadło, contained Cohen’s ballads, translated by Zembaty and his friend
Maciej Karpiński, performed by distinguished musicians and actors. How-
ever, the programme was shown only once on January 12, 1981. Also
from the late 1970s, Zembaty with Porter and occasionally other musicians
played numerous concerts with Cohen’s songs in Polish. A decade later this
activity made him the main promoter of Cohen’s works in Poland. By the
end of the 1980s, Zembaty released eight albums, including cassettes, with
his versions of Cohen’s songs (and sometimes with his own pieces as well),
sung with the support of musicians such John Porter, Stanisław Sojka and
Winicjusz Chróst. According to Zembaty, the double album from 1983,
‘Ballady Leonarda Cohena’ (Ballads of Leonard Cohen), also known simply
as ‘Cohen’, released without Cohen’s consent or knowledge, was produced
in 100,000 copies that sold out momentarily. The 1985 album ‘Alleluja’
(Hallelujah) sold over 400,000 copies and achieved the status of a gold
record. The book Mój Cohen (My Cohen), authored by Zembaty, with
illustrations by Henryk Waniek, published in 1988 by the Kalambur the-
atre, crowned Zembaty’s efforts to make Cohen popular in Poland, as well
as to make Zembaty the Polish mouthpiece of this master in poetry. Zem-

baty also published many translations of Cohen’s songs and poems, some
of them in cooperation with Karpiński, in books and literary magazines.
In 1985, Cohen gave four concerts in Poland: in Warsaw, Poznań,
Wrocław and Zabrze. This concert tour was preceded by many rumours
about Cohen’s visit to Poland. The artist was supposed to give a concert
during the Festival of the True Song in Gdańsk in 1981, an event orga-
nized by Zembaty to support the Solidarity movement. In 1983 and 1984,
two editions of the National Festival of Songs by Leonard Cohen (co-
organized by Zembaty) took place in the Academic Centre of Culture in
Cracow, with the participation of dozens of amateur performers, most of
whom played and sang in a gloomy manner characteristic more of Zembaty
than of Cohen’s performance. One year later, the best of them performed
at the event ‘Cohenlada’, taking place in the student club Hybrydy in War-
saw. There were also some screenings of the 1965 documentary Ladies and
Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen by Don Owen and Donald Brittain. Dur-
ing martial law (1981–1983) and after it ended, the songs by Cohen were
often broadcast on public radio and television. It could thus be argued
that the 1980s was truly ‘Cohen’s decade’ in Poland, with his songs being
offered in large quantities to Polish audiences in different contexts, dis-
guises and with different meanings attached to them. This, as we will argue
in due course, resulted, in large part, from their malleability. On the other
hand, the presence of Cohen on the radio and television was the begin-
ning of the end of the ‘silent fanaticism’ previously mentioned, which was
characteristic of his reception in the 1970s.
After the fall of state socialism, Cohen remained popular in Poland, but
he lost his unique status, in part due to the fact that since the 1990s it
became easy to get access to foreign music. The Polish market became
saturated with western pop-rock and Cohen’s records were reduced to
some compact discs competing with others for space on shelves, first in
brick-and-mortar shops, and then also virtual ones. On the Radio Three
Chart, the oldest and perhaps most popular music chart in Poland, only
two of Cohen’s songs reached first place: In My Secret Life for two weeks in
2001 and You Want It Darker, which occupied the position for five weeks
in 2016, no doubt to a large extent due to a renewed interest caused by the
artist’s death. From 1989 on, only three other songs got into the first ten
places: Boogie Street in 2002 (fifth place), Tower of Song in 2006 (eighth
place) and Travelling Light in 2016 (ninth place). These charts show that,
after 1989, Cohen’s popularity in Poland increased in comparison with the
1980s, when the hit Dance Me To the End of Love reached only the fifth
position in 1985.
Cohen Through Several Decades of Polish History

Our research is based on the assumption that for an artist to gain popu-
larity in a foreign country two conditions have to be fulfilled. First, there
should be a fit between certain aspects of the work of this artist and the
environment into which it is transported. Secondly, there should be cultural
translators able and willing to mediate between this work and the target
audience. This often means literally translating the work from one language
to another, as well as playing up the aspects which might be most attractive
to a given audience and playing down those that might risk antagonising
or confusing it. In the subsequent part of our discussion we will try to
identify the aspects of Cohen that rendered him particularly attractive to
the Polish audiences and the strategies of his translators, which were meant
to add to his appeal, as well as to ‘smooth the edges’ of Cohen’s work and
personality and eliminate those aspects which might put Poles off.
In Poland Cohen’s music appealed predominantly to the more educated
strata of society, the intelligentsia. This was especially the case in the 1970s,
when Cohen was first introduced to Polish audiences. However, this group
is not homogeneous, and its understanding has changed in the course of
Polish history. During the 1970s and 1980s, which are of principal interest
to us, one can identity two main layers of Polish intelligentsia. One layer
consisted of intellectuals and artists, people who perceived themselves as
trendsetters and creators of culture rather than merely its consumers. This
layer, which can be labelled ‘intellectual bohemians’, was principally located
in Polish metropolitan centres, chiefly Warsaw, Cracow and Gdansk. The
second layer included people with higher education or on the path to receiv-
ing it, like clerks, teachers, librarians, doctors and engineers.
Cohen initially appealed to the first strata. From the early 1970s, young
Polish bohemians, especially poets and writers with a hippie attitude, lis-
tened to Cohen, read his lyrics, translated them and wrote their own with
dialogue or references to Cohen. Piotr Bratkowski, Antoni Pawlak and
Katarzyna Boruń, whose testimonies we collected, as well as Stanisław
Stabro, were among these young poets captivated by Cohen’s words. Jan
Krzysztof Kelus, Walek Dzedzej (Lesław Danicki), and Jacek Kleyff also
wrote and sung ballads inspired by Cohen. Many of these attempts were
unofficial and published on the threshold of the 1980s, like the first books
by Pawlak, Bratkowski, and Boruń. Boruń wrote a whole cycle of poems,
Par˛e dialogów z Cohenem (A few dialogues with Cohen). The title of the 1984
book of poetry, Dzieci Leonarda Cohena (Children of Leonard Cohen) by
Stabro could serve as the proper name for this generation of poets and
intellectuals, despite Stabro being a bit older than the rest of this group.
The main reason why Cohen was so appreciated by people like
Bratkowski seems to be the high quality of his lyrics and their dark, fore-
boding tone. The charm of the first consisted of the fact that to understand
them on a basic level does not require particular proficiency in English as
they do not include slang words and do not rely on any subcultural knowl-
edge. Waniek even claimed that one could have learned English by listening
to Cohen’s songs. At the same time, the beauty and complexity of their
metaphors required cultural knowledge available only to the very educated.
Pawlak, for example, mentioned Cohen’s deep engagement with the Bible.
Paradoxically, to understand that was beyond the vast majority of Poles, on
account of the superficiality of Polish Catholicism, reflected in how the
Poles’ lacked the habit of studying the Bible.
The attractiveness of Cohen’s affinity to darkness and gloom can be
seen in the context of the political situation of the 1970s, known as the
‘decade of the propaganda of success’, when Edward Gierek became leader
of the Party. As the term ‘propaganda of success’ suggests, the official
outlook at the time was optimistic. In the 1970s, Poland opened itself to
western products, ideas and lifestyles. Foreign investment and loans created
a few years of economic prosperity. The so-called Gierkówka motorway
and other motorways were built and car tourism was promoted, creating
demand for domestic car production in Polish factories. In that context, it
was within the bounds of possibility to draw parallels between Polish and
western cities, and easily find oneself in the bars, hotels, and restaurants
from Cohen’s lyrics. However, the bold tone of state optimism caused
a backlash, which increased as the years went by, with the gap widening
between the propaganda of success and the reality of the falling standard
of living and finally food shortages. Under such circumstances, heralding
this prophet of gloom, as Bratkowski asserts, was a political act, even if
committed in private and practically without any political consequences.
It is also worth mentioning that fragments of Cohen’s novel Beautiful
Losers were published in 1973, in the literary magazine, ‘Literatura na
świecie’ (Literature in the world), translated by Bogdan Olewicz, a popular
songwriter. Learning that Cohen was not only a singer-songwriter, but also
an author of critically acclaimed books of poems and novels, added to the
pride of these early ‘Cohenistas’, who in this way convinced themselves that
they are dealing not with ordinary songs and an ordinary singer-songwriter,
but with poetry and a poet whose aim was to take the art of song writing
to a higher level.
This sense of exclusivity—or simply the snobbery of intellectual bohemi-
ans captivated by Cohen—was challenged in the second half of the 1970s,
when Cohen’s songs started to be translated into Polish by the previously
mentioned Zembaty. In total, he translated over sixty of Cohen’s songs.
As we mentioned, Zembaty was a radio journalist working on the Third
Programme of the Polish Radio (Trójka), where he had his own radio pro-
gramme, ‘Zgryz’, which was a mixture of cultural information with light
satire. Zembaty used it to present the original works of Cohen, as well as his
interpretations and translations. It was through Zembaty that a large pro-
portion of Cohen’s fans, belonging to the ‘ordinary intelligentsia’, came
in contact with his work. Zembaty’s efforts in popularising Cohen were
met with suspicion by the ‘intellectual bohemians’. One reason was the
simple loss of an exclusive good which stopped being exclusive due to the
democratising activities of Zembaty. The second reason was disappoint-
ment in the quality of Zembaty’s translations and performances, a point to
which we return in due course. At this stage it is enough to say that there
was nothing fundamentally wrong with these translations, but they came
across as literal and lacking in poetry. Although Zembaty dabbled in many
literary genres, his talent as a poet was not acknowledged; he was most
respected as a journalist and a satirist. Even though Zembaty facilitated the
encounter of the bulk of Polish fans with Cohen’s work, in due course many
of them took a more active approach in accessing it. We were repeatedly
hearing stories of fans bringing his records from abroad, at great cost, given
that all western goods were very expensive at the time and of borrowing
each other’s tapes and vinyl records to make copies of his albums.
The sense of exclusivity experienced by both subgroups of Cohen’s fans
was also fostered by the scarcity of information about this artist in the
musical press. Browsing through the issues of Jazz, the most popular music
magazine in the 1970s, we were surprised by the infrequency of articles
devoted to Cohen. Not only were they few and far between, but they were
short and their focus was on the topics and recurring motifs in Cohen’s
songs, as opposed to their musical qualities. Probably the first text about
Cohen in the Polish press, a short biographical note, presented Cohen as
a ‘critic-moralist’, ‘dreamer’, a poet with a guitar who ‘fought against the
hatred and indifference of the people around him’. The author, in a manner
reminiscent of the West’s take on Cohen, compared the Canadian singer
to Bob Dylan; a collation that was reiterated by many other journalists
(KJ 1972: 14). In a similar vein, in the Radar weekly, Maciej Karpiński
wrote about ‘poet-bard’ with ‘a bit hoarse, soft, extremely masculine, and
lyrical’ voice who did not suit the contemporary world. Cohen’s poetry,
according to Karpiński, was existential and related to the question of the
possibility of love in an alienating civilisation, the responsibility of a man to
the world, traditions, and ‘true’ values (Karpiński 1975). In 1978, music
critic Jerzy A. Rzewuski analysed the scenery and protagonists of Cohen’s
songs, concluding that ‘Cohen represented the group of people compelled
to search for happiness and freedom on their own’ (Rzewuski 1978: 15).
From the scarcity of the articles devoted to Cohen in the 1970s and their
content we can deduce two things. First, the popularity of Cohen in Poland
in this period was more to do with word of mouth than the media, except
for the efforts of Zembaty. Second, he was considered more a literary than
musical phenomenon. Neither music magazines nor popular press showed
any interest in the musical quality of Cohen’s work. Such an opinion is also
corroborated by the testimonies of Bratkowski, Pawlak and Boruń.
In the 1980s Cohen’s popularity in Poland increased, despite the fact
that his work was still significantly under-represented in the Polish musical
press; one could learn more about Cohen from cultural and literary journals
than from music magazines. By the end of the decade he stopped being the
property of the intelligentsia and was just a popular singer. A sign of that
was the playing of his songs on all programmes of Polish radio, as opposed
to the more elitist Trójka (The popular name of the Third Programme of
the Polish Radio). Some songs of Cohen, most importantly Dance Me to
the End of Love, could be heard in restaurants and even at weddings, in
spite of the sorrowful meaning of the song. One reason for such a change
in status was the world popularity of Cohen. His record, ‘Various Posi-
tions’, released in 1984, which included Hallelujah and Dance Me to the
End of Love, proved very successful, widening Cohen’s appeal, in part due
to the cover versions of his songs. Other factors were more to do with
the situation in Poland. Cohen’s song The Partisan from his 1969 record
‘Songs from a Room’ (which was itself a re-working of a French song about
French partisans), in Zembaty’s translation became one of several unoffi-
cial anthems of Solidarity, which inevitably increased his standing among
Solidarity supporters. The most likely function of the saturation of state
media with Cohen’s songs was to convince audiences that Polish culture
was free from (heavy-handed) indoctrination. In the space of two years or
so, Cohen moved from being the informal Solidarity bard to a publicly
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Leonard Cohen from his visit in Warsaw in 1985 (Courtesy of
Andrzej Kielbowicz)
acknowledged and promoted artist. The final factor of Cohen’s popularity

in the 1980s was the previously mentioned concert tour in Poland.
This mainstreamisation of Cohen led to some backlash, especially among
a younger generation of intellectuals, who found his cult excessive. A
poignant example is a song, Leonardzie Cohen (To Leonard Cohen), by
a punk band Brak from Łódź, recorded in 1981. In it, he is presented as
a hypocrite who drinks wine and makes money from singing protest songs
while others die in the war. It shall be noticed that such criticism was largely
misplaced, because Cohen did not specialise in protest songs, but rather
Fig. 3.2 Photo of Leonard Cohen from his visit in Warsaw in 1985 (Courtesy of
Andrzej Kielbowicz)
intimate songs about love and its betrayal and he never indulged in lux-
uries or, indeed, never achieved the financial position commensurate with
his critical standing. But this is not really our point; the point is that Cohen
was an easy target for such criticism, because his songs and life mattered in
Poland, he was almost a national property, unlike, for example, Bob Dylan.
In the 1990s, Cohen’s Polish reception had significantly changed. Due

to the great popularity and mass media coverage, it was no longer ‘quiet’
nor ‘fanaticism’. It lost the previous political, ‘oppositional’ dimension as
well, which was only natural, given that in 1989 anti-communist opposi-
tion won, hence there was no longer any need to make or ‘adopt’ songs
that would articulate such opposition. Now Cohen was perceived mostly as
a Jewish singer-songwriter, the author of popular hits about love, infidelity,
solitude, and sorrow. This depoliticization and petrification of Cohen’s
image in Poland was uncontested, partly because after ‘The Future’ in
1992, Cohen did not issue almost any new pieces till ‘Ten New Songs’
in 2001, while in Poland Zembaty still performed Cohen’s songs, pub-
lished books with new translations, and released new albums. The effect
was the final ennoblement of Cohen in the 2000s, when his songs were
performed in theatres and at festivals by well-known actors and vocalists,
including Piotr Machalica, Adam Nowak, Wiktor Zborowski, Zbigniew
Zamachowski, Marian Opania, Krzysztof Krawczyk, Bogusław Linda and
Renata Przemyk. Przemyk is the only popular female artist who released
a whole album with songs by Cohen. Przemyk’s case was exceptional in
many ways. Her album followed the music spectacle Boogie Street, which
was performed for the first time in the Old Theatre in Lublin and based on
poems and lyrics from Cohen’s Book of Longing translated into Polish by
Daniel Wyszogrodzki. Wyszogrodzki asked Przemyk to play the main role
in the spectacle. This invitation surprised the vocalist, who was associated
mostly with the alt-rock and very emotional way of singing. She accepted
the proposition when she saw that the songs for the spectacle were taken
only from the albums ‘Ten New Songs’ and ‘Dear Heather’ and did not
include any hits sung by numerous Polish artists. Also, arrangements were
rich and far from the usual sadness of ‘Polish Cohen’. Eventually, Prze-
myk underlined in press interviews that her aim was to show the female
element of Cohen’s poetry; she emphasised that Cohen liked the female
interpretations of his songs and praised them many times (Przemyk 2017).
Finally, Cohen himself came back to Poland, and from 2007 until 2013
gave six concerts in Warsaw, Wrocław, Katowice and Łódź. In 2007, he
was invited to Warsaw by Anjani Thomas, a singer-songwriter and pianist
who collaborated with him for many years and who promoted in Poland
her 2006 album ‘Blue Alert’ with songs by Cohen. At the beginning of the
concert in the Trójka studio, Cohen looked back to his first performance in
Warsaw 22 years before, recalling the difficult political situation, but then
quickly moved to questions of love and intimacy—topics of the songs of
Anjani. As her special guest, Cohen sang only two songs, but his presence
was a big event for his Polish fans and Trójka’s audience. The almost pri-
vate atmosphere of the concert with Anjani was in contrast with the shows
Cohen gave one year later in big concert halls in Wrocław and Warsaw dur-
ing his 2008 world tour. The concerts were appreciated for their intimate
atmosphere created despite a mass audience, as well as the vitality and the
sense of humour of then 73-year-old Cohen. In 2010, the artist performed
in Katowice and again in Warsaw, mostly playing his greatest hits, as he had
done two years earlier. At the Warsaw performance, former president and
leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, was in the audience. During his last per-
formance in Poland, in Łódź in 2013, Cohen made a tribute in gratitude
to his Polish translator Maciej Zembaty, who had passed away in 2011.
Polish Cover Versions of Cohen’s Songs

One of the most ambitious attempts to create ‘Polish Cohen’ was a televi-
sion programme Songs of Love and Hate, produced in 1978 and broadcast
in 1981. The precise reasons for the delay of the transmission are unknown.
It is possible, however, that while Cohen was acceptable on the radio, in
television, which was more heavily censored, his songs came across as more
transgressive, especially in this version.
Based on a script written by two translators of Cohen, Maciej Zembaty
and Maciej Karpiński, and directed by Tomasz Zygadło, it offered a mixture
of Cohen’s songs translated by the two authors, performed by Polish artists
and some other texts by Cohen, presented by the Polish actor, Roman Wil-
helmi. All the performers are on stage at the same time, accompanied by
some children, who wander freely between the adults. The camera moves
between the main performer and the entire group. This creates an effect of
a hippie commune, in which each member has an opportunity to live as an
individual, but is always part of the group. Inevitably, such choreography
implies that Cohen was a hippie and his work a reflection of a hippie mind-
set, corroborating the dominant representation of Cohen in Polish press,
as we will argue.
This contrasts with the way Cohen presented himself and is described
in his biographies, namely as somebody who liked to hang out with his
friends in cafés and nightclubs, but equally cherished his solitude. Wil-
helmi is widely regarded as one of the most charismatic Polish actors of
the period of state socialism, and his trademark is machismo, sometimes
verging on caricature, as in the film Dzieje grzechu (Story of Sin, 1975) by
Walerian Borowczyk. Inevitably, he brings to this programme a memory

of his earlier films, when he stood for strong, toxic masculinity. This aspect
is also visible in his performance, in contrast to Cohen, who offers a softer
type of masculinity. Wilhelmi as ‘Cohen’ is surrounded by women and he
talks about his interest in them, not unlike the protagonist of Cohen’s
works and the artist himself. However, while in Cohen’s work we typically
can detect a deep preoccupation with a specific woman, his lover or muse,
Wilhelmi’s ‘Cohen’ comes across as promiscuous and somewhat indifferent
to the women who swarm around him as bees around honey. He reminds
us more of Henry Miller than Cohen.
All the songs in the programme are sung by men, including Maciej
Zembaty and Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, a well-known composer and co-
founder of Anawa, the first band in Poland which successfully merged
rock with ‘singing poetry’. Most likely these two men were chosen to
participate in the programme not because of their talent as performers,
but because they were regarded as intellectuals with a good command of
English and ability to reach some deeper layers of Cohen’s work. Their
singing betrays their lack of performing skills, although each is bad in a
different way. Pawluśkiewicz’s singing is wooden and emotionless. Zem-
baty, on the other hand, who sings, amongst other things, Bird on the Wire,
in a manner of a protest-song, almost shouting at times, is over-emphatic
and out-of-tune. All songs are sung by men with women providing only
weak back-up vocals, with the exception of Who By Fire, finishing the spec-
tacle, which is performed by everybody taking part in the performance.
Such marginalisation of women can be explained by a desire to be true
to Cohen’s voice, which is ultimately male. However, since the beginning
of Cohen’s career, the trademark of Cohen’s art was that his voice was
wrapped in female voices which provided both the background of and the
counterpoint to his singing. Moreover, many female singers interpreted
his songs, hence it would be not strange if this also happened in Songs of
Love and Hate. It would be particularly justified, given that of the three
female singers, two—Bożena Adamiak and Teresa Haremza—were already
renowned singers of poetry, and the third one, Olga Ostrowska, although
unknown at the time, in less than two years, under the pseudonym Kora,
would become the greatest Polish female pop-rock star of her generation.
The writing women off in Songs of Love and Hate reflected the machismo,
pervading Polish culture of this period.
Songs of Love and Hate provided a blueprint for covering Cohen’s songs
in Poland. In a nutshell, the majority of Polish singers ‘macho-ised’ the
originals. A fitting example is Bogusław Linda’s cover version of I’m Your

Man, which is probably the most popular of all Cohen’s cover songs in
Polish, at least among the ‘YouTube generation’, with 850,000 hits. The
original is marked by humility and the irony of an older man aware that
he is unable to fulfil the expectations of his lovers and female friends, yet
cannot give up on female company. The Polish version of I’m Your Man,
on the other hand, is presented in a more assertive, even cocky, manner
by an actor, known for playing ‘injured machos’ on screen (and, to some
extent, off-screen), including in many war and gangster films. The macho-
isation of I’m Your Man is augmented by the original context of this song:
it was used as part of the soundtrack to Sara (1997) by Maciej Ślesicki, a
gangster film with misogynistic messages.
Cohen in Polish Poetry

As we have established, until Zembaty and other radio disc jockeys pop-
ularised Cohen’s music in the middle of the 1970s, the artist was known
mostly by the intelligentsia with literary interests. The Polish press pre-
sented him as the ‘singing poet’ or ‘sad poet’, according to Anna Kulicka,
who wrote an extended review about the artist’s concert in Warsaw in
1985 in Magazyn Muzyczny (Kulicka 1985). Significantly, the text con-
tained long fragments of Cohen’s answers from a press conference with
comments by Kulicka; there was almost nothing about the performance
itself. Once again, Cohen was portrayed as a poet, writer, philosopher of
Jewish origins and sarcastic sense of humour. Music seemed to pale into
insignificance in comparison with stories about people lost and lonely in the
landscape of hotels and cheap bars of great cities, conveyed by the lyrics.
Cohen, as a ‘singing poet’, was admired in Poland because of the impor-
tance attributed to lyrics in Polish pop-rock music, as reflected in the flour-
ishing of the genre of ‘sung poetry’ (and similar styles such as ‘actors’ song)
in the 1970s and the 1980s. While in the West artists representing this genre
could not compete with rockers for their popularity, in Poland they did,
as demonstrated by the successes of such performers as Marek Grechuta,
Jonasz Kofta and Jacek Kaczmarski, with the third being regarded in the
early 1980s as an unofficial Solidarity spokesman. Moreover, some rockers
used classical poetry in their works or have respected poets penning songs
for them. Notable examples are Czesław Niemen, who based several of
his most famous songs on the works of the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian
Kamil Norwid (see Gradowski’s chapter in this collection) and blues band
Breakout, whose regular lyricist was the distinguished poet Bogdan Loebl.
Many lyricists, such as Franciszek Walicki and Andrzej Tylczyński, played
prominent roles in the music industry. Last but not least, we have to men-
tion Edward Stachura, the rebel standing alone, but also a renowned author
of poems, novels, and songs who sometimes even sang them. Stachura, who
committed suicide at the age of forty-one in 1979, had never performed
on stage, but can be perceived as a crucial link between poetry and pop
music as his songs are still sung with guitars and printed in songbooks.
It was by no means accidental that among Cohen’s enthusiasts and emu-
lators in Poland, where the boundary between sung poetry and pop-rock
was blurred, there were many bards and singing poets. Cohen served the
Polish artists and listeners as evidence that this blurred boundary was also
the case elsewhere and showed them how to achieve popularity on the
national music scene without compromising on their standard of poetry.
In this context, poet and journalist Janusz Drzewucki pointed out that
Cohen, though perceived as a poet and admired by poets, was in 1986 still
known only superficially. None of the books by Cohen, be it poetry or nov-
els, had been translated into Polish; there were only fragments of Beautiful
Losers and some poems and songs published in Polish translation in literary
or cultural journals, such as Literatura na Świecie, Nowy Wyraz, Literatura
and Student. On the other hand, the most popular songs by Cohen were
printed in Polish translation in the student and tourist songbooks, even
without mentioning the name of the author (Drzewucki 1986). The banal-
isation of Cohen depicted by Drzewucki serves as a good starting point to
examine the reception of Cohen’s work in Polish poetry.
Polish translations of Cohen’s songs and poems resulted in passionate
discussion about their style, mood and meanings. The ‘silent fanaticism’
of Cohen’s reception resulted in a large number of translations as well as,
paradoxically, distrust of the intermediaries between the artist and his fans
and inability to agree on the ‘correct’ Polish versions of his songs. This is
demonstrated by the fact that in 1976 Jazz magazine published Famous
Blue Raincoat in four versions: original, linguistic translation, poetic trans-
lations by Zembaty, and a poetic translation by Jacek Kleyff. While Zembaty
tried to write in a more ‘literary’ style and used clauses with exact, single
rhymes, Kleyff employed more colloquial language to reach the intimate
tone but also moved far from the precise meanings of the original lines
(JK 1976). Kleyff, a poet, satirist, and singer-songwriter with hippie incli-
nations and anti-government attitude, was also the author of two Letters
to L. Cohen—songs written in 1975 and 1977. Due to his straightforward
criticism of the socialist state, Kleyff has never made such a career as Zem-
baty. In the First Letter to L. Cohen (Pierwszy list do L. Cohena), Kleyff
confided how difficult it was to find one’s own self in the contemporary
world. The topic of the second song is the existential sense of freedom
against the power of history. In both Letters, Kleyff tries to stay as far from
politics as possible, using metaphors drawing on the universe and nature
and a very private, personal perspective. He addresses Cohen as his friend
or even ‘brother’ with whom he could correspond, despite the difference
of social and political circumstances.
Another Polish poet strongly influenced by Cohen was Jan Krzysztof
Kelus, sociologist and pro-democracy activist, who, beginning in 1977
recorded and distributed his songs on cassettes in the ‘second circuit’ (drugi
obieg, the Polish version of samizdat), thus becoming one of the favourite
bards of the opposition. With his ‘voice of everyman’ and nonchalant style
of guitar playing, as well as his simplicity of poetical discourse and con-
centration on ordinary life, Kelus was probably closer to Cohen’s poetic
idiom and artistic persona than Zembaty, Kleyff and other Polish poet ‘Co-
henistas’. Maybe because Cohen’s poetry and music were such an obvious
inspiration for Kelus, he had to mark his difference from Cohen. He did
so by highlighting his different political situation. ‘First of all, Mr. Cohen,
this will not be about Suzannes’—states Kelus at the beginning of one of
his most popular songs Na przystanku PKS-u (On the intercity bus stop)
from 1981. ‘This will not be about Suzannes because the political situa-
tion in Poland made it impossible to indulge in love’—one may add. As
an activist, Kelus could not sing about love, sexuality, and intimacy, but
in the same song he ridiculed political songs about Poland and Polishness
by Jan Pietrzak and asked how to avoid the ‘internal emigration’: with-
drawing into one’s private life, practiced by many Polish people during this
period. The conflict between the fascination by Cohen and the depress-
ing reality of martial law was underlined by Kelus in another of his songs,
Przed nami było wielu (There were many before us ), written in the Białoł˛eka
prison. ‘Someone elsewhere is making love, someone elsewhere is pray-
ing […] someone elsewhere for sure is translating something by Cohen’,
sang Kelus sardonically, suggesting that dreaming about the world depicted
in Cohen’s songs was naive under the authoritarian rule. In the same
vein, Antoni Pawlak wrote in Gryps dla Leonarda Cohena (Message from
prison to Leonard Cohen) in 1982, that he envied Cohen the possibility of
writing about existential problems and passing over political issues, some-
thing which he could not afford to do. Thus, the ultimate limit of Cohen’s
poetics was the wall of a prison. ‘In Montreal, as writes Leonard Cohen,
nothing happens as well’, noticed Bratkowski in his poem Montreal in
1975. Cohen’s pessimism well suited the atmosphere of decay and crisis of
the second half of the 1970s in Poland. But with the brutal interference
of politics into everyday life under martial law, the inflation of meanings
of Cohen’s words started. The ‘Children of Leonard Cohen’, according
to the title of the 1984 book by Stanisław Stabro, felt bitterly deceived:
their imaginary father did not save them and the night turned out to be
much darker than in his ballads. Even Katarzyna Boruń, who in her cycle
Par˛e dialogów z Cohenem (A few dialogues with Cohen) revealed a slightly
ironic attitude toward the melancholic masculine identity manifested by
her colleagues fascinated by Cohen, wrote sombrely in the poem I znowu
siedzimy po nocach (And again we stay wakeful all nights ) from the period
of martial law: ‘Cohen still sings the same’.
Boruń and Bratkowski, from 1975 until 1977, were members of the
poetic group ‘Moloch’; Pawlak also participated from time to time in meet-
ings of this group. The young poets from that circle were interested in
the hippie movement, rock music and pop culture. They focused on the
topics of everyday life, relationships, rhythms of big cities, social injus-
tices, and obscenities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they
needed Cohen to create new poetics, adequate to such subjects and dif-
ferent from the linguistic tendency of poets about ten years older from
the New Wave, who concentrated on dismantling the propaganda and ide-
ological constructions in the official language, speaking on behalf of the
generation or even the whole nation as public intellectuals. Cohen’s poetry
helped younger authors to combine private matters with public events, e.g.,
love affairs with participation in social protests and underground organi-
zations. They were connected with the so-called generation of New Pri-
vacy, poets who concentrated on their own Lebenswelt. Such a standpoint
became hard to maintain when the conflict between the government and
Solidarity erupted. During this period, the legacy of Polish romanticism,
especially the responsibility of a poet towards the nation, turned out to still
be felt very strongly, resulting in the clash of a dream of an individual life
free from social and political restraints and an obligation to engage in the
struggle of the nation. Thus, the former enchantment of Cohen’s poetry
and borrowed nostalgia for the world he described evolved into envy and
bitterness.
Characteristically, the next generation of poets who debuted in 1980s
showed no interest in engaging in a dialogue with Cohen. They respected
him as a ‘classic’, rather than ‘friend’ or ‘brother’, as had their older col-
leagues. For example, Marcin Świetlicki, perhaps the most esteemed Polish
poet of the 1990s and 2000s, wrote about Cohen’s albums in the literary
magazine Lampa, but in his own poetry has never made reference to Cohen
nor did he try to evoke Cohen’s mood or play with his metaphors. The
poem Piosenka starzejacego
˛ si˛e Leonarda Cohena (Song by ageing Leonard
Cohen) by Tomasz Titkow from the beginning of the 1990s, creates a cor-
dial but at the same time ironic picture of an old man who prepares himself
to pass away one day; it serves as an illustration of the attitude toward
Cohen of the poets born in the 1960s and later.
Cohen as ‘Honorary Citizen’ of Poland

We would like to devote the last part of this chapter to examining reasons
why Cohen was so popular in Poland. The first was the poetic quality of
his work. The second reason was the low level of contentious content in
his writings. Cohen’s songs are not overtly political and even those which
are a reflection of political events such as Lover Lover Lover, inspired by
Cohen seeing the bravery of Israeli soldiers fighting against Palestine, does
not convey pro-Israeli or anti-Palestine sentiments. If anything, it expresses
the idea that we are victims of cultures in which we are born and advocates
for breaking free from such entrapment. Cohen’s biographer, Sylvie Sim-
mons, mentions that Cohen was attracted to socialist ideas, from the time
he went to Jewish youth camps and in his twenties travelled to Cuba, being
fascinated by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. At the same time, he was less
than enthusiastic about the authoritarian regime he encountered there and
returned home disillusioned. Moreover, contrary to the stereotypical image
of a western liberal, Cohen was fascinated by war and violence, carried a
knife and cherished a gun his father used in the First World War (Sim-
mons 2013: 92–98). Although religious motifs abound in Cohen’s songs,
as exemplified by Susanne, Hallelujah, If This Be Your Will and You Want
It Darker, and many of Cohen’s songs have the form of a prayer, they can-
not be described as religious, because these motifs are taken out of their
primary religious context and are placed in a secular one. References to dif-
ferent religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Scientology intermingle
in them and the existence of a deity is often called into question, as in Who
by Fire, whose protagonist asks, ‘who is calling me?’. By and large, they con-
vey a certain quest for spirituality, ironically pertaining to people who lost
religious faith and live a largely secular life, yet do not want to completely
renounce the metaphysical aspect of religion from their existence.
It appears as if the author of these songs uses the Bible and other religious
texts to understand such secular, god-free lives. Such a magpie take on
religion also pertains to Cohen himself. He was brought up according
to the principles of Judaism and throughout his entire life observed the
Sabbath, but also since his childhood ‘loved Jesus’, in part because his
maid was Catholic and took him to church for Christmas. Later in his
life he also joined the Church of Scientology and spent several years in a
Buddhist monastery, observing a strict regime. One can conjecture that
such a take on religion, signifying religious tolerance and seeing religions
as manifestations of cultural rather than ideological and political difference,
suited a large part of the Polish intelligentsia. It was palpable to Catholics,
who might have enjoyed the frequent references to Jesus (and even the term
‘unborn child’, which became very contentious following the introduction
of a restrictive abortion law under the new regime), surpassing anything one
could find in Polish pop-rock, including sung poetry. It could also appeal
to Marxist atheists, who wanted religion to be reduced to an innocuous
anthropological pastime and those who were simply apolitical.
More importantly, perhaps, the position adopted by Cohen can be
described as an ‘internal refuge’ (or ‘internal emigration’). His focus is
on private, internal and spiritual life, rather than social and political activ-
ity, which characterises Dylan’s work; hence Footman describes him as the
‘Bedsit Bard’ (Footman 2009: 7). In Poland, as in Eastern Europe at large,
‘internal refuge’ was adopted widely during the period of state socialism
and was marked by external adherence to the rules imposed by the political
authorities, yet opposing them internally. Cohen’s work dignified such a
position, which could be seen as, ultimately, proof of one’s political confor-
mity or cowardice. On the other hand, it seems significant that the Polish
official press, in the period of martial law and afterwards, portrayed Cohen
as an apolitical poet and philosopher concerned with existential questions,
a hippie and a Buddhist intellectual longing for peace and happiness in the
world. The passivity of Cohen’s fans was convenient for the government,
as this meant that they would not openly challenge the status quo. By the
same token, it can be suggested that Cohen’s music was a useful tool for
‘putting the nation to sleep’.
Finally, we suggest that there is a fit between Cohen’s outlook and
what, following Raymond Williams, we describe as a ‘structure of feel-
ing’ (Matthews 2001) dominating in Poland. Cohen’s outlook is that of
‘optimism despite pessimism’. The protagonist of Cohen’s songs is aware

that he will lose or even already lost his battles, but he goes on neverthe-
less and even shows some pride about his condition. Loss is announced at
the beginning of some of Cohen’s most distinguished songs concerning
war, such as The Partisan, whose protagonist is ‘cautioned to surrender’
or in Nevermind where ‘the war was lost, the treaty signed’. However, the
same songs convey defiance, unwillingness to give up. ‘I must go on, the
frontiers are my prison’, states the protagonist of The Partisan. Defeat is
also a point of departure in Cohen’s songs about love. They begin when
the affair is over or is about to finish. The Suzannes, Nancys and Janes of
Cohen’s songs are inhabitants of his memory, not women with whom he
is presently in love. In this context it is also worth mentioning that the title
of Cohen’s second novel is Beautiful Losers. The protagonist of Cohen’s
songs also, in a somewhat Foucaldian fashion, expresses scepticism in the
possibility of finding truth, as expressed in Nevermind: ‘There’s truth that
lives and truth that dies. I don’t know which. So never mind’.
Like a man from Cohen’s songs, the archetypal character of Polish cul-
ture, originating in Polish romantic poetry, is also a ‘dignified loser’. He
goes to war and uprising knowing that his chance of victory is close to
zero. Perhaps he even secretly wants to lose, because victory will mean his
suffering is over and he becomes like everybody else. Being a loser does
not undermine his social standing; it affords him sympathy and admira-
tion. Again, Cohen dignified such a position, which in the Poland of the
1970s and the 1980s lost some of its traction and even became an object of
ridicule, helping to locate it in a more universal context. Thanks to Cohen,
the ‘Polish loser’ found himself in a cosmopolitan company.
Conclusions: Imaginary Cohen vs. Real Cohen

The poetical value, moderate political engagement and concentration on
private, emotional and spiritual dimensions of life and sympathy for losers of
Cohen’s songs well suited the Polish late socialism era and some aspects of
Polish culture in general. However, Polish covers of Cohen’s songs ‘macho-
ised’ the original, and Polish poets had very ambiguous emotions toward
Cohen behind manifested adoration of his poetry. Many people in Poland
had expected Cohen to take a position in politics and show his support
for the Solidarity movement, which had been repressed under martial law.
These expectations—demands even—caused tension when Cohen came to
Poland for the first time in 1985. During his Warsaw concert he stated what
was his own position towards political struggles in Poland of the 1980s:
You know, I come from a country where we do not have the same struggles
as you have. I respect your struggles. And it may surprise you, but I respect
both sides of this struggle. It seems to be that in Europe there needs to be a
left foot and a right foot to move forward…. My song has no flag, my song
has no party. And I say the prayer, that we said in our synagogue, I say it for
the leader of your union and the leader of your party. May the Lord put a
spirit, a wisdom and understanding into the hearts of your leaders and into
the hearts of all their councillors.
Zembaty remembered that the statement about left and right feet had
horrified the Polish audience, which had been waiting for an endorsement
of Solidarity. In fact, the audience remained in complete silence until Cohen
mentioned the name of the anti-government movement. Cohen’s main
Polish translator claimed in his book that an even more cold and aggressive
reaction, including whistling and angry screams, had been caused by the
words about the extermination of Jewish society on Polish soil (Zembaty
2002: 187). Cohen’s Jewish ancestry was regularly recalled in the Polish
press and welcomed by a Philo-Semitic part of the Polish intelligentsia,
especially in the middle of the 1980s. This attitude followed the screening
of Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann in Polish cinemas, for the first time
a public discussion about Polish complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Jews
took place. At the time it was acceptable among some sections of the intel-
ligentsia to show interest in Jewish history and culture; that was the case
of Pawlak who in some poems drew on the ‘Jewish’ topics. Many Polish
intellectuals had Jewish origins and, like Kleyff, meditated what did it mean
to be a Jew in Poland after the war and especially during the March 1968
anti-Semitic purges. Still, this was not a universal position. A similar com-
ment to that by Zambaty was made by the critic Daniel Passent in his review
of Warsaw’s concert: When Cohen made a joke about his bar mitzvah, the
listeners became silent, not knowing how to respond (Passent 1985). The
reactions of Warsaw audiences contrasted with those at the later party in
honour of Cohen given in the Canadian Embassy, where elites from oppos-
ing sides appeared and Cohen was applauded as a hero from the ‘Imaginary
West’.
The concert as a confrontation between the real Cohen and the imag-
inary one, the figure created by his Polish fans, unveiled tensions and
contradictions that the Polish audience did not want to confront. Cer-
tainly it was much easier to cultivate the image of ‘Polish Cohen’ who
seemed to be at the same time ‘one of us’, while making Poles feel better
about themselves thanks to coming from the West (hence from a better
world), and creating work that was of a high quality and had a certain sur-
plus of meaning, which allowed its consumers to adjust it to their views
and sensibilities.
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CHAPTER 4
Authenticity and Orientalism: Cultural

Appropriations in the Polish Alternative
Music Scene in the 1970s and 1980s
Xawery Stańczyk
The penchant for exotic, ethnic and oriental motifs was present in Polish
postwar culture, and especially in Polish music, from the late 1940s to the
end of the century and can be still found in contemporary genres despite
racist and Islamophobic attitudes that have arisen in the last few years in
Poland. In the 1950s, rumba, samba, cha-cha and other Latino rhythms
and dances enjoyed great popularity despite attempts by the Polish United
Workers’ Party to reduce the circulation of this ‘cosmopolitan’ music. After
the decline of the doctrine of socialist realism in 1956, there were no longer
clear rules of what was compatible with socialist culture and what had to be
censored and rejected. Thus, in the 1960s, jazz and blues were presented
as the original music of the black working-class communities exploited by
capitalist oppressors in the United States of America, while rock’n roll had
to be euphemistically renamed as ‘big beat’ and ethnicised by the inclusion
X. Stańczyk (B)
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw,
Poland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_4
76 X. STAŃCZYK
of Polish folk motifs in order to escape accusations of carrying the messages

of bourgeois decadence. Bob Dylan could be officially acclaimed as a hero
of social resistance against American militarism and aggression and, at the
same time, he served as the epitome of dissident culture for Polish hippies
and political activists challenging the authorities. The Party demanded mass
entertainment that would suit socialist principles while at the same time
requiring the entertainment industry to generate profit with its activities.
All the ideological and economic problems and contradictions of the
music industry in the Polish People’s Republic had repercussions on the
alternative music scene that emerged in the cultural underground of the
1980s. As with most countercultural phenomena, it is easier to describe
what the alternative music scene was against than what were its specific
values, attitudes and styles. Many endeavours undertaken in both journal-
istic and academic writing about the alternative scene and its contemporary
legacy, aiming to define the scene, draw borders around it, and specify its
core values were founded on numerous misconceptions that stemmed from
the ideological dichotomy between the state and society, the ‘mainstream’
and the ‘alternative’, the Party and the people. In contrast to such attempts,
I began to search for flows and fluidity instead of borders, relationships
and dependencies instead of strict classifications, continuous interruptions,
tensions, and conflicts instead of stable hierarchies and structures. From
this point of view, the presence of Oriental and exotic motifs in the alter-
native music scene is a striking case of how the ideological, economic,
and aesthetic influences and dependencies of the mainstream music scene
intertwined with what was perceived as an alternative society’s resistance
to the system. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon. The
band Osjan (English: Ossian), playing improvisations and so-called world
music, represented many values associated with the alternative scene but
at the same time served as an export product of the Polish music busi-
ness to western markets. Did the popularity and commercial success of the
reggae group Daab undermine their authenticity and cast them out of the
alternative milieu?
Stanisław Tokarski, a professor of the Oriental Department of the Jagiel-
lonian University, as well as a judoka and expert in Hindi philosophy, wrote
in his 1984 book, Orient i kontrkultury (Orient and Countercultures ), that
youth rebellion in western countries in the 1960s was a ‘genetic’ continua-
tion of the previous dissent in colonial countries, especially India (Tokarski
1984: 8). The self-orientalisation of western youth was, from this perspec-
tive, an effect of the clash of civilisations; that was how members of the
4 AUTHENTICITY AND ORIENTALISM: CULTURAL APPROPRIATIONS … 77
counterculture reacted to the war in Vietnam and other instances of US

imperialism. Tokarski argued that Indian youth resistance against West-
ernisation and colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s served as a structural
blueprint for the American youth resistance against their own dominant
culture in the 1960s (Tokarski 1984: 13). From Tokarski’s viewpoint, the
orientalisation of western culture was not a matter of cultural appropria-
tion but an ‘expansion’ and the ‘conquest of another civilization’ by the
currents of Indian philosophy (Tokarski 1984: 140). If the West was cul-
turally conquered by the Orient, where was the place of Eastern European
socialist countries?
In this chapter, I will focus on two distinct features of the alternative
music scene in the Polish People’s Republic: authenticity and Orientalism. I
will argue that both played a major role in the alternative scene though they
were present in the mainstream culture as well, if in slightly different forms.
In the context of underground music, the moral aspiration of being authen-
tic, spontaneous and free from social constraints led to the appropriation of
images, ideas, styles, and genres of other cultures, perceived as genuine and
original, subjugated by the powerful, threatening regimes but also retain-
ing the memory of venerable rituals. The social construction of authenticity
in alternative lifestyles was connected to one’s perceived otherness from the
social majority and actually invented otherness against both the dominant
culture and the suppressive political power. The practice of playing the
Other—starting as an act of social resistance and cultural differentiation—
was an instrumental usage of elements of ‘exotic’ cultures, which conveys
more meanings about Polish culture than any other. I will concentrate on
the period from the second half of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s
because that is when the most intensive growth of the alternative music
circuit took place. I will use the terms ‘alternative’ and ‘underground’ inter-
changeably, but ‘alternative’ will primarily refer to the style and attitude of
the participants of the scene while the word ‘underground’ will highlight
the autonomous, informal and unofficial character of the scene.
My work is informed by articles from the two official Polish music mag-
azines of the 1970s and 1980s, Non Stop and Jazz Magazyn Muzyczny. I
also rely on underground fanzines, of which QQRYQ was the most influ-
ential. In my research of the alternative scene and alternative culture in
the Polish People’s Republic, I did several interviews with participants as
well as observers of the scene. Finally, I considered music albums (vinyl
and cassettes), radio charts, video clips, documentary footage of concerts,
festivals, and other events.
78 X. STAŃCZYK
Methodological Framework
In his 1996 book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globaliza-
tion, Arjun Appadurai remarked that in American newspapers, ‘Eastern
Europe is used to show that tribalism is deeply human, that other peo-
ple’s nationalism is tribalism writ large, and that territorial sovereignty is
still the major goal of many large ethnic groups’ (Appadurai 1996: 20).
In opposition to these claims of the Western liberal press, Appadurai per-
ceived Eastern Europe as ‘the modal instance of the complexities of all
contemporary ethnonationalisms’ (ibid.: 20). Showing how the ‘tribal’ and
‘territorial’ image of Eastern Europe was constructed by the western lib-
eral and affluent intellectual strata, Appadurai emphasized the end of the
simple, polarized world of centres and colonies, North and South, and the
emergence of a globalized world of cultural flows and tensions between
homogeneity and heterogeneity. For that ‘complex, overlapping, disjunc-
tive order’ of the global cultural economy (ibid.: 32), Eastern Europe with
its engrained identity problems would suit as the case in point. Hence,
Appadurai’s theory of flows and -scapes, with the decisive role of ‘imagi-
nation as a social practice’ (ibid.: 31), offers a nuanced perspective on the
question of Orientalism in the alternative music scene in socialist Poland.
According to Edward W. Said, Orientalism is far from a simple reflection
of political interest on the sphere of culture:
It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly,

economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration
[…] of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discov-
ery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and soci-
ological description, not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than
expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control,
manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative
and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct,
corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is pro-
duced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped
to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial
establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative
linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural
(as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with
ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we”
do). (Said 2003: 13)
As regards the Polish alternative music scene, the relevant part of Said’s
arguments concerns the will to manifest a different world. I argue that
musicians, critics, and activists of the music scene displayed genuine interest
in ‘Oriental’ and ‘exotic’ cultures, actively sought information about them,
promoted their melodies, ideas, and values, and were proud of all such
activities performed against the cultural national homogenization fostered
by mass media. Orientalism conceived as a discourse of the alternative scene
with its own specific rhetoric and axiology had to do more with Polish
culture and Polish society of late socialism than about the (imagined) Other,
whose mask was worn by participants of the alternative circuit. Moreover,
the similarity of the mask and the original is far less important than the
gesture of using it. As Said asserts:
The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices,
historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation
nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation
is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could
represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for
the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. (ibid.: 22)
Accordingly, I will not examine whether images and fantasies of living in

India or Africa circulating in Polish alternative culture were close enough
to the historical truth, but instead I will ask about their functions and
construction.
The Orientalist engagement in depicting the East, drive for knowledge
and efforts in understanding the Orient seem to be in contrast with the
‘banal exoticism’ of popular music described by Ewa Mazierska:
Banal exoticism in popular music takes place when the composer or performer
limits him/herself to appropriating superficial aspects of a far-away culture,
such as well-known foreign words, locations or melodies, and intensifies their
presence, by granting them a privileged place in the text, most importantly in
the title or repetition, and dehistoricizes them, by creating a timeless image
of a specific site and its culture. (Mazierska 2018: 49)
Mazierska noted that Orientalism ‘can be regarded as a type of exoticism’

and the two often intermingle (ibid.: 48). Banal exoticism, similarly to the
concept of banal nationalism introduced by Michael Billig, is based on daily
routines and is reproduced by mundane practices of the citizens of national
states, far from political extremism or heated emotions that western elites
80 X. STAŃCZYK
like to connect with the idea of ‘hot’ nationalism, which can be located on
the peripheries (Billig 1995: 7). Mazierska identified such ‘exotic’ motifs
as banally integrated into popular music of the Polish People’s Republic.
The Orientalism of the alternative music scene was rarely banal; partici-
pants of the scene were often deeply interested in the ‘exotic’ cultures and
self-consciously imitated their musical or visual features. I argue that this
purposeful and well-informed Orientalism of the alternative scene was the
reverse of the banal exoticism of the music mainstream and a response to it.
There was, naturally, a lot of banality in the exotic tropes and statements of
the cultural underground too. Nevertheless, authenticity as the main value
and the communication frame of the alternative scene made the Orientalist
engagement more desirable and appreciated by public.
The ideal of authenticity was described by Charles Taylor, who con-
ceived it as a phenomenon of modern civilization, as characterized by,
firstly, individualism (or even narcissism) against the backdrop of moral
horizons; secondly, the rise of the instrumental reason; and thirdly, the loss
of political control and therefore decrease of freedom. The culture that
came into being with these processes is the culture of authenticity with
its goal of self-fulfillment. The ideal standing behind these goals could be
rendered with the phrase ‘being true to myself’. This meant, in the words
of Taylor, ‘being true to my own originality, and that is something only
I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself.
I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own’ (Taylor 2003: 29).
In the era of late state socialism in Poland, alternative culture could be
understood exactly as a culture of authenticity with all its contradictions of
the social conformity to perform as an original and self-conscious human
being. Moreover, as far as musical values are concerned, authenticity was
not only a formidable moral force but a frame of communication as well,
especially in genres such as improvised music, or in punk where it was not
important if you played well or not, provided you were true and natural
(whatever that means). From this perspective Polish folk music could be
as authentic as Jamaican reggae or ‘tribal’ rhythms of punk. For example,
on the famous 1985 Polton LP Fala (The Wave), one could find songs by
the reggae bands Izrael, Bakshish, and Kultura; punk and new wave groups
Prowokacja, Siekiera, Abaddon, Tilt, Dezerter, and Kryzys; congas music
project Rio Ras; and Polish folk musician Józef Broda.
The opposition between ‘authentic’ creativity and ‘commercial’ or ‘en-
tertainment’ production preceded the neoliberal economic changes and
could be observed in the discourse of the music press beginning in the
late 1970s. The crucial change in the music discourse occurred in the years
1979–1981, paving the way for the ‘boom’ of Polish rock in the early
1980s, and was connected with the invention of ‘youth’ as the privileged
segment of music consumers. The shift was most visible in Non Stop, a
monthly magazine with strong personal links with the music and entertain-
ment industry. The editors and journalists of this magazine made systematic
inquiries about the tastes of its listeners—the consumers of the products
of the industry that the magazine represented. But the editorial staff of
Non Stop not only observed their audience and engaged in dialogue with
their readers; they, in fact, sided with young music fans and consequently
highly valued the authenticity of their musical choices. The very meaning
of the term ‘authentic’ in music discourse evolved from ‘true’, ‘sincere’,
‘real’ to the more sophisticated sense of behaving in accordance with one’s
own nature, character or emotions. For example, critics started to describe
the ‘authenticity’ of loud and insubordinate behaviour of rock fans during
concerts as the specific habits that should not be demonized. The obscene
gestures and shouts of punk and new wave bands were perceived, like-
wise, as an ‘authentic’ expression of the young musicians. The link between
authenticity and youth is crucial because the alternative music scene of that
time was represented mostly by young musicians, cultural animators, and
activists, and was widely recognized as the space of the youth. Hence, the
alternative youth became the main possessor of authenticity or even more,
the alternative youth embodied the value of authenticity (Rachubińska and
Stańczyk 2016: 184–186).
‘The music we declare to be “authentic” is the music we “appropriate”’,
stated Allan Moore, explaining how the ‘white urban bourgeois youth’
carry out appropriations of the actions by some ‘naı̈ve’ individuals—the
authenticated absent (Moore 2002: 219). The distinction between ‘au-
thentic’ and ‘commercial’ is prevalent in the history of popular music from
Elvis Presley on, distinguishing (authentic) rock from (inauthentic) pop
and a lot of ensuing oppositions of genres, styles, and techniques. Starting
with an assumption that ‘‘authenticity’ is a matter of interpretation, which
is made and fought for from within a cultural—and thus historicised—posi-
tion. It is ascribed, not inscribed”, Moore claimed that one should ask not
what (piece of music, album, genre, instrument, performance) but who is
being authenticated (ibid.: 210). He recognized three types of authenticity.
The first of them, ‘first person authenticity’, is based on the criterion of the
honest expression of cultural experience, which in rock discourse means the
unmediated expression of emotions; while in punk ‘authenticity is assured
82 X. STAŃCZYK
by ‘reflecting back’ to an earlier authentic practice’ (ibid.: 213). This kind

of authenticity of the artist may be guaranteed by his or her denial of com-
mercial ventures or by the rejection of technological mediation. The clue is
‘an interpretation of the perceived expression of an individual on the part
of an audience’, hence Moore called this type alternatively an ‘authentic-
ity of expression’. The second type is ‘third person authenticity’, based on
the local, vernacular, original expressions of culture that are appropriated
by musicians who ‘discover’ them and identify with them. Such invented
traditions are authenticated by the artists who bring them to a broader
audience, as in the case of the black blues musicians ‘discovered’ by Eric
Clapton and other guitarists who imitated their style, thereby achieving
authenticity by authenticating them. The same is the case for non-western
artists who should act in accordance to the western romantic idealization of
pre-industrial communities and original identities. This kind of authenticity,
‘authenticity of execution’, ‘arises when a performer succeeds in conveying
the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded
within a tradition of performance’ (ibid.: 218). Finally, there is the ‘second
person authenticity’, the ‘authenticity of experience’, ‘which occurs when
a performance succeeds in conveying the impression to a listener that the
listener’s experience of life is being validated, that the music is “telling it
like it is” for them’ (ibid.: 22).
The separation of these three authenticities is purely analytical; in reality,
they always occur simultaneously and intersect with one another. However,
it is helpful to identify which one is dominant in a specific situation. In the
case of the Polish alternative music scene, the punk bands represented pri-
marily the authenticity of expression while the reggae, dub, ska and world
music groups acquired their authenticity mainly from non-western artists
and ideas of life far from modern civilization. The whole alternative scene,
integrated with its audience and functioning in the autonomous commu-
nicational circuit of fanzines and underground publishing, was based on
the authenticity of a common experience of young musicians, their crews,
fans, and activists organizing events.
The Alternative Music Scene in the Poland of State

Socialism
Today, the legacy of alternative culture has become a type of symbolic cap-
ital that many social actors, both individuals and institutions, try to appro-
priate for their own goals. For example, the Polish Institute of National
Remembrance put the 1980s underground into the wide concept of the
highly politicized, nationalist and conservative ‘independent culture’, con-
nected with the Solidarity trade union and anti-government opposition.
From this perspective, the main function of the underground was to express
the moods of youth groups and individuals who were antagonistic toward
the socialist regime (Toborek 2010). Another point of view is offered by
the memories, recollections, and autobiographies of veterans of alternative
culture who are interested in documentation and demonstration of their
own specific experiences and achievements (Konnak 2012). There are also
art historians, who search for formal connections and similarities between
music pieces, performances, and genres with currents present in the field
of visual and performance arts (Crowley and Muzyczuk 2016; Lisowski
2017). My aim here is to locate the underground practices and ideas in
their own sociocultural contexts.
One of the first endeavours to describe the specific features of the alter-
native culture was made in 1989 by journalist and poet Robert Tekieli
in the literary magazine Brulion. Tekieli wrote an essay titled ‘Fuckty’: a
combination of the words ‘facts’ (Polish: ‘fakty’) and ‘fuck’ (Tekieli 1989:
168). Tekieli was at the time one of the few advocates of alternative culture
among authors of officially published journals—he promoted underground
graffiti, poetry, and ideas in his magazine. He was especially fascinated by
the Totart collective: a liquid group of artists, poets, musicians and per-
formers who helped create the 1980s underground network. Writing about
Totart, the Orange Alternative movement, New Expression paintings, graf-
fiti, fanzines, punk bands and other elements of the alternative milieu,
Tekieli acknowledged that the attempt to define this movement must end
in failure. Nonetheless, he referred to some categories that were funda-
mental to the underground as a whole: movement, a postulate of activity,
fluidity, changeability, non-Polish-centredness, creativeness, transgression,
rejection of prevailing structures, building an alternative, self-reliance, indi-
vidualism, authenticity and spontaneity, cooperation, a primacy of imagi-
nation and authentic contact (ibid.: 168).
In its heyday the music underground in the Polish People’s Republic
took the shape of a wide platform, rather than a monolith with a single
perspective, strategy and direction. The participants were mostly students,
in many cases affiliated with official socialist youth organizations and insti-
tutions like students’ clubs, galleries, theatres and cultural centres. They
used both official locations and infrastructure and unofficial, private or
vacant spaces for concerts and gatherings. They also travelled extensively
84 X. STAŃCZYK
from city to city and town to town, to meet other alternative youngsters,
distribute papers, leaflets or cassettes, or just have fun during music festi-
vals, from the official Rock Musicians’ Festival in Jarocin to secret Hyde
Parks organized by anarchists in the countryside. The social network of
the alternative music scene was created by being together at such events,
as well as through the practice of listening to the same music and sharing
albums and fanzines. The sense of belonging was located in the frames
of authenticity adopted by members of this network; these frames made
possible communication among punks, Rastafarians, anarchists, pacifists,
Buddhists, and radical artists.
The history of the alternative music scene in Poland started in the late
1960s when some new currents appeared on the margin of mainstream rock
‘n roll and popular entertainment bands. The niche character and hippie
style of the marginal groups gained them the name of the underground
or ‘the avant-garde of the beat’. The bands represented different styles
in music, from psychedelic rock (Nurt and Romuald i Roman) through
jazz-rock (Grupa Kalisz), to intuitive and experimental music (Zdrój Jana,
Grupa w Składzie). Grupa w Składzie (In English, Composition of the
Group), Nirwana, 74 Grupa Biednych (In English 74th Group of the Poor)
and some other underground bands had in their repertoire ‘Oriental’ motifs
and used instruments from India and the Far East as early as the beginning
of the 1970s. A few years later, musicians from the underground bands of
that period became the leading Orientalists on the Polish popular music
scene. Many of them remained active, despite their marginal status, until
the late 1970s, when with the beginnings of punk and post-punk, the
alternative scene started to take its shape. Hence, they were pioneers of
the underground music as well as of Polish Orientalism. Milo Kurtis, Jacek
Ostaszewski, Marek Jackowski and Wojciech Waglewski were the central
figures.
In the 1970s, with the increasing number of students in Polish univer-
sities on the one hand, and the increasing influences of Western counter-
culture on the other, the so-called students’ culture, which developed under
the patronage of official students’ organizations, adopted more radical
forms. Young artists, musicians, poets, performers, and activists gradually
became conscious that their socioeconomic positions were quite similar
despite being active in different domains. The cost of living for a student,
in particular one from an intelligentsia background, was relatively inexpen-
sive in Poland of late state socialism, and so was cultural activity under the
umbrella of students’ unions. According to Sławomir Magala, the students’
culture offered artistic freedom because it served as a transmission belt from

the Party’s officials to the young activists, and at the same time, as a buffer
between students’ milieu and the state authorities (Magala 2011: 47).
While in the 1980s the official culture and political rhetoric became
more nationalistic and conservative, the alternative music scene shared the
values of cultural exchange and common responsibility for the world that
had previously been promoted by the socialist state. From the first punk
concert in Poland, by the British group The Raincoats during the Inter-
national Artists’ Meeting festival in 1978 in Riviera-Remont, the music
underground was a transnational phenomenon, in contrast to the domi-
nant Polish national culture. Contacts with foreign music scenes, via letters,
fanzines, radio, and personal acquaintances were essential for establishing
the alternative music scene in Poland. Unsurprisingly, most of the links
with the wider world were to Western Europe and North America. Edi-
tors of the most influential Polish hardcore-punk fanzines ‘Antena Krzyku’
and ‘QQRYQ’ were inspired by western magazines like ‘Fallout’, ‘Toxic
Waste’, ‘Maximum Rocknroll’, and ‘Flipside’.
Those members of the Polish alternative scene who were more interested
in ethnic music from India, the Far East, and other parts of the globe
other than the American and Western European hardcore-punk, also drew
information from press and publications they received from Germany, Italy,
Great Britain, France, and the United States. Correspondence and fanzine
exchanges with individuals from Eastern and Southeastern Europe (mainly
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia) were scarcer than with western
countries, while similar connections with the Middle East or Central Asia
were exceptional. The fascination with ‘Oriental’ and ‘exotic’ music was,
at least partially, mediated by the West.
Searching for Authenticity: From Banal Exoticism

to Orientalist Knowledge
Orientalism in Polish music took three forms: banal exoticism popular in
Polish music after the war; ideologically motivated ennoblement of ethnic
and folk music, both local and foreign; and the quest for an authenticity
and originality in the theatre of Jerzy Grotowski and his followers that
preceded similar endeavours in music. In the 1940s and 1950s, Latino
music—rumbas, sambas, cha-chas—satisfied the demands for light, cheer-
ful music to celebrate life after the end of the Nazi occupation. Singers like
Maria Koterbska and Natasza Zylska or bands such as Tercet Egzotyczny
86 X. STAŃCZYK
entertained their audience with fantasies of relaxation, joy and love in the
hot, tropical countries of South America and the Caribbean. The con-
ventional, artificial quality of these representations of ‘exotic’ cultures was
very clear for listeners who longed for illusions of an easy going life in
the times of real hardship, as suggested by the names of all-female vocal
bands like Filipinki and Alibabki, which obviously had nothing in common
with the Philippines and the tale of Ali Baba. However, it was the latter
group, which, perhaps for the first time, took Caribbean music seriously
and in 1965 recorded the single W rytmach Jamajca Ska (To the Rhythms
of Jamaican Ska). Today the record is celebrated as the cornerstone of Pol-
ish reggae, but in 1965 probably nobody besides a few connoisseurs had
heard about this musical genre. As in the first of the four songs on the single
Alibabki sang repeatedly ‘dykcja’ (diction), one could conjecture that ska
music served as a vocal exercise for the band members. In the song, there
was no representation of exotic life in Jamaica, neither realist nor imaginary.
But there was certainly an attempt to embrace the unfamiliar rhythms and
the way of singing of ska. By the 1980s reggae and ska had been banally
included in the Polish pop-rock mainstream, for example in the songs W
tym domu straszy by Homo Homini band in 1975 or Reggae o pierwszych
wynalazach (Reggae about the first inventors ) by Maria Jeżowska.
The second form stemmed from the official declaration of the People’s
Republic but had pre-war provenance as well. Piotr Korduba described how
Cepelia, the Polish union of cooperatives producing and selling folk art and
traditional handicraft objects, from furniture to utensils, was organized by
members of the associations and institutions dedicated to the development
and popularization of folk art before the war. Cepelia and the whole folk
craftsmanship industry in socialist Poland was a logical continuation of
the previous initiatives and as such secured the state’s patronage (Korduba
2013: 133–145). The popularization of folk motifs was perceived by the
authorities as necessary to change people’s tastes, especially to eliminate a
preference for petit bourgeois decorations and heavy furniture that would
not fit in the new small flats in high-rising prefabricated estates. In the
1960s and later, the trend popularized in glossy magazines was to mix
folk fabrics and decorative elements with modern pieces of equipment, in
a fusion of tradition and modernity (ibid.: 229–251). A similar situation
could be observed in fashion and music. The two main song and dance
ensembles—Mazowsze and Śl˛ask—were established in 1948 and 1953,
respectively, but the model of such ensembles dated back to pre-war times.
In the 1950s and later, there were also many smaller, often amateur,
ensembles affiliated with regional entertainment enterprises or even facto-

ries where workers formed choirs. Both Mazowsze and Śl˛ask were socially
prestigious, ideologically necessary and profitable. Both groups explored
the musical traditions from different regions of Poland but each formed
their own eclectic styles; Śl˛ask’s shows were even depicted as ‘folk operas’
(Bittner 2017: 116). When rock ‘n roll came to Poland, euphemistically
named ‘big beat’, it had to incorporate Polish folk motifs into the songs
to get official legitimization. Karolina Bittner described it as ‘big beat
folklorism’ (ibid.: 138), drawing on the concept of folklorism as an arbi-
trary, artificial, spectacular representation of folk culture fabricated for a
mass audience (Burszta 1974: 299). Big beat bands like Niebiesko-Czarni,
Trubadurzy, Skaldowie, and No To Co put together rock music with folk-
lore, recording new guitar versions of the traditional songs or new com-
positions enriched with traditional instruments. A youth folklore festival
has been organized in Miechów since 1970. Since 1979, journalist Włodz-
imierz Kleszcz has promoted folk and world music on the airwaves of Polish
Radio.
Thirdly, there were Orientalist trends in Polish philosophy, theatre and
visual arts that preceded its appearance in music. It was Jerzy Grotowski,
the creator of ‘poor theatre’, who popularized Indian philosophy from the
late 1950s and gave lectures at the Pod Jaszczurami club in Cracow in
1957 and 1958. Grotowski was also known for his deep engagement with
the philosophical traditions of Islam and Judaism, studying books about
Kabbalah and Hasidism (Kolankiewicz 2001: 330). After three journeys to
India in the late 1960s he broke with the traditional theatre and focused
on genuine, interpersonal relationships, explored and intensified in a series
of mystery rituals and workshops. The culmination of these activities was
the Theatre of Sources, which traced Grotowski’s and his collaborators’
ethnographic trips to Haiti, Mexico, India, and other countries before he
emigrated to the United States in 1982. The co-workers and students who
stayed in Poland continued the exploration of traditional myths and rituals
in search of authenticity in the vein of an anthropological theatre. For
instance, in the 1980s, the Gardzienice group undertook expeditions into
the countryside in eastern Poland in search for relics of the original folk
customs and ceremonies.
Orientalism was prevalent in Polish theatre and philosophy before it
found its way into music, enhanced by the omnipresence of folk and ethnic
motifs on the one hand, and banal exoticism on the other. The exploration
of ‘Oriental’ sounds and music structures was, of course, intensified by
88 X. STAŃCZYK
western counter-cultural fascination with the Orient, which was echoed in

Poland, especially after the release of the Beatles’ White Album in 1968.
The geopolitical situation was also favourable, with close contacts between
Poland and the non-aligned countries in Africa and Asia, above all with
India after the historic visit of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to
Poland in 1955 and the subsequent visit of the Polish head of the govern-
ment Józef Cyrankiewicz to Delhi in 1957. Alongside political and eco-
nomic contacts, cultural initiatives were established, including the Indo-
Polish Friendship Association with branches in even small Polish towns.
In the 1960s the association became a favourite space for Polish hippies
who were interested in the practices of yoga, Indian religion and philoso-
phy, and of course music traditions. Similar political and cultural exchanges
flourished between Poland and many non-aligned countries from Asia and
Africa. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of African students studied at Pol-
ish universities, many of them choosing to stay in Poland after their gradua-
tion. Visits of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and Ethiopian emperor
Haile Selassie to Poland in 1961 were obvious signs of the importance of
relations with Africa for the Polish government.
Underground bands, beginning in the late 1960s, embraced this first
strand of Orientalism in Polish music. Grupa w Składzie, set up about
1971 by Milo (Dimitrios) Kurtis, Andrzej Kasprzyk and Jacek ‘Krokodyl’
Malicki with regular participation of Witold Popiel and Andrzej ‘Amok’
Turczynowicz (though the musicians had been jamming together since
1968) illustrate this point. The band, linked with the famous hippie com-
mune in Ożarów near Warsaw (Sipowicz 2008: 340), had many links to
Warsaw’s independent, neo-avant garde galleries like Dziekanka, Sigma and
Repassage, the Indo-Polish Friendship Association, and the jazz club ‘Jajo
pełne muzyki’ (English: The Egg Full of Music). The musicians partici-
pating in this project were mostly non-professional ones; the only member
of the band who had gone to music school was Kurtis, the son of Greek
political migrants who settled in Poland in the 1950s (Strzelczyk 2013:
5–8). The ‘exotic’ appearance of Kurtis made him a stranger in the eyes of
the homogenous Polish postwar society; he was mistakenly thought to be
a Jew—a symbol of the Other in Polish culture—so his Orientalist interests
could be understood as a conscious play with his public identity. The band
originally and wittily combined ethnic music with free jazz and intuitive
music in the style of Karlheinz Stockhausen. They adopted the pentatonic
scale and some traditional Asian instruments, such as the Japanese flute.
After Grupa w Składzie disbanded in 1975, its members established several
other bands. Among them were Grupa Swobodnej Improwizacji (Group

of Loose Improvisation) founded in 1977 by Turczynowicz, Grupa Wolnej
Improwizacji (Group of Free Improvisation) formed in 1971 by Malicki,
Andrzej Bieżan, Zdzisław Piernik, but also Władysław Chyla, and Dżu Dżu
Band created by Popiel, Kasprzyk, Piotr Rodowicz, and Jerzy Kutyłow-
icz in 1975. During the 1970s, Turczynowicz also organized so-called
Sound Clubs in Warsaw’s student club Remont and popularized ethnic
music from other continents. However, the most influential and critically
acclaimed band was Ossian, established in 1970, by Jacek Ostaszewski,
Marek Jackowski and Tomasz Hołuj. Ostaszewski and Jacowski were pre-
viously members of Anawa, fronted by singer-songwriter Marek Grechuta.
The latter, renowned for putting together pop-rock idiom with the Pol-
ish tradition of sung poetry, recorded with Anawa the album Korowód in
1971. The opening song, Widzieć wi˛ecej, was composed by Jackowski who
played guitar in the style of a sitar. With Ossian, Jackowski and Ostaszewski
deepened their Orientalist fascinations and were widely praised by critics.
In 1975, Ostaszewski, Jackowski, and Hołuj recorded the album Ossian,
which featured gongs, flutes, dholak, and tabla. The compositions were
inspired by different music traditions based on intensive rhythms evoking
ritual trances.
Even before the release of the first album, Ossian had already been recog-
nized as experts in music Orientalism. In 1973, in Gliwice, the fifth National
Seminar of Contemporary Music was held. The main subject of the event
gathering musicians, critics, and journalists was ‘Oriental music and con-
temporary music’; its participants were asked whether the popularity of
Eastern art and philosophy in Poland was just a trend, a Polish snobbery
borrowed from the West, or something with deeper roots (Radziejowska
1973: 11). The answer was ambiguous: some Orientalist musicians were
sheer opportunists while others—among them, Ossian—approached East-
ern musical traditions and their structures with the comprehension and
subtlety of genuine researchers. Thus, Radziejowska contended, Ossian
did not just play Hindi music according to its own laws, but enriched it
with the creative power of the three personalities, making out of it ‘beau-
tiful, clearly jazz improvisation’ (ibid.: 11). In other words, the composi-
tions of Ossian incorporated the Orientalist fantasy of a culturally enriching
encounter between East and West, rather than offering a banal imitation
of ‘Oriental’ schemes.
Kurtis joined Ossian in 1976 and stayed in the band until he emigrated
to the United States in 1985. Interestingly, after his departure, three other
90 X. STAŃCZYK
Greek musicians joined the group: guitarist Antymos Apostolis, drummer

Sarandis Juvanidis and vocalist Jorgos Skolias. Meanwhile, the band was
joined by globetrotter, writer, and percussionist Radosław Nowak; artist,
drummer, and one of the first Polish maker of conga drums, Jerzy ‘Słoma’
Słomiński; and Wojciech Waglewski, guitarist and composer who in the
early 1970s created, with Michał Urbaniak, two other Orientalist bands:
Zen and Nirwana. Ossian also worked with the artist Jerzy Bereś, playing
music during his liturgy-inspired performances. Throughout the 1970s
and 1980s, Ossian attracted the most inventive, Orientalist musicians and,
despite changes in membership, played concerts that were regularly com-
pared to tribal rituals, trances, and mystical self-transcendence experiences.
In the late 1970s, the Polish Jazz Association made Ossian its top ‘ex-
port product’. The band gave countless concerts in West Germany and
other Western European countries. Their albums received warm approval
from critics. Five albums in two decades, released even during an economic
recession on the threshold of the 1980s, when the music industry almost
collapsed, serve to further corroborate the prestige acquired by the group.
Thus, Ossian was a rare success of alternative culture, strikingly different
from the mainstream scene and both an esteemed and profitable avant-
garde initiative.
Who Could Live in Africa?

Ten years after the emergence of the first music underground, in the early
1980s, the boom of punk, reggae, ska, ethnic music and the entire wave of
fascination with vernacular and minor genres, the next phase of this alter-
native culture began. This phase helped to strengthen the ethics of authen-
ticity and Orientalisation in the alternative culture, which by that time had
created its own music scene, in parallel with official cultural institutions
and organizations. By imitating the musical traditions of African, Asian and
American indigenous cultures, Polish musicians gained new opportunities
to endow their identities with the subversive power of the ‘authenticity’
of genuine self-expression, characteristic of cultural minorities. Although
from the late 1970s punk was described in music journalism as a return
from advanced civilization to the primitive culture of tribal savages, this
time reggae turned out to be the privileged genre of music Orientalism.
On the margin of mainstream pop reggae that reached Polish listeners
in the 1970s, the underground and non-commercial Polish reggae bands
emerged. Noteworthy is the ludicrous, absurd style of the first underground
reggae band in Poland, Galago, established in 1975 by brothers Jan and

Michał Erszkowski, young painters from Gdańsk. It was renowned for the
fictitious language of the songs that the brothers recorded in their home,
without any support from the music industry. Even more carnivalesque was
the band Düp˛a (By Ass) created in Cracow in 1981 by hippie painter and
poet Piotr Marek. Marek wrote neo-dadaist lyrics, based on alliterations,
rhymes, glossolalia, neologisms, and other sound features of a word, with
little interest in its meaning.
The songs of Düp˛a were parodies of reggae, sometimes with provocative
statements such as ‘Rastafarians lie’ and ‘Babilon nie spłonie – woda w ortal-
ionie’ (‘Babylon won’t burn – water in polyamide’). Similarly, Düp˛a’s gigs
were something between cabaret, happening, concert, and improvisation. A
different sense of humour was foregrounded by Krzysztof ‘Kaman’ Kłosow-
icz, who together with his brother Piotr Kłosowicz and Artur Gołacki
in autumn 1981 formed the first line-up of the band Miki Mousoleum.
Krzysztof Kłosowicz was another member of the Indo-Polish Friendship
Association, fascinated with the Oriental musical motifs. He had been active
as a musician in the 1970s, playing jazz-rock and psychedelic rock, but when
he discovered reggae for himself at the end of the decade, he was struck
by the simplicity of the genre, its softness of sound and political power.
Inspired by Linton Kwesi Johnson and other reggae artists, ‘Kaman’ found
his way of connecting radical political statements with easy, melodic music
and hilarious happenings (Kłosowicz 2015: 69). Miki Mousoleum was set
up during the students’ strikes in the school of fine arts in Wrocław, amidst a
rebellious yet cheerful atmosphere. The emotional climate of these protests
strongly affected the repertoire of the band. On the unofficially distributed
cassette Wieczór Wrocławia (Wrocław Evening News ), Miki Mousoleum
mixed bright reggae sounds with Gregorian chant and political satire aimed
at the local music industry and authoritarian government, as well as criti-
cism of neoliberal austerity imposed by Margaret Thatcher. But the playful
atmosphere faded with the following wave of Polish reggae bands that rep-
resented, in general, two types: the mystical and the political reggae. Both
of them, however, drew on the Orientalist imaginations.
The last years of the 1970s brought the first articles published in the
music press informing Polish readers about reggae. Among their authors
was Kamil Sipowicz, philosopher, poet, journalist, and partner of Kora Jack-
owska, frontwoman of Maanam who in turn had been the wife of Marek
Jackowski. The texts focused on the socio-political contexts of Jamaican
music and its African traditions. The practice of mentioning the liberating
92 X. STAŃCZYK
and progressive social background was a common tactic of journalists and

promoters to legitimize western music in socialist Poland. This trend was
continued in the 1980s when Sławomir Gołaszewski and Andrzej Jakubow-
icz published a series of articles about reggae, ska and rocksteady in Non
Stop magazine in 1983–1984. From the point of view of Gołaszewski and
Jakubowicz, the socio-political events and processes were crucial for under-
standing reggae and the Rastafarian movement, from which the voice of
the exploited and subjugated blacks became the universal form of resistance
against injustice all around the world (Gołaszewski and Jakubowicz 1984:
16–17). Gołaszewski, under the pseudonym Dr. Ayane, drew a comparison
between reggae and punk, arguing that both punk and reggae musicians
uncovered social inequalities and strove to create their own alternative cul-
ture in opposition to show business. Both punks and Rastafarians repre-
sented the oppressed peoples fighting for their rights, so skin colour no
longer mattered (Gołaszewski 1984: 9). The journalist wrote that against
the artificial music production for mass consumption, the ‘off-side’ genres
like reggae, ska, punk, and new wave took the shape of a ritual that deeply
engaged the audience. This tribal facet was even more significant as a com-
mon ground of Jamaican music and British punk than any formal similarity
(Gołaszewski 1984: 11).
Many of the first Polish punk and post-punk bands from the late 1970s,
such as Kryzys, Tilt, Białe Wulkany (White Volcanos), Deuter, Deadlock,
and Brygada Kryzys, as well as the new-wave Maanam, combined punk with
elements of reggae, ska, and world music. That was due to the fact that the
first wave of punk in Poland was created in a large measure by musicians
who were earlier engaged in Orientalist and intuitive music, among them
the already mentioned Andrzej Turczynowicz, Sławomir Gołaszewski, Milo
Kurtis, Marek Jackowski, Jerzy Słomiński. Others, like Tomasz Szczeciński,
Krzysztof Kłosowicz, Maciej Góralski from Kryzys (nowadays curator at the
Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw), and the leader of Tilt group Tomasz
Lipiński, were also fascinated by ‘Oriental’ and ethnic music. Roughly the
same group of people formed reggae bands in years 1982–1983. The shift
from punk and post-punk to reggae had a symbolic meaning during the
time of martial law (1981–1983); it could be interpreted as a sign of the
anti-militarist, peaceful attitude, as opposed to the militant punk poses. But
there were also other factors. In the same years, punk gained great popu-
larity among the youth audience and approval from critics, even some of
the elder ones. Musicians who wanted to maintain their positions as inno-
vators had to find for themselves new genres and styles and reggae fitted
the bill. Its boom brought about such bands as Izrael (1982), Bakshish
(1982), Daab (1982), Gedeon Jerubbaal (1983), Kultura (1983), Rokosz
(1984), Reggae Against Politics (R.A.P., 1985), Bush Doctor (1985), Grass
(1986), Rocka’s Delight (1986), Orkiestra na Zdrowie (ONZ, 1986),
Basstion (1988), Stage of Unity (1988), to name just a few. Finally, in
1988 Mirosław ‘Maken’ Dzi˛eciołowski and Mariusz Dziurawiec founded
the first Polish sound system called Joint Venture Sound System in the
small town of Zgorzelec. Reggae songs and themes were also performed
by many punk and post-punk bands, including Śmierć Kliniczna. Most of
the groups were located in western or south-western regions of Poland.
The area of the so-called Regained Territories that Poland received after
the war were nationalized with reinvented ‘Piast’ traditions but also with
cultural events like avant-garde art, theatre, and pop music festivals located
in Opole, Tricity, Kołobrzeg, Świnoujście, Zielona Góra, Wrocław, Poznań
and Jarocin. Perhaps the uprooted communities that were settled in the
regions after 1945 were more vulnerable to ‘exotic’ influences than people
living continuously in central and eastern regions of Poland.
While reggae music, along with Rastafarian lifestyle and rhetoric (like
dreadlocks and quotations from the Bible), religious conversions, and paci-
fist, democratic political attitudes were all about self-exoticisation, there
were also some persons in the alternative scene with the ascribed pub-
lic identity of the Other. Besides the already-mentioned Greek musicians,
these included: Viviane Quarcoo, female member of Izrael and partner
of Robert Brylewski, a leading alternative guitarist; Jacek Kleyff, singer-
songwriter of Jewish origins and leader of Orkierstra na Zdrowie; Keller
Symcha, musician in reggae band Katharsis, nowadays a rabbi and Jew-
ish activist; and Grey Andrew Shereni, a medical student from Zimbabwe,
who joined the reggae-ragga-hip-hop band Rocka’s Delight, becoming its
vocalist and lyricist. Together, their exotic image served to authenticate the
whole scene.
Although musicians and artists were not really repressed under martial
law, and certainly no more than the rest of Polish society, and the under-
ground scene maintained its autonomic space of freedom and fun, many
alternative musicians wanted to symbolically resist censorship, the milita-
rization of everyday life, and political repression. With decreasing oppor-
tunities for artistic careers, due to the temporary shutdown of many art
galleries and rehearsal studios, and without hope for social change, mem-
bers of the alternative community started to settle in the countryside, where
they sought freedom unavailable in cities. A visual example of this tendency
94 X. STAŃCZYK
is the sequence about the band Brygada Kryzys in the documentary Kon-
cert (The Concert ) by Michał Tarkowski from 1982; the melancholy and
alienation of the city is contrasted with the energy and togetherness of the
bohemia gathered around the musicians. The sequence shows images of
empty streets and concrete buildings in the modern city, contrasted with
the young people dancing in the meadow and running naked to the river
with the sound of reggae and vocal calling for the return to Zion, to the
paradise. In other sequences of Tarkowski’s film, there are many images
from the rock festival Rockowisko organized in 1981 in Łódź. During
the event, Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Raniszewski, artists associated with
Warsaw’s independent gallery Repassage, carried out the action Malowanie
twarzy (Face Painting ), literally painting on the faces of participants ‘tribal’
patterns in vivid colours. Gutt and Raniszewski studied ethnographic texts
about primitive and archaic cultures for many years, trying to find in their
‘wild’ rituals alternative ways of interpersonal communication to the ones
offered by advanced civilization (Ronduda 2009: 182). The objects Spears
by Leszek Knaflewski (1983) and Honolulu Baboon by Mirosław Filonik
(1986), both rooted in new expressionist poetics, could serve as another
example of the self-exoticisation strategy in visual arts parallel to the music
field.
A similar representation of the authentic underground contrasted with
the alienating landscape of the modern city was caught by the short doc-
umentary movie I Could Live in Africa, shot by young Dutch director
Jacques de Koning in 1983. De Koning spent the winter of 1982–1983
in Warsaw, where he met the band Izrael. The small camera he brought
to Poland was overlooked by security guards so he could make his movie
without government censorship. The unsuspected meeting of Dutch film-
maker and Polish reggae musicians in Warsaw under martial law provided a
grotesque and fascinating picture of the Polish punk-reggae underground.
The main principle of montage in I Could Live in Africa was to underscore
the contrast between law and disturbance, the emptiness of the city streets
and the spiritual power of underground music. Warsaw in the movie seemed
to be nearly monochromatic, grey-brown with dirty snow and concrete.
People were alienated, apathetic and did not trust each other, trying to
mind their own business. Musicians’ interventions into this lonely, melan-
cholic space were not effective. When one of the boys offered passers-by
to listen to music on his Walkman, people shrugged their shoulders and
ignored him. In another scene the group walked into an old Jewish ceme-
tery where they cleaned tombstones and talked about Polish antisemitism.
This fragment was crucial because of the name of the band: Izrael, the
same as the state of Israel. The members of Izrael criticized the Catholic
church and mendacious politicians, using words such as ‘system’, ‘bitch’
and ‘Babylon’, drawing attention to egoistic, conformist social attitudes.
While Warsaw was shot in upsetting grey and brown colours, the place
where the band played was rendered in warm and rich colours. Three lamps
gave green, yellow and red lights, as in the Ethiopian national flag. The
emptiness and apathy of city streets constituted a sharp contrast with the
intensive, trance-inducing music with an anarchistic message. When one of
the musicians said ‘I could live in Africa’ adding that ‘fatherland is a bitch’,
it seemed that the group alienation from the outside world was complete.
The whole movie I Could Live in Africa can be interpreted as an attempt
to understand the reality constructed by juxtapositions of opposite images,
sounds and voices that challenged each other; for instance, the montage
of forgotten Jewish tombstones under snow, Catholic devotional images
on sale and speeches about Polish antisemitism and conformist priesthood.
Moreover, de Koning used found footage; for example, a fragment of a
TV news story, which came across as an official, yet untrue vision of the
state and society. Even the band’s name embraced three heterogeneous ref-
erences: God’s Chosen People, the contemporary state of Israel, and the
contemporary Jewish nation. The first had a specific positive meaning in
underground culture through its connection with the Rastafarian move-
ment while the other two were objects of Polish antisemitism both in the
traditional and modern sense. These semantic connections of the band’s
name were actualized in different contexts by fans and opponents of the
group. The meaning established in de Koning’s movie and in musicians’
descriptions of the band’s name symbolized the alienation and Otherness
of the group with a specific aura of Rastafarian mysticism, confronted with
the dominant culture of nationalism, xenophobia and hierarchical relations
among people. Thus, the clash of scenes from an abandoned, degraded, but
nevertheless monumental city with the hidden energy of the punky-reggae
underground suddenly showed the strangeness of what before had been
seen as the elements of the familiar world.
Exploring the power of such a strangeness and covert conflict behind it
was a crucial tactic in the alternative music scene in the 1980s. When Polish
reggae musicians in de Koning’s movie said that they could have lived in
Africa, they were simply referring to their strangeness in Poland, almost the
same as the strangeness of the foreigner who was filming them. It was the
underground’s attitude toward dominant culture as it attempted to show
96 X. STAŃCZYK
to the majority the shocking Otherness of a minority. When in the protest

song Białe murzyństwo (White Niggerhood) ‘Kaman’ sang about himself as
a ‘white Negro in his own country’ he was pointing to the social status
of the independent artist in a state spoiled by corruption and nepotism,
probably even unconscious about the racist meaning of the term ‘Negro’.
In the play between the alternative community and dominant cultural
norms, there was limited space for the actual Other, whose main role was
to authenticate the practices of Polish self-Orientalising. When Izrael musi-
cians said that they could have lived in Africa they meant that Poland of
the 1980s was a so-called banana republic, nearly the same as authoritarian
regimes in Africa. Such a point of view was not just instrumentalising the
people and history of Ethiopia and other African countries; it was conde-
scending as well. Africa was used here as an example of something inferior
to Europe, something humiliating and outside of civilized society. Further,
the statement ‘I could live in Africa’ from the mouth of a young European
blurred the crucial anthropological distinction between choice and compul-
sion. A more explicitly patronizing act that purported to show empathy and
support took place on 13 December 1989 in Gdańsk. The event, organized
by Kleszcz, was called Solidarity Anti-Apartheid and featured an outstand-
ing line-up of Polish and foreign reggae groups, Rocka’s Delight, Linton
Kwesi Johnson, and Twinkle Brothers among them. On the one hand, it
served as an anti-racist protest with thousands of participants displaying the
democratic values of Polish society, which had recently protested against
communism (not by accident, the date was set on the anniversary of the
introduction of martial law). On the other hand, the concert was an adop-
tion of the western model of a charity event with popular music to help
the people of the global South, like Live Aid concerts organized by Bob
Geldof in 1985. Thus, Solidarity Anti-Apartheid seemed to be more about
Polish aspirations to join the club of the powerful liberal democratic coun-
tries than about transnational unity of the people fighting for their rights
to self-determination.
Conclusion
Under state socialism, Eastern European countries were subjected to pro-
cesses of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization that trans-
formed the entire social life. Paradoxically, ideological principles of state
socialism also brought old forms of folklore—intertwined with new avant-
garde concepts—as a basis of the people’s culture, which is supposed to be
both familiar and progressive. Elements of ethnic cultures of other societies,

often the ones perceived as less advanced, were used here as proof of Polish
internationalism. But in the alternative scene, they connoted a nostalgia
for someone else’s past, more profound and authentic than Polish cultural
heritage, often perceived as a burden no longer worth preserving. Thus,
in Poland in the 1970s, Indian music traditions were used against the con-
temporary dominant culture (and its most legitimized parts). Thus, in the
next decade, ‘living in Africa’ could be used as a clear sign of the regressed
civilisational despite all of the symbolic gestures of solidarity, friendship,
and comradeship. The styles and figures of musical Orientalism in Poland
of the 1970s and 1980s were reflecting the tensions characteristic of late
socialist Polish society—playing the Other was a way to contest one’s own
national culture but without questioning the rules of ethnonationalism.
The underground culture in Poland ‘invented’ its specific forms of Ori-
entalism as a way of emancipating itself from the structures of the dominant
culture with its aesthetic hierarchies, social norms, and ideological impli-
cations. Orientalist knowledge and cultural practices helped to distinguish
oneself from the social majority and to underline the liminal status of those
musicians who participated in the alternative scene, without any support
from the official music industry. Self-Orientalisation served to authenticate
the alternative scene, which was necessary to differentiate the underground
communities from the popular entertainment organized by public institu-
tions and enterprises. According to Moore, authenticity can be ascribed
in three ways, all of them present in the alternative scene in the Poland
of state socialism. The first, ‘authenticity of expression’, was consequently
acclaimed by critics and audiences of reggae, punk, world and improvised
music. Similarly, the ‘authenticity of experience’ was emphasized by the
music journalists, fans, and musicians themselves, when talking about the
same generation and the common lifestyles and attitudes of alternative
bands and their audiences. But in the case of Orientalism, the ‘authenticity
of execution’ was the crucial type: it was based on the appropriation of the
local, original musical expressions by musicians who authenticated them
while at the same time drawing their own authenticity from them. In this
vein, Ossian, Grupa w Składzie, and later Izrael and other dub and reggae
groups showed off their ‘exotic’ styles, genres, and poetics, gaining rele-
vance from the realisation of the Orientalist dream of a creative encounter
between East and West. Semi-peripheral, Eastern European, state socialist
Poland seemed to be the ideal place for such a meeting. However, the space
for reciprocal cultural exchange was actually restrained since the images of
98 X. STAŃCZYK
the Other were primarily used instrumentally to contest or reshape Polish

(and European) culture and to achieve specific goals by particular musi-
cians.
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Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna.
CHAPTER 5
Eastern Europe as Punk Frontier
Aimar Ventsel
In 2005 a friend of mine opened a rock club in Tartu, Estonia. The club
had an Eastern European focus—the owner planned to have a wide variety
of music in the club—from ska to metal, biker events, mixing mainstream
and underground music. Something like this would be atypical in West-
ern Europe, where clubs differentiate themselves as mainstream or under-
ground, or through a specific genre. But in Estonia, anything rock-oriented
(mainstream or not) and other connected styles (such as reggae and ska)
was considered part of an extended scene, easily fitting together in the
scant rock clubs. I helped to create this club and had a close association
with it. A few years ago, I returned to Estonia after being in Germany for
10 years, mostly in Berlin. I brought back contacts of bands and booking
agencies, in order to bring new and exciting punk, garage and ska bands
to Estonia. I was offered an all-female American punk band, managed by a
booking agency from Berlin. There were several misunderstandings about
the contract and the rider (specific hospitality demands of the band), and
since I knew the agency owner, I decided to call him instead of exchang-
ing numerous emails. In our conversation the guy asked me to send more
A. Ventsel (B)
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
e-mail: punkrock@folklore.ee

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_5
102 A. VENTSEL
information about the club because it was new. He said, ‘You are out on the
frontier, we don’t know much about how things are run in your country,
and what type of clubs exist there.’
This phrase got me thinking. Why was Estonia, from a German point
of view, considered a frontier, and a frontier of what? I am an anthro-
pologist, specialising in the Russian Far East. When conducting fieldwork
in the region, one encounters the notion of frontier. Frontier is an area
that is semi-wild and unpredictable, something to be mastered. There is
a blurred and constantly changing border between the ‘wilderness’ and
‘civilisation’, defined through administrative, cultural, social and economic
markers (Gow 1996). Historically, the state usually undertakes an attempt
to ‘civilise’ the frontier, or re-shape life there with the aim of creating a
society similar to the mother country, or the centre. For example, both the
Russian and British Empire sent women—usually criminals, poor, or single
mothers—to their frontier to address the sexual imbalance and introduce
‘normality’ (Collins 2004). A region ceases to be a frontier when it looks
like any ‘normal’ region, has similar laws, practices, infrastructure, and a
level of predictability similar to the centre. Appropriation of territory and
creation of a ‘normal’ life also means trust: a person from the centre under-
stands how things work. The American West was officially closed around
1890, when the consensus was that the frontier line, a point beyond which
the population density was less than two persons per square mile, no longer
existed (Dick 1965; Wilkie 2010: 49). In the capitalist and socialist worlds,
the frontier has always been associated with a ‘sense of contested space’
and progress (Brightman et al. 2010; Forsyth 1992; Hine 1984; Slezkine
1994). States use different strategies to control a frontier: they send in
settlers, sedentarise indigenous nomads and establish military or trading
outposts (Bassin 1991; Cañas Bottos 2008; Dedering 2002; Kozlar 1955;
Tilly 1975). The Berlin band manager actually used the word ‘Vorposten’,
that in German means military outpost. Was it really the case that our club
was located in a wild territory, inhabited by hostile savages?
The phone call took place a few years after Estonia had entered the Euro-
pean Union and became a member of the Schengen visa zone. Freedom
of travel and European legislation did not exist across the Estonian east-
ern border with Russia. Therefore, Estonia was one of the EU countries
bordering the Great Unknown—Russia with its visa regulations, mythically
anarchic life and corrupt society. This chapter is an attempt to analyse the
notion of ‘frontier’ in the context of European and Western punk, and
relate the existence of a subculture with the functioning of a state and
5 EASTERN EUROPE AS PUNK FRONTIER 103
regional political and economic processes. I draw on my experience as a

concert organiser for more than a decade. And I rely on the interviews and
discussions with eighteen band managers and concert organisers I con-
ducted as a music journalist, or a researcher, over those years. The main
argument of the chapter is that punk networks exist as a result of face-to-
face, or personal contacts, and that it is too early to bury the concept of a
subculture usually related to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud-
ies definition: a group based on common understanding of style, mutual
physical communication and shared musical preferences.
Organising concerts in a Rock’n Roll Club in Tartu, I quickly learned to
deal with various booking and management agencies. I booked German,
Finnish, Slovenian, French and Norwegian ska, punk and garage bands, and
even some Argentinian hardcore punk bands. Usually the band started their
tour somewhere in Scandinavia, with a concert in Helsinki, Finland and
then the next big gig would be in Liepaja or Riga, Latvia at an established
rock venue. From there they would move through Poland to Germany,
and their final concerts were in the United Kingdom. Another option is for
a band to start their tour in the United Kingdom, move through Central
Europe and finish in Scandinavia. In both cases, usually between Helsinki
and Liepaja or Riga, they had a couple of days off. These days were usually
not Fridays or Saturdays, the best days for concerts, but rather mid-week.
When a band is touring, they are interested in playing every day, because for
any day off the band members are liable for the financial costs. Therefore,
I was able to book quite interesting acts who delivered splendid concerts
just for beer, food, a small fee, and a place to sleep.
The touring circuit of punk bands is widespread. Besides the physical
geography of the European punk scene, Visa-free travel has a huge impact
on how live music spreads. Russia is often excluded from the circuit of
small bands, and to play in Russia for western and overseas bands is the
exception rather than the rule. Therefore, punk as an underground music
relies heavily on existing political geography, infrastructure, laws, and so on.
One can say that punk exists within the network of laws, services, material
objects and—last but not least—borders created by the state.
There are very few studies on how subculture integrates with the state
and exists within the legal field. Political anthropology—which started in
the 1940s with the publication of African Political Systems (Fortes and
Evans-Pritchard 1940)—has focused on structures that create and main-
tain order, sometimes through deploying force. Later, studies appeared
that discussed how these structures are used by different agents. Some-
104 A. VENTSEL
what paradoxically, the national and European ‘art of government’ (Fou-

cault 2003) affects how punk music networks operate. Punk subculture in
general, and individual musicians or managers in particular, work on very
low margins. Nevertheless, looking at the functioning of punk networks
we see that the actors have developed what Silverman and Gulliver (2006:
122) have described as a ‘clear political rationality’ to cope with the existing
legal and institutional framework.
The relationship between subcultures and the state is usually viewed
through rebellion and resistance (Hall and Jefferson 1986; Kochan 2003;
Rapport 2014; Wade 1999). The practices of a subculture must, neverthe-
less, be to some extent congruent with existing laws and fit into the institu-
tional landscape (see Cartledge 1999; Van Gelder 2010; Ventsel 2008), and
practices like releasing and selling music must follow general laws (O’Con-
nor 2008; Thompson 2004). Ignoring the norms and laws would mean
the end of the subculture. Full confrontation and the demise and trans-
formation of a subculture is well demonstrated in the case of neo-Nazi
skinheads in the Northern Russian town Vorkuta (Pilkington 2010; Pilk-
ington et al. 2010) whereas other studies hint that in order to exist, punk
subculture must fit into the national context (Hannerz 2015). This discrep-
ancy raises the question about how much we can talk about local/national
ways of practicing punk and how it affects global punk networking (see
also O’Connor 2002, 2004; Pilkington and Johnson 2003).
The second issue to be addressed is linked to the notion of ‘East Euro-
pean punk’ and ‘frontier’. Punk has, nevertheless, established its free zones
(in German, Freiräume), but these Freiräume are embedded in the main-
stream society and the state, and they depend on the larger society and
state institutions. I would like to go one step further and argue that we
can speak about national punk traditions. Zygmunt Bauman writes about
the ‘gardening state’, whose function is the production of order and avoid-
ance of ambivalence (Bauman 1991). Different methods of maintaining
the order and drawing a line between the legal and illegal—combined with
local social norms and traditions—exist in parallel with local and national
understandings of punk and how it should be practiced.
In my younger punk years, when I spent more than a decade in Berlin,
I recall how several Berlin squats had a rather dismissive attitude to Polish
visitors. The belief was that Poles expected inhabitants from the squats
to feed them and give them free alcohol. Poles were also troublesome
when it came to the concerts. Squat concerts in 1990s East Berlin were
often Solidarity concerts, with the objective to collect money for charitable
or political causes. In Berlin, to pay the entrance for such concerts was
understood as an act of political consciousness and solidarity. Poles would
ask to be let in for free, arguing they were poor Eastern Europeans with no
money. When they were not allowed in, Polish punks accused the clubs of
un-punkish behaviour. This offended the people who organised the political
concerts, because they thought their motives were very punk.
Antifascist activists analysed the antifascist movement and international
cooperation in the European antifascist scene after the collapse of the East-
ern Bloc. One West German antifascist activist explains: ‘It is easier to find
a common language with Italian Antifascists than with the East German
ones’ (Projektgruppe_Antifa 1994: 28). In the 1990s, the divide between
Eastern and Western Europe was huge in the punk scene. Clubs were dif-
ferent, attitudes were different, and the politics were different: street life
in Eastern Europe was more violent, but somehow less divided between
the left and right wing; there existed a far larger apolitical segment of the
East European scene than in Western European countries. The contrast
was especially noticeable in West Germany, where many squats and clubs
received state funding as centres for alternative culture, as opposed to the
much poorer Eastern European countries where everything was radically
do-it-yourself (DIY).
Zygmund Bauman’s definition of common sense is ‘To abide by the
rules of reason, to behave rationally’ (Bauman 1976: 6). On one level this
definition applies to the unity in the punk scene, as expressed in several
songs: ‘Network of Friends’ from Heresy, ‘You Are Not Alone’ by the
Street Dogs, ‘United and Strong’ and ‘Gotta Go’ from Agnostic Front, ‘As
One’ from Warzone, ‘Fight to Unite’ by Youth Brigade or ‘Our Tattoos
Are the Story of Our Lives’ by Control, to name a few. In reality, within
the western punk scene there existed a certain angst-ridden cautiousness
or—the other way around—an Orientalist exoticising attitude looking at
Eastern scenes as dangerous and suspicious but also exciting. I encountered
plenty of mistrust when booking western bands for Tartu. On the one hand,
the status of the frontier means mistrust. Western musicians did not know
what to expect from performing in the ‘Wild East’. They did not know
whether signed contracts would be honoured or agreements kept. And last
but not least, whether the food is edible or the hotels ‘civilised’ enough.
And here we are not referring to ‘pop stars’, but to people who play punk
or punk-related music, people openly opposed to the petit bourgeois and
middle class lifestyle, values and politics. At the end of 2014, a friend of
mine, a singer in a Berlin-based band making Irish folk punk, contacted
106 A. VENTSEL
me to organise concerts for the band in the Baltic states and Finland. It
took a few months to organise, but I managed to book the dates. When
my friend initially contacted me, he said that the bands were not interested
in money, they just wanted to play ‘in the East’. And because the band did
not demand a high fee, it was relatively easy to book the venues. Later,
when band members heard they were playing virtually for free, and would
be paying for their own hotel rooms, some of them refused to come.
This story is significant for two reasons. First of all, the band members
did not trust me, or the clubs, the local scene and the agreements, illustrat-
ing the unpredictability factor associated with the Eastern frontier. Other
band members were eager to play, because they wanted to see the Eastern
frontier, expecting something special. In such a situation, I see a conflict
on two levels: the punk underground mutual trust (i.e., to confirm deals
with a handshake) contradicts the German quest for a predictable form of
vacation. One reason for their rejection, I was told, was that the whole
tour is ‘too DIY’: A seemingly inappropriate position for a punk musician.
But in reality, these people were questioning the form and nature of Esto-
nian DIY—or how much the Estonian DIY ethos follows the rules of DIY
as they understand it. It was my ‘naïve belief in common sense’ (Bauman
1976: 25) that inspired me to organise the concerts and my belief that the
band members trusted me, especially because I had organised a concert in
a huge festival in Estonia for them years ago (Fig. 5.1).
This form of exoticising of the Eastern Europe punk scene, on the other
hand, is in full correlation with the expectation of cool underground clubs,
energetic concerts and sexy girls. In looking back on the bands I have seen
in the Rock’n Roll club in Tartu or have organised concerts for, I realise that
most of them were pretty crazy people. With few exceptions, the musicians
were indeed interested in the city and the country they came to play in.
Their attitude was very relaxed, the musicians got along with people, people
got along with the bands. All the bands were more interested in the free
alcohol than the amount of money they were supposed to get. In retrospect,
the reason why my memories are so positive is because I did not book any
other kind of band; that is, bands that did not trust me, or those bands
that were not ready to take a risk with a tour of the frontier. Bands that
demanded payment in advance (a lot of German metal and punk bands),
for instance. Bands with too detailed contracts. Bands that had riders that
were too extravagant. This was the case with the all-female American punk
band mentioned in the beginning. The club could not book them because
they demanded coffee with soya milk, and we simply did not have it on
Fig. 5.1 Russian punk band from Saint Petersburg 4Scums in Anemooni, DIY
club in Tallinn
sale in Estonia during those times. So instead they played at a bigger club
in Liepaja, Latvia.
A club and a national scene builds up its international reputation by
hosting touring bands. In academic discussions of punk, the ‘success and
failure’ of punk is frequently linked to ‘introducing new codes of dress and
behaviour’ (Cartledge 1999: 151). In an international social network, dress
counts less than following certain ‘common sense’ norms and behaving in
a predictable way. It is usual practice that the club provides the touring
band food, some free beers and a place to sleep, the latter very often on
a floor of the organiser’s apartment. The reputation of the club depends
on how much it fulfils these unwritten rules, whereas the reputation of the
national scene depends on how many people attend the concerts and how
they behave. The framework for existence of the local punk network is,
of course, set by the national state. For example, squats, a typical base of
the DIY clubs in Western Europe, do not exist in Estonia. Instead, punk
gigs are usually organised in alternative clubs that host various genres, or in
rock clubs. None of the clubs I know have a certified kitchen and therefore
108 A. VENTSEL
usually order fast food (hamburgers, pizzas) for members of visiting bands.
This narrows down the profile of hosted bands to those with a modest rider,
who do not demand specific food or have a problem spending a night on
someone’s floor. On the other hand, basic services associated with a punk
DIY touring are provided—bands can perform and are taken care of by
earning some small fee to cover their fuel costs.
During the last five or so years, it seemed like Poland had effectively
been absorbed into the Western European side of the punk world, and
the punk frontier switched to the Baltics, Slovakia and Bulgaria, lesser
known countries when it comes to clubs and festivals. The Czech Republic
established its status as a non-frontier country by the 1990s, with festivals
like Antisocial and a blossoming club scene, especially in Prague. This
shift demonstrates that the frontier status is associated with the lack of
events with an international reputation or that fulfil certain criterions. For
instance, Slovenia—with its annual Punk Rock Holiday festival hosting a
fairly standard selection of rather poppy punk bands—fulfils the criterion of
a ‘civilised’ country. Nevertheless, certain differences between the western
and eastern scenes still remain. In an interview with the singer Kristo from
the Estonian band Huiabella Fantastica I learned that under the surface
there exist dissimilarities:
Me: Are there differences where the band comes from in these days?
Kristo: Not really! In the 1990s, Western bands were something special but
not now.
M: But when you tour in Europe, do you feel differences between the East
and West?
K: There are huge differences!
M: Can you specify?
K: First of all the West is more politicised. There are not such a left-right wing
fragmentation in Eastern Europe. And there is the social security issue.
All punk bands sing against being rich but Eastern European punks really
do not have money. When somebody knocks your teeth out, in the West
punks just go to the dentist and get your dentures. In Eastern Europe,
punks cannot afford it (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3).
This segment from the interview demonstrates that the authenticity in punk
is defined by how much people can live up to the ideal of the outcast.
Although Eastern European punk scenes have been integrated into global
punk, they still maintain the reputation of being more anarchic, less ideol-
ogised but therefore more ‘real’ because of the forced austerity. No doubt,
Fig. 5.2 Huiabella Fantastica, the most touring Estonian DIY punk band, per-
forming in Saint Petersburg, Russia in MOD Club
Fig. 5.3 Belurussian skinhead band Mister X performing in Anemooni

110 A. VENTSEL
there exist conflicts between radical left and right wingers in Poland, Estonia
or Croatia, but politics as a defining line is far less important in the Eastern
European scene. Of note, punk is currently identified through practice:
international cooperation takes place via real movement of people; i.e., the
bands or the audience. Ideological differences have a modest impact, as is
demonstrated by the flow of Russian bands touring in the Baltic states in an
era where official relationships between these countries have cooled down.
Moving Out of the Frontier Status

Around 2010 I stopped working with the Rock’n Roll club in Tartu and
soon after the club expanded from a basement to the second floor of the
same building. The old basement club was rented out for youth projects.
The small side room, which was used as a backstage for bands, and which
the owner once had planned to refurbish as a recording studio, was rented
as a rehearsal room to a local hardcore band, Project Dekadenze. When I
recorded an interview with them in 2013, I heard that they also use the
rehearsal room as a small club, organising mini-concerts for bands they
liked; e.g., DIY vegan bands with a radical left tilt (Tiger 2013).
Today, Estonia has many alternative culture centres, clubs and concert
venues that host touring punk bands, both DIY and ones more famous. The
iconic Scottish band, The Exploited, has performed in Estonia many times.
Talking to promoters, I assume that now they seldom have the trust prob-
lem I encountered ten years ago. Different bands from different leagues
perform in Estonia almost weekly and they seem to have confidence in the
Estonian club landscape. Politically, many of a new generation of Estonian
punk bands have aligned themselves to western standards; whereas a decade
ago, radical left ideas were rare in the Baltic punk scene, now they are more
common, as is confrontation with local right wing factions. Simultaneously,
punk with a more social protest edge continues to flourish. New hardcore
and punk bands sing in English, release their digital albums in Bandcamp,
and sometimes have cassette or vinyl releases on foreign punk/DIY labels.
As my informants confirmed, Estonian punk is currently embedded within
a global punk network, allowing the movement of music and bands not
only into Estonia but also out of Estonia (Fig. 5.4).
So is the Eastern frontier of punk indeed any kind of frontier at all?
When we look at what is going on in punk/underground clubs in the
Baltic countries, there is a vibrant scene. Punk clubs are run by people with
a punk ethos, doing things in a punk way, and it runs on a ‘common sense’
Fig. 5.4 Russian band Kobra performing in Anemooni
basis that is globally understood. Playing the Eastern frontier is a pretty

standard procedure, a tour of small clubs with cheap beer, and most bands
know this. The young generation of punks I know from Estonia are more
influenced by the ideas and patterns from the West. Today there are small
DIY gigs, not because this is the only way, but because organisers want to
keep it DIY, for political reasons. Punk festivals contain a healthy number
of foreign bands, some of them iconic punk classics like the Scottish band
OiPolloi or Finnish legends such as Lama or Riistetyt.
There are several studies that connect subculture and space (Drissel
2011; Driver and Bennet 2015; Henri 1991; Marciniak 2015; Massey
1998; O’Connor 2004; Smith 1998), but they usually focus on the space
at a local level. The successful entry of Estonian punk into the European-
wide networks shows that the postulate of the CCCS—that a subculture is
a face-to-face community—is correct in many ways. The assumption that
subcultures cease to exist and become virtual (Bennet 2004) are proven
wrong here. According to interviews, the internet is important for main-
taining contacts or informing oneself about a band (As Kristo put it: ‘The
ideology of the band is already known before they come. You also find
112 A. VENTSEL
out what they sing about. Then you decide whether you organise a gig for
them or go to see them.’) Punk is not only a ‘lifestyle aesthetic’ (Williams
and Hannerz 2014) but a practice and social capital that holds it together.
Punks dress very differently these days, but the contribution to the network
is what defines the global solidarity. Thus, punk is not a rebellion anymore
(c.f. Cross 2010) but a niche activism with the focus on circulating artists
internationally.
In an ironic way, the state—the placating archenemy of punk—plays an
enormous role in the life of the subculture. The intervention of the state in
all spheres of life in democracies (Levy 2006) creates a framework that punk
can use to connect internationally. When Estonia entered the European
Union, it made Estonian clubs more trustworthy. The state plays the role
of guaranteeing that punk ‘common sense’ can uphold the expectations of
visiting artists: contracts hold, there are no bureaucratic hitches or problems
with moving around in the country. This stability contributes to the more
Western-style attitude of a new punk generation and its process for making
and spreading music, which helped to incorporate Estonian punk networks
on an equal basis into the larger worldwide network.
Conclusion
Matthew Worley writes that ‘punk remained an important cultural force’
that ‘cuts through social barriers’ (Worley 2017: 26–27). This is true, but
national barriers still exist within the global subculture and they can be bro-
ken through individual activism. In this sense, the reputation of a local scene
depends on the enthusiasm of a few promoters, concert organisers and club
owners. Music often spills over the border of the underground culture and
can become an object of mainstream production and consumption (Huq
2006). The underground is more defined by a network of shared ideas and
practices, as the story of the East European punk frontier demonstrates.
Non-commercial underground music is, in terms of global connected-
ness, in a better position than regional commercial pop music. Because punk
exists outside of trends, bands are not forced to react to seasonal changes of
the soundscape, as is the case with pop musicians. Punk music itself is quite
conservative, which also allows for a greater variety of sounds. Another
aspect is the promotion. In mainstream pop music, musicians depend on
the whims of their management to invest in advertising. In pop music there
are other corridors for how to sell music, both literally and metaphori-
cally. The punk ethos makes punk more accessible to bands from obscure
regions like Estonia or Romania. Moreover, there is a strong tradition in

global punk to go to a specialised punk music shop and buy vinyl, CDs or
cassettes from bands who come from a country you never imagined had
punk music—like the Philippines, Thailand or Iran. All these factors grad-
ually assist bands from the Eastern frontier to become integrated into the
European punk scene. The fact that the most important aspect of touring
on that level is for the fun puts financial concerns in second place. This
constellation gives more freedom for bands to tour and make contacts.
When talking about punk I still want to stress that we know too lit-
tle about certain aspects of punk. It even seems that the majority of aca-
demic publications about punk start with citations from Dick Hebdidge’s
classic book, ‘The meaning of style’, and mentioning classic British punk
bands like The Sex Pistols or The Clash. In fact, we know very little about
the individuals and national particularities beyond the global and relatively
coherent style. It is also worth mentioning that The Sex Pistols or The
Clash are no longer that relevant among the new punk generation. And
there are still too few studies that link local punk scenes to their national
background. Unfortunately, the dominant approach in subcultural sociol-
ogy is to disconnect subcultures from their environment and focus more on
style or global subcultural practices than a reflection of the national culture
or social norms in the world of subculture. This is also the problem when
discussing the East European punk frontier. It is not only the question
of how Estonian is Estonian punk, or how Latvian is Latvian punk. What
constructs the notion of the frontier is the point of view of a national sub-
culture or how Norwegian is Norwegian punk, German is German punk
or how Frenchness is expressed in French punk.
Acknowledgements This research was supported by the institutional research

funding IUT34-32 (‘Cultural heritage as a socio-cultural resource and contested
field’) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.
114 A. VENTSEL
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PART II
Eastern European Music Crossing the

Borders
CHAPTER 6
Success, Failure, Splendid Isolation:

Czesław Niemen’s Career in Europe
Mariusz Gradowski
Asked in 1968 how he saw his future, Czesław Niemen, who by that point
was regarded as the greatest Polish popular music star, replied,
I’m slightly embarrassed by the position I’ve achieved. I’ve never sought
fame. I simply wanted to sing, sing better and better, and my private success
is due to the fact that my songs don’t sound as banal as before. I would like
to learn many more things, above all to improve my skill as a composer and
singer. […] Fame comes and goes. One day – when I have to go – I will buy
a small studio in which I would like to conduct various musical experiments.
I’m very much attracted by the idea. (Jazz 4/1968: 13)
The future Niemen envisioned for himself more or less became a reality.
Beginning with the album Katharsis (1976), Niemen devoted himself to
electronic music. He collaborated less and less with other musicians, and
increasingly created pieces on his own, in his home studio, using synthe-
sisers, computers and sequencers, which he called his robotestra. From the
M. Gradowski (B)
Institute of Musicology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_6
120 M. GRADOWSKI
early 1980s until his death in 2004 he performed music, with very few
exceptions, on his own, using only a great flashing robotestra.
A somewhat similar path, from being a member of a typical rock band,
to taking full control over the composition and performing of music, was
undertaken by artists like Vangelis, Klaus Schulze or Brian Eno. Yet in
Niemen’s case, the stylistic change was combined with his reluctance to
release recordings and focus on illustrative music (for theatre and film) and
live performances. His withdrawal from rock music’s commercial rivalry
(measured in numbers of singles and albums) becomes even more signifi-
cant when compared with his earlier artistic endeavours. From the begin-
ning of his solo career in 1966 Niemen very quickly developed his artistic
language and made numerous recordings, frequently surprising his listen-
ers and journalists with changes in his style. Over the course of a decade,
Niemen moved from beat songs à la early Beatles style (‘Baw si˛e w ciuci-
ubabk˛e’ [Let’s Play Bo-peep]), through orchestral pop (‘Sen o Warszawie’
[A Dream of Warsaw aka Warsaw In My Dream]), Motown and Stax sounds
(‘Płon˛aca stodoła’ [A Burning Barn]), progressive rock (‘Bema pami˛eci
żałobny-rapsod’ [Threnody In The Memory Of Bem aka Mourner’s Rhap-
sody]) and jazz rock with elements of free jazz (‘Piosenka dla zmarłej’ [A
Song For the Deceased]), to electronic music (‘Pieśń Wernyhory’ [Song
of Wernyhora]).
Niemen’s stylistic transformations were accompanied by his increased
activity in both Polish and Western European musical life. Significantly,
Niemen’s biographers and scholars focusing on his work describe his
activities with militaristic expressions and make references to ‘conquest’
(Radoszewski 2004: 107), ‘fight’ and ‘war’ (Michalski 2009: 231), ‘cam-
paign’ (Gaszyński 2004: 104–107); this last term being used by Niemen
himself (Radoszewski 2004: 107). I also used it in a previous article on
Niemen’s Italian work (Gradowski 2011). Today I am aware that this lan-
guage makes Niemen’s activities part of a colonial discourse, identifying
him as an artist representing the peripheries (Polish music, Polish music
market) who tries to make his mark on the centre (Anglo-Saxon music). In
this discourse the West is represented as a place that needs to be conquered,
while one’s artistic value is confirmed by achieving success in the West. In
this chapter I examine Czesław Niemen’s international work, explaining
why the artist’s attitude to his career—to a certain extent—falls outside the
postcolonial discourse.
6 SUCCESS, FAILURE, SPLENDID ISOLATION … 121
Postcolonialism and Poland

The application of postcolonial theory to the study of Polish culture has
both advocates and critics. Its application is relevant in so far as there are
two events in Polish history that made the country subordinate to its neigh-
bours and which had a huge impact on the development of national culture.
The first of these is the Partition Period (1795–1918) when Poland did not
exist as an independent state and its culture developed under partitioning
powers (Tsarist Russia, Prussia and Austria). The second colonial period
emerged as the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence increased after 1945.
These two episodes of dependency are viewed differently by scholars. Some
(Koczanowicz 2010; Kołodziejczyk 2010; Borkowska 2010) claim that
despite the evident subordination to the Soviet Union and, previously, to
Russia, Austria and Prussia, the premises of colonialism cannot be applied to
Poland. They argue that colonialism is associated with overseas conquests,
while Poland was subordinated to states with which it shared a border.
Second, after the Second World War the Soviet hegemons were not phys-
ically present in Poland (unlike, for instance, the British in colonial India)
and power rested with Poles. Third, there was no settlement of the alleged
colonisers within Poland’s territory, Russian was not imposed as the official
language, and finally, there was no direct economic-political dependency.
Instead of speaking of postcolonialism, these scholars use the term ‘de-
pendency’. Others (Skórczewski 2008; Domańska 2008; Ostrowska 2011,
and, above all; Thompson 2005, 2011) draw attention to parallels between
Poland’s situation and that of colonial countries and call for an application
of postcolonial theory in the studies of Polish history and culture, although
one that takes into account the differences between Poland’s specific situ-
ation and classic colonialism in relation to Asia, Africa and South America.
I side with the latter view, noting that this polemic—outlined only
briefly—is mainly confined to historical, political and literary studies.
Scholarly research, inspired by postcolonial studies and focusing on the
relationship between Polish and western popular music, is still scarce and
underdeveloped. Yet there are some studies that served as important inspi-
ration for the present analysis. Niemen’s oeuvre has been examined from
the postcolonial perspective by Sławomir Rzepczyński (Rzepczyński 2014),
who described his constant search for identity under hegemonic pressure
coming from various sources. As he notes, Soviet hegemonic oppression
‘imposed on [Niemen’s] emerging identity some other, alien or even hos-
tile identity, from which he wanted to escape’ (Rzepczyński 2014: 158).
122 M. GRADOWSKI
The evolution of Niemen’s artistic personality was all the more important
given the fact that he was born in a region that before the Second World
War belonged to Poland, so called Kresy (Borderlands) and become part of
the Soviet Union only after 1945. For the artist, raised in a Polish family in
the Borderlands, his first language was not Polish but the local Ruthenian
dialect (as Niemen used to say, ‘we spoke our language’ at home). After
repatriation to Poland, Niemen remained an ‘other’ and his subsequent
actions reveal his need to save his own self not only from direct colonisa-
tion by the empire (Soviet Union) but also the indirect cultural colonisation
of Poland’s popular musical culture, dominated by Anglo-Saxon music. As
Rzepczyński writes,
From the demand that Polish art be ‘socialist in its content and national in its
form’ to Niemen’s artistic projects from the twenty-first century, projects as
much as possible free from considerations other than the artist’s own prefer-
ences, we can trace the history of colonisation and attempts to decolonise Pol-
ish culture, the thrive to go beyond its own peripheral nature and to get rid the
complexes deriving from centuries of hegemonic oppression. (Rzepczyński
2014: 165–166)
In Niemen’s case, the artist’s entanglement in colonial relations leads to

growing awareness of his own identity and the need to manifest it. It should
be added, however, that resistance to cultural colonialism did not appear
initially; it emerged after a period of stylistic mimicry of Anglo-Saxon styles.
In this regard Niemen’s withdrawal from active musical life and his giving
up activities on western markets can be seen as part of his conscious efforts
of self-decolonisation.
Important reflections on the subject can be found in Ewa Mazierska’s
essay ‘Czesław Niemen: Between Enigma and Political Pragmatism’, where
the author devotes a separate section to Niemen’s international career.
Mazierska notes that ‘the issue of Niemen’s international career can be
approached by asking two contrasting questions: why did he achieve so
little in the West, given his talent or so much, given that he upstaged so
many Eastern European artists of his generation’ (Mazierska 2016: 258).
She points to external causes: the difficulty to reverse the dominant direc-
tion of flow of music in pop-rock culture (from the British and American
centre to the periphery), the delayed transfer of Niemen’s novel ideas to
recordings (this was caused not so much by the artist’s inertia, as the inef-
ficiency of the Polish music industry), as well as the reduced openness of
the western market in the 1970s (when Niemen tried to make his mark on
the West) compared to the 1980s. A very important intrinsic factor should
also be mentioned: namely Niemen’s lacking a coherent strategy of gaining
success on western scenes (Mazierska 2016: 259). Mazierska’s analysis does
contain excellent observations. However, she looks at Niemen’s perspective
from outside and assesses his international successes and failures according
to objective, measurable criteria of success. The picture gets more compli-
cated if we adopt a so called ‘emic perspective’ (Pike 1967) and examine
Niemen’s inroads into the international arena from his own position. I use
this approach in the last part of the chapter.
Czesaw Niemen’s Foreign ‘Campaigns’

Scholarly reflections name four stages of Niemen’s activity in the West: his
visibility in the French, Italian, German and American pop music markets.
Niemen’s French success (1965–1966) was a result of his performances
(under his birth name, Wydrzycki) at the Paris Olympia in December 1963.
At that time, Niemen was only a talented amateur making his debut in
the summer of 1962, performing as one of several singers of the band
Niebiesko-Czarni for just over a year.1 And yet a song, ‘Wiem, że nie wró-
cisz’ (I Know You Won’t Come), performed by Niemen was included in
a prestigious Niebiesko-Czarni’s recording released in France.2 Niemen’s
performances as a singer with Niebiesko-Czarni led to further offers made
by French managers directly to him. As a soloist he also gained some notable
acknowledgements: two awards at the 3rd Festival International des Var-
iétés in Rennes, performances for French television and radio, a contract
signed with the Disc’Az label and a subsequent album featuring songs in
French. Niemen also recorded Polish lyrics to tracks written and recorded
in a French studio and the result, released in Poland by Polskie Nagrania,
became Niemen’s first solo record including ‘Sen o Warszawie’ (A Dream
of Warsaw), a song that turned out to be his first major hit. His activities
in France influenced and established Niemen as a soloist, and their impact
on his career in Poland was considerable (Chlebowski 2014).
It should be noted that, metaphorically speaking, the Niemen who
went to France was a young singer of such diverse songs as ‘Locomotion’
from Little Eva’s repertoire, ‘Mamo, nasza mamo’ (Mother, Our Mother)
(a coarse, twist arrangement of a Polish folk song); Ray Charles’ ‘What’d
I say’; and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Adieu Tristesse’. The Niemen who
returned to Poland was a musician with a clear artistic vision, fascinated,
124 M. GRADOWSKI
on the one hand, with orchestral pop and, on the other hand, with the
soul style of Otis Redding, James Brown and Clyde McPhatter. This
change is emphasised by the rejection of his birth name (Wydrzycki) and
the adoption of the pseudonym Niemen, which was a pragmatic change
to make the pronunciation easier for non-Polish speakers. This was also
complemented by a change in his image: Niemen grew his hair long and
began to wear colourful clothes and jewellery.
The Italian stage (1969–1970) began with a visit to the Midem trade
show in Cannes in January, 1968. Niemen received the Trophée MIDEM
and the magazine Billboard award for the ‘most promising artist in Eastern
Europe’ (Michalski 2009: 91; Radoszewski 2004: 52); he also met Antonio
Foresti from the Italian branch of the Columbia Broadcasting System, CGD
(Compania Generale del Disco) (Michalski 2009: 118–119). Significantly,
Niemen did not move to Italy, but shuttled between Warsaw and Rome
from February 1969 until August 1970 (Gradowski 2011). This arrange-
ment resulted in two artistic avenues: concerts in Italian dance clubs and
solo projects that produced recordings of thirteen songs in Italian, with
some of them being released on three singles. Niemen’s concerts in the
clubs with his own band Akwarele included, at first, dance music, soul and
R&B; then, with a new line-up called Enigmatic, Niemen began presenting
pieces far less suited to dance and featuring extensive improvised parts. The
solo recordings, usually made with local studio bands and session musicians,
featured Italian versions of Niemen’s Polish songs, such as ‘Dziwny jest
ten świat’ (Strange Is This World) as ‘Io Senza Lei’ (I Without Her), with
Niemen’s guitarist Tomasz Jaśkiewicz playing as an exception, and British
and American hits. What is noticeable is the stylistic diversity, which ranged
from a musical (‘Somwhere Over the Rainbow’ as ‘Arcobaleno’), through
dance soul with jazz inclinations (‘Spinning Wheel’ as ‘24 ore spese bene
con amore’) to rhythm and blues (‘Pami˛etam ten dzień’ as ‘Sorridi, bam-
bina’). This eclecticism, which indeed suggests a lack of strategy as pointed
out by Mazierska, contrasts with Niemen’s growth as the leader of his own
band. The dissolution of Akwarele and the founding of the band Niemen
Enigmatic testifies to Niemen’s search for more complex musical forms:
from dance soul to the language of broadly defined progressive rock with
elements of jazz. From a postcolonial perspective, this is still an example of
self-colonisation, but from the perspective of universal pop-rock aesthetics
(to follow Motti Regev’s idea), it is a qualitative change. From overtly util-
itarian music, Niemen moves to rock music treated as high art (Mazierska
2016: 253–257).
A contract signed by Niemen with CBS in Italy guaranteed him the

release of five LPs. The recordings were not to be made in Italy but at
the company’s regional headquarters, in West Germany. Like the Italian
stage of his career, his German activities were also characterised by a certain
duality. On the one hand, Niemen with his recently founded Grupa Niemen
gave a lot of concerts, made recordings for German radio and television,
and released two LPs (‘Strange is This World’ and ‘Ode to Venus’), yet
another example of his stylistic transformation. After the progressive rock
of Niemen Enigmatic, his new band played the jazz rock of Mahavishnu
Orchestra combined with the avant-garde sound effects of a bowed double
bass. On the other hand, after he recorded the third album, Niemen was
contracted by CBS as a solo artist. ‘Russische Lieder’ was starkly different
from his work with Grupa Niemen: a folk album with Russian songs. It
was a market-motivated move (similar music by Ivan Rebroff, popular at
the time, sold well), but also, as he himself said in interviews, a personal
move: Niemen turned to Russian songs he knew from his youth. There is
some dissonance in this gesture. Niemen treated Russian songs (culture of
the hegemon) as his own and did not really take into account the political
context and significance of his decision. In making a distinction between
Russian folk culture and the imperialist status of the Soviet Union, Niemen
was guided by what Ewa Mazierska calls political pragmatism (Mazierska
2016). The same dissonance appeared in his stylistic perspective. Although
the juxtaposition of Grupa Niemen’s recordings and ‘Russische Lieder’
can be interpreted as a manifestation of Niemen’s broad musical horizons,
given the possibilities offered by the CBS contract it can also be viewed as
another example of a lack of strategy in the aesthetic sphere.
In a direct continuation of his activities in Germany, Niemen was invited
to record his fourth album in the United States in 1974. The American
chapter of Czesław Niemen’s activity in the West is very short and comes
down to the very fact of recording ‘Mourner’s Rhapsody’, an otherwise
highly important album. While Polish jazz musicians like Michał Urba-
niak, Urszula Dudziak, and later Adam Makowicz or Tomasz Stańko did
release records in the United States, for Polish rock music this was an excep-
tional opportunity, all the more, since the sessions were recorded in a high-
end studio and featured exceptional musicians. ‘Mourner’s Rhapsody’ was
released, after some delay, first in West Germany (1974), and later in the
United Kingdom and the United States (1975), with very modest sales and
reception. The delay was not Niemen’s fault; it resulted from the actions
of CBS, which was disappointed with the final outcome. The situation is
126 M. GRADOWSKI
another example of a dissonance in Niemen’s life: as his delayed American

record was being released, he was already working on ‘Katharsis’, an album
that was completely different in style and which opened a period of work
focused on producing music and not on recording albums, irrespective of
the side of the Iron Curtain they were to be released. The fifth album for
CBS was never made since the contract was terminated and Niemen was
struck off the company’s roster at the end of 1978. He made no more
attempts to make his mark on western markets, limiting his contact with
them to occasional concerts.3
A Narrative of Niemen’s Failure

The narrative of Niemen’s failure highlights his objective assets, such as a
very good voice with a broad range, original sound and expressive capabil-
ities, as well as musical self-education, which resulted in highly developed
compositional skills and a style unparalleled in Poland in the 1960s and
1970s, and hence stresses their lost potential. This narrative draws on the
understanding of a successful musical career as measured by artist achiev-
ing wide popularity, being active in album production, having high record
sales, a stable position in a given market, continuity of musical activities and
their significant impact on the local music markets. Similar careers would be
pursued successfully in the 1970s by the Polish jazz musicians mentioned
above and would have very likely been enjoyed by Krzysztof Komeda and
Zbigniew Seifert, had they not died prematurely.
In the case of Niemen, these criteria were not met. The albums he
recorded in the West did not sell well, nor did they have an influence on
the local music scene. It is also clear, in the light of Motti Regev’s the-
ory, that Niemen’s relative popularity (measured by the awards he received
in France, and his initial performances in the Italian clubs) went hand in
hand with his performances, which were the typical expression of aesthetic
cosmopolitanising: music drawing on broadly recognised and established
styles. The French, British or Polish varieties of beat sounded quite similar
around 1963, just as the dance soul performed by Niemen’s Akwarele was
no different stylistically from the soul of Italian bands imitating the Stax
or Motown sound. Artistic individualisation, which began in Italy with the
dissolution of Akwarele and the founding of Niemen Enigmatic, intro-
duced an original element that was harder to sell than the conventional
sounds Niemen was trying to transcend. The progressive rock he opted for
was intellectual and elitist, and his focus in the lyrics on Polish Romantic
poetry only consolidated these initial premises and made Niemen’s music
even more resistant to attempts at cultural translation.
Those commenting on Niemen’s overseas actions observe that he
avoided all things commercial. Roman Waschko recalls the words of a CBS
representative who offered Niemen a song designated for the Italian band
Ricchi e Poveri, popular at the time:
‘Here we have their new future hit. Already recorded. But they’re doing fine,
so if you record it, you’ll have a sure hit and we’ll give them something else.’
[Czesław] listened to the recording and said, ‘I don’t like it.’ In my opinion,
at this point he lost a chance he was never given again, at least in Italy. But yes,
he did hold the banner of High Art high at the time. (Michalski 2009: 118)
A similar story exhibiting this very attitude occurred a few years later in
the United States. Michał Urbaniak recalls trying to talk Niemen out of his
plan to include one of his most complex pieces, ‘Threnody in the Memory
of Bem’, on his American record:
[This] great poetry had been translated by an expert on songs – and that
was bad enough, secondly, a man who has sold six million albums in his
own country and is welcomed by his hosts as someone different or even very
different, has to use such an opportunity, because he may not get another
one. Czesław, of course said ‘no’. And he was never given an opportunity of
such magnitude […]. I think Czesław should have recorded [in New York]
twelve of his best songs, even ‘Pod Papugami’ (Under the Parrots), all his
songs even, because they were and still are excellent – he would have had a
chance, with this publicity and Columbia’s attitude to him, to conquer the
world and he would have won this fight by default. But, unfortunately, he
dug his heels in. (Michalski 2009: 226–231)
Thus, on both occasions, we witness a popular musician who, rather than

offering to the foreign audience the part of his work which is easiest to
consume, puts the bar higher for his prospective foreign fans than for his
domestic audience.
A Narrative of Success in Europe

The story of Niemen’s overseas career is, however, also presented in
a positive light. In these narratives, success is not understood in such
broad terms as in the narrative of failure. This success, to use postcolonial
128 M. GRADOWSKI
language, was a success to the extent it made it possible for an artist from
the peripheries to make a mark on the centre, to seize a fragment of the
western world rather than conquer it and become a household name. Such
a narrative of Niemen’s European success is one of a Polish person achiev-
ing success in Europe, hence achieving success according to less stringent
criteria than in the case of other nationals. According to this approach,
reception and sales cease to matter; what matters is that Niemen released
more records (both LPs and singles) in the West than any other Polish
rock musicians in state socialist Poland. In addition, the records were of
high artistic quality and also made with high artistic consistency. A telling
example is Niemen’s participation in the MIDEM fair, which was, ulti-
mately, insignificant to the development of his career. As Dariusz Michalski
writes about the album ‘Postscriptum’, ‘which [Polskie Nagrania decided
to] release at the MIDEM fair in Cannes, where it had its – European! – pre-
miere on 23 January 1980. […] Guests arriving in Cannes included nearly
five and a half thousand so-called industry people from forty three coun-
tries, representing one hundred and fifty-one record companies, authors’
agencies, various music companies. […] Polskie Nagrania handed out five
hundred copies of Niemen’s record. […] Polish poems sung by a Polish
artist in France in Polish’ (Michalski 2009: 319). Michalski also mentions
the other side of the coin, namely that out of the 1600 people invited to
Niemen’s concert only 200 turned up, adding that ‘a Jazz Gala featuring
the tenor Stan Getz was being held at the same time’ (Michalski 2009:
319). If it had not been for Getz’s concert, would more people have come
to Niemen’s concert? In the success story the answer is: yes, they would
have. From a Polish perspective even such a slight and, in fact, valueless
visibility in the West, was an asset.
Interestingly, the narrative of Niemen’s overseas success focuses almost
exclusively on the West, with the question of the reception of Niemen’s
music within the Eastern Bloc remaining practically unexplored. This might
be the side effect of Polish political and cultural aspirations towards the
West, a lack of identification with eastern countries and, to some extent,
maybe even a disregard of the eastern Bloc as an area of Soviet political
influences. Politics are combined here with a feeling of Polish superiority
over Soviet culture as well, which is reflected in rock music. Polish bands
playing in the 1970s USSR often included western hits in their repertoires.
For them playing western music for an audience that otherwise couldn’t
hear it live, was just like being a part of the cultural West. And yet all we
know about Niemen’s eastern ‘conquest’ is information about his long tour
of the Soviet Union and of film music written for a Yugoslav film ‘Miris
zemlje’ (Smell of the Earth, 1978), directed by Dragovan Jovanovic.
It is true that his activities in Eastern Europe were far less intensive than
in the West, that these did not lead to recordings and album releases (which
did happen in the case of other Polish bands and artists, like Czerwone
Gitary, Skaldowie, No To Co, Maryla Rodowicz). However, Niemen’s
influence on music performed in Eastern Bloc countries was considerable,
as evidenced by two examples. There are quite a few versions of Niemen’s
songs recorded in Eastern Europe and sung by artists like Pasha Hris-
tova (Bulgaria), Donika Venkova (Bulgaria), Irina Oteva (Russia/Soviet
Union), Marie Rottrová (Czechoslovakia), Valdemaras and Algis Franko-
niai (Lithuania/Soviet Union), or bands like Electro Combo (GDR) and
Junior Speakers (Czechoslovakia). Even if we take into account the speci-
ficity of the Sopot Festival, which made it obligatory for overseas artists
to sing a Polish repertoire, including songs by Niemen, the fact that his
songs were included on the various artists’ albums was by no means obvi-
ous. Another interesting example of Niemen’s reception is the fact that his
music was included in the repertoire of the band Integral at the first Soviet
rock festival, Tbilisi 80, with the song ‘Ctpanny Mip’ (Strange Is This
World) appearing on the album documenting the festival. The inclusion of
Niemen’s song on this release, crucial in the history of Russian rock, is a
significant episode of his reception.
The two narratives described above, entangled as they are in a post-
colonial discourse, reveal their shortcomings when juxtaposed with the
electronic period of Niemen’s work. At this point, we can resort to a post-
colonial reflection whereby the rejection of market mechanisms is a gesture
of the artist’s liberation from the colonial mechanisms of the music show
business. In addition, it allows me to focus on his autonomous oeuvre asso-
ciated with the Polish tradition and addressing Polish listeners. The post-
colonial perspective certainly helps us to understand Niemen’s actions, but
the motivation behind them becomes clearer, when we take a closer look at
the values professed by the artist himself. The emic perspective, often used
by ethnomusicology (Alvarez-Pereyre and Arom 1993) and well suited to
the study of popular music (Stokes 2003), enables us, when superimposed
on a postcolonial interpretation, to see the individual caught up, often
unconsciously, in an interplay of cultural forces.
130 M. GRADOWSKI
Splendid Isolation and Communion with Norwid:

Niemen’s Career in His Own Eyes
The Czesław Niemen of rock and roll–inspired music is a self-colonising
Niemen. However, it is worth pointing to some nuances: fascination with
Anglo-Saxon music does not denote admiration for Anglo-Saxon culture;
as Mazierska notes, the United Kingdom and the United States are less
important on the map of Niemen’s travels than France, Italy or West Ger-
many (Mazierska 2016: 260). To follow Allan Moore (Moore 2001), it
could be said that Niemen took over (purely musical) stylistic features of
a given musical language (soul, beat, progressive rock), filling the gen-
res’ (non-musical) features with his own, local content. This becomes even
clearer if we bear in mind that the period of Niemen’s activity in the western
markets coincided with his discovery of Polish poetry, especially the poetry
of Cyprian Norwid, which became a key element in his compositions.
The significance of Norwid to Niemen cannot be overestimated. Niemen
sang and interpreted over twenty works by Norwid, composing music to
a majority of them (Brajerska-Mazur 2017: 41). This close connection
between Niemen and Norwid has various dimensions: it serves to dignify
‘popular music as a form capable of adapting high art’ and is an example of
an ‘aloof attitude to politics’ (Mazierska 2016: 250) or the intensive self-
education and discovery—free from the constraints of a school—of values
corresponding to his worldview (Rzepczyński 2014). The album ‘Mourn-
er’s Rhapsody’ clearly illustrates Niemen’s desire: irrespective of market
demands, he wanted to show Norwid to the world. When he failed, he
decided not to pursue popularity in the West. Working in Poland and in
close contact with Polish culture turned out in the end to be more impor-
tant than the benefits stemming from his visibility in France, Italy, Ger-
many or the United States. After ‘Mourner’s Rhapsody’ Niemen recorded
the album ‘Idée fixe’, which is not only a tribute to Norwid, but also an
expression of Niemen’s artistic creed: to embrace Norwid’s worldview and
to follow in his footsteps.
Norwid’s poetry presents a man torn between what is passing and what
is eternal. Passing values are linked to Norwid with the order of civilisa-
tion, the city, money, success and instant pleasure, which ultimately leads to
despair, a sense of void and hopelessness. Eternal values are connected with
nature reflecting God’s laws and the order of Christian humanism. For Nor-
wid of specific importance is work, understood literally, as an everyday effort
to survive, and metaphorically, as a road whose goal is self-improvement
and avoiding everyday temptations. ‘Work’ for Norwid also means a moral
duty to approve eternal values, employing them in everyday life and incul-
cating them in others. This is also the task of an artist, including a musician,
who adopts the role of a teacher. He is supposed to pass his knowledge to
his listeners; it has to be more important for him than selling records and his
status in show business. Identification with Norwid’s philosophy became
an important element of Niemen’s artistic and human identity and can also
be seen as a rejection of self-colonisation with western music, although the
music in which Niemen manifests Norwid’s values and which he recog-
nises as his own still remains within the orbit of Anglo-Saxon music, like
funk in ‘Larwa’ (Larva), progressive rock with elements of jazz in ‘Moja
piosnka’ (My Song) and jazz rock in ‘Białe góry’ (White Mountains). It
seems, therefore, that Motti Regev is right when he points to the common
aesthetic plane of popular music on the basis of which local discourses may
be constructed.
In my opinion Niemen’s international career, both in the West and in
the East, should not be discussed as a separate aspect of his work. First of all,
the very act of separation into domestic and overseas activity does not stem
from Niemen’s intentions but from the market-driven determinants of his
times. Moreover, to this day Polish listeners have been unable to listen to
Niemen’s overseas releases. Vinyls with Niemen’s songs recorded abroad
were never released in Poland, so today there are practically no official
releases or CD reissues available on the market.4 The only exception is
‘Mourner’s Rhapsody’, which Niemen reissued in 1993, but the number
of copies was so low that today the CD is a rarity.
As a result, the reception of Niemen’s music in Poland includes only
his Polish discography. This is problematic, since it is only through the
chronological examination of his Polish and foreign recordings that the
logic behind Niemen’s artistic growth comes to light. Irrespective of which
side of the Iron Curtain he was recording music, Niemen paid little atten-
tion to the expectations of the market, an attitude stemming from the work
and art ethics he found in Cyprian Norwid’s oeuvre.
Niemen’s critical attitude towards the mechanisms limiting artistic free-
dom in rock culture is already visible in interviews from the very beginning
of his solo career. He voiced such concerns in his soul-inspired period,
when in one of the songs, entitled simply ‘Sukces’ (Success, 1968), he
sang: ‘Success – for many measured by their fortunes, / for me, above all,
my love, you are my success …’ What is striking here is the contrast between
Niemen’s avowed modesty, and his attention-seeking behaviour and
132 M. GRADOWSKI
clothing (as was shown, not without a degree of spite, by Marek Piwowski
in his documentary on Niemen, also entitled ‘Success’). It was only after
Niemen got to know Norwid’s work that a qualitative change occurred in
his artistic attitude. Surviving interviews and accounts about the artist give
us no reason to doubt the sincerity of his fascination with Norwid. Its scale
and impact on Niemen’s musical output seem to have no parallel. It would
be hard to find an artist, either in Polish popular music or elsewhere, who
would identify with the achievements of another artist in such a profound
and consistent manner.
Initially, Niemen simply sang Norwid’s poems. Then he adopted his phi-
losophy and aesthetics of art, its Christian foundations, work ethic, hard
distinction between good and evil,5 vision of humankind dazed by what
civilisation (today Niemen might have added, after John Paul II, ‘civili-
sation of death’) had to offer, and a simple, Franciscan-style life in com-
munion with God and nature. Finally, Niemen’s poetic language and his
lyrics began to draw directly on Norwid’s language with its word forma-
tion, unique punctuation, and Romantic irony. Niemen began to speak as
Norwid, and he began to feel like Norwid, with whom he also shared an
aversion to people, as well as a sense of being misunderstood and alienated.
One of the first gestures of Niemen-Norwid’s budding artistic sensi-
bility was the rejection of the simple and tuneful songs that had made
him popular. This came at a time when such songs in his repertoire would
have sustained his winning streak in concert, which may have helped him
sell the singles he recorded in that period (Gradowski 2011). A similarly
uncompromising attitude put an end to his potential American popular-
ity. Niemen would not include his old hits on ‘Mourner’s Rhapsody’, as
Michał Urbaniak suggested. Their simplicity and hit quality jarred with his
new, Norwidian, ethical view on art. The fact that Niemen behaved consis-
tently on both sides of the Iron Curtain is well proven by comments of the
Polish Radio’s Third Programme, which in November 1977 declared that
Niemen ‘goes out of his way to be original’, ‘musically gets bogged down
in regions that are not for him’, that he ‘has lost touch with his public’, that
‘he’ll soon be playing only for himself’, because ‘he’ll be the only person
to understand his music’.
Niemen once again managed to combine his growing attraction for Nor-
wid with authentic popularity,6 but in the 1980s his fascination led to an
increasing alienation not only from his audience, but also from develop-
ments in popular music. Niemen, who until the mid-1970s had followed
new trends in popular music, often spearheading changes, in his electronic
period would increasingly lock himself within his own music, sharply con-
trasting with what was going on in the musical culture of the 1980s, 1990s
and 2000s.
From the moment he encountered Norwid’s poetry, for him music
would represent high art rather than entertainment. Drawing on Ruth
Finnegan’s research (1986), I argue that the encounter with Norwid
marked the beginning of a shift in Niemen’s work and attitude, from rock
towards the classical music mode. Creating music collectively, maintaining
contact with the public, and elements of oral transmission (rock mode)
began to give way in Niemen’s case to a desire for independence with
regard to the music he was creating, a focus on compositions recorded in
their notation, and the limited role of the audience (as in classical music).
Niemen, an heir to Norwid (both in his own eyes and in the eyes of music
journalists), wanted to be an independent, classical-like composer.7
Nevertheless—and this is where the paradox lies—Niemen did not
entirely cut himself off from the music industry. He gave concerts, wrote
opinion pieces for the Tylko Rock music magazine, and released a recording
with new material. The recording did not feature avant-garde, autonomous
compositions but songs. They are long pieces in his original, inimitable
style, quite different from pop hits; nevertheless, they are still songs, a for-
mat from which he wanted to escape.
Niemen’s case is intriguing, because Norwid’s inspiration clearly pushed
him away from the rock mode and might have convinced him to give up
concerts and record-making altogether, and only write for classical con-
cert halls. Nevertheless, this did not happen; Niemen remained suspended
between these musical practices, feeling comfortable in or belonging to
neither. He remained a distinct entity on the Polish music scene. Before
his death, Niemen was an artist appreciated for his achievements from the
1960s and 1970s, respected for what he did in the 1980s and 1990s, but
at the same time he was treated with detachment, because of his separation
from current music culture, as was evidenced by his last recording.
Conclusion
The question of Niemen’s success or failure raised by his biographers and
popular music scholars is one of the dimensions of cultural colonialism,
in which the peripheral space of communist Poland remains influenced by
the ‘empire’ of the capitalist West. The postcolonial perspective rejects this
colonial success/failure dialectic and instead points to the operation, in
134 M. GRADOWSKI
Niemen’s biography and oeuvre, of colonial forces as well as their over-

coming, which culminated in Niemen’s electronic period. His story is thus
post- postcolonial in a sense of experiencing both liberation from colonial
influences and not caring about colonial powers. However, a look at both
Niemen’s avowed and actual attitude from the emic perspective will reveal
yet another dialectic, this time of music as utilitarian art and music as high
art, stemming from Cyprian Norwid’s philosophy of art, which Niemen
sought to implement in music.
The question remains: can musicians growing up in the world of rock
and functioning in its mode become artistically independent of market
mechanisms? Niemen claimed that they could not, which is why he tried to
shed his rocker’s skin. Many artists succeeded in this: Julie Driscoll ceased
to be a pretty face singing soul and became a jazz artist. Glenn Branca used
the language of guitar rock to create avant-garde music. Disheartened by
showbusiness, the Polish singer Ewa Demarczyk cut herself off from the
media for good, sticking to her decision for yet another decade. But Niemen
was unable to do it. Although aware of the faults of the music industry, he
nevertheless concluded that he had to function within it. He returned to
the song format, from which he started as a young man, towards the end of
his life in the hope of reconnecting with the public. Yet most people were
no longer interested in what Czesław Niemen had to say. He remained
suspended between musical worlds in his ‘splendid isolation’.
Notes
1. If not indicated otherwise, I give all biographical data referring to Niemen
after Skliński (2006), Radoszewski (2004), Michalski (2009), and Gaszyński
(2004).
2. Les Noir Et Bleu - Les Idoles De Pologne, DECCA 460.811 M.
3. The American single ‘Extravaganza’ (MU 178231, Lato Music 1986)
recorded with Michał Urbaniak was an ephemereal, one-off venture. It went
unnoticed.
4. Niemen considered the albums recorded for CBS and released by Citys-
tudio Media Production and Green Tree Records to be pirated versions.
His premature death prevented him from completing his project of officially
reissuing all his recordings.
5. Just like in Matthew 5:37: “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean
‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one” (The New American Bible, Revised
Edition, http://www.usccb.org/bible/, accessed 14 August 2018).
6. ‘Nim przyjdzie wiosna’ (Before Spring Comes) released in 1980 was his
last hit. Significantly, it featured not a poem by Norwid but Jarosław
Iwaszkiewicz’s more accessible and sensual poetry.
7. This may also explain the actions of Niemen’s heirs, who are reluctant to
release recordings with the music of their late husband and father. I think
that it is about not so much a desire to cultivate the Niemen myth, as Ewa
Mazierska claims (Mazierska 2016: 257), but a desire to remain faithful to
the artistic testament of Niemen, who published only those works with which
he was pleased. This obedience to Niemen’s wish but also the quality of the
surviving recordings make the process of releasing CDs with his music so
protracted (after fourteen years only two concert albums and one compila-
tion featuring archive recordings have been released, although much more
material is available in bootleg versions).
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Drugie, No. 6, pp. 289–302.
CHAPTER 7
Yugo-Polish: The Uses of Yugoslav Music

by Polish Musicians
Ewa Mazierska
The aim of this chapter is to examine several instances of collaboration

between Polish and Yugoslav musicians in the postcommunist period, most
importantly between Goran Bregović and two Polish singers, Kayah and
Krzysztof Krawczyk. I wish to establish the main reasons why such a col-
laboration occurred, what was its mechanism and outcome, and how it was
greeted by Polish and international audiences. Through describing it and,
most importantly, the way Polish and Yugoslav adapted old motifs to the
new environment, I hope to shed light on what I will describe as ‘legitimate’
and ‘illegitimate cultural appropriation’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad intertextuality’.
Before I move to the main topic of my discussion, I shall briefly present
the links between popular music in these two countries.
E. Mazierska (B)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_7
138 E. MAZIERSKA
Polish and Yugoslav Encounters in the Socialist

Period
Within the Eastern Bloc there was probably a stronger affinity between
Polish and Yugoslav musicians and their fans than between those from any
other Eastern European countries. One of the reasons for this affinity was a
perception that both countries (together with Hungary) were more liberal
and oriented towards the West than the rest of the Soviet bloc. This was
especially the case of Yugoslavia, which broke its political ties with the Soviet
Union in 1948 and allowed its citizens to travel freely to the West, leading to
a large import of western records into Yugoslavia, as well as releasing many
of them by Jugoton, the leading record company in this country, including
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk. Many of these
records were subsequently bought by tourists from other Eastern European
countries. The second factor in this connection was the fact that Poland
and Yugoslavia had well developed pop-rock scenes and a number of bands
and performers toured in each other’s countries. As Zdravko Jovanovic
observes,
Yugoslavia’s first big mainstream rock band, Bijelo Dugme, established in

1974, went on a tour to Poland in the spring of 1977. The audience’s enthu-
siasm at the 11 concerts Bijelo Dugme played led other Yugoslav bands to fol-
low. A couple of years later, heavy metal band Gordi competed and won at the
Poznań Rock Festival, making it even more popular for Yugoslav bands to go
to Poland. This development overlapped chronologically with the rise of punk
and new wave as the dominant subgenres of rock music in Yugoslavia and
Poland (and elsewhere). Consequently, several of the most popular Yugoslav
punk and new wave bands – such as Yugoslav punk pioneers Pankrti (The
Bastards) or Otroci socializma (Children of Socialism), both from Ljubljana,
or the bands Šarlo Akrobata and Električni Orgazam (Electric Orgasm), both
associated with Belgrade’s new wave scene – all went on tour in Poland in
the early 1980s. (Jovanovic 2016: 34)
On the other hand, Yugoslavia was a frequent destination of the arguably

greatest Polish rock star, Czesław Niemen.
As Jovanovic argues, the clearest manifestation of the closeness of musi-
cians from these two countries were concerts given by Yugoslav bands in
support of Solidarity, the trade union delegalized in 1981, after imposition
of the martial law in Poland. The Zagreb band Azra in some of its songs,
most importantly Poljska u mome srcu (Poland in My Heart ), released in
7 YUGO-POLISH: THE USES OF YUGOSLAV MUSIC … 139
1981, condemned the Polish government for the suppression of Solidarity.

In addition, on several occasions in early 1982, the band’s leader and song-
writer Branimir Johnny Štulić openly criticized Polish authorities (ibid.:
32). It shall be emphasized that the interest in Polish music was motivated
by political considerations, rather than a desire to create music together.
These 1980s encounters were facilitated by Grzegorz Brzozowicz
(b. 1960), who in 1972 moved from Poland to Belgrade, due to his
father’s job as a foreign correspondent. In Belgrade Brzozowicz became
familiar with the Yugoslav rock scene, before returning to Warsaw in 1977.
In the 1980s Brzozowicz organized several concerts of Yugoslav bands in
Poland and served as a mediator, when the Belgrade Student Cultural Cen-
tre (SKC) hosted an event called ‘The Days of Young Polish Culture’, with
Polish band Brygada Kryzys being the main act (Brzozowicz 2001a: 75;
Jovanovic 2016: 39). In due course Brzozowicz became a music journalist,
mostly working in radio. In the Third Programme of Polish Radio he had
his own programme, devoted to Yugoslav music. In the 1990s he contin-
ued his activities as a mediator between Polish and Yugoslav artists, which
resulted in the production of some of the most popular Polish records of
the postcommunist period. However, rather than putting in touch (proper)
rockers from these two countries, he facilitated collaboration between rep-
resentatives of Yugoslav folk rock and Polish pop musicians.
Why did these Polish musicians embrace this opportunity, rather than
trying to ‘westernise’ their music? I will list several factors. The first con-
cerns the fact that the end of the 1990s saw in Poland (as well as in other
parts of Eastern Europe) a certain disillusionment with the way the western
record companies treated Eastern Europe, namely as a market to exploit
rather than to invest in (Elavsky 2011). With this came a realisation of the
difficulty of making a career outside the borders of Poland or even the
lack of advantage in singing in English. At the same time the 1990s was
a decade of the greatest triumphs of disco polo—a Polish genre of dance
music that merged folk motifs with electronica. The genre was derided by
music critics and intellectual elites, with some seeing it as an epitome of the
cultural desert Poland allegedly became after the collapse of state socialism
(Sobolewski 1996). However, it also pointed to the great appetite of the
Polish population for music which is ‘closer to home’ and which edifies
rather than derides Polish traditions. This was also the time of an explosion
of interest in world music in Poland, in a large part thanks to the opportu-
nities brought by digitisation. Fans of world music, true to its name, saw
themselves as cosmopolitan cultural omnivores, in contrast to fans of disco
140 E. MAZIERSKA
polo, who were portrayed as uneducated, narrow-minded provincials, who

do not listen to anything else. I argue that the records on which Polish
and Yugoslav musicians collaborated were meant to tap into two tastes and
types of audiences: those who liked disco polo and used music largely as an
accompaniment to family holidays, and those who were looking for exotic
music, but packaged for foreign tourists. An additional factor that made
Polish artists willing to collaborate with Yugoslav musicians was the popu-
larity of Bijelo Dugme and Goran Bregović in Poland in the 1990s, in part
facilitated by the success of soundtracks to the films by Emir Kusturica,
such as Arizona Dream (1993) and Underground (1995).
The Winning Formula in Action

By the time Kayah and Bregović recorded their album in 1999, titled sim-
ply ‘Kayah i Bregović’ (Kayah and Bregović), Bregović had already collab-
orated with a number of artists in different countries, including a Cape
Verdean pop-folk singer, Cesária Évora. The idea was for Évora to sing
Bregović’s most popular songs in her own language, supported by local
artists. The assumed result was a synthesis of different types of folk music,
which was meant to appeal to fans of world music, as well as capitalising on
the popularity of both artists. Looked at more cynically, such a search for
partners could be seen as a sign of a crisis of an artist unable to compose
new melodies, who tries to overcome this problem by offering audiences
new arrangements of old works. This is what, in a nutshell, happened in
‘Kayah i Bregović’. The record is based largely on pieces composed by
Bregović, previously for different musicians and purposes, although with
Polish lyrics written by Kayah and with new musical arrangement. As with
Évora, Kayah was approached to collaborate with Bregović, because she
was already a major star on the Polish scene, fusing various musical styles,
such as disco and soul. Moreover, rather than being merely a singer, she was
also composing and writing lyrics to her songs. In addition, with her dark
hair, large dark eyes and large nose, she had the most ‘Oriental’ look among
the leading Polish female singers. She could be easily taken for somebody
coming from the Middle East or Turkey.
Bregović produced the record, while Kayah wrote all the lyrics. In some
cases she translated the original lyrics into Polish; on others she wrote Polish
versions from scratch. The record includes mostly pieces already well known
in Poland from Bregović’s soundtracks to films directed by Kusturica, such
as Underground, Arizona Dream, Time of the Gypsies (1989), Black Cat,
White Cat (1998), as well as Queen Margot (1994) by Patrice Chéreau, and
which were frequently new versions of songs produced by Bijelo Dugme,
which recycled some anterior texts. For example, Byłam róża˛ (I Was a Rose)
draws from Bijelo Dugme’s hit Ružica si bila, which was an adaptation of a
traditional song in the Croatian Kajkavian dialect. Kayah’s performance was
supported by Bregović’s band, Weddings and Funerals Orchestra, which
includes a large brass section, and a group of musicians from Zakopane, who
subsequently set up the band Zakopower, one of the most successful Polish
bands, fusing traditional mountain music with contemporary pop-rock.
Their inclusion was suggested by Bregović to Brzozowicz, who previously
gave the Yugoslav musician a large number of records with Polish music,
drawing on Tatra folklore (Brzozowicz 1999: 158). However, with the
exception of the song Prawy do lewego (Right to Left ), which I will discuss
later in detail, the influence of Polish mountain music on ‘Kayah I Bregović’
is minimal. Much stronger are the Middle-Eastern influences.
The songs on the record can be divided into two groups. One contains
love songs, as is the case with the track opening the record, Śpij kochanie,
śpij (Sleep, My Love, Sleep) and the one finishing it, Nie ma, nie ma ciebie
(You Are Not Here) or Trudno kochać (Difficult to Love). The second type of
music can be described as wedding songs, as they explicitly refer to the sit-
uation of a wedding or encourage communal singing, as in Prawy do lewego
(Right to Left ). What is characteristic of their lyrics is their self-conscious
folkisation and Orientalisation. They create the image of a woman who
sees herself living on the side of nature, as conveyed by comparing her-
self to a bird and a rose, and picturing herself in the proximity of sea and
flowers. She becomes aware of the passage of time not through looking at
her watch, but by observing the movement of the sun and stars in the sky.
Another aspect of folkisation is the use of diminutives such as sukieneczka
(little dress ) and archaisms such as tabakiera (snuffbox). The beloved man
is often addressed in lyrics as mój miły (my nice man); a term not encoun-
tered in contemporary colloquial Polish, only in old folk songs. By contrast,
there is a conspicuous absence of terms and images that suggest modern
and urban lives, such as cars, television sets and computers.
Polish tradition is evoked at its strongest in Right to Left. The song is
credited to Bregović, but its melody is very similar to another Yugoslav
song, Hej mala malena, composed and performed in the early 1990s by
Džej Ramadanovski, a musician from a Roma family and a pioneer of turbo
folk. It shall be mentioned that this fact is not widely known to the Polish
audiences and I myself obtained it from a Yugoslav colleague only recently.
142 E. MAZIERSKA
It is possibly that such knowledge would have a negative influence on the

Polish reception of Right to Left, especially by its more educated section
due to two factors: undermining the ‘auteurist’ credential of the project
and linking it to turbo folk, which in Poland has bad connotations, due to
being seen as a genre for the uneducated masses and a vehicle of nationalist
politics, similar as disco polo in Poland. The version of Hej mala malena
can be also found in Black Cat, White Cat, where it is used in a wedding
episode. I have contacted Kayah’s office during writing of this chapter,
asking whether she was aware that Hej mala malena and consequently
Right to Left can be seen as a plagiarism. After many attempts I eventually
received an answer that Kayah did not know about the origin of the song
at the time of its recording and learnt about it much later, as well as about
the conflict in which Bregović was involved.
Right to Left begins with Polish ‘Tatra singing’, after which it gives
way to heavier, Balkan sounds, created by brass instruments. Then we hear
Kayah encouraging the listeners to drink ‘from right to left’ and ‘from left
to right’, as if she was a hostess at a wedding ceremony. She proclaims
that people should drink this way (meaning much) because this is a Polish
tradition. Anyone who does not conform to it, deserves scorn. There is
an official video, accompanying this song, set on a boat, in which both
Kayah and Bregović play a newlywed couple celebrating their union. They
are both wearing white clothes, with Kayah sporting a dress that can be
regarded as an exaggerated version of a traditional wedding dress. The video
draws on films, which are important for Polish and Yugoslav viewers: Rejs
(Cruise, 1970) by Marek Piwowski, regarded as the ultimate Polish cult
classic and the previously mentioned Underground and Black Cat, White
Cat by Kusturica. The video begins like Cruise, with guests boarding a boat
by invitation from a master of ceremonies. The guests look like characters
in Piwowski’s films, who used to rely on amateurs and ‘natural’ actors. Men
are overweight and have coarse features; women have stiff hair and display
overripe bosoms. At one point we also see Bregović repeating a scene from
Cruise in which a passenger is looking through binoculars at scantily clad
women, when pretending that he sees such innocuous objects as cows and
a village road. Like in Black Cat, White Cat, the song accompanies the
scene of a wedding and the image of heavily partying people, oblivious
to what is happening outside and moving further away from a stable land,
brings to mind Underground. By the same token, the video has also a Gypsy
‘tinge’, as Roma people are frequently cast in Kusturica’s films. The point
is, however, not to draw on any specific Romani music but evoke a certain
Fig. 7.1 Cover of the record ‘Kayah i Bregović’ (1999)
touristy reworking of this music, which, as Carol Silverman argues, renders

it as ‘hybrid, fusion, borderless, bricolage’ (Silverman 2014: 186). Use of
these films and the cultures they portrayed, the video addressed Poles who
perceived themselves as culturally sophisticated. This is because knowing
and enjoying Cruise and appreciating certain versions of Gypsy music is
seen in Poland as a sign of sophistication, while also having appeal to those
who treated the song simply as a wedding music. Admittedly, the song
succeeded in both respects; Right to Left became a popular Polish wedding
tune (Rudnicki 2017).
The design of the record sleeve strengthens many of the connotations
conveyed by the songs. It shows Kayah and Bregović sitting next to one
another, with Bregović looking straight into camera and Kayah modestly
looking down. Her hair is intricately plaited and she has a bunch of wild
flowers in her hand, as if she was a country girl, posing for a wedding photo.
144 E. MAZIERSKA
Rather than being joyful, she looks melancholic, perhaps mourning the fact
that she is not marrying her beloved man. The picture is printed in sepia,
reinforcing the archaic and folkish stylisation of the photo and the songs.
‘Kayah i Bregović’ was released by BMG Poland, which at the time was
one of the most successful record labels operating in Poland. In Poland
alone it sold over 700,000 copies and was certified platinum (Borys 2017).
However, most likely the real number of copies sold was significantly higher,
as this was probably the most pirated record of the year. It became one
of the greatest successes of the Polish record industry in the 1990s. In
2000, the record was released in eleven European countries, including
Italy, Spain, France, Turkey, Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and
Croatia, as well as in Israel. Its best result outside Poland was in Italy,
where it peaked at seventh place in the charts. The duo also promoted the
record by touring extensively, both in Poland and abroad, including Italy
and France. Commercial success was combined with critical recognition. In
2000 Kayah received three Fryderyks (the highest award given in Poland
to musicians) for the best female performer, the best pop record and music
video (for Right to Left ), as well as many other awards. Its reviews were also
overwhelmingly positive (Borys 2017). In short, this was a great success
for everybody involved. However, the popularity of ‘Kayah i Bregović’ in
Poland was not matched or even approached by its recognition in any post-
Yugoslav countries. In Serbia and elsewhere it was seen as a fruit of one of
Bregović’s numerous foreign adventures and did little for Kayah’s lasting
popularity in this region. This might be explained by the fact that the record
was recorded in Polish, therefore a large part of its meaning was lost to the
(post) Yugoslav audiences. It can also be seen as a reflection of the unequal
status of Kayah and Bregović in their respective countries; while Bregović
was a major star in Poland at the time the record was made, Kayah was
practically unknown in the Balkans. Indeed, by the time of its production,
memories of the Polish 1980s punk bands had faded in Yugoslavia, while
practically no new Polish pop-rock artist made a mark in any of the countries
that previously constituted Yugoslavia.
Although ‘Kayah i Bregović’ is largely about love, in subsequent years
Kayah confessed in interviews that there was no love or even friendship
lost between her and Bregović. She was particularly resentful about two
aspects of their collaboration. First, she alleged that the Yugoslav artist
had bad manners and was domineering, treating her as a junior partner.
Second, she claimed that he cheated her on royalties from the record
(Lewińska 2015). The figure mentioned was as high as 350,000 Zloties
(about 70,000 GBP) (Lewińska 2015; ‘Bregovic spłacił Kayah’ 2017). In

addition, Kayah accused Bregović of thwarting her chances of an interna-
tional career, because he was not interested in sharing the limelight with
her and did not respond to invitations directed to both of them (Łuków).
In a nutshell, she painted Bregović as a stereotyped Balkan man: patriarchal
and dishonest, while presenting herself as a more civilised, more western
female. Kayah’s take on Bregović thus points to the existence of Oriental-
ist discourse within Eastern Europe, with the Balkans playing the role of
the Orient for more Western Eastern European countries, such as Poland.
Such positioning of the Balkans was advantageous for marketing its music,
but less so when dealing with personal issues. These accusations haunted
Kayah twenty or so years later, when she and Bregović announced a joint
tour in Poland. At this point the Polish diva retracted her words, saying that
it wasn’t really Bregović who cheated on her, but his accountants. There
were also claims that the Balkan musician settled his accounts with the Pol-
ish singer. Similarly, Kayah brushed off the old criticism of Bregović as a
boorish man, saying instead that he, like almost every artist of his stature,
simply had a big ego and on occasions had difficulty communicating with
fellow artists (‘Kayah o konflikcie z Bregovićem’ 2017).
While working on the record, Bregović had another Polish project,
composing music for Operacja Samum (Samum Operation, 1999), a very
successful film directed by Władysław Pasikowski, for which one of the
songs from the record, Sleep, My Love, Sleep, was used. He was also
meant to compose music for another film, directed by one of the then-
greatest stars of Polish cinema, Bogusław Linda, titled Laguna (Lagoon).
However, this project did not come to fruition (Brzozowicz 1999: 158).
The sum Bregović demanded for composing music for this film was very
highUS$100,000 plus the rights to release it on record and collect all prof-
its from it. Thus, although the collaboration between Polish and Yugoslav
musicians was frequently and possibly justly presented as an expression
of cultural closeness and friendship between artists from Yugoslavia and
Poland, such friendship never obscured financial calculation. For Bregović,
Poland most of all constituted a large market worth tapping into.
Between Yugoslav and Polish ‘Cepelia’

The success of ‘Kayah i Bregović’ encouraged Bregović and Brzozowicz to
continue developing the Polish-Yugoslav music connection. The next artist
invited to collaborate with Bregović was Krzysztof Krawczyk. Not unlike
146 E. MAZIERSKA
Kayah, Krawczyk was a major star in Poland, first gaining popularity in the
1960s with the band Trubadurzy (Trubadours), which together with Czer-
wone Gitary and Skaldowie, was the most popular Polish pop-rock band
of that decade. Trubadurzy’s repertoire was eclectic, but the band leaned
towards folk-rock. However, unlike Skaldowie, for whom the main source
of inspiration was Polish mountain music, with Trubadurzy it was more dif-
ficult to pinpoint the roots of their music. Their style can be described as
pan-Slavic. The connection with folk and archaic culture was also signified
by their elaborated costumes, which looked like a cross between Polish folk
and the attire of Three Musketeers. The very name Trubadurzy suggested
the band’s affinity to the old traditions, harking as far back as the Middle
Ages. In 1973 Krawczyk left Trubadurzy to launch a solo career, which
spanned two countries, Poland and the United States, where he lived for
several years in the 1980s and 1990s. Krawczyk’s repertoire remained eclec-
tic. During his American years he dabbled in country music and covered
many hits of American stars, such as Elvis Presley and Stevie Wonder. In
the 1990s he even made a record in Nashville, titled Krystof: Eastern Coun-
try Album (1997), whose producer was David Briggs, who used to work
with Elvis Presley (Brzozowicz 2001b: 52). However, the record failed to
make a mark on the American market and Krawczyk returned to Poland.
Upon his return he embraced disco polo, religious songs and even songs
for children. Most likely Krawczyk’s non-specific folkism and his openness
to different styles was a factor in being considered as Bregović’s new Polish
partner. To that add his strong voice and distinctive physical appearance.
With dark curly hair, dark moustache, thick dark eyebrows and penchant for
religious jewellery, he looked mildly exotic and easily could be taken for a
Gypsy. However, the most important reason, in Bregović’s own words, was
that he was popular in provincial Poland. ‘Where Warsaw ends, Krawczyk
begins’, he said (quoted in Wyszogrodzki 2001: 51). Essentially, thus, the
choice of Krawczyk was dictated by Bregović’s attempt to expand his mar-
ket, which was a strategy he followed previously, seeking collaborators in
different countries.
The result of the collaboration was a record, ‘Daj mi drugie życie’ (Give
Me a Second Life), whose international title was ‘Kris & Goran’, released in
2001 by the label Zic Zac and distributed by BMG Poland, the same com-
pany that released ‘Kayah i Bregović’ two years earlier. Broadly speaking,
the record was made according to the same formula as ‘Kayah i Bregović’
but with less care and personal investment of the collaborating artists. In
comparison with ‘Kayah i Bregović’, the songs are more similar to each
other, largely due to having the same musical arrangement. Usually we hear
Krawczyk’s voice against the background of a female chorus. Polish moun-
tain music is practically absent, even though ‘mountain motifs’ appear in the
songs’ lyrics. The lyrics also lack the dexterity and catchiness of those writ-
ten by Kayah. They are not written by Krawczyk, but penned by translator
and journalist Daniel Wyszogrodzki, known for adapting foreign musicals
to the Polish stage. They are written mostly from the perspective of an old
playboy, who has a cynical attitude to life and low expectations concerning
other people’s loyalty. Two songs which perfectly convey this attitude are
Mój przyjacielu (My Friend), which opens the record and Płatna miłość
(Paid Love), which is the second song on the record.
My Friend in fact was not composed by Bregović, but by another
Yugoslav composer, Momčilo Bajagić. Its original title is Moji drugovi.
Its choice was suggested to Krawczyk and Bregović by the label and had
to be subtly negotiated with Bregović, who was not particularly pleased to
have the composition of another artist included on ‘his’ record (tj 2014).
My Friend is a sarcastic tale of male friendship from the perspective of a
man who gave his friend ‘money and a car’ and ended up destitute and
cuckolded. This song was also made into a video. As with Right to Left,
it is a humorous mini-film, which draws heavily on stereotypes pertaining
to Yugoslav and Gypsy cultures, although its main source of inspiration is
Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Its main character, played by Krawczyk,
is a cigar-smoking and cat-stroking mafia boss, who confronts his cheat-
ing friend during a lavish meal, at which he and his men gobble large
quantities of spaghetti and drink alcohol, and then play cards, while his
‘friend’ sits tied, forced to listen to the reproaches. Eventually the ‘friend’
is disposed of, as suggested by the last scene, when the members of the
mafia attend a funeral. This scene is juxtaposed with a back story, told in
black and white, showing the ‘friend’ cheating on his boss’s wife. Bregović,
as in the video version of Right to Left, plays a secondary role; this time
being Krawczyk’s sidekick. The humour of this story relies on exaggerating
stereotypes, as well as the fact that the ‘friend’ is played by a puny and oldish
man, an unlikely competitor to the macho character, played by Krawczyk.
Compared with Right to Left, this video appears rather heavy handed and,
ultimately, not funny.
Paid Love is a reworking of the theme from Arizona Dream and tells the
story of a man who praises the advantages of ‘paid love’ while visiting an
older, yet still attractive prostitute. The lyrics play on the double meaning
of ‘unpaid love’: love which is not paid for by money and love which is
148 E. MAZIERSKA
in vain. In comparison with such love, prostitution seems to be a better

option. The titular song, Give Me a Second Life conveys a desire to get a
second chance in life, which ultimately means a second chance for love.
The entire record has a strong religious undertone. Many songs draw on
Christian imagery and have the form of a prayer. God is even present in
songs whose explicit topic is a man’s love for a woman. The protagonist
of Krawczyk’s songs is able to love a woman only if God allows him to
do so. Such an idea is present most clearly in the song closing the record,
Gdybyś była moja (If You Were Mine). This constant evoking of God’s will,
on which a man is totally dependent, poignantly contrasts with the lyrics of
Kayah’s If God Exists, which expresses scepticism to the presence of a deity.
Unlike Kayah, Krawczyk did not complain (at least publicly) about his
collaboration with the Yugoslav composer and seemed to be happy with its
outcome (tj 2014). Not surprisingly, as ‘Give Me a Second Life’ achieved
a significant commercial success, being certified ‘gold’ in Poland. It also
received some critical recognition, as reflected in a nomination for a Fry-
deryk in the category of the best ethno-folk album. However, in compar-
ison with ‘Kayah i Bregović’, the success was modest. One reason for this
more modest success was the sense of repetition: repeating the winning
formula, without adding much of a personal touch, unlike Kayah’s record,
which was a novelty on the Polish market and sounded like Kayah’s per-
sonal project. Another reason is the de-emphasis on giving the record an
arthouse feel; testifying to a different cultural capital of Krawczyk. This
perception is reflected in critical comments one can find on Polish inter-
net forums, when the word ‘cepelia’ is often used. ‘Cepelia’ is taken from
a chain of shops, popular in Poland during the state socialist period (and
still existing in a residual form), which offered tourists Polish folk art. In
due course, the term was used to describe fake folkism, based on touristy
clichés and prompted merely by a desire to make profit, rather than a need
for self-expression. Finally, the record industry changed significantly in the
two years between the two records—1999 was the last of the Golden Years
of the record industry both globally and in Poland (IFPI Report 2000).
Since then the sales of records declined, due to both piracy and legal down-
loading. Still, against this background ‘Give Me a Second Life’ did quite
well and is seen as a high point in Krawczyk’s career. In hindsight, the
record was probably more advantageous for Krawczyk than for Bregović,
who following its release lost much of his aura as an ‘authentic artist’ and
started to be seen in Poland as the purveyor of a limited range of tunes
endlessly recycled.
The tradition started by Kayah was continued by another Polish female

artist, Justyna Steczkowska, a singer with a similar artistic profile who was
five years younger. Rather than turning to Bregović, she chose an artist who
was less well known in Poland and hence could be seen as more ‘authentic’,
Boban Marković. With him she recorded in 2015 the LP ‘I na co mi to
było?’ (What Have I Needed It For?). The record was promoted by a video
to the song Kto mi wciska kit? (Who Is Trying to Cheat Me?), recorded
in Macedonia. In Poland, this song and video led to a conflict between
Steczkowska and Kayah, who accused her younger colleague of stealing
ideas from her song and video to Right to Left. Indeed, both videos use the
motif of a wedding, with respective female stars playing the role of the bride.
Steczkowska responded to this accusation by saying that nobody has a
monopoly on using Balkan music; everybody is free to borrow from it (MT
2016). Steczkowska’s record did rather poorly in comparison with Kayah
and Krawczyk’s record, reaching only thirty-eighth place in the Polish chart
and receiving no official awards.
The spat between the two Polish divas, diligently examined in the tabloid
press and on various Polish gossip portals, and the reception of their works
raises the issue of authenticity and originality, pointing to the fact that
they are relative. In Poland, Bregović appropriating the work of Džej
Ramadanovski was of no consequence, because Poles were not familiar
with Ramadanovski’s original. Kayah was not reproached for being inau-
thentic or unoriginal despite drawing on a different ethnic culture than her
own and borrowing from an old Polish film. On the contrary, her voyage
into another culture and the past were seen as proof of her ingenuity. What
mattered was not what she appropriated, but how she used the source
material. The question of Steczkowska’s originality was not related to her
borrowing from Balkan or Gypsy culture, but from the work of her older
Polish colleague. The problem with authenticity thus only appeared when
the borrowing took place within the same ethnic and social context. In
a wider sense, these examples of appropriation and recycling confirm the
view of Roland Barthes, which became a postmodern cliché, that all art is
intertextual. However, they also suggest that not all types of intertextuality
are equally valued and legitimised: borrowing from an exotic culture is seen
as a marker of originality (hence a relatively high prestige of world music);
borrowing from the older colleague is regarded as a sign of the lack of
originality and the proof of low work ethics.
150 E. MAZIERSKA
‘Yugoton’ and ‘Yugopolis’

Brzozowicz is also the godfather of a series of records with ‘Yugo’ in their
titles, ‘Yugoton’ (2001) (an obvious nod to the record company Jugo-
ton), ‘Yugopolis - Słoneczna strona miasta’ (Yugopolis - The Sunny Side
of the City, 2007), ‘The Best of Yugoton/Yugopolis’ (2009) and ‘Yugopo-
lis 2012’ (2011). They include versions of Yugoslav songs of artists such
as Električni Orgazam, Parni Valjak, Film, Idoli, Haustor, Aerodrom and
Bajaga, covered by Maciej Maleńczuk, Paweł Kukiz, Tymon Tymański,
Kazik Staszewski, Katarzyna Nosowska and Olaf Deriglasoff. These Pol-
ish artists represent different generations, but the best known of them,
Maleńczuk, Kukiz and Staszewski, were born in the early 1960s and made
their career in large part thanks to the political dimension of their songs.
This is a generation who grew up during the period of the first Solidarity
and martial law, hence they might not only remember these Yugoslav bands
from their youth, but be aware of their sympathy for the Polish cause.
The very fact that there were so many records released under the same
banner suggests that the project tapped into a gap in the Polish market.
Indeed, the first two records were certified ‘gold’ in Poland. Inevitably,
inclusion of so many singers means that they do not have the same level
of thematic and stylistic consistency as those made by Bregović with Kayah
and Krawczyk. Nevertheless, there was an attempt to achieve more than
releasing a series of popular songs on one album. This is conveyed by the
title ‘Yugopolis’ and the design of this record. ‘Yugopolis’ can be regarded
as a play on two words: ‘Polish’, pointing to the Polish-Yugoslav connection
and ‘polis’ (‘city’ in Greek). The reference to the idea of the city is con-
veyed by the design of the record’s sleeve, which unfolds like a map. Many
of the songs deal with a journey through space and time, such as Ostat-
nia nocka (The Last Night ), Dzień pomyłek (Day of Mistakes ), Miasto budzi
si˛e (The City Wakes Up) and Morze Śródziemne (Przepływa przeze mnie)
(The Mediterranean Sea Moves Through Me). The songs convey Ostalgia:
yearning for the lifestyle, mindset and popular culture created during the
period of state socialism. It is largely a masculine culture, fuelled by alcohol
and long nights filled with discussions about the meaning of life. Money
matters little in Yugopolis. An important part of this culture is also West-
algia: imagining the West as a better world than the East, to which one
wants to escape. Many people in Poland and Yugoslavia, as well as in other
Eastern European countries, imagined such a West and were disappointed
when the old system was supplanted by capitalism, failing to bring to their
countries the West which they imagined.
The most popular song on the records was The Last Night, sung by
Maciej Maleńczuk, which is a cover of Verujem - Ne verujem (I Believe
– I Don’t Believe), released in 1988 by Bajaga & Instruktori, a band
whose leader is Momčilo Bajagić ‘Bajaga’. Maleńczuk is a popular singer-
songwriter from Kraków, whose original works fuse several strands: rock,
sung poetry and urban folk, elements which can also be found in the work
of Bajaga. The Last Night draws most openly on the third strand. It tells
the story of a man who is about to leave prison and is in equal measure
exhilarated and frightened by this prospect. In anticipation of its popularity,
a video was produced for The Last Night, which significantly changed the
meaning of the song. It begins in a nurses’ room, with two nurses com-
plaining about their boredom, while browsing a colourful magazine ‘Na
Martwo’ (Dead), which is a humorous reference to a sensationalist Polish
tabloid ‘Na żywo’ (Live). They also contrast their lives with that in the
West. Next we see some people on the crowded hospital ward, celebrating
with a bottle of champagne the release of one of the patients. Eventually
the nurses join in the party and the patient who was meant to leave, changes
his mind and returns to his hospital bed. Unlike the videos to the songs
performed by Kayah and Krawczyk, which were widely praised by the view-
ers leaving their comments on YouTube, on this occasion comments were
mostly negative and the viewers wondered what made its producers move
the setting from prison to hospital. It is possible that this change was meant
to ‘soften’ the song and make it more appealing to both genders.
As with the records which Bregović made with Polish musicians, the
resurrecting of old Yugoslav songs by Polish artists worked in favour of the
Yugoslav artists also in the sense that they could secure tours in Poland.
In particular, in 2013 Bajaga i Instruktori gave a series of concerts in this
country. Most likely it would not have happened, if not for the popularity
of The Last Night. However, while ‘Yugopolis’ and ‘Yugoton’ attracted
much attention in Polish, they barely made a mark on popular music in the
territories of the old Yugoslavia. Clearly, when faced with a choice between
the Yugoslav originals and Polish reworkings, the audiences in countries
such as Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia chose the former.
152 E. MAZIERSKA
Conclusions
The collaboration of Polish singers with Yugoslav musicians at the end
of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century
can be described as a ‘marriage made in heaven’. It brought significant
financial profits to both sides, as well as critical recognition. This success
capitalised on the Polish appetite for ‘world music’, yet was tailored to
specific Polish needs: with Polish lyrics and addressing Polish culture and
sensitivity. It also took advantage of Ostalgia: a yearning for certain facets
of the state socialist past. However, the interest in ‘Yugo-Polish’ was asym-
metrical. Polish love of Yugoslav music was not reciprocated by a surge
of (post)Yugoslav artists covering Polish songs, which might suggest that
Polish popular music is more parochial than Yugoslav, as demonstrated by
the fact that Poland does not have such successful cosmopolitan and multi-
genre music producers as Bregović. But this might be explained by the fact
that the size of the Polish market for music encourages Polish musicians to
address Polish audiences, rather than seeking popularity abroad. Another
connected factor concerns different perceptions of Poland in Yugoslavia
and Yugoslavia in Poland during the period of state socialism. For Poles,
who grew up under state socialism, Yugoslavia felt superior to the rest of
Eastern Europe due to its political, economic and cultural proximity to the
West. For some, myself included, it was superior over both the socialist East
and capitalist West thanks to combining the best features of both systems
in its self-management model. To Yugoslavs, Poland, being one of many
countries making up the Soviet bloc, came across as politically and culturally
inferior. In terms of popular music, Yugoslavs were very Western-oriented
and biased against the rest of Eastern Europe, assuming that everything
created behind the Iron Curtain was of little value. It was only the birth
of Solidarity and its suppression under martial law, which rendered Polish
popular music ‘interesting’, yet, as previously argued, this was for political
rather than artistic reasons. Although state socialism fell in Poland, and
self-management does not exist in the territory of the former Yugoslavia,
the old attitudes linger, contributing to the lack of appreciation there of
Polish popular music.
Special Note The author is grateful to Slobodan Karamanic and Marko Zubak for
their comments on the draft of this chapter.
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Lewińska, Joanna. 2015. Bałkańska muzyka w Polsce – przewodnik subiekty-
wny. Balkanistyka.org, 8 January. http://balkanistyka.org/balkanska-muzyka-
w-polsce-przewodnik-subiektywny/. Accessed 24 March 2018.
Łuków, Magda. Kayah. Polki.pl. https://polki.pl/zycie-gwiazd/
newsy,kayah,7266073,artykul.html. Accessed 22 March 2018.
MT. 2016. Steczkowska próbuje przyćmić Kayah. Fakt24.pl, 8 July. http://www.
fakt.pl/kobieta/plotki/justyna-steczkowska-i-kayah-walcza-na-balkanskie-
rytmy/p1wtwzy. Accessed 22 March 2018.
Rudnicki, Ludwik. 2017. Polskie wersje bałkańskich przebojów, które na
pewno znasz! Eastbook, 11 September. http://www.eastbook.eu/2017/09/
11/polskie-wersje-balkanskich-piosenek-ktore-na-pewno-znasz/. Accessed 17
March 2018.
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priation, and Representation. In The Globalization of Music in Transit: Music
Migration and Tourism, ed. Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu. New
York and London: Routledge.
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tj. 2014. Krzysztof Krawczyk: mój przyjaciel Goran Bregović… PolskieRadio.pl, 12
January. https://www.polskieradio.pl/7/3085/Artykul/1022526,Krzysztof-
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2018.
Wyszogrodzki, Daniel. 2001. Rozmowa z Goranem Bregovićem. Machina 9:
50–52.
CHAPTER 8
Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music

Production Between Hybridity and Class
Struggle
Slobodan Karamanić and Manuela Unverdorben
In the last couple of decades, ‘Balkan music’ has emerged as a new kind
of transnational superstyle, comparable to global music genres like ‘Afro’,
‘Asian’, ‘Cuban’ or ‘Latin’. This Balkan music superstyle—in the West alter-
natively called ‘Progressive Balkan folk’—has been widely celebrated for its
hybrid nature because it fuses influences from East and West, contempo-
rary and traditional, urban and pastoral. Throughout many major European
cities we could find plenty of flyers and teasers catching the fancy of Balkan
music and inviting people to ‘wild’, ‘hilarious’ and ‘flamboyant’ Balkan
parties.
In contrast, during the same period, across a vast area of Europe’s periph-
ery, other genres of local pop-folk music production appeared, which were
baptised with different names in various countries, including: Algerian rai,
S. Karamanić (B)
Munich, Germany
M. Unverdorben
Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Munich, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_8
156 S. KARAMANIĆ AND M. UNVERDORBEN
Turkish arabesk, Albanian tallava or muzika popullore, Bulgarian chalga,

Greek skiládiko, Romanian manele, Serbian turbofolk, Polish disco polo, etc.
Although these musical genres are also characterised by their hybrid and
transnational tone, they were not welcomed by pro-Western cultural elites,
who perceived them as excessive and aggressive: either as being too modern,
or too traditional, inauthentic or nationalist and, in essence, too commer-
cial and obscene.
In this chapter we examine the reception and perception of these two
streams of music production, Balkan world music vs. Balkan pop-folk
music. While noticing some of the basic ambivalences and contradictions
in evaluation of two different genres, we focus on discursive and political
implications of the notion of Balkan itself in popular music. As we intend to
show, the signifier of Balkans in the field of popular music reflects a division,
a split allotting the music under the name of Balkans into the two camps.
Our special focus aims at a particular paradox: despite the fact that Balkan
world music and Balkan pop-folk share similar Oriental features they are dif-
ferently received and evaluated, creating a clear-cut demarcation between
high and low modes of music production. Besides our intention to desig-
nate specific material conditions in which these music modalities appear, we
try to explain the specific class connotation that the word ‘Balkan’ imparts
in this historical moment.
What Does It Mean to Talk About Balkan

Music Today?
To define ‘Balkan music’ seems equally difficult as to demarcate precise
borders of the Balkan territories. Perhaps due to its fundamentally negative
connotations in recent history (especially the Yugoslav wars, 1991–1999),
the term ‘Balkan’ today continues to recall something fluid and odd. With
the exception of the Balkan mountain in Bulgaria there is not a single
topographic point on the current map of Europe associated with the name
‘Balkan’. Furthermore, there is hardly any social or political idea that can
be represented by this name, although Brussels has introduced a techni-
cal term of ‘Western Balkans’ for those countries sitting in the waiting
room for potential European Union membership. Hence, it appears that
the Balkans keep representing an imagined and fictional space of the Euro-
pean consciousness (as in fantasy countries like Syldavia and Borduria from
Tin-Tin’s adventures).
8 BALKAN HIGH, BALKAN LOW … 157
Nevertheless, there is a kind of Balkan music: an average European pop

music listener may easily recognise a characteristic Balkan sound, in its
vibrations and rhythms, usually associated with such internationally famous
performers as Goran Bregović, Gogol Bordello, Taraf de Haiducks, Boban
Marković, Ferus Mustafov, Kočani orkestar or Balkan Beat Box. Hence,
a certain basic musical configuration connected to the name Balkan is
already present. What characterises this ‘Balkan sound’? Or, what makes
the sound ‘Balkanic’? Is it ‘Gypsy’ brass music, does it have Oriental fea-
tures, asymmetric and syncopated rhythms or melismatic singing? None
of these components are distinctly from the Balkans. What is more, such
a definition is reductive: such elements do not necessarily belong to all
varieties of the music traditions in the Balkans, which also still inspires con-
temporary interpretations—just to mention Bosnian sevdalinka, Dalmatian
klape, Slovenian jodlanje, Zagorje’s popevke, or Slavonian and Vojvodinian
tamburica music.
Yet if Balkan music consists of a set of different sounds, how does it
distinguish itself in the rubric of the so-called ‘world music’?
For many of its producers and promoters, it is more appropriate to speak
of Balkan music in terms of a certain sentiment: as an ‘emotional territo-
ry’ (Barber-Keršovan 2006), Balkan music can be seen as a territory of
adventure, transgression and mixture, a space where the actual borders are
suspended and where seemingly impossible encounters between cultures
become possible. For somebody like DJ Shantel—the self-pronounced
‘King of Balkan Pop’ from Frankfurt am Main—Balkan music is a feeling or
an emotion, rather than something related to a particular essence, attribute
or territory. In fact, Shantel would identify Balkan music exactly as a virtual
location of an impure, bastard and hybrid musical mixture, the location
of a mixture which fuses influences of East and West, contemporary and
traditional, new and old: ‘This music builds bridges and eliminates borders.
This is Utopia, an Ideal, even when it goes beyond the reality’ (Winkler
2007).
Beyond Reality or Reality Itself?

Now, if we take a closer look at the Balkans, we can indeed notice a certain
musical genre—widely popular all over the region—that would perfectly
fit into Shantel’s definition of hybridity. This new genre is truly a bastard
mixture, a genuine music phenomenon (rather real than virtual) that incor-
porates folk elements together with disco beats, techno and dance rhythms.
It has quickly spread not only over the Balkans, but also beyond the zone
of Europe’s periphery, connecting the melodies of revived Algerian rai
and Turkish arabesk with newly established music subspecies like Albanian
tallava, Bulgarian chalga, Greek skiládiko, Romanian manele, Serbian turbo
folk, and so on.
In effect, in this contemporary hybrid Balkan music, which DJ Shantel
himself discovers in the zero years of twentieth century, nothing is really
new. Here we do not need to repeat the old catchphrase about the Balkans
as a crossroads of different cultural and musical influences. Back in the
1960s, a new musical wave under the name of ‘novokomponovana nar-
odna muzika’ (newly composed folk music, hereafter NCFM) emerged
in Yugoslavia, which consisted in modernising folk sounds by pop music
structures (verse-chorus-verse); and by joining ‘traditional’ instruments
(accordion, violin, darabuka) with electric guitars, bass and keyboards.
As Uroš Čvoro defines it, ‘NCFM combined pop sensibilities with “re-
gional codes”, such as distinctive rhythmic pattern, a melodic sequence
and an instrumental or textual motive associated with local traditions. The
resulting music functioned as a sum of recognisable songs framed around
motifs of love, regional belonging, family and everyday life’ (Čvoro 2014:
9). One among the domineering themes was, however, the theme of the
relationship between rustic and urban life, reflecting upon the migration
of rural populations to the cities in Yugoslavia after the Second World War,
especially touching on the phenomenon of so-called ‘gasterbajteri’ (guest
workers employed in western countries) and linking their musical home-
land with the place of work. Lepa Lukić, the first generation ‘Queen of
folk music’ in her iconic song Od izvora dva putića (Two Paths leading
from the Water Spring, 1967) sings about a village girl, whose boyfriend
left her and moved to the city. Reaching unprecedented popularity, this
single was sold in 260,000 copies (Rasmussen 1995: 245). Equally iconic
is a video, in which Lepa interprets Od izvora dva putića in front of Paris’
Eiffel Tower, coupling the melismatic and melancholic vocal with the sym-
bol of European modernism. In the video we then see Lepa among the
Yugoslav ‘gastarbajteri’ at their workplace, singing next to her. A voice of
the rising urbo-folk was at the horizon (Momčilović 2002: 62).
A paradigmatic step further came with Lepa Brena (Bosnian-born
Fahreta Jahić), the ultimate Yugoslav and Balkan pop folk star, inaugu-
rating a new age in pop music, an age of newly born pop-folk. This pop-folk
genre commenced as the ultimate genre of reconciliation. Take Brena’s
hit Mile voli disko (Mile loves Disco, 1982): the ‘conventional’ world of
Serbian peasant Mile meeting the modern discotheque, epitomised in an

effort of the Serbian folk accordion to play disco music. What used to be
perceived as antagonistic counterparts in modern reality suddenly became
non-contradictory in music: mixing urban and rural, contemporary and
traditional. And while NCFM, with its standard themes of love, family,
homeland belonging and patriotism, it had been possible to interpret it
as a ‘product of acculturation suggesting a process of cultural impoverish-
ment brought about by the migration of rural populations to the cities’
(Rasmussen 1995: 241). Brena’s song announced the radical break with
the nostalgic pathos of the homeland, with the return to ‘rural’ roots was
no longer in question.
The new compilations immediately received enormous popularity.
Within one decade of performing, Lepa Brena held 2000 concerts, each
with more than 5000 visitors, and had sold over 10 million records. The
culmination of Brena’s career was probably her spectacular appearance at
Sofia’s stadium Vasil Levski in 1990: she entered in a helicopter and sang
for three hours in front of 100,000 visitors. This event was not only musi-
cal, but also reflected one important political moment in Bulgaria: the fall
of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Without much cynicism, one could compare the sig-
nificance of Brena’s performance in Sofia with Pink Floyd’s concert (The
Wall ) in Berlin 1989. Namely, the paradox lies in the fact that, while Bre-
na’s performances in Yugoslavia were perceived as Eastern and Oriental,
in Bulgaria and other socialist countries this music played the role of the
liberating sound coming from the West, but spiced with the local Balkan
flavour. The Bulgarian people, Donna A. Buchanan writes, ‘preferred Ser-
bian ethnopop because it was simultaneously “more Western” than any-
thing produced locally, and yet, “closer to home”’ (Buchanan 2007: 233).
In the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s, Goran Bregović and his
band Bijelo Dugme (White Button) started to play so-called pastirski rok
(Shepard rock) supported with traditional instruments such as Macedo-
nian zurla, Mediterranean derbouka and mandolin, Serbian frula (flute)
and gajde (bagpipes). In Sarajevo or Skopje pop scenes, it became more
and more difficult to distinguish rock from folk. A real boom in the pop-
ularity of this pop-folk wave finally happened at the end of the 1980s and
1990s, when new music technology (especially electronic instruments like
synthesizers and drum machines) and the development of communications
(satellite TV, internet) made it simple to fuse and mix beyond limits. Today
at the satellite TV Balkanika we can watch, one by one, video clips from
Albania, Bulgaria or Croatia and simultaneously read sms messages from
Sarajevo, Stuttgart and Seattle. Against the predominant cliché of the clash
of cultures in the Balkans, the Balkan pop-folk genre confirmed that there
exists a space that—despite its immense cultural heterogeneity and political
divisions—shares a specific unifying sound.
The Balkan Sound and Its Discontents

It is evident that two sorts of music production—Balkan world music and
Balkan pop-folk music—are not celebrated at the same places and with
the same intensity. In contrast to Shantel’s ‘prophetic’ understanding of
the Balkan pop emancipatory potentials, a utopian model for the future
and a new sound for Europe, the same Balkan pop-folk mixes with Orien-
tal features are vastly disputed by national and international cultural elites,
academics, educated musicians and journalists. While rejecting the contem-
porary Balkan pop-folk as being cheap kitsch, the elitist discourse in this
music usually projects various mutually contradictory features.
Let us mention a few examples. When we, in the course of our research of
the Balkan hype phenomenon, first tried to inform ourselves about Bulgar-
ian pop-folk—chalga—and consulted Wikipedia, we encountered the fol-
lowing (‘psycho-dynamic’) definition: ‘Unlike disco music, where attitudes
are often age related, chalga is IQ related—the lower their IQ the more
people enjoy and prefer chalga to pop music.’ That this is not just an inno-
cent and contingent cultural racist joke confirms an event from 1999, when
the Bulgarian Parliament faced a petition, directed against the ‘“gypsifica-
tion” and “turkification” of the Bulgarian nation’ (Levy 2002: 208). The
petition was a reaction against the ‘excessive’ popularity of chalga—indeed
inspired by Roma and Turkish music, mixed with contemporary western
pop music styles. Analysing how the elites in Bulgaria have shaped such a
cultural-racist canon, Claire Levy states that ‘the national discourse in Bul-
garia very much excludes, or at least pushes to the margins, not the “distant
other”, but the “local other” represented by its most visible minorities –
Gypsies and Turks – whose music contributes significantly to the musical
style chalga’ (Levy 2002: 199).
In contrast to Shantel’s desire for hybridity, expressed in the refrain of
the song Disko partizani: ‘Tsiganizatsia, come on baby this is what you need’,
and whilst Shantel’s remixes of Romanian manele tunes are receiving great
success in Europe and the world, shaking the dance floors from New York to
Moscow, in Romania an entire ‘anti-manelist’ movement has been estab-
lished in order to defend the Romanian culture and society against the
‘anti-European’ and ‘ominously hybrid’ lifestyle offered by this music

(Haliliuc 2015: 290). In Albania, the authenticity of new mixes of musika
populare or tallava has also been strongly contested by intellectuals. To
quote just one instance of such discourse uttered by a video director: ‘Al-
banians are a Western people, but this music [muzika popullore] had ori-
entalised Albanians a great deal. The Serbs have imposed this music on us
so as to associate the Albanians with the Orient, fundamentalism, and the
like. This isn’t our culture’ (cited in Archer 2012: 194).
The official reception of turbo folk in Croatia was no different. Turbo
folk had been completely absent from both the state and private-owned
media from the beginning of the 1990s until just recently.1 Proscribed
and rejected as istočnjački (Eastern), Yugofolk and Serbo-Byzantine kitsch,
these sounds and visual iconography have been seen as an insult to the
genuine Croatian Mittleuropa and Mediterranean cultural heritage (Baker
2008: 742). Notwithstanding all of this, one recent survey, conducted in
2018, showed that nearly half of high school students in Croatia are actively
listening to turbo folk.2 Another example also demonstrates this Croatian
paradox: in March 2009, 2 million people (around 50% of the entire Croa-
tian population) watched a talk show on national TV featuring Lepa Brena,
currently the owner of the most powerful pop-folk label, ‘Grand Produc-
tion’, in Serbia.
In Serbia, the liberal intelligentsia resolutely attacked the already pejo-
ratively labelled turbo folk, as a pop-cultural supplement to Milošević’s pro-
paganda machinery of nationalism, xenophobia and war. Turbo folk was
perceived as a destruction of genuine European and urban Serbian cul-
ture—as some journalists were repeatedly warning the public—through
‘Teheranization’, ‘Islamic shouting’ or ‘techno-Jihad’. For Serbian urban
proponents, similar to the rightist defenders of national purity, turbo folk
was a catchword in disclosing the nature of Milošević’s nationalism as
something Oriental, non-European and rural.3 Such views we can find
in the documentary series, Sav taj folk (All That Folk, 2004) produced by
Belgrade’s independent TV station B92, which propelled the thesis that
turbo folk should be understood as one of the three basic components
of Milošević rule, besides nationalism and mass corruption, being part of
the ‘aggressive primitivism as a code of public communication and cultural
legitimation’ (Sav taj folk, B92 2004: ep. 5).
Numerous renowned scholars in Serbia and abroad have also negatively
reviewed turbo folk. American cultural sociologist Eric Gordy portrayed
the appearance of turbo folk as an effect of the systematic ‘destruction of all
music alternatives’ in Milošević’s Serbia, especially the destruction of rock

& roll music in its rebellious political orientation: ‘In their stand against
neofolk kitsch rokeri also constantly reminded the urban population that
war and nationalism are associated with the new dominance of semirural
culture – its nativism, lack of interest in global culture, and xenophobia
were epitomized by the explosion of neofolk and directly associated, in
the mind of Belgrade rokeri, with the regime and with the war it brought
on’ (Gordy 1999: 116). Not unlike Gordy, German author Katja Diefen-
bach has defined turbo folk as ‘national disco’ or ‘nationalist subculture’
(Diefenbach 1999), while British pop-culture theoretician Alexei Monroe
has approached turbo folk as a cultural paramilitary force, designating it as
‘hardcore ethnic music’ or ‘porno-nationalism’ (Monroe 2000). Serbian
scholars were describing turbo folk in variations such as ‘kitsch-patriotism’
(Dragićević-Šešić 1994), ‘newly-composed war culture’ (Kronja 2001),
or as a constitutive part of Serbian neo-Fascism, being ‘Turbo-Fascism’
(Papić 2002).
For many intellectuals in Serbia, the paradigmatic showcase in push-
ing forward the thesis on identity between turbo folk and nationalism was
Svetlana Ražnatović—Ceca, the third-generation pop folk mega star, who
married paramilitary leader Arkan. Despite turbo folk expanding to hyper-
production in the times of war, a great majority of turbo folk hits were not
populist in nature. Quite the contrary, they expressed mostly an individu-
alist and hedonistic orientation, echoing the conditions and contradictions
of the transition to capitalism. Probably here we might find the reasons for
Ceca’s paradoxical popularity in Slovenia and Croatia. For instance, Ceca’s
repertoire has been very monothematic in its content: the only topic she is
singing about is sad or unrequited love. Being confronted with the ques-
tion of her role in the nationalist mobilisation during the times of war, she
answered: ‘Although I consider myself a big patriot I have not a single patri-
otic song in my repertoire, they are all love songs’ (B92 2004). Explaining
the continuous popularity of Ceca and turbo folk in Slovenia and Croa-
tia, Zala Volčič and Karmen Erjavec stressed how her music ‘promote and
promise a new type of personal empowerment in an era of rapid institution
and value changes’ (Volčič and Erjavec 2010: 103) of the post-socialist
context. Furthermore, not only ‘the content of commercial turbofolk has
generally been anationalist in form’ (Archer 2012: 188), even the turbo
estrada during the Yugoslav wars could be seen as the most diverse and
heterogeneous public scene in Serbia. Along with gay and queer figures,
access to the stage has attracted nationally excluded names like Halid Bešlić,
Halid Muslimović, Džej Ramadanovski, Sinan Sakić, Šemsa Suljaković or a

Bosnian singer with the Kosovar background Selma Bajrami.
Still, turbo folk has been detested by urban intelligentsia as a dystopian
vision, destroying the bridges between the Balkans and Europe; it is as if
the Oriental sound of pop folk jeopardises the purity of their ‘European
identity’. Here the vision of the Balkans as a bridge joining East and West
suddenly turns into a metaphor of the wall. There is something in this posi-
tion that remarkably fits the Hegel’s definition of ‘beautiful soul’. While
expressing a moral disgust in front of the invasion of turbo folk, urban
intelligentsia fails to acknowledge that the form and content of this music
largely reflect the basic features of modern Europe, that is to say, western
capitalism. For Belgrade’s art historian Branislav Dimitrijević, the iconog-
raphy promoted in turbo folk’s video clips (of violence, misogyny, money
fetishism, etc.) is ‘exactly the proof that turbo-folk is an indicator that
Serbia inclines, more and more, towards the West, and not the opposite’
(Dimitrijević 2002: 98).
What is so irritating for the national cultural establishment, when con-
fronted with the Oriental sound of Balkan pop folk, is not just a lack of
authenticity or good taste, but exactly the fact that this sound exceeds the
borders of any normal petit bourgeois sense and sensitivity. As some of
the interlocutors in the B92 documentary Sav taj folk reasoned, the rise of
turbo folk was a part of the process of destruction of the middle class, the
middle class being an ultimate guarantee of the true and authentic culture.
Turbo folk music fits neither to the normalised western urban sound nor to
traditional folklore. It is a non-canonised sound, indeed, an impure, bastard
and hybrid musical mixture, as DJ Shantel would say. In the hierarchically
organised vision of (conservative or European) national culture, however,
everything should be placed at the right place: different cultural genres and
codes should not mix with each other, national folklore should stay national
folklore, as much as peasants should stay at the places where they belong.
As the Serbian folk singer of the older generation Miroslav Ilić said, ‘I am
still the same folk singer who never got mixed up in foreign waters, Islamic
ones least of all. Nothing is more lovely than the Morava and Šumadija’
(cited in Gordy 1999: 152).
Struggle for Hybridity or Class Struggle?

What is the source of both similarity and specificity in the regional Balkan
sound? First of all, we should dismiss explanations that point to the
persistence of some authentic, traditional, rustic—that is to say, ‘ori-

ental’—Balkan collective sentiment or mentality. Remembering Frederic
Jameson’s imperative—always historicize!—we should note that the Balkan
spaces, today more than ever, share a similar political order of liberal democ-
racy and capitalist economic system united in the global market. As a famous
materialist thesis, proposed by Karl Marx, asserts, ‘It is not the conscious-
ness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness.’ The determining factors of today’s social
existence are, apparently, the production capabilities of globalized capi-
talism without limits and borders. These relations of capitalist production
convey, beside many other contradictions, the split between the processes of
unification and differentiation. Every child knows that the logic of capitalist
production and commodification subsumes all differences under the aegis
of general equivalence (money). In pursue of money and profit, this circula-
tion represents an ‘abstract movement’ (see Sohn-Rethel 1970: 82). On the
other hand, the capitalist extraction of surplus value only becomes possible
under the condition of the production of differences—the re-articulation
and re-invention of differences.
In Balkan pop folk music production these relations are perceptible as
dynamism between the dominant mainstream western sound and regional
Orientalised music as its culturally differentiated supplement. Not only is
this sort of musical genre naturally and deeply rooted in today’s global
entertainment industry, it also demonstrates a specific capacity to produce
its own surplus value, its own differences, and to compete with global music
production at the local level. As Nikola Janović and Rastko Močnik explain
via the concept of peripheral cultural industry (PCI), the Balkan pop folk
employs an alternative and parasitic strategy, incorporating the contradic-
tion of the capitalist economy within itself. By using the already general-
ized music patterns—borrowed from global cultural industry (MTV, VIVA,
Hollywood, etc.)—PCI are adding the local flavour to them. Here a char-
acteristic Oriental echo of the Balkan pop folk functions as a surplus value,
as ‘strange’ and ‘different’ element vis-à-vis the dominant sound matrix.
Orient and Oriental clichés become common features that allow the dom-
inated to survive within the dominance. In such a way PCI mobilises the
potential of the social substrate situated at the periphery of the capitalist
system, from the deprived masses within the peripheral regions to immi-
gration, by producing an effect of authenticity and peripheral intimacy.
From that perspective, Janović and Močnik affirm the existence of a
specific dialectic between the local music industry and a diasporic nexus:
As to peripheral cultural industry, commodification they promote does not

trigger the homogenizing effects so typical of the mainstream entertainment
industries. Social dialectics here seems much more complex: on one side,
imposed upon the nexus purely commercial reasons, neofolk has ‘colonised’
its cultural, ideological and mental spaces to the point to become by far
its most important cultural dimension; on the other hand, though, nexus
definitely transforms the immediate output of the industry, in a way that
transcends simple effects familiar to the sociology of reception. (Janović and
Močnik 2006: 239)
Instead of grasping the phenomenon of turbo folk as one-way ‘opium for

the people’, the two authors put forward the interplay between ‘global’ and
‘local’, as a transversal relationship between the local music production and
the global nexus.
The same logic of unification/differentiation is present in contemporary
Balkan world music, although in a somewhat inverted way: in this case, the
global music industry exploits not only the raw material of the Balkan music
inheritance, but also the clichés that mirror the mind of European univer-
salism itself. Most prominently, Balkan world music has been constructed
around the figure of the ‘Balkan Gypsy’. Starting with Emir Kusturica’s
film Time of the Gypsies (1988), to Goran Bregović and DJ Shantel to Lady
Gaga, this pop figure started to represent a special way of life: transgres-
sive, flamboyant, adventurous, wild, so to speak, the figure of a postmodern
nomadic subject. In her study on the Balkan Gypsy music, Carol Silverman,
however, hints at the basic contradiction of non-Romani promotion of the
‘fantasy Gypsy’, as a sort of ‘new exotica’, intermingling romantic with
criminal stereotypes and reproducing the image in which ‘Roma, then,
serve as Europe’s quintessential Others’ (Silverman 2014: 189). Further-
more, Silverman shows how European hegemonic perception of Romani
people is being perverted and repeated in the commercialised Balkan pop
production, leading to a double erasure of Romani musicians:
At the same time that Roma are rejected as ‘Others’, Romani music is cel-
ebrated by western journalists, marketers, and scholars as ‘hybrid, fusion,
borderless, bricolage’. This discourse often gives non-Romani performers
license to appropriate from Roma; in effect they have been pushed out of
some of their traditional musical spheres, I argue that Roma are twice erased:
first by being relegated out of the core of European values and nation-state
frameworks, and then being stereotyped as ultimate hybrids with no music
of their own. (Silverman 2014: 186)
As pointed out before, the conservative cultural discourse of liberal and

national intelligentsia is generating the ideological borders between the
West and the East rather than spanning bridges between many cultures. It
does this in order to purify culture from the ‘foreign’ Oriental influences.
At the same time, in Balkan world music we encounter the reproduction of
the identical Oriental clichés, apparently positively evaluated. In such a way
the vision of a hippie or happy Gypsies, ‘claims a legitimating place in mul-
ticultural discourse’ simultaneously contradicting the position of Balkan
Romani musicians, themselves faced with multiple exclusions’ (Silverman
2014: 204). The differences are not suspended by recognising them as dif-
ferences. On the contrary, they are de-politicised and translated into the
catalogue of identity and the identitarian struggle for survival. In such a
way, the abstract movement stays an abstract movement, attached to its
difference, permanently circling around itself.
Conclusions
We claim that the sounds of Balkan world music are no less artificial or
authentic then average turbo folk or chalga melodies. There is no formal
and substantial difference between the remix of Balkan pop folk and Balkan
world music. However, a difference exists at another level: whether some
particular music is produced and consumed in the core or periphery, and
if it is designed for high or lower class taste.
This fact betrays the fundamental deficiency in the hybridity definition
of Balkan pop music per se. As we learn from cultural elitist discourse,
the dividing line in the definition of genuine Balkan music is not that of
the distinction between hybridity and homogeneity, but rather the division
between an authentic, genuine and high quality Balkan music and one
which is inauthentic, unoriginal and of low quality. This discloses the class
nature of the division between two music streams.
Here we do not point to the simple fact of empirical existence of two
classes that clash with each other. Rather, it is about a process of class
struggle that produces the separation of two musical genres, attributing to
them the markers of dominant and dominated class (taste). In affirming
the principle of primacy of contradiction over the terms of contradiction,
Louis Althusser warned that ‘The class struggle is not a product of the
existence of classes which exist previous (in law and in fact) to the strug-
gle: the class struggle is the historical form of the contradiction (internal
to a mode of production) which divides the classes into classes’ (Althusser
1976: 50). Furthermore, according to Althusser’s reading of Karl Marx,

the class struggle cannot be exclusively attributed to the realm of economy,
because it transverses all the spheres of social edifice, including the level of
ideological superstructure. Only in that sense can we say that the division
of Balkan sound into its high and low qualities represents an effect of ideo-
logical class struggle par excellence. It is the struggle of the ruling ideology
that tries to impose and reproduce the strict lines between the genuine and
inauthentic music.
Nevertheless, Balkan pop-folk music production (turbo folk, chalga,
manele, etc.), still propels the transgression of the boundaries of inside
and outside, high and low, proving to be more vital and stronger than any
expert opinion or the statist defence of national identity.4 This is confirmed
in the constant penetration of Balkan pop-folk elements at the Eurovision
Song Contest. In 2004, the Serbian representative Željko Joksimović per-
formed the ethno ballade called Lane moje (My Fawn). The song was very
successful, taking the second place in the finals, the winning song being the
equally ethnicised Ukranian song Wild Dance, performed by Ruslana. In
2006, Severina Vučković represented Croatia at Eurovision with the song
Moja štikla (My Stiletto), arranged by Goran Bregović, the song that ‘never
escaped its initial media framing as only ambiguously Croatian’ (Baker
2008: 753). Bregović was also a special guest performer at Eurovision Song
Contest in Belgrade (2008). There he staged the song Gas, Gas, a parody
about highways and the smell of gasoline, about opening the ‘season of tur-
bo’ and driving ‘turbo machines’. Namely, features usually associated with
the highly despised Serbian turbo folk suddenly became a representative
song, a song with which the Serbian state represents its own ‘high cultural’
product to the world. But this time, it was performed by ‘our’ high musi-
cian, internationally known Brega. The same song was soon after remixed
and performed by Severina and DJ Shantel. Bregović has also written the
song with an explicit referencing Ovo je Balkan (This is the Balkans ) for
the Serbian candidacy at Eurovision 2010, performed by Milan Stanković.
As the most recent illustration of Balkan pop-folk becoming ‘high’, we can
mention Moldova’s song My lucky day for Eurovision 2018, remixed with
the menele-like trumpet tunes and rhythms arranged by DJ Shantel himself.
Meanwhile, the class struggle over the sound of one simultaneously
damned and desired region on the European periphery continues.
Special Note
This chapter is an updated and extended version of the text previously
published in German: ‘Balkan High, Balkan Low: Musikproduktion zwis-
chen Hybridität und Klassenkampf’, in Crossing Munich – Beiträge zur
Migration aus Kunst, Wissenschaft und Aktivismus, ed. Natalie Bayer, et al.
(München: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 2009). For their invaluable assistance
in writing this chapter, we would like to thank to Dušan Grlja, Eleanor
Schiller, Vesna Jovanović, Ewa Hanna Mazierska and Kuros Yalpani.
Notes
1. At the moment of writing this text, Radio Extra has been established in
Zagreb, a first Croatian radio station specialised in broadcasting Balkan pop-
folk.
2. ‘Tko to sluša turbofolk? Veliko istraživanje na uzorku od 2650 srednjoškolaca
u šest najvećih gradova na Jadranu: ugledni sociolozi otkrili koja djeca će
navjerojatnije slušati cajke’, Slobodna Dalmacija, 28 April 2018.
3. Interestingly enough, such discourse of balkanism (Maria Todorova) para-
doxically accuses the Orientaliser for being Oriental. Namely, in his famous
speech at Kosovo polje in 1989 Milošević exclaimed: ‘Serbia heroically
defended itself in the field of Kosovo [against the Ottoman Empire], but
it also defended Europe. Serbia was at that time the bastion defending the
European culture, religion, and European society in general. At the time
when this famous historical battle was fought in Kosovo, the people were
looking at the stars, expecting aid from them. Now, six centuries later, they
are looking at the stars again, waiting to conquer them’ (Milošević 1989).
What is more, rather than being a fan of turbo folk, Milošević’s government
has pronounced the year of 1995 as a ‘Year of culture’, which consisted
of a public campaign against turbo folk and kitsch culture, including the
prohibition and censorship at the public TV stations.
4. In Rumania, ‘Manele continue on their own trajectory, on their own path
of perpetual change, their features modifies, their boundaries dissolved, pro-
gressively unclassifiable, at the crossroads of most diverse music’ (Beissinger
2016: 9).
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B92. 2004. Sav taj folk (Documentary Series). Belgrade: B92.

Baker, Catherine. 2008. When Seve Met Bregović: Folklore, Turbofolk and the
Boundaris of Croatian Musical Identity. Nationalities Papers—The Journal of
Nationalism and Ethnicity 36 (4): 741–764.
Barber-Keršovan, Alenka. 2006. Rock den Balkan!: Die musikalische Rekonstruk-
tion des Balkans als emotionales Territorum. In Cut and Paste, ed. Dietrich
Helms. Bielefeld: Transcript.
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2018.
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tion of Alternatives. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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Communication, Culture and Critique 8 (2): 290–308.
Janović, Nikola, and Rastko Močnik. 2006. The Three Nexal Registers: Identity,
Peripheral Cultural Industry, Alternative Cultures. In Transcultural Europe:
Cultural Policy in a Changing Europe, ed. Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna
Triandafyllidou. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kronja, Ivana. 2001. Smrtonosni sjaj. Beograd: Tehnokratija.
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Different Source of Identities in Bulgaria. In Critical Studies, Music, Popular
Culture, Identities, ed. Richard Young. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
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Momčilović, Ivana. 2002. Da li je (t)urbo-folk tiger (od papira)?7. Prelom—Journal
for Images and Politics, 4: 51–66.
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and Body Politics in Serbia. Filozofski vestnik XXIII (2): 191–204.
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Folk Music of Yugoslavia. Popular Music 14 (2): 241–256.
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priation, and Represetation. In The Globalization of Music in Transit: Music
Migration and Tourism, ed. Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu. New
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Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1970. Geistige und Körperliche Arbeit – Zur Theorie der
gesellschaftlichen Synthesis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Volčič, Zala, and Karmen Erjavec. 2010. The Paradox of Ceca and the Turbo-Folk
Audience. Popular Communication 8: 103–119.
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spiegel.de. Accessed 24 April 2018.
PART III
Liminal Spaces of Eastern European Music

Festivals
CHAPTER 9
The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial

and Pan-European Alternative
to the Eurovision Song Contest
Dean Vuletic
Just as other international song contests based on entries representing states

have been influenced by international politics, the Intervision Song Con-
test (ISC)—staged in Czechoslovakia and Poland irregularly from 1965 to
1980—was an example of the cultural diplomacy between Eastern Euro-
pean states, as well as between Eastern European and Western European
ones. Of all the televised international song contests for popular music, it
is the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) that continues to be the biggest and
most famous in the world. In the last decade, academic research on the
ESC has grown significantly. The development of the ISC has, however,
been hardly studied,1 and this chapter addresses this lacuna by drawing
on archival documents relating to the ISC from international broadcasting
organisations. Eastern European states did not participate in the ESC dur-
ing the Cold War, but instead had their own televised international song
D. Vuletic (B)
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: dean.vuletic@univie.ac.at

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_9
174 D. VULETIC
contests like the ISC, which was both modelled on and promoted as an
alternative to the ESC. The commercial dimension and competitive nature
of the ISC may seem incongruent with the Eastern Bloc’s communist ide-
ology, which in theory promoted international equality and solidarity and
opposed commercial rivalry. However, as with the ESC, the fact that ISC
entries competed against each other meant that the contest reflected the
realpolitik that defined international relations among Eastern European
states and highlighted the cultural stereotypes, economic differences and
political affinities and tensions between them. The ISC also exposed the
commercial interests that Eastern European states separately had in forging
international markets for their national popular music industries.
There was more exchange in popular music and television across the
Iron Curtain than Cold War divisions might intuitively lead us to think,
and the two international song contests embodied the connections between
television stations and music professionals from Eastern Europe and West-
ern Europe and the commonalities that existed in the popular cultures
throughout Europe during the Cold War. As this chapter underlines, the
ISC even embraced Western European commercial interests and was more
open to Western European entries than the ESC was to Eastern European
ones. There were artists whose careers successfully straddled both sides
of the Iron Curtain and who consequently performed in both the ESC
and the ISC. One of them was Karel Gott, the Czechoslovak singer who
was selected by the Austrian national broadcasting organisation, the Aus-
trian Broadcasting Corporation, to represent Austria at the ESC during
the period of the Prague Spring in 1968. In that year he won the ISC for
Czechoslovakia; he had also won the first ISC in 1965. Gott’s popularity
on both sides of the Iron Curtain reflected the persistence of a common
cultural area in Central Europe that was defined by the German language
(for example, Gott sang in both German and Slavic languages) and a shared
predilection for the ‘schlager’ genre of popular music. Yet, as the fate of
other Eastern European artists demonstrated, there was one major differ-
ence between the ESC and the ISC: governmental interference was greater
in the ISC than in the ESC because the media in Eastern Europe were
controlled by the ruling communist parties. While the ESC has been held
every year since 1956, the ISC was first held in Czechoslovakia from 1965
to 1968 and then in Poland from 1977 to 1980. However, in both cases the
contest ceased to continue because of political upheaval, namely the quash-
ing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of the Solidarity
Movement in Poland in 1981.
9 THE INTERVISION SONG CONTEST … 175
Intervision as Eastern Europe’s Eurovision

The establishment of Eastern European and Western European interna-
tional song contests for popular music was rooted in the development
of separate international organisations for Eastern Europe and Western
Europe during the Cold War. In 1950, two different international broad-
casting organisations were formed that brought together national radio
and television broadcasters and promoted cultural and technical coopera-
tion between them: the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for West-
ern Europe, and the International Broadcasting Organisation (OIR), later
renamed the International Organisation for Radio and Television (OIRT),2
for Eastern Europe. Beforehand, the International Broadcasting Union had
been the equivalent organisation for all European states. Due to Cold War
tensions, cooperation between Eastern European and Western European
states within this organisation became unfeasible, resulting in the estab-
lishment of separate international broadcasting organisations for each of
the blocs. These international broadcasting organisations promoted coop-
eration among their members as the blocs were pursuing their first steps
towards economic and political integration through the Council of Europe,
the European Coal and Steel Community, Euratom, the European Eco-
nomic Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Western
Europe, and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw
Pact in Eastern Europe (Eugster 1983: 39–47).
The EBU and the OIRT also both developed their own networks for
programme exchange, the Eurovision Network and the Intervision Net-
work, respectively, from which were derived the names of the song contests.
The ESC was first held in 1956, while the ISC started in 1965. The OIRT
had, however, begun organising popular music festivals for its members
as early as 1958, when it staged the first Light and Dance Music Festi-
val in Prague; in the early 1960s, the festival was held in Leipzig. At the
second edition of the Light and Dance Music Festival, a conference was
held in which music professionals from Eastern European states discussed
the development of popular music (OIR 1959: 3–4; OIRT 1961: 3–4).
This further reflected how popular music had become more of a priority
in the cultural and economic policies of these states as liberalisation in the
context of de-Stalinisation had brought their governments to place more
emphasis on consumption and entertainment. The Czechoslovak govern-
ment was a relative latecomer to de-Stalinisation, beginning its own eco-
nomic and political reforms in the early 1960s which also made it more
176 D. VULETIC
open to cooperation with the West. The first major festival that reflected
this was the OIRT’s Golden Prague international television festival, which
began in 1964 and drew participation from states of both Eastern Europe
and Western Europe. As part of that festival’s edition in 1965, the first ISC
was staged as the Golden Clef Intervision Contest, and it took place in the
Karlín Musical Theatre in Prague in June 1965. The national broadcasting
organisations from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the
USSR and Yugoslavia participated in the 1965 ISC, in which they were
each represented by two prominent singers from their states. These artists
included Gott, who won the contest with ‘Tam, kam chodí vítr spát’ (There,
Where the Wind Goes to Sleep), which had been selected for the ISC in
a national television competition, and the Yugoslav singer Ivo Robić, who
was already popular in Eastern Europe as well as in German-speaking states.
There were other international song contests developed in both Eastern
Europe and Western Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s; other Eastern
European ones were sometimes also broadcast through the Intervision Net-
work, such as the Sopot International Song Festival that was established in
Poland in 1961 and would be rebranded as the second series of the ISC, the
Golden Orpheus Festival in Bulgaria, the Golden Stag Festival in Romania
and the Dresden International Song Festival in East Germany. However,
except for the Sopot festival from 1977 to 1980, the other contests were
only organised by national television broadcasters and were not the OIRT’s
own prestige projects. Furthermore, it was the ESC and the ISC that were
the most directly connected international song contests, as the ISC was
modelled on the ESC as a competitive, televised event that was a flagship
project of its international broadcasting organisation. Both the ESC and the
ISC were meant to demonstrate cultural and technical cooperation within
their respective international broadcasting organisations, such as through
programme exchange and the advancement of television technology.
The Intervision Network and the ISC were more open to Western Euro-
pean cultural influences than the preconceptions of a closed and controlled
Eastern Bloc suggest. Beginning in the early 1960s in the context of the eas-
ing of East-West tensions—the thaw that accompanied the de-Stalinisation
policies of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev—there was institutionalised
cooperation between the EBU and the OIRT. In 1964, the EBU and the
OIRT also agreed to exchange each other’s song contests, as well as the
Sanremo Italian Song Festival that had been established in 1951 as the
world’s first-ever song contest and the Sopot festival (Czechoslovak Tele-
vision 1965a: 42, 44). Beginning in 1965, Eastern European audiences
could even watch the ESC on their national television stations as part of
the official programme exchanges that existed between the EBU and the
OIRT. The ESC was consequently first relayed by the Intervision Network
in 1965 to some Eastern European states, and later editions of the ESC
even began with greetings by the hosts who welcomed those viewers who
were watching through the Intervision Network. The 1965 ISC was broad-
cast to six Intervision states, to Finland which was a member of both the
EBU and the OIRT, as well as to seven other Western European states via
the Eurovision Network. However, based on a comparison of the media
coverage of the ESC and the ISC in both Eastern Europe and Western
Europe, there appears to have been less interest for both the Czechoslovak
and Polish series of the ISC in Western Europe than for the ESC in Eastern
Europe, as was generally the case with the transfer of programmes from
Intervision to Eurovision members. Indeed, this reflected the widespread
attitude in Eastern Europe and Western Europe that the cultural products
of the latter were typically superior to those of the former. Still, surveys
conducted by Polish Television—the only surveys for the ISC that I found
in the archives of Czech Television and Polish Television—showed that
the second series of the ISC was well-received among viewers who com-
plimented its staging and compared it favourably to other song contests,
presumably also the ESC (Polish Radio and Television 1979: 1–2).
Although the ESC had a broader, pan-European audience than the ISC,
the development of both the ESC and the ISC mirrored cultural, eco-
nomic, political, social and technological changes across post-war Europe
While the contests were initially conceived by the EBU and the OIRT as
events that would promote cultural and technical cooperation between the
states of their blocs, the practice of featuring national entries meant that
they were stages upon which national interests and identities were also
articulated, as in other international organisations. The format for the two
contests was the same: the national television broadcasters sent a singer or
group with a song to represent their states. Juries with representatives from
each of the participating states submitted their votes to select the winner,
and the voting results were often interpreted in media reports and pub-
lic discussions as a measure of how national publics perceived each other.
The rules for the ISC were also largely taken from those of the ESC: they
originally only allowed entries from members of the Intervision Network,
which were all required to broadcast the contest; they stipulated original,
recently composed songs, the international comparison of works and pub-
lic involvement through national pre-selections; and starting in 1966 they
178 D. VULETIC
allowed for an international jury using the ESC’s points system to select
the top three songs, with jury members not being allowed to vote for their
own states. Although the ISC had no rule for the languages that the entries
had to be performed in—which the ESC only adopted in the mid-1960s
when it insisted that entries be performed in the national languages of their
states—songs in the ISC were also always sung in national languages. Songs
in the ISC in the 1960s were, however, allowed to be slightly longer than
ESC entries, at three-and-a-half, later four, minutes.
Intervision and International Openness

The major difference from the ESC rules was in the ISC’s international jury:
whereas voting in the ESC was done by national juries representing each
participating state, the first series of the ISC, held in Czechoslovakia from
1965 to 1968, had only one jury, which was made up of musical experts
from each of the participating national broadcasting organisations, and the
voting was meant to be secret (Czechoslovak Television 1965b: 1–5). In
the second series in Poland from 1977 to 1980, there were two compe-
titions and the winning songs were selected by international juries com-
prising representatives from national broadcasting organisations or record
companies.
Although the ESC’s rules left the selection of the jurors up to the
national broadcasting organisations, as it did with the national selection,
various changes were progressively incorporated into that contest’s rules to
make the juries more representative and transparent. The first was that they
sought to reduce the influence of representatives from record companies, as
several national broadcasting organisations, especially from Nordic states,
had begun criticising the contest for becoming too commercialised. This
ban was extended in the 1970s to employees of the national broadcasting
organisations themselves.3 One of the other national broadcasting organi-
sations that was opposed to the ESC’s commercialisation was the Yugoslav
one: such criticisms were also couched in its state communist ideology and
were cited for its withdrawal from the contest from 1977 to 1980, although
Yugoslavia participated in the ISC in 1977 and 1979, as it had in the ISC
in the 1960s (Vuletic 2010: 135). Finnish singers also often criticised the
ESC for being more commercialised in comparison to the ISC; they par-
ticipated in both the ESC and the ISC as their state was, uniquely, a full
member of both the EBU and the OIRT due to Finnish non-alignment. In
the 1960s, for example, Finland was represented in the ISC by two artists
who also performed in the ESC, Viktor Klimenko and Lasse Mårtenson.
Finland joined the ESC in 1961, but a string of low scores there in the
1960s and 1970s prompted a national discussion on Finland’s cultural,
economic, geographical and linguistic peripherality in relation to Western
European states. This situation contrasted with Finland’s relative success
at the ISC, where it even won the 1980 ISC with Marion Rung singing
‘Hyvästi yö’ (Where is the Love), which she sung in Finnish; in that same
year, the Finnish entry ‘Huilumies’ (A Flute Man), sung by Vesa-Matti
Loiri, came last in the ESC. Still, the ESC had greater cachet in Finland
because of its associations with western fashion, modernity and prosperity
(Pajala 2013: 225–235) (Fig. 9.1).
The second series of the ISC contrasted sharply with the ESC in terms
of its management of commercial interests, as the former innovatively
added a competition for artists representing record companies—includ-
ing Western European ones—which was separate from the competition
for artists representing national broadcasting organisations. Another major
difference between the ESC and the ISC was that there was direct over-
sight of the ISC by organs of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments,
especially the central committees of their communist parties and the min-
istries for broadcasting, culture and information. They oversaw not only
the organisation of the ISC but also the selection of their states’ entries,
which was done in cooperation with Czechoslovak Television and Polish
Television, local record companies, concert organisers and artists’ organ-
isations. Such official involvement was, of course, considered appropriate
by the OIRT, whose membership was based on governments rather than
national broadcasting organisations, whereas the EBU was mostly made up
of members from liberal democracies in which the public service media were
meant to be free of government interference (although Greece, Portugal
and Spain under their right-wing dictatorships and communist Yugoslavia
were exceptions in this regard). The Eastern European national television
broadcasters’ entries in the ISC were direct examples of cultural diplomacy
that demonstrated how political actors wanted to promote their states to
an international audience. For both the preparation of an entry and the
hosting of the contest, the national television broadcasters responsible for
arranging these drew on various experts to determine how to present their
states. These professionals came from the popular music industries, tourism
organisations and government ministries. The choices of ISC entries, as
well as the locations of the shows themselves, could thus be potentially
loaded with political interests. For example, in 1966 and 1967, the ISC
180 D. VULETIC
Fig. 9.1 Helena Vondráčková, 1977 ISC
was incorporated into the first two editions of the Bratislava Lyre festi-
val, which was established as an affirmation of Slovakian identity amidst
calls for the federalisation of Czechoslovakia, and it had a separate com-
petition for Czechoslovak songs through which the Czechoslovak entries
for the Golden Clef were selected. The contest was staged in Bratislava
to decentralise cultural events from Prague, which already held jazz and
television festivals, as well as to promote the emerging Slovakian popular
music industry (Szabó 2010: 17).
However, there were also major differences between the ESC and the
ISC that reflected the nature of international relations between and within
the two blocs in terms of ideology and political, cultural and economic hier-
archies. The first was that the winning state in the ESC would host the con-
test the following year, whereas each series of the ISC was staged in the same
state: first in Czechoslovakia and then in Poland. Thus, although almost
all Eastern European states (Albania being an exception after withdrawing
from the OIRT in 1961 when it ended its alliance with the USSR in the
context of the Sino-Soviet split) participated in the ISC, only Czechoslo-
vakia and Poland benefitted from the hosting of the contest for the purposes
of the promotion of their states and their national popular music industries
and television broadcasters. In the first series of the ISC, Czechoslovak
entries also won three of the four editions, with Bulgaria’s Lili Ivanova
winning in 1966 and Czechoslovakia’s Eva Pilarová in 1967. So, not all
states represented in the ISC profited from the contest as an exercise in
cultural diplomacy in the same way. Czechoslovakia and Poland took the
lead in organising the ISC due to their relative openness and proximity to
Western European cultural influences and their technological superiority in
comparison to other Eastern European states. Prague was, furthermore, the
location of the headquarters of the OIRT thanks to its technological infras-
tructure as well as geographical location. The USSR, which was militarily
and politically dominant in Eastern Europe, did not have the compara-
tive cultural cachet when it came to the ISC, and its national broadcasting
organisation never took the lead in organising the contest. Soviet popular
music was not valued as relatively highly in Eastern Europe as its Western
European counterpart, which was considered more fashionable and mod-
ern. It was to Western European artists that Czechoslovak Television and
Polish Television turned when they sought prominent guest acts. And a
Soviet artist only won the ISC once, when Alla Pugacheva was victorious
in 1978, following the win of Czechoslovakia’s Helena Vondráčková in
1977 (Fig. 9.2).
Indeed, the second major difference between the ESC and the ISC was
that the ISC proved more open to participants from outside of Eastern
Europe, even though the ESC during the Cold War also included Israel,
Morocco, Turkey and Yugoslavia. The ISC, as the prefix ‘Inter-’ in it sug-
gests, invited entries from other socialist states from around the world, and
in some years it even welcomed Western European performers as compe-
tition entries or as interval acts. ESC winners such as Austria’s Udo Jür-
gens and the United Kingdom’s Sandy Shaw were guest acts in the ISC in
the 1960s. The Intervision Network and the ISC were thus more open to
Western European cultural influences than the ideological insularity and the
182 D. VULETIC
Fig. 9.2 Alla Pugacheva, 1978 ISC
tighter control of society in the Eastern Bloc might have suggested. Reports
by the Czechoslovak organisers of the ISC mostly praised the contest for
the exposure that it received in the media in Western European states, even
when these did not participate in the ESC, and how it facilitated contracts
between Eastern European artists and Western European record compa-
nies (Czechoslovak Television 1967: 2–3; Malásek and Peprník 1966, 2–3;
Vašta et al. 1965: 1–2). West Germany’s Telefunken, for example, released
Gott’s 1965 ISC hit in Sweden under the directly translated title ‘Där
vinden går till vila’. Rather than being focussed on producing an Eastern
European contest that would compete with the ESC, the organisers of the
ISC were more interested in how they could develop connections with the
ESC and western record companies, which also reflected a sense of cultural
inferiority that they felt towards Western Europe.
Intervision and Cultural Censorship

Indeed, since 1966, one of the goals of the Czechoslovak organisers of
the ISC was to have Western European entries in the contest (Malásek and
Peprník 1966: 3). The director general of Czechoslovak Television, Jiří
Pelikán, had in 1964 already proposed to his Western European counter-
parts at a meeting between the EBU and the OIRT in Helsinki that they
together organise an international show of popular music for their mem-
bers. However, the EBU rejected this idea and instead suggested that the
OIRT organise its own song contest and that the Eurovision and Intervision
networks broadcast each other’s contests (Pelikán 1964: 5, 8). A reason for
the EBU’s stance might have been that it did not want to co-produce such
a high-profile show with national broadcasting organisations that were,
despite the liberalisation under de-Stalinisation, still under the control of
communist parties, which could seek to manipulate such a song contest
for political purposes. Yet, following the coming to power of the reformist
Alexander Dubček as the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslo-
vakia in January 1968, Czechoslovak Television saw a new opportunity to
realise its plan for a pan-European song contest. The Dubček government’s
reforms initiated the Prague Spring period, which ended media censor-
ship and permitted Czechoslovak Television to further open up to western
cultural and political influences, including in its organisation of the 1968
ISC in June. That became the first international song contest that included
states from both the OIRT and the EBU, which Billboard described as ‘an-
other step towards open competition and a common market in European
pop music’ (Billboard 1968). The location of the ISC was also changed
from Bratislava to the spa resort town of Karlovy Vary, where it was again
included as part of the Golden Prague festival. Karlovy Vary had a political
significance as it was located near the border with West Germany, which at
the time did not have diplomatic relations with most Eastern Europeans
states, as this was still before the Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) period that
would begin in 1969.
The support of Western European states for the Prague Spring was also
reflected in the intensified cooperation between Czechoslovak Television
and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, which was the only Western
European observer member of the OIRT. Although no Eastern Bloc state
184 D. VULETIC
ever participated in the ESC, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation chose

Gott to represent Austria in the 1968 ESC in April with the song ‘Tausend
Fenster’ (A Thousand Windows) that was composed by Jürgens. The song
referred to people being alienated from their neighbours, which could have
been interpreted as a reference to a predicament of modern society or an
allusion to the division of Central European states by the Iron Curtain.
The 1968 ESC had seventeen participants, and the 1968 ISC had fourteen,
including seven national broadcasting organisations from the EBU, Aus-
tria, Belgium, Finland, Spain (which, under the otherwise anti-communist
dictatorship of Francisco Franco, was at that time seeking a diplomatic
rapprochement with Eastern Europe), Switzerland, West Germany and
Yugoslavia, and ones from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hun-
gary, Romania, Poland and the USSR. The ISC was won again by Gott
in 1968 with the song ‘Proč ptáci zpívají?’ (Why are the Birds Singing?).
Yugoslavia’s Vice Vukov, who had already represented Yugoslavia twice at
the ESC, came second in the 1968 ISC, and Spain’s Salomé, who would be
one of the four winners of the 1969 ESC, came third. After the success of
the 1968 ISC, the Czechoslovak organisers hoped that ‘the East European
equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest’ would in 1969 include ‘partic-
ipation from a number of independent American TV companies’ (Doruzka
1968). However, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia by
Warsaw Pact forces in August, which quashed the Prague Spring as Moscow
believed that the reformist movement had come to challenge communist
rule in the state, the plans for the ISC were also ended under the revived
cultural censorship. The contest would never be staged in Czechoslovakia
again, and some of the leading figures behind it, such as Pelikán, were
removed from their positions in Czechoslovak Television (Pelikán himself
later went into exile in Italy and from 1979 would be a representative in
the European Parliament for the Italian Socialist Party).
When it came to the revival of the ISC in the late 1970s, the political pat-
tern was a similar one. The second series of the ISC was incorporated into
the Sopot International Song Festival that had had the longest tradition of
any popular music festival in the Eastern Bloc and also reflected Poland’s
international openness, which was unprecedented in Eastern Europe in
the 1970s, under the government of Edward Gierek. There was also a new
easing of East-West tensions in the context of the signing of the Helsinki
Accords among almost all European states—Albania and Andorra were
the only exceptions—as well as Canada and the United States in 1975. The
Helsinki Accords not only produced pan-European agreements on borders
and human rights but also sought to promote cultural cooperation between
the Eastern and Western Blocs, such as through the exchange of television
programmes. So, while Maciej Szczepański, the chairperson of the Polish
government’s ministry responsible for broadcasting, the Radio and Televi-
sion Committee, presented the ISC as an ‘effective propagandistic coun-
terweight to the Eurovision Festival’ (Szczepański 1977: 1), the Radio and
Television Committee also wanted the contest to include participants from
beyond the Eastern Bloc in ‘the spirit of Helsinki’ (K˛edzierski 1979: 2,
4). As this series of the ISC included a second competition, alongside the
usual one mainly for OIRT members, for record companies, it also had
entries from Canada, Japan and the United States together with ones from
Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Boney M. was one of the guest acts
from western states, appearing in the 1979 ESC, while the Dutch group
Dream Express, which had represented the Netherlands and Belgium in
the ESC, won the competition for the record companies in the 1978 ISC
with the song ‘Just Wanna Dance with You’. The Polish organisers had
also considered that one of the competitions in the ISC could be between
the winners of the ESC and the ISC, but this could not be realised as the
Israeli winners of the ESC in 1978 and 1979 were subjected to political
censorship: Eastern European states—with the exception of Romania—did
not then have diplomatic relations with Israel, which is why they also did
not broadcast the 1979 ESC, which was staged in Jerusalem (Szczepański
1976: 2). Yet, the second series of the ISC was more international and
open than the ESC: the ISC’s organisers were still keener to have western
artists perform than the ESC’s organisers were to have Eastern European
artists, and the ESC remained closed to any entries from states that were
not members of the EBU (Fig. 9.3).
However, again mirroring the political pattern of the first series of the
ISC, the Polish edition would come to an end because it relied on the
political situation in the one state that it was fixed to. In the late 1970s,
political dissent and social discontent was growing in Poland, especially as
the state faced an economic crisis. Czesław Niemen’s winning song in the
1979 ISC, ‘Nim przyjdzie wiosna’ (Tomorrow the Spring Will Come), did
not, though, deliberately allude to this political context (Mazierska 2016:
251). Yet, a strike calling for economic, labour and political reforms did
begin in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, which is just eleven kilometres
away from Sopot, a week before the 1980 ISC was staged; it has been sug-
gested that the strikers were trying to take advantage of the media presence
in Sopot for the ISC (Rosenberg 2012). Solidarity, the first independent
186 D. VULETIC
Fig. 9.3 Boney M., 1979 ISC
trade union in communist Poland, was formed one week after the 1980 ISC
in response to the strikers’ calls, and it would lead further anti-government
protests amid deteriorating economic conditions. The ISC was not held in
1981 due to continued social unrest: the Radio and Television Committee
stated that ‘in the tense current economic and social situation such expen-
diture would not be accepted by the population’ (Agence France-Presse
1981). When the Polish government imposed martial law from December
1981 to July 1983, the ISC was cancelled in those years as well. The Sopot
International Song Festival was revived in 1984, but never again as the ISC.
The end of communist government in Eastern Europe would also mean

that the ISC would never be restarted, as the Central and East European
members of the OIRT joined the EBU in 1993 and went on to enter the
ESC. Some Russian politicians—including President Vladimir Putin—have
since called for a revival of the ISC, especially as they have criticised the ESC
for allegedly being politically biased against Russia or for promoting the
visibility of sexual minorities. However, the ISC has so far been staged only
once since the end of the Cold War, and that was in 2008 when it was held
in Sochi, with only states from the former USSR participating in it (Adams
2014). So, the 2008 ISC was not like the ISC of the Cold War era, which
had never been Russian-led or just for states of the USSR but was a more
internationally open event that reflected the desire for cultural exchange
with Western European states that Czechoslovakia and Poland had.
As an attempt to promote the national popular music industries of East-
ern Europe, the ISC was modelled on the success of Western Europe’s ESC.
Yet, the ISC was not simply an imitation of the ESC, but rather introduced
innovations to the ESC’s format that made the ISC more commercial and
more internationally open than its Western European counterpart. This
would seem unexpected when we consider that Eastern European societies
were otherwise subjected to greater cultural censorship and travel restric-
tions than Western European ones were. However, one explanation is that
the popular music showcased at both the ESC and the ISC tended to be
innocuous, critics would even call it ‘kitsch’, and in this regard it was con-
sidered politically harmless for communist governments. In the end, it was
not because of any political content in their entries that the two series of
the ISC were ended, but because of their organisers’ openness to West-
ern cultural influences. The popular music featured in the ISC continued
to be commercially produced even when the contest was not held. How-
ever, the fact that Eastern Europe could not maintain an international song
contest that could compare with the regularity of the ESC renders legible
the limits of the cultural openness of—as well as the cultural integration
among—Eastern European states during the Cold War.
Notes
1. Other studies of the Intervision Song Contest, namely Pajala (2013),
Piotrowska (2016), and Yurtaeva (2015), focus on national case studies and
the series of the ISC that was staged in Poland. For a discussion of the devel-
188 D. VULETIC
opment of the ISC in the context of the history of the ESC, see Vuletic
(2018).
2. ‘OIRT’ was the abbreviation that was used internationally for the organisa-
tion, based on its French name ‘Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffu-
sion et de Télévision’, as had also been the case with the OIR.
3. Criticism of the influence of record companies on the ESC was a reason
why the Danish national broadcasting organisation withdrew from the con-
test from 1967 to 1977. In the 1970s, other Nordic national broadcasting
organisations joined forces against what they considered to be the excessive
influence of record companies on the contest, which also reflected the social
democratic mentalities that politically predominated in Nordic states. In
Sweden, the anti-commercial, left-wing ‘Progg’ musical movement opposed
the commercialism of popular music and was critical of groups such as ABBA
that allegedly undermined national culture by singing in English. The Progg
movement also opposed Sweden’s participation in the ESC because of the
financial costs of entering and hosting the contest, which was held in Swe-
den in 1975 after ABBA’s victory, and this pressure compelled the Swedish
national broadcasting organisation to withdraw from the contest for one year
in 1976. Although the Progg movement declined from the late 1970s, it was
ironic that it exerted such an impact in a state that has since developed the
world’s third-largest popular music export industry and which has one of
the biggest national followings for the ESC; it was also ironic that Nordic
states would pioneer the commercialisation of the ESC from the mid-1990s
(Vuletic 2018: 64–65, 179–180).
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CHAPTER 10
Between Utopia and the Marketplace:

The Case of the Sziget Festival
Zsolt Győri
Since the 1960s, music festivals have become an ever-increasing segment

of the popular music industry. Promoting new acts and capitalizing on
the fame of well-known performers is only part of the cultural offering of
both mainstream and underground festivals that invite audiences of various
ages, nationalities and social backgrounds to participate in an intense yet
ephemeral experience. Although mega-festivals offer much-sought acts, it is
often smaller, genre-specific events where it is the music itself that mobilizes
people and maintains the translocal character of music scenes by serving as
the infrastructure of interaction (Dowd 2014: 148). Either small or big,
the proliferation of these events go hand in hand with the festivalisation of
culture, understood both as ‘the process by which cultural activity, previ-
ously presented in a regular, on-going pattern or season, is reconfigured
to form a ‘new’ event’ (Négrier 2015: 18) and the arrangement of cultural
events according to the festival calendar. Festivalisation is closely linked to
commodification, as the ever-increasing weight of the experience industry
ZS. Győri (B)

University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_10
192 ZS. GYŐRI
within the service sector suggests. It also signals the growing appeal to
cosmopolitanism, communitarianism and openness.
The desire for the experience of openness and fluidity is informed by
both ‘a psychosocial need for intensity, evanescence, and a carnival-like sus-
pension of routine of everyday life’ (Szemere 2017: 16) and the demand
to accentuate one’s lifestyle and identity and be receptive to other lifestyles
and identities. The rejection of the routinized and the acceptance of the
plural, furthermore, the global conquest of the mythology of these commu-
nal events played a significant role in the expansion of the festival industry,
which, according to Morey et al. ‘is part of a prevailing trend towards
affordable escapism’ (Morey et al. 2014: 252) but also of hedonism, the
cult of youth and alternative ways of expressing identity.
According to a 2016 industry report, there were approximately 1000
popular music festivals organized in Hungary with over 4 million people
participating at events where live music was played (Verebes-Szász 2016:
21). This chapter examines the Sziget Festival, the Hungarian mega-festival
that had a significant role in the festivalisation of local popular music cul-
ture and, in doing so, has embodied, transformed and marketed the above-
mentioned context of openness. My approach combines historical, socio-
logical and promotional perspectives in order to comprehend what market
forces and societal visions shaped the Sziget-experience and how it negoti-
ates between local and international dimensions of popular culture. I focus
on the internationalisation of the event already manifested in the rise of
Western European participants, but I am equally interested in the mean-
ings of internationalisation for the local participants. Closer analysis of the
festival’s self-branding, reflected in television spots, proves especially suit-
able to comprehend how organizers intended to reach Hungarians and
foreigners and position the festival at the intersection of local and interna-
tional popular culture.
Festival Basics and the Transformation

into a Mega-Festival
Organized for the 26th time in 2018, Sziget Festival is one of the oldest
and best-known post-communist Eastern European summer festivals. The
dense festival calendar of the region—including the EXIT Festival in Ser-
bia, Electric Castle in Romania, the Positivus Festival in Latvia, Outlook
Festival in Croatia, Pohoda in Slovakia, Colours of Ostrava in the Czech
Republic, the OFF Festival in Poland—has integrated Eastern European
10 BETWEEN UTOPIA AND THE MARKETPLACE … 193
cities into the European and global festival circuit, yet Sziget stands out
among these in its sheer size, length, ticket sales and programme offering.
The week-long event, organized in early August, occupies the northern side
of an island on the Danube, a 15-minute train ride away from Budapest’s
historic city centre. The location explains why the festival has been able to
generate widespread popularity and become Hungary’s chief tourist des-
tination. Opinion journalist László Bede goes as far as to contend that
‘in Hungary since 1990 nothing can be compared to the achievements of
Sziget and its ability to attract soaring numbers of foreigners and to spread
the good reputation of the country’ (Bede 2009). Toping at 496,000 vis-
itors in 2016, up from 43,000 in 1993 and 353,000 in 2003 (ProfitLine),
the venue has come to resemble a mobile city, erected and dismantled in
weeks, and recognized on same terms as the long-standing Glastonbury
Festival and Reading Festival in the United Kingdom, the Roskilde Festi-
val in Denmark, or the Rock Werchter in Belgium. The European Festival
Awards named Sziget the Best Major Festival twice (2011, 2014) and two
times the festival provided the Best Line-Up (2015, 2017). This year’s
line-up, featuring Kendrick Lamar, Arctic Monkeys, Gorillaz, Lana Del
Rey, Mumford & Sons, Shawn Mendes and Dua Lipa, would probably fill
a venue anywhere in the world.
In the beginning the situation was very different. Initiated by Péter
Müller Sziámi, a, writer and underground rock legend and Károly
Gerendás, a cultural intermediary and the founder of Sziget Kulturális
Menedzseriroda Kft. (Sziget Cultural Management Agency Ltd.), the first
festival, Diáksziget (Student Island), featured mainly Hungarian and East-
ern European bands. The following year, under the name Eurowoodstock,
organizers quadrupled ticket sales and invited legends of the progressive
rock and the jazz-rock scene including The Birds, Blood, Sweat and Tears
and Jethro Tull. The period that followed saw an expansion in musical
offering and featured both iconic figures of Anglo-American rock music,
like Iggy Pop, David Bowie, John Cale, Lou Reed and Patti Smith and pop-
ular post-punk indie rock bands, including The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth,
Chumbawamba, Green Day, Therapy? With star acts representing various
genres, including 1990s electronic dance (The Prodigy), dub (Asian-Dub
Foundation), rave (Goldie), rap (Run DMC), heavy metal (Rammstein),
the festival became a mega-event yet still reflected the organizers’ pref-
erence for independent and alternative rock music. Financial stability was
also achieved by securing Pepsi as its main sponsor between 1996 and 2001
and the establishment of a classic management model in which every field,
194 ZS. GYŐRI
like booking, activities coordination, PR and marketing, security, technical

infrastructure and service infrastructure was handled by its own responsible
task team.
The maturation of the festival was aided by a global transformation
of the music industry. Since the late-1990s, records sales have constantly
decreased due to illegal file sharing and, later, streaming. Consequently,
musicians have become increasingly dependent on live performance. Since
festivals allow for both the concentration of experience and the optimal-
isation of resources, with the right business model they could become
profitable. Increasing artist fees and growing competition on the Euro-
pean festival market pressed the Sziget-management to rationalize their
activities and in 2002 Sziget merged with Volt Festival, the other major
event dedicated to popular music in Hungary. Later further venues, like
Félsziget (half Island, between 2003 and 2013) in Transylvania, Balaton
Sound (since 2007, electronic music) and B.my.Lake (since 2013, under-
ground electronic music) at the popular tourist site of Lake Balaton were
added to the Sziget portfolio, which made it easier for the management
to negotiate multiple concert bookings with international stars. In 2007
Econet (later Est Média), a Hungarian media group, became the majority
shareholder of Sziget. However, liquidity problems and failure to involve
investors in their grandiose expansion plans left the company on the verge
of bankruptcy. Gerendás and partners bought back their share in 2012.
Apart from market forces, geopolitical factors also supported the trans-
formation of the event from a post-communist cultural initiative founded
on DIY ethics into a professionally executed mega-festival. With Hungary’s
accession to the European Union in 2004, the management geared up
its promotion in Western Europe, increased its musical variety with the
inclusion of jazz, world music and Roma music and branded the festi-
val as a week-long cultural event offering entertainment activities ranging
from theatrical productions, film screenings, dance performances, art exhi-
bitions, craft booths, public lectures to fairgrounds, circus shows, Lumi-
narium relief tents, spectacular action theatre shows and huge fireworks.
The 2011 brochure of the festival was 152 pages long, while the online
website for the event offered information in 9 languages. As a result of the
increasing market power of live music, the growing visibility of the event
among international festivalgoers and the strategic decision to position it
as a ‘Gesamtkunst-festival’ (total art festival), the Sziget Festival was soon
ranked amongst the largest European summer events. Károly Gerendás
attributes this success to the multi-genre entertainment quality:
these days almost every festival offers an almost identical line-up, we have
to position ourselves by being a spectaculum…A number of people have,
for instance, shown incomprehension about the multi-generic nature and
asked why we spend money on all these things that do not attract visitors.
Well, this approach became an international trend and a growing number
of festivals offer theatre performances, circus shows and similar programs,
because others have also realized that people demand more than the simple
concert experience. (Kollár 2018)
Some described this strategy as turning what once was a community-

oriented, affordable and multi-genre music festival into a funfair offering
outdated stars of mainstream pop and disco. They pointed to the discrep-
ancy between the musical taste of the middle-aged festival managers and
the young audience, furthermore called attention to the lack of both high-
prestige bands at the peak of their career and upcoming talent, the stars
of tomorrow (Bede 2013). Strengthening their international marketing
campaign, organizers managed to turn trends over and gradually increased
ticket sales to a solid figure of around 500,000 visitors. The most recent
development in the history of Sziget is the change in ownership struc-
ture with British Edition Capital and the American global investment fund
Providence Equity Partners purchasing 70% of the Sziget Ltd. However,
the Hungarian owners retain management rights, Gerendai as the remain-
ing founding member transferred executive duties to Gábor Takács, whose
declared task is to build up an international portfolio through expansion
to Eastern and Southern European countries and increase Sziget’s market
share in an ever tightening competition of summer festivals.
Whose Island?
Proprietors, organizers and promoters have a significant role in creating
the character of any festival; however it is festivalgoers, who gradually live
its communal experience. Aksel Tjora’s research into the social rhythm of
music festivals emphasizes this very point: ‘the festival – as community
– is constantly being developed and (re-)created by its participants and …
organisers can only shape the festival by attempting to influence the actions
and patterns of action of its participants’ (Tjora 2016: 69). Drawing on this
logic, the first slogan of the festival ‘We need a week together’ (‘Kell egy hét
együttlét’) hoped to connect with youth subcultures disillusioned with the
commercialising post-socialist society and demanding a different culture of
196 ZS. GYŐRI
socialization. In a 2001 interview Müller echoed Tjora’s claim emphasizing

that the festival ‘wished to create a single space where young people with
different backgrounds can be together, get acquainted, and learn from each
other. Here we do not indoctrinate people to accept ideologies; we are
recipients, people interested in what other people have to say’ (Sebestyén
2011). Clearly, Sziget was initially a product of the shared yearning for a
space to exist without constraints.1
Many commentators compared Sziget to a huge house party fuelled
by its participants’ longing for an anti-ideological utopia. The 1994
Eurowoodstock2 certainly satisfied such needs even if this was founded
on the art punk and rock scene of the late socialist period with bohemian
university and college students, punks, skinheads and rockers serving as its
core audience. In its junior years, the free expression and coexistence of
different subcultures were the event’s key cultural assets. For the author
of this chapter, the festival felt like a realized utopia where the suppressed
and censored subcultural energies of the 1980s could find expression in
the public sphere. It was a euphoric acknowledgement of cultural regime
change, an unmistakable signal that the ghettoisation of dissident strands
of popular music had come to an end.
The week-long house party might have been enjoyed by bohemians
unwilling to accustom themselves to the unsentimental reality of neolib-
eral capitalism, yet it did not suit the business model of a profitable festival.
To survive, organizers could no longer provide a safe haven for young intel-
lectuals and underclass youth preferring low ticket prices and cheap booze.
The festival itself started to put up a financial barrier and limit the equal
opportunity to participate, swiftly adapting to the market logic of capital-
ism. In a more general context, Greg Martin calls attention to the conflicts
such transformations behold: ‘[g]iven that many festivals have fallen prey
to commercializing forces and experienced, at one time or other, cynical
exploitation of counter-cultural values and lifestyles, it would seem impor-
tant not to over-estimate—or indeed romanticise—the counter-cultural
function of festivals’ (Martin 2014: 89). Indeed, organizers continued to
emphasize the countercultural appeal of the event by booking internation-
ally acclaimed stars of the classical underground and the new wave scene.
These very choices brought a specific taste to dominance. Paradoxically,
they also marginalized Hungarian amateur bands. The underrepresenta-
tion of local talent in countercultural genres like hardcore, punk, heavy
metal, industrial rock, gradually eroded the commitment of their fan-base
towards the festival. Devoted but low-income teenage members of the very
subcultures from which Sziget originally emerged from found themselves

eliminated as a result of commodification. What was once promoted as
the house party for all was becoming the house party of the professional
middle-class.
Hungarian sociologists have recognised the significance of the festival
as soon as 1997. Béla Szilárd Jávorszky notes that the conditions for a
comprehensive research project were ideal for sociologists studying youth
culture: ‘The event is like Eden for them: within an enclosed area and a well-
defined time-span, they can interview 2-3000 young people’ (Jávorszky
2002: 119). The research, initiated by Kálmán Gábor and later joined by
Marianna Szemerszki, was conducted for a period of ten years and was
founded on Jürgen Zinnecker’s theory of youth epoch change which exam-
ines the effects of the prolongation of the adolescent life period on youth
autonomy and free-time activities. Despite the demographic decline in the
1990s in Hungary, the number of secondary school and university students
rose constantly (Gábor 2000: 10). Gábor and fellow researchers observed
that ‘with the increase of purchase power of consumer goods and enter-
tainment services, adolescents become active participants of the market at a
younger age’ (Gábor 2004: 239) and added that for this group ‘consumer
values became more important than traditional and other ideological val-
ues’ (Gábor 2004: 241).
While sociological surveys proved invaluable for deciding which gen-
res of music to centrepiece and which to neglect, they also explained the
social ingredients of festival participation. The central thesis of Gábor and
his associates argued that with the passage of time Sziget Festival became
more appealing to the middle-class participants. Questionnaires and life-
interviews both revealed that since the late 1990s university students speak-
ing a foreign language and participating in the online community were
overrepresented (Gábor 2004: 236, 238). A 2004 survey revealed that
81.8% of the participants spoke English and 49.7% German while the same
figure for the Hungarian youth as a whole was only 42 and 32.5%, respec-
tively (Gábor and Szemerszki 2006: 16). Considering the education of fes-
tivalgoers, researchers also concluded that they arrived from urban milieus
tolerant towards cultural diversity and with a strong support for modern
information technologies. Quantitative methods also showed an increas-
ing acceptance for alternative family models, including living single, in a
homosexual relationship, or being an underage mother (Gábor and Sze-
merszki 2006: 37–40). Researchers also claimed that these participants pur-
sued more intellectual leisure activities than their contemporaries, such as
198 ZS. GYŐRI
playing musical instruments, painting and creative writing and were also
more interested in politics (Gábor 2004: 241).
Comparing the results of the Sziget-research with the findings of a
nationwide youth survey conducted in 2000 and 2004, Gábor confirmed
that the festival attracts middle class students in higher education and young
professionals in their late 20s and early 30s. It was also observed that visi-
tors ‘belong to a generation, the members of which consciously prepare for
a competitive professional career’ (Gábor 2000: 48) with an appeal for the
intensive recreational possibilities the festival catered for. It was also found
that the urban middle-class youth embraced the festival’s core value of
tolerance more than adolescents with lower qualifications who were more
vulnerable to racist and homophobic sentiments (Gábor and Szemerszki
2007: 53).
Hard data established positive correspondence between consumer iden-
tity and liberal values, both of which came to prominence in the postcom-
munist epoch and became symbols of the westward orientation of the coun-
try. The emerging middle-class subscribed to neoliberal economic princi-
ples and civic social ideologies that were, and still are, highly contested in
Hungary. While social liberalism gained ground, a large segment of soci-
ety, including young people, viewed the welfare state, paternalism and a
strict control over values and lifestyles positively. These were fundamental
to strengthening nationalist sentiments which proclaimed the superiority
of the local over what they describe as culturally alien identities and value
sets imported from the West.
Organizers of Sziget did not simply make tolerance into a trendy buz-
zword in the promotional campaigns, but took concerted measures to use
the festival as a milieu of tolerance and emancipation. The most apparent
steps to cultural pluralism and openness were the initiation of the World
Music stage, and since, 2002 the World Music Village, a separate Romani
tent for local and international representatives of a variety of Romani music
and the creation of Magic Mirror, a hetero-friendly queer venue. As Anna
Szemere claims ‘these spots have been important for signifying the Sziget’s
adherence to progressive “European” values in an era when the national-
ist, anti-EU rhetoric of the Right has become hegemonic’ (Szemere 2017:
21). In addition, various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were
represented at the event (Civic Island) promoting human rights, European
values, democracy, cross-cultural global internships and volunteer exchange
for students, equal opportunities, equality between the sexes, tolerance for
people living with disabilities, healthy lifestyle, AIDS prevention, environ-

ment protection, and animal rights.
The integration of programmes against discrimination was not always
problem-free. In 2001 the launch of Magic Mirror led to public scandal
after the homophobic attack made by István Tarlós, the mayor of the dis-
trict where the festival venue is located. Tarlós has repeatedly intervened
in the life of the festival since 1997 and—supposedly, acting on behalf of
home-owners who had to endure the noise pollution caused by concert-
s—even threatened to close down the festival. Although his antagonism
partly served to increase his media visibility, solidify his support among
voters and establish his image as a mayor, his homophobic attacks directly
questioned organizers’ adherence to liberal values, and made both the fes-
tival and its middle-class audience vulnerable to party politics.
In post-millennial Hungary and especially after the country’s accession
to the European Union in 2004, a certain political hysteria came over
the public sphere, as political parties and leaders intruded into the private
domain to mobilise Hungarians for their own aims. The intense period
of struggle for power between the political left and the right, liberals and
nationalists, led to the antagonization of society along presumed political
values. This atmosphere serves as a background context for József Kar-
dos’ characterisation of the festival. Program director since 1999, Kardos
described it as
a cultural mega-event with the power to mediate social values and shape
young people’ opinion. This puts tremendous responsibilities on our shoul-
ders. It matters whether we raise important issues or not and also how we
raise them. Our aim is not to get involved in politics and to take sides in the
debate about hot topics… We can, at best, hope that the liberty and tolerance
promoted during the festival will continue to shape our daily lives. (quoted
in Jávorszky 2012: 153)
In line with the sociological surveys, Kardos’ assertion also suggests that
the festival has served an outlet for liberal thought and a socialising milieu
for middle-class people. Jávorszky goes as far as to claim that ‘Sziget surveys
usually predict what values and tendencies will spread among young people’
(Jávorszky 2012: 127). This might sound an overstatement, especially in
view of the emerging national conservatism and xenophobia amongst the
youth in the 2000s and the more recent anti-migrant sentiment among
the majority of Hungarians. In fact, while the media-generated visibility
200 ZS. GYŐRI
of Sziget festival increased, its success in promoting a social liberal value-

system declined. To explain this tendency, we might simply say that a week-
long experience of tolerance cannot endure for 51 weeks in a year.
As early as 1999, some festival-participants had voiced scepticism about
the tolerance experienced at the event: ‘here everyone is too friendly and I
don’t like this, because it’s not genuine but awkward. Everyone is everyone
else’s buddy – give me a beer, have a sip, lend me a cigarette. These are not
how things work outside. This is a pose and I don’t like it at all’ (quoted in
Gábor 2000: 53). Gábor calls this attitude fashionable tolerance but fails
to analyse it in detail. I believe this type of superficial identification with a
social attitude for the sake of acceptance into a community was less a sign
of a character flaw than a conscious identity strategy. Hungarian middle-
class youth at Sziget were not just consumers of festival experience but
also of poses. Since they lacked full financial independence and economic
stability, and the experiences of emancipation, openness and tolerance were
undermined at paternalistic education institutions and workplaces, they
could only play along but not fully embrace the open spirit of the event.3
For the Hungarian middle-class youth, Sziget remained a utopia, since
their ambitions to spearhead modernisation and the advancement of social
liberal attitudes were contested by a social reality heavily governed by pater-
nalist attitudes. Nevertheless, it was this discrepancy between promise of
equality and real experience that served as a unique selling point for Hun-
garian participants. The question was whether they could afford it.
We can draw similar conclusions from the sociological comparison of
Hungarian and western participants. Research has shown Western Euro-
pean festivalgoers’ higher involvement in the work of NGOs and other
grassroot initiations, higher acceptance for alternative religious move-
ments, lifestyle and ethnic minorities and more active participation in non-
traditional political incentives, while Hungarians embraced more ‘conserva-
tive values (respect for traditions, family security, politeness, the importance
of national identity, religious belief). Wealth is also a value that Hungarian
young people rank higher than foreign young people’ (Gábor and Sze-
merszki 2007: 32). It is symptomatic that the only area where Hungarians
proved to be socially more active was mobility with 27.7% planning to
study abroad and 36.2% to work in Western Europe in comparison with
21.8 and 23.7% foreigners with similar plans (Gábor and Szemerszki 2007:
9). The higher willingness to move to another country can be attributed to,
as amongst Eastern European populations, the hope of financial security
and a better life.
The business model founded on the sponsorship of multinational com-

panies created the new image of the venue, flooded by logos and banners of
multinational firms. This consumption-driven environment allowed orga-
nizers to strengthen the musical line-up and increase the variety of pro-
grammes without the involvement of governmental funding and influence.
However, what kept the festival independent also made it less affordable for
Hungarians. The number of foreign participants has been constantly rising
and they became the majority first in 2007 when they gave a 50.1% of total
participants (Gábor and Szemerszki 2007: 7)4 and since then this tendency
continued. Most of them came from Germany, France, The Netherlands,
Austria and the UK with Eastern Europe being heavily underrepresented.
The top five countries from this region were Romania, Slovakia, Croatia,
Slovenia and Russia (Gábor and Szemerszki 2007: 25). Western European
participants’ purchase power was considerably higher than that of Hun-
garians: 68.2% of foreigners had a daily budget of more than 5000 HUF
while 32. 5% of Hungarians had the same budget (Gábor and Szemer-
szki 2007: 8). On average, the daily budget of foreigners was 80% higher
than that of Hungarians (Gábor and Szemerszki 2007: 7). Based on these
figures the following conclusion was drawn: ‘the 2007 Sziget Festival is
new in that these relationships shifted from the Hungarian middle class to
the European middle class. … this may have caused temporary dismay and
introversion for certain young Hungarians’ (Gábor and Szemerszki 2007:
27).
Other commentators have also noted that superior consumer status,
rather than social status and related value sets play, made the festival
increasingly popular among Western Europeans. Péter Uj even contended
that the international success of the festival was a natural consequence
of the European economic inequalities and the event’s Eastern Euro-
pean location. According to Uj, Sziget became ‘the Tesco value festi-
val of Dutch/French/German/Belgian/etc. lower middle-class youth’
(Uj 2014). While for western festivalgoers the event symbolized afford-
able escapism, it was a popular perception among Hungarians that Sziget
became a fancy brand, an emblem of Eastern Europe’s subaltern position
within the continent. This is well reflected in the following op-ed:
These days going to Sziget is like going abroad. It is a like a city-state

which one can enter after customs control (Do you have any alcoholic drinks
on you?) and passport control (Show your wristband!). Luckily they do
not require mandatory allowance and a letter of invitation…It is not us,
202 ZS. GYŐRI
Hungarians who offer our hospitality to foreigners, it is Sziget – incidentally

a part of Hungary – that extends its hospitability to everyone. We are not
combatant anti-globalists, yet this situation is hard to face and to deal with.
(Admin 2009)
This bitter assessment voices the anxieties of the local youth brought about
by the festival’s presumed idolization of consumer power but also the frus-
trating experience of having become second-rate citizens in their own coun-
try. In their perception, what promised to serve as a gateway to Europe
proved to be a threshold, a sign of ruptured European youth commu-
nity, the affluent part of which had full access to extravagant amusement
park Sziget became over the years, whereas Hungarians’ participation was
limited to chief attractions. Since the 2010s, this meant that Hungarians
bought daily tickets, visited main stage performances and had a quick taste
of the carnivalesque atmosphere. Such pattern of participation did not allow
for involvement in the social rhythm of the event. At this point the festival
ceased to be a celebration of music, of tolerance and liberalism; it came to
symbolise the traditional perception of capitalism creating inequalities of
wealth while the Sziget-experience ceased to evince openness, only closure.
Branding the Sziget-Experience in Television Spots

Sziget’s gradual transformation into a carnivalesque celebration of cos-
mopolitanism but also the resulting contradictions are well-drawn by tele-
vision spots. My investigations focus on how the core values of the event
were reinvented from time to time, in what ways they subscribed to local
and international contexts and to what degree the Sziget-experience was
maintained by a brand-community addressing young people with middle-
class consumer attitudes.
Early television promotion with the tagline ‘We need a week together!’
followed the classic structure of multimodal cinematic discourse5 character-
istic of movie trailers which seek to raise interest in a forthcoming release.
The TV spots contained images of the venue occupied by youngsters danc-
ing, singing together, and fooling around, furthermore included musical
fragments of songs by scheduled bands and a voice-over describing the
cultural and musical variety of the event. These ads, with catchphrases like
‘Europe’s largest party’ (from 1997) already identified festivalgoers as peo-
ple dedicated to extravagant activities, different subcultures and live music.
The brand value of Sziget remained fixed on the hype delivered by the
star-status of performers. The spots for the 2000 marketing campaign

openly addressed this by imitating a movie trailer [that of the horror film
I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie 1997)]. Interestingly,
main stage performers including Apollo 440, Chumbawamba, Bad Reli-
gion, Bloodhound Gang, Clawfinger, Die Ärzte, Guano Apes, HIM, Lou
Reed, Oasis, Suzanne Vega were unanimously referred to as ‘stars’ without
naming any of them. While the strategy to remain silent about the supe-
rior line-up implied that stars have become inherent and natural features of
the Sziget-brand, it also suggested that brand building became increasingly
dependent on the international trends of popular music.
In the 1990s promotional campaigns hoped to mobilize youth participa-
tion by pointing to the festival’s prominent place within youth culture, an
experience that cannot be overlooked by brand-conscious consumers.6 The
2001 campaign reflected both the brand and non-conformism by drawing
satirical parallels between the adult’s world and the values of young people.
In one of the TV spots a gym teacher is telling off his students, calling them
undisciplined, overtly self-assured and free spirited. As a warning he asks:
‘Do you know what grade you deserve?’7 A boy, thinking of his festival
ticket, makes a satisfied grin. Neither the line-up nor the name of the event
appears here, suggesting that Sziget Festival had become a central reference
point for young people, a brand that was best promoted when pretending
not being promoted at all.
Generational experience as the main selling point, especially since 1998,
was somewhat transformed in 2002, when emphasis shifted to the appeal
to middle-class consumers. The campaign featured a carefree cartoon
figure, Little Cow (Kistehén), symbolizing middle-class youngsters who
made their choices independently, resisted paternalism, exploited possi-
bilities and managed risks. In the following years, the televisual promo-
tion of Sziget foregrounded artistic heterogeneity, abstraction, reflexivity,
and critical thinking as qualities of the target audience. These intellectual
agencies implied that, branding was aware of the consumers’ social sta-
tus, and targeted the more educated classes, especially the middle-class,
for whom Hungary’s accession to the EU represented a historic opportu-
nity to recover from post-communist apathy and embrace European iden-
tity. In one of the advertisements, the legendary line from Mihály Kertész’
Casablanca, ‘This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ is a direct
reference to the optimism of this Eurocentrist middle-class:
Another strategy with which television campaigns targeted middle-class
consumers was the employment of opinion leaders in the mid-2000s.
204 ZS. GYŐRI
Described by Michael R. Solomon, ‘opinion leaders are set apart by their

interest or expertise in a product category, they are more convincing to the
extent that they are homophilous rather than heterophilous. Homophily
refers to the degree to which a pair of individuals is similar in terms of edu-
cation, social status, and beliefs’ (2017: 426). The Sziget spots attributed
this role to representatives of art cinema and upper middlebrow culture,
featuring, among others, filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, filmmaker and media
celebrity Attila Till, and the host of edgy and stylish talk-shows Gabriella
Jakupcsek. In some cases, they stressed the festival’s cultural excellence, in
others they simply listed the names of stars from the line-ups. These spots
illustrate Solomon’s claim, according to which the choice of opinion leaders
must take into consideration one’s class: ‘Effective opinion leaders tend to
be slightly higher in terms of status and educational attainment than those
they influence, but not so high as to be in a different social class’ (Solomon
426). Featuring celebrities of the politically left-leaning upper middlebrow
culture as mediators of the Sziget experience was another proof of the
middle-classification of Sziget-brand.
While the previously analysed television spots were rather conventional
examples of music television aesthetics, the new approach between 2009
and 2012 under the creative direction of Dávid Ráday, featuring actor and
stand-up comedian Péter Janklovics, was unorthodox in a way that it liter-
ally ridiculed the product it was supposed to advertise. Mixing ghetto-style
masculinity with redneck taste, the protagonist of the campaign belonged
to the uneducated and politically incorrect urban underclass. Markers of
his low social status are, for example, the high-octane temperament, or
the hilarious fast-speech slang. In addition, the character’s musical pref-
erences, and ignorant attitude portrayed him as the social type who was
the very antidote of the festival-goer. These spots thus stand out in the
event’s marketing history both with their boldness to address questions of
class and their chosen meta-discursive approach; namely, that advertising
campaigns did not simply serve the sale of a product but pointed to the
extraordinariness of the sales strategy.
Despite their popularity (even today), these spots failed to increase
ticket sales which, during the early 2010s, fluctuated between 380,000
and 390,000. More importantly, and as a sign of the failure to mobilize
local middle-class consumers, the composition of visitors shifted consid-
erably towards foreigners while Hungarians preferred the more afford-
able Volt Festival. Acknowledging the event’s ultimate dependence on for-
eign participants, the promo videos lost their unorthodox character and
integrated into well-established international trends. Emphasis shifted

towards cosmopolitanism, the carnivalesque atmosphere and youth culture
that relegated the local context into a secondary position. Principles such
as independence, individualism, and defiance against daily drudgery were
well captured by the catchphrase ‘Festival Republic’ (2013). Although this
name carried certain reference to recent domestic constitutional reforms
initiated by the right-wing government, these connotations were hardly
visible for most foreigners.
In recent years, lengthier videos of festival anthems shared a lot in com-
mon with television spots. Anthems provided the musical background and
the visuals comprised of a spectacular montage of people enjoying the pro-
grammes. Spots usually showed young people arriving to the central train
station of Budapest, followed by birds-eye view images of landmark build-
ings and the bridge leading to the venue emphasizing its physical separation
from the metropolis. Paradoxically, although the Hungarian capital was fea-
tured heavily in the videos, it was also reduced to an image intended for
tourists, without depth or couleur locale. In similar fashion, images of the
festival portrayed exclusively young, sexy looking people in the style of
MTV aesthetics (short takes, lots of cuts, emphasis on kinetic energy). The
dynamic exchange of low and high camera angles with birds-eye views of
pyrotechnic shows, stage antics and ecstatic crowds provided no informa-
tion about the line-up or verbal commentaries. The Sziget-videos from this
era show no remarkable difference from television spots for EXIT, Electric
Castle or Positivus Festival.
Due to the emphasis on ephemeral-carnivalesque atmosphere as well
as the ‘individuals whose behaviour deviates from the current average or
standard’ (Foucault 1997: 333), these videos can be regarded as represen-
tations of what Michael Foucault termed chronic heterotopia, the spatiali-
sation of ‘time in its more futile, transitory and precarious aspects, a time
viewed as celebration’ (Foucault 335). The cinematic design of TV spots
and anthem videos called forth not as much a specific festival space but the
cosmopolitan festivalscape, a heterotopic space instituted upon ‘the power
of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations’ (334).
In the videos this cosmopolitan festivalscape is centred around the main
stage which invokes a particular conception of theatrical space. Participants
bring multicultural and multi-ethnic semiotic codes to this centre, while
imaginative clothing and the exhibitionist fashion of seaside resorts sexual-
izes the space. Other images of festivalgoers enjoying catering and amuse-
ment services recall restaurants, pubs and fairgrounds, thus representing the
206 ZS. GYŐRI
Fig. 10.1 The promotional logo of the 2015 Sziget Festival
venue’s ‘cityfication’, the transformation of the venue into a heterotopia of

deviance, a week-long love parade. The somewhat psychedelic logo of the
Island of Freedom explicitly reflected upon this colourful and sexy youth-
fulness while the ring-shaped design situated the festival at the centre of
this experience (Fig. 10.1).
The 2017 anthem, ‘Love Solution’ by Mary PopKids, and the television
spot of 2018 festival with the tagline ‘Love revolution’ brought a histor-
ical layer to this experience. On the 50th anniversary of both the Paris
student protests and the Woodstock Festival (as the epitome of the hippy
movement), a new branding strategy appeared, linking the heritage of 60s
counter-culture with the exhibitionism of post-millennial youth culture. In
this era of branding, freedom, art, love, chic and sexiness were celebrated
but also consumed as global ingredients of the cult of youth.
International Openness and the Closure of Local

Contexts
The overviewed promotional campaigns and strategies render legible a
gradual weakening of the local context parallel with a strengthening of
international context. This included the emergence of an affluent European
middle-class youth as the main pillars the festival’s brand-community. The
transformation of Sziget into a cosmopolitan festivalscape was the price
of financial independence, itself paradoxical. During the 25 years of its
existence, the organizers of Sziget have established themselves as finan-
cially autonomous and influential members of the neoliberal business elite.
Gerendai has consciously avoided being entangled by political games. As

he remarks: ‘I’ve always played fair and never asked anyone favours just
because we were ‘on good terms’. The moment that happens, you become
obliged to people. It is essential for me to be treated on equal terms’ (Zsi-
borás 2016: 35). Later he adds: ‘I genuinely believe in market forces and
that businesses should succeed through competition and not the money
they acquire through lobby activities’ (36).
I regard such independence paradoxical, since achieving it meant the
isolation and careful selection of local content. Practically this meant two
things. One the one hand, Hungarian bands were set apart from the main
line up and headlined on the ‘minus first day’ called ‘Day of Hungarian
Songs’ in 2008. The following year a Rock Against Racism concert was held
on this day with the participation of mainly Hungarian bands. In upcom-
ing years, classic icons of local popular music were continuously presented
on the main stage, even if prior to the official start of the event. On the
other hand, more contemporary bands, which either sang in English and
had international fandom, or played music in genres suited for dominant
taste, were spotlighted on the Hungarian Music Stage and later the Petőfi
Rádió—Telekom VOLT Fesztivál stage—dedicated exclusively to Hungar-
ian performers. At the same time, main stage appearances of local talent
declined, with only two or three Hungarian bands featured, usually in the
afternoon time slot.
The case of Tankcsapda, Hungary’s prime hard rock band, well illustrates
the above points. The band, which had been a mainstage feature since the
early days of the festival, celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday at the 2014
Sziget. Since then, however, the formation was not included in the line-up
despite its cult popularity. According to Csaba Bakó, the PR manager of
the band, this situation was a direct result of the international orientation
of organizers who can no longer offer the rock group the stage and time-
slot they deserve. While Tankcsapda insisted on playing before or after a
band with similar musical style, this proved problematic in a period of very
modest offering in hard-rock. Bakó added that the band prefers summer
events ‘where the line-up consists of Hungarian bands’ (Rituper 2017),
most notably Volt Festival, where the hard-rock trio remains a main-stage
and prime-time attraction. The factors leading to the absence of Tankc-
sapda at Sziget have affected other major performers of the Hungarian
popular music scene. Although it lies outside the scope of this chapter to
explore the complex influence of this mega-festival on the local music scene,
I would just say that it both advanced and hindered its internationalisation.
208 ZS. GYŐRI
By offering exclusive opportunities to play in front of tens of thousands of

people, some bands—including Ivan & the Parazol, Bohemian Betyars, Irie
Maffia, Belau and Fran Palermo—established a fanbase outside the coun-
try’s borders and entered the international festival and club scene. As for
other formations with Hungarian set-lists (a disadvantage on the interna-
tional market), the subsidies of the Sziget enterprise, like the Volt Festival in
Sopron, Balaton Sound, B.my.Lake. Strand, offered well-publicised oppor-
tunities to be in the spotlight.
Conclusion
The Sziget Festival showcases the rapid expansion of the global festival
industry in a region that had a relatively isolated popular music culture
until the fall of Eastern European communist regimes. While it is tempting
to regard the festival as a symbol of Hungary’s reintegration into global
circuits of youth culture, there are challenges and paradoxes that need to
be considered. The most important challenge addressed by this chapter is
the tension between the adopted business model and the envisioned social
mission of the festival with the former putting certain limitations on the
latter. Plainly put: mounting budgets, spent on the expansion of the event
both in size and the range of its cultural offering, forced organizers to grad-
ually increase ticket prices, which in turn undermined the festival’s appeal
amongst Hungarians. As such, the strategy that allowed organizers to suc-
cessfully resist integration into the nepotistic state sector of youth culture
and, consequently, remain faithful to middle-class values of independence
and emancipation, also hindered the involvement of middle-class Hungar-
ian youth. Besides the empirical findings of sociologists, television spots
of Sziget—making rich use of the intellectual agencies of self-reflexivity,
playfulness, ambiguity and humour—prove that the values of cosmopoli-
tanism and openness were consistently foregrounded, and while the lack of
widespread acceptance for these values did not fully erase marketing mes-
sages, Hungarian participants came to perceive the event as a liberal utopia.
As a recognition of this, more recent videos accentuated the carnivalesque-
heterotopian qualities of the Sziget brand.
The history of the Sziget Festival is a multi-layered narrative written
by global trends, economic necessities, social transformations and local
visions. It is a narrative of branding cosmopolitanism but also of how
a postcommunist country can integrate cosmopolitanism into its youth
and music cultures. Sziget is not just a mega-festival offering specific
experiences, but an Eastern European popular cultural experiment in the

age of commodification. This experiment has not been concluded so its
teachings cannot be offered as conclusions. As a preliminary conclusion,
the organizers of Sziget have undoubtedly accelerated the festivalisation of
popular music not only by methodically building up a festival portfolio but
also by creating the myth of summer music festivals, which, in effect, started
to proliferate around the country. For the past decade, the press has dubbed
Hungary a festival empire. This empire, nevertheless, is still a receiver and
not a producer of musical talent: while Sziget Festival has brought global
trends to Hungary, it has so far failed to increase the international visibility
of local acts.
Notes
1. Already in 1993 Péter Müller Sziámi’s declared his wish to create a festival
that allowed people ‘to live their lives. Live it as it should be lived…At present,
this country is not a good place to live in, yet I have no desire to leave. It is
not only me who wish to live in another country, there are many of us. The
Student Island will be this other country’ (quoted in Jávorszky 2002: 22).
2. Pol’and’Rock Festival held since 1995 also contained Woodstock in its name
and was formerly known as Woodstock Festival Poland.
3. There is agreement among Hungarian sociologists and political sciences
scholars that the advent of a postcommunist civic class in Hungary was full
of paradoxes and more or less failed as a project. Péter Felcsúti, for example,
contends that people actively participating in civic society ‘do not become
models for the whole of society, their value systems have no visible impact on
the general public and, even less, on politics’ (Felcsúti 2016: 48). According
to Péter Róbert, the continuous crisis of civic values was a result of pater-
nalism still serving as a strong normatizing power in Hungary. He asserts:
‘The burgher is not a dependent person, not someone who can be humili-
ated either as an employee or as a citizen’ (Róbert 2016: 63), as it was the
case with the Hungarian middle class. For further details, see the chapters of
Péter Tölgyessy, Iván Szelényi, Péter Felcsúti, Péter Róbert, István György
Tóth in the volume A magyar polgár [The Hungarian Burgher] (2016).
4. Statistical figures of a decade long period puts trends in a wider perspective:
in 2006 weekly-ticket sales to foreigners was 40% (Wikipedia), in 2016 it
was around 80–85% according to MTI, the Hungarian news agency.
5. According to Carmen D. Maier, who explores film trailers through the inter-
dependencies of semiotic modes, ‘trailers are mixed promotional genre char-
acterised by a distinct generic structure in which each functional stage fulfils
210 ZS. GYŐRI
a specific communicative purpose through multimodal means’ (Carmen D.

Maier 2011: 141).
6. Until 2001 the brand-name Pepsi was included in the videos with increasing
visibility.
7. In Hungarian the words ‘grade’ and ‘ticket’ are homonyms.
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mon. Forbes, June, 29–36.
CHAPTER 11
A Tale of Two (or #EverMore) Festivals:

Electronic Music in a Transylvanian Town
Ruxandra Trandafoiu
Untold is an annual electro-dance music (EDM) festival in Cluj-Napoca,

Romania, attracting 350,000 attendees and well-known DJs and musi-
cians, including: Armin van Buuren, the late Avicii, David Guetta, Afro-
jack, Tiësto, Jason Derulo, and, lately, The Prodigy, Tinie Tempah and
Black Eyed Peas. Since 2015, Untold has captured audiences’ imaginations
with a series of ‘chapters’ in a ‘story’ describing a fantasy land populated
with characters from Romanian folk tales mixed with fantastic animals that
exploit the demon, vampire and magic beast franchises popular worldwide.
Although respected for the international music it promotes, Untold is
also unashamedly part of a rebranding, marketing and tourism drive, aiming
to promote Transylvania (the northwestern region of Romania where Cluj-
Napoca is located) and Romania to tourists, international audiences and
musicians. However, Untold’s marketing strategies are also tapping into the
desire of the Romanian and, particularly, the Transylvanian audience, to feel
proud of its own identity and see its own heritage, genuine, appropriated
R. Trandafoiu (B)
Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK
e-mail: trandar@edgehill.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9_11
214 R. TRANDAFOIU
or simply invented, projected on a larger international canvass, particularly

in the context of the post-communist transition.
This is a complex objective, when in the nearby village of Bont, ida, the
Electric Castle festival has been thriving since 2013, with a similar emphasis
on the Transylvanian multicultural spirit, and the Untold formula has now
been replicated in the Neversea festival on the Black Sea Coast, thus raising
questions about uniqueness, authenticity and global neoliberal reproduc-
tion.
Consequently, the chapter aims to explore the way identity is negoti-
ated by audiences and the festival music, between the international, the
national and the regional, how ‘natives’ become citizens of the world over
the four festival days and how ‘foreigners’ become adopted and temporar-
ily Transylvanian or Romanian. The chapter also investigates the blend of
old and new, of history and technology, resulting in a staged event that
is inherently universal, but also locally specific, reflecting thus the inter-
play between received, inherited, adopted and internalized identities at an
international music festival.
This chapter adopts a comparative outlook, analyses Untold chapters,
posters and YouTube promotional clips, from 2015 to present, and gives
voice to both fans and critics of the festival. If witnessing encompasses
both seeing and saying (Durham Peters 2001: 709), then it is important
to capture what the participants make about the event, their participation
giving them the authority to reflect on the transformation of ‘experience’
into ‘discourse’ (Durham Peters 2001: 711).
United in Diversity: Negotiating Locality

on the Global Stage
Untold is the biggest EDM festival in Eastern Europe and the biggest music
festival in Romania. It was organized for the first time in 2015, as part
of the Cluj European Youth Capital events. The European Youth Capital
badge is awarded by the European Youth Forum to ‘empower young peo-
ple, boost youth participation and strengthen European identity’ (https://
www.youthforum.org/youthcapital, accessed 27 September 2018). With
the majority of the 350,000 attendees being in their twenties and thirties,
the festival fitted the bill perfectly. Like many similar European-led initia-
tives, the ‘united in diversity’ motto was adhered to. As a result, Untold
was, from the very beginning, meant to showcase an array of musicians from
Europe and beyond, while also encouraging local talent and acquainting
11 A TALE OF TWO (OR #EVERMORE) FESTIVALS … 215
visitors with the uniqueness of Cluj-Napoca, the second largest Romanian

city, located in the northwestern region of Transylvania.
Its apparently contradictory mission still defines the festival today, creat-
ing some contestation over the distribution of international and Romanian
musicians, the mix of music genres and the impact on the town. Unlike fes-
tivals that start locally and then become internationalised through export
(see Ferdinand and Williams 2013), Untold relies on an already successful
model of international EDM festivals (Tomorrowland, Mysteryland, Air-
beat and Creamfields, to name but a few), which was readily imported and
adapted for the Eastern European-, Romanian- and Transylvanian-specific
contexts. The formula worked; Untold win the Best Major Festival accolade
at the 2015 European Festival awards.
Untold’s arrival on the Romanian music scene was partly dictated by
external factors and opportunities, such as the ‘capital of culture’ success-
ful blueprint. Existing academic work gives considerable credit to the role
of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) initiative in many cities’ regen-
eration and cultural promotion (Richards and Wilson 2004; Nobili 2005;
Griffiths 2006; Herrero et al. 2006; Campbell 2011; O’Callaghan 2012;
Cohen 2013; Krüger 2014) and Cluj is no exception. An equally strong
internal impetus, motivated by the aim to reconfirm Cluj’s role as the sym-
bolic capital of Transylvania and the main cultural competitor to the admin-
istrative capital, Bucharest, was also in play. As Richards and Wilson have
observed, the establishment of music festivals as a focal point within the
annual calendar ‘can be linked to a general increase in competition between
cities for the attention of important stakeholders, including consumers,
investors and policy-makers’ (2004: 1931). Capitalizing on Transylvania’s
historical traditions, established multiculturalism, perceived cosmopolitan
attitudes and successful economic development, Untold became one of
the main urban music festivals that ‘provide concentrated versions of local,
regional, national and transnational encounters’ (Lalioti 2013: 136).
Like many other festivals, Untold’s role was, from its beginnings in
2015, to promote local identities, as well as encourage regional develop-
ment within a larger global framework (see, among others, Connell and
Gibson 2003, 2016; Richards and Wilson 2004; González-Reverté and
Miralbell-Izard 2009; Ferdinand and Williams 2013; St John 2015 for
similar research), a trend that has led to an unprecedented growth of the
‘symbolic economy’ (Lash and Urry 1994). Like other European music
festivals, Untold also taps into the trend to protect and promote European
cultural traditions and identities in the face of globalisation (Cohen 2013:
216 R. TRANDAFOIU
584). As Sara Cohen reports in relation to Liverpool ECOC 2008, many

European cities mobilise heritage in the staging of music events; Liverpool
was among those that had rich popular music memories and traditions to
resurrect and drum up (Cohen 2013). By comparison, Cluj has a rather
more modest popular musical pedigree, although the Electric Castle fes-
tival organized annually by the Bánffy Castle ruins in the vicinity of Cluj,
had already been up and running for two years when Untold debuted in
2015, and the city is not short of musical venues and festivals of various
genres, especially classical, jazz and folk. As a result, Untold relied less
on local specificities and used more stereotypical, mythical and universal
tropes, that had the advantage of being immediately recognizable by inter-
national audiences and musicians. This adoption was followed by a process
of adaptation, through which many of these tropes were imbued with local
flavour. Romanian folklore is not short on fairy tales, usually involving
some magic realm, and the organizers tried to recreate and populate it
with images of typically local animals, especially brown bears and wolves,
of which Romania has substantial numbers, as well as woods and moun-
tains, which symbolize Transylvania and the Carpathians. This storyland
also becomes a playful realm that comes alive for four days each August.
Chapters are added in each successive year, which usually means new
characters—human, beasts and anything in between—which are a mod-
ernized version of tradition. Thus, Untold can still claim connection to
Transylvanian heritage, while also departing from it to become globally
relevant. A brief analysis of Untold’s chapters, as promoted via posters and
annually chosen themes, images and activities, validates the assumption
that the universal and the specific meet for ludic and hedonistic purposes,
culminating, at least visually, in a massive theme park in the middle of the
city.
Headlined by Armin van Buuren, Avicii, David Guetta and brothers
Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, the 2015 Untold poster (Fig. 11.1) featured
a prince and his horse emerging from a forest at dusk. Horses are a much-
loved fixture of Romanian fairy tales and they are usually talking ones
or in possession of some other kind of magic power. The figures of the
horse and prince are reminiscent of the illustrations produced by Done
Stan for the 1972 edition of Petre Ispirescu’s ‘Basme’ (Fairy Tales), the
most famous Romanian fairy tale book that many generations have grown
up with in Romania due to numerous reprints. Like Stan’s illustrations,
they are slightly stylised: the long hair, the thick eyebrows, the crown and
boots, and thus look like archetypes. Transylvania, as its name recalls, is
Fig. 11.1 Untold 2015 poster

218 R. TRANDAFOIU
the land beyond the forest; the figures emerge from an ancient forest, with
trees thick with age. Yet the forest or the figures are not threatening; they
are bathed in yellow sunlight, which becomes the defining colour for the
poster, recalling the strong light component of an EDM show. The image
was appropriate for an event that was only emerging on the global music
stage but wanted to capitalize on the way Transylvania is imagined by pri-
marily Romanian, but also global, audiences.
The characters and colours changed from 2016 onwards, tapping into
much darker Gothic and therefore universal imagery. In 2016, the poster
featured a night realm, with deep forests and mountains, requiring a special
portal for entering. There is an obvious shift here towards neo-Gothicism:
the pointed arch, which forms a frame around the portal; the Medieval look
of the monk-like wizard; the Capuchin cloak and skeletal jewelled hand;
the high mountains and impenetrable forests; the dark blues and blacks of
the night, both threatening and alluring. It is obvious that the 2016 visual
design is tapping into a more universal design toolbox, belonging to the
Gothic and vampire traditions and thus attempting to reinforce Transylva-
nia’s appeal in the popular imagination. It also matches the festival’s drive
to entice international audiences (Fig. 11.2).
The script for the accompanying promotional video could have been
written for the promotion of a horror film but used the same symbolic
triggers that audiences would have recognized in relation to Transylvania:
mountains, dragons, unseen worlds, moon light. Yet these are also universal
Gothic fairy tale tropes.
The narrator’s voice is heard saying: ‘Beyond the golden mountains of
Carpathia and through the fallen citadels of the mighty Dacians, far to
the north from the dragon nests and deep into the lands of the storm-
keepers, a millenary wizard was awakened. Brought to life by the com-
munion of the Untold people and the blessing of the moon, the energy
from the unseen world opened the gates to Transylvania. Bringing the
ancient magic to our times and turning the great city of Cluj into a place
that no one has seen before. And that’s how we became the world capi-
tal of night and magic. Fulfil the prophecy, be part of Untold!’ (Untold
promotional video clip, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6vEV6e3dExM, accessed 27 September 2018).
Visually, National Geographic styled shots of mountainous landscapes
were interspersed with previous festival footage, live animals and Gothic
imagery. The trope of entering a special realm was carried out into the
everyday life of the festival. For example, top Romanian designers were
Fig. 11.2 Untold 2016 poster

220 R. TRANDAFOIU
able to showcase their fashion lines within the festival space and attendees
could hire or purchase unique clothes to strut around in the ‘kingdom’
ruled by ‘King’ van Buuren, as the DJ is often called by the Romanian
press.
The mythical realm theme continued in 2017, when the hooded myste-
rious wizard in the dark forest returned, accompanied by a magic book and
dragon-like creatures. The festival space was then dubbed ‘the Dragon’s
Nest’. In 2018, Untold’s fourth chapter ran with the ‘Wolf Spirit’ caption
and hashtag (#WolfSpirit). The ‘Realm of Night and Magic’, protected
by the ‘Millenary Magician’, returned once more to continue elaborating
on the already established themes of good against evil, universal love and
magical communion with nature. The fourth chapter also introduced two
new characters: The ‘Warrior King’ (protector of the Realm) and the ‘Wise
Priestess’ (who can predict the future and can stop the evil). These two ‘Al-
pha’ characters were connected via a special force that endowed them with
the ability to summon the power of their spiritual animal, the wolf, who,
together with the Dragon, led a wolf army against anyone who threatened
the Realm.
The wolf arrived earlier, in 2016, but did not take a prominent role
until 2018. Its visual representation borrowed significantly from the Dacian
Draco. The Draco, as represented on Trajan’s column in Rome, was the
symbol of the ancient inhabitants of Dacia (the territory that is now Roma-
nia), who were conquered by the Romans in 106 AD. This war standard
blended the head of a wolf with the body of a serpent and is thought to have
had religious significance. Although little is preserved from Dacian culture
and language (mostly through Roman depictions, such as Trajan’s Forum
in Rome), Dacianism, the attempt to reimagine and resurrect Dacian cul-
ture as a sign of immemorial continuous existence on the same territory,
has recently enjoyed a revival, led mainly by conservative nationalists. Its
presence at the festival is therefore significant (Fig. 11.3).
The arrival of the wolf allows organizers to delve deeper into Roma-
nian history and connect audiences with primordialism and ancestry. This
is a subtle evolution, from the first chapter of the fairy tale, which was
more nationally embedded in 2015, to the Gothicism of a more global
and universal nature in 2016–2017, with 2018 finally bringing a return to
referencing more specific Romanian traditions. Infusing Untold with ref-
erences that would be more familiar to Romanians is now possible because
of the established nature and reputation of the festival, but also moti-
vated by the need to blow the competition (the rurally placed and more
Fig. 11.3 Fans of Untold, Rares, and Mihaela Lupu, with the festival’s Dacian
Draco T-shirts. The English translation of the surname “Lupu” is “the Wolf”.
Reproduced with kind permission
222 R. TRANDAFOIU
musically eclectic Electric Castle festival) out of the water. By deploying

Dacian religious symbolism, Untold also referenced the spiritual nature of
Goan raves. As a result, both local tradition and universal themes got a nod.
This same trajectory of evolving themes, as a way of projecting iden-
tity, is used by advertisers and sponsors. In 2018, Ursus, the brewery that
started its life in Cluj to become the biggest beer producer in Romania and
has been one of the festival’s official sponsors from its inception, designed
festival T-shirts using a play on its own logo, the bear. The dancing bear
referenced an old tradition at village fairs, the (now viewed as cruel) display
of dancing bears by traveller artists, although in its latest incarnation it sym-
bolized mostly having a good time. In the T-shirt reproduced below, the
brown bear that populates the Carpathian Mountains is clearly in motion,
with the caption spelling ‘fur moves’, inferring that anyone can dance (like a
bear). This image thus captures the EDM festival vibe, typical fauna for the
region and the logo of the sponsor, in a clever marketing mix. As Romania
has the largest brown bear population in Europe, the bear is also viewed as
a symbol of Romania’s natural wealth and is, according to the old Ursus
slogan ‘king of beers’. The crown clearly visible on the bear’s own anthro-
pomorphised T-shirt, is reiterating the brewery’s slogan, but also creating
a symbolic link with the festival’s fairy tale theme. The motto Ursus used
during the festival was ‘What starts with Ursus, ends up epically at Untold’.
The brewery’s aim was to associate the brand with enhancing the festival
experience, through sponsoring certain types of music, building special
leisure areas and running various competitions that focused on recycling
beer cans responsibly. Both brand and marketing were therefore in sync
with the spirit of the festival and both capitalized on traditional represen-
tations. Recognizable brands or symbols like Ursus and its bear lend their
power to the Untold brand, producing meaning associated with national
culture. As Connell and Gibson observe, even previously unknown sites of
music-making have become trend setters, not only through the diversity of
the music being promoted, but also their ‘sophisticate’ organization and
promotion (Connell and Gibson 2016: 3) (Fig. 11.4).
In 2016, Untold used the association between Transylvania, vampires
and blood to launch the ‘Pay with Blood’ campaign, which raised awareness
of the lack of blood donors and encouraged people to donate in exchange
for tickets. 2017 saw the return of ‘Transylvania All Inclusive’, which began
in 2016 and gave Untold participants discounts at major tourist attractions
in Transylvania. The Untold bracelet, with acts as a ticket and pre-paid
device, allowed discounted access to palaces, towers, synagogues, museums,
Fig. 11.4 Ursus

sponsored T-shirt, with a
modernized version of
the brand’s logo
the famous Turda salt mine and, of course, Bran Castle of Dracula fame. The
same year, Lonely Planet made Transylvania their top world destination.
Although the mythical land Untold projects may not match the stereo-
typical image of electro-dance raves, the audience experience was nothing
but contemporary though a complete digitalization of experience: free wi-
fi, digital maps, specialist apps, pre-loaded pay cards and bracelets, areas
for playing the latest video games, special effects and new technology at
every turn. In addition, any historical and cultural references were adapted
and modified to be read universally. One might not know anything about
Dacia and its Draco, but fantastic beasts and fairy tales fit perfectly into
the theme park trope that everybody recognizes. Untold had to equally
engage local music lovers and international visitors that follow the EDM
festival circuit. As a result, the festival had to be international, but also give
the locals a sense of pride and identity, and had to be EDM-focused, while
also catering to more diverse music tastes.
Eva and Dan, who are Untold fans and were happy to speak with me,
initially thought that the festival was organized with a Romanian audience
in mind, but as early as its second year, the festival had begun to attract large
numbers of foreign tourists and EDM fans. They credited the involvement
of local sponsors with facilitating excellent organization and resources. Eva,
who is a fashion designer and event organizer, and Dan, who is a music
224 R. TRANDAFOIU
promoter, were keen to emphasize that what makes the festival unique are
the variety of music genres and sub-genres available to audiences, although
about 70% of the offering is still reserved to EDM musicians and DJs. How-
ever, there is enough diversity in the way stages are organized and acts are
booked to make the festival uniquely rich. The talent line-up proves it.
For example, in 2016, in addition to DJ stars like Dimitri Vegas & Like
Mike, Tiesto, Ummet Ozcan and Afrojack, audiences were able to sam-
ple rap, reggae, soul and house, due to the presence of Labrinth, Tanya
Stephens, Naughty Boy, Ella Eyre and many others. Romanians, although
a minority, were represented by a similarly varied line-up, with Alexand-
rina, Subcarpaţi, Argatu’, Macanache and Cedry2k among the guests. The
following year, in 2017, no less than 180 artists performed at Untold, pro-
viding plenty of choice. Like other EDM international festivals, Untold
was defined from the start by the presence of celebrity DJs, following the
now typical recipe of instrumentalization of music stars (Robinson 2015:
14) and standardization of line-ups, in an industry that attempts to bal-
ance commerce and art (Robinson 2015: 176). There are now a number
of Untold regulars, like Armin van Buuren, Afrojack or Dimitri Vegas &
Like Mike, with other big acts from outside the traditional EDM scene
being regularly booked. There is a greater musical diversity among Roma-
nian guests. Subcarpat, i credit hip-hop, grime and Trip-Hop among their
main influences. Macanache is also hip-hop artist. Alexandrina is a folk
composer and lyricist. The eclectic Romanian scene is an attempt to attract
a more diverse local audience but is also dictated by the limited availability
of Romanian electronic artists, the genre having had a patchy history in
Romania. Dance music has come into its own after the fall of communism,
but a Romanian version, imbued by folkloric musical themes remains com-
mon. Consequently, Romanian dance music remains associated more with
pop than electronic music and tends to be less experimental.
However, this eclecticism does not necessarily stand out within the cur-
rent heterogeneity of EDM. Lalioti observed a similar diversification of the
musical repertoire in the case of the Synch festival in Athens, ranging from
electro to hip hop. The presence of the Prodigy, the Black Eyed Peas, Ellie
Goulding, Tom Odell and Tinie Tempah at Untold is an indication of the
same heterogeneity, multiplicity and open-endedness that Lalioti observed
in Athens (Lalioti 2013: 142) and Montano in Sydney (2011: 68). This
diversity, which is a feature of the EDM scene, ‘gives participants the oppor-
tunity to negotiate hybrid local belongings in a global, rather than national,
or even European, frame of reference’, by allowing the ‘deconstruction of
fixed boundaries between styles, genres and spaces’ (Lalioti 2013: 146). It
is also a sign of mainstreaming and appropriation of EDM, helped by the
relocation from clubs into parks and other public places, which also defines
Sydney-based EDM festivals (Montano 2011). Most EDM festivals have
now evolved from once illegal raves and psytrance events that took West-
erners on a spiritual but also more niche quest to Goa and other eastern
natural beauty spots (Coutinho 2006: 143), to events where star DJs, the
diversification of the musical repertoire, careful staging and branding, as
well as increased security arrangements allow events to take place in the
middle of cities, attended by young but more diverse and hence bigger
audiences. As in the case of Sydney, the motivation for Untold was largely
economical and part of a clear cultural economy strategy on the part of
the city, so in its first year, Untold was marketed as just a music festival,
without much information about guests or music genres. As Marius (23
August 2018), one of my informants told me, he bought the tickets before
he knew it was EDM and came to love it when he came to experience it.
Untold is therefore part of a more recent trend in EDM that aims to
colonize the city temporarily through mainstreaming and diversification,
while maintain a playful appearance. The mundane thus becomes temporar-
ily mythical through the staging and reorganization of place, with the city’s
monuments lit up long into the night, to match the colourful and bright
stage displays. The original symbols and meanings of rave culture might
have been lost in this Romanian translation, but Untold has proposed new
meanings, based on local cultural content and feeling of place, which res-
onate at a global level.
Participation, Witnessing and Social Intimacy:

Experiencing Identity in a Transylvanian Town
Music festivals have benefited from a significant historical economic shift,
with an emphasis on pleasure and the nature of experience. As Pine and
Gilmore explain, alongside commodities, goods and services, contempo-
rary economies are equally in the business of exchanging experiences and
transformations (Pine and Gilmore 2013: 23). They describe experiences
as ‘memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently per-
sonal way’ and can become transformative (Pine and Gilmore 2013: 26).
Consequently, ‘a significant change towards news styles of leisure’, such
as ‘experience seeking, learning, edutainment, or discovery’ (González-
Reverté and Miralbell-Izard 2009: 53), has come to define the tourism
226 R. TRANDAFOIU
and, implicitly, the festival industries. Consuming the city (Ritzer 1999) is
now part and parcel of the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999).
The experience is the marketing (Pine and Gilmore 2013: 30), because it
is the nature of experience that allows audiences to feel individualized and
able to participate, as individuals, in a collective, yet unique and person-
ally transformative experience (see also Pine and Gilmore 2013: 33–34).
As Pine and Gilmore observe, ‘in a world of experiences – an increasingly
unreal world – consumers choose to buy or not buy based on how real they
perceive an offering to be. In other words, authenticity has become the new
consumer sensibility’ (Pine and Gilmore 2013: 29). It is important there-
fore for festival participants to feel that they can be true to themselves and
the festival experience, and for the experience to be perceived as being what
it promises to be. However, authenticity is not measured in the amount of
local content or number of Romanian musicians, which remains small, but
in the ability to witness what other audiences around the world witness,
which offers audiences in Cluj a sense of sameness and egalitarianism. Mar-
ius, a fan of Untold, who has not missed any of its annual incarnations so
far, observed that probably the best thing about the festival is that ‘it gives
you access to people who compose or mix music and who have been in
New York, Ibiza or LA the week before, doing the same thing’ (Marius,
23 August 2018).
Marius was born in Cluj and is a visual artist, having now worked in
the fashion and design industries in Cluj and Bucharest for the past two
decades. He and his wife are both in their mid-forties and keen Untold fans,
which they have attended every year together with their now seventeen-
year-old daughter. The overall assessment is overwhelmingly positive: the
festival is ‘safe’, ‘civilized’, with no pushing or throwing up in the streets.
There is a downside and that is the ever-increasing price of tickets. Although
one hundred Euros for three days may not seem that much, it can cost as
much as a holiday if you take several members of your family along and
you add the price of food and drinks. Despite the cost, he plans to attend
again, due to the witnessing and experiential nature of the live electro-
dance performances. The way Marius describes it, it is very much a physical
experience, which positively impacts psychological wellbeing: ‘it gives you a
fantastic feeling, you feel great, everything is great, lots of adrenaline, like a
type of drug’ (Marius, 23 August 2018). When I asked Eva, another fan, to
define the festival in three words, her response was ‘experience, explosion,
effervescence’ (28 September 2018). Both Eva and her husband Dan use
the festival as a good occasion to party with friends.
The whole nature of the live performance is based on a similar premise.

The live performance is not only perceived as being sensuous and hence
desirable, but also more authentic in comparison to other musical expe-
riences (see Holt 2010). In addition, rave and psytrance have long been
associated with a heightening of the senses. Drugs aside (because of the
family ambiance for much of the day, drugs are a peripheral activity at
Untold), the futuristic atmosphere produced by the staging of neon and
strobe lights induces ‘another type of reality’ (Coutinho 2006: 147), while
also exploiting acoustic parameters that challenge ‘the limits of human
condition’ (Coutinho 2006: 149). As a result, sound pollution at Untold
has become a bone of contention within the local Cluj community, to the
point that sound levels were lowered in 2018, to the displeasure of par-
ticipants. However, fans were delighted when more than sound and vision
were stimulated at one of American DJ Steve Aoki’s typical stunts in 2018,
as he threw thirteen large cakes into the crowd. This had a double purpose:
one, for the audience members pelted by cake to feel that they had been
individualized and therefore given an active participatory role in the per-
formance, and two, for the sensuous nature of EDM to be magnified, by
stimulating even more senses.
It would be convenient, but also a tad problematic, to interpret what
happens at Untold as participation in a political sense, in the way Turino
(2008) or Robinson (2015) use the term ‘participation’. The spectacle and
presentation or ‘showing’ of music to audiences, as well as the exhibition
of DJs, outweigh true participatory elements, although EDM has always
encouraged physical involvement and there are, as in the case of Steve Aoki,
new ways in which DJs attempt to establish a physical connection with
their participants (although to be cynical, cake throwing could be read
as just another self-marketing ploy). Despite such attempts, participants
are still spectators, not performers, although elements of co-creation are
inherent in what DJs do and in live music performance more generally. Still,
as Robinson notices, contemporary festivals offer immersive and playful
opportunities, via new types of event design, that lead to content creation
(2015: 2). This view is also supported by St John’s research into psytrance.
As he observes, ‘event-goers are encouraged to contribute to and effectively
co-create events’ (St John 2015: 4).
For audiences, participation in EDM festivals can lead to a religious,
as well as a cinematic experience, due to the DJs’ performances and the
use of sensory technologies. It is for this reason that participation in music
festivals of this type can become ‘transformational’ (St John 2015: 8), true
228 R. TRANDAFOIU
rites of passage. In addition to the religious, cinematic nature of the expe-

riences St John describes, it is also the nature of witnessing and being part
of an audience that witnesses the same thing, that creates social intimacy
and transformative participation. Witnessing the extraordinary means risk-
ing ‘to have your life changed’ (Durham Peters 2001: 714). An example of
witnessing extraordinary feats is the amount of time spent by DJs on stage,
which is often the focus of Romanian press reporting. Armin van Buuren,
one of the Untold regular star DJs, was reported to have spent five hours
mixing in 2017 and no less than seven in 2018. Coming on stage at 2.00
a.m. and leaving at 9.00 a.m., van Buuren streamed his performance live on
his Facebook account and dedicated a song composed by himself to his Cluj
fans. At the end of his performance, he descended among the fans, to shake
hands and sign autographs. In an interview with Cosmopolitan Romania,
van Buuren talked about his special connection to Cluj, and the trans-
formative nature of his performances. The DJ became even more famous
among Romanians after crying, kneeling in front of his audience and wrap-
ping himself in the Romanian flag at previous festivals. In the interview he
described his Untold experiences as ‘breath-taking’ and professed Cluj and
Untold to have become his ‘home’. ‘Trance is emotion’, van Buuren told
his interviewer, ‘and the fans have been on the same wave length. To share
such a moment with people who share your convictions – people from
around the world – is both emotional and memorable’ (Dragomir 2018a).
What van Buuren describes is an exchange that entails a boundary disso-
lution between DJ and fans, who are concomitantly being transformed by
an experience that has a rite of passage quality for both. In this process,
personal and collective identities are constantly being renegotiated.
This symbolic communion enhances a type of social intimacy that Roma-
nians, in particular, crave. After being one of the most isolated countries
in the communist block with almost no opportunity to interact with for-
eigners, Romanians relish the kind of experience that Untold provides: the
symbolic exchange between them and the musicians, the boundary dissolu-
tion between local festival goer and tourist, the democratizing experience of
witnessing and being there, in the moment. For four days, Cluj townsfolk
become citizens of the world, while foreigners become adopted Roma-
nians and Transylvanians. Untold, like many similar festivals, can achieve
a cosmopolitan effect, making people open to different others and new
experiences and creating new solidarities (Lalioti 2013).
One of the journalists reporting for the Cosmopolitan wrote about the
apotheotic end of Untold 2018 thus: ‘THE GOD [Armin van Buuren,
capitals in the original] came on stage. Over seven hours of trance. Over
seven hours and, by dawn, there were thousands of people witnessing day
break together with him. Nothing left to say, we should give him citizen-
ship, he now speaks Romanian!’ (Dragomir 2018b). After emphasising the
importance of being in the moment as a Romanian, or adopted Romanian,
the journalist extoled the cosmopolitan nature of the audience, with many
EDM fans travelling from South Africa, China, Cuba or Canada (Dragomir
2018b). Interestingly, in this journalistic perspective, there did not seem
to be a mismatch between being a local and foreigner, Romanian and cos-
mopolitan. To a certain extent this is not unusual for EDM festivals, where
‘national identity is performed on site, including by way of national flag dis-
plays by individual dancers’ (St John 2015: 6), while ‘EDM culture lies at
the crossroads of local dance event origins and global industry imperatives’
(St John 2015: 2).
From Untold’s first incarnation, Belgian brothers and regulars Dimitri
Vegas & Like Mike got into the habit of waving Romanian flags on stage.
In 2018, van Buuren wore a personalised version of the yellow Romanian
football shirt. After their first participation in 2018, The Black Eyed Peas
declared: ‘It’s incredible what’s going on here! The moment we stepped
on the stage, we immediately felt the warmth and positive energy of the
fans. When we return to the United States, the United Kingdom and any-
where else we go in the world, we will tell people about Untold Festi-
val and Romania’ (https://cluj-napoca.xyz/news/untold-festival-2018/,
accessed 27 September 2018). These festival discourses of practices show
that international musicians make a clear effort to connect with fans at
an identity level, instilling a sense of national pride, when fans have the
chance to see, at least at a symbolic level, Romanianness being played and
referred to on a global stage. In an iconic pose from the festival, Armin
Van Buren is depicted holding the Romanian tricolour flag. It is a typical
Christ-like stance, with Armin’s hands stretched out on the flag, the head
tilted back, the eyes watching the sky. He is offering himself as sacrifice to
the Romanian audiences at the end of an epic set lasting more than five
hours. Its symbolism is all the more potent, since the tricolour flag is a key
and hard-fought symbol of Romanian national identity. These renegotiated
and temporary identities, constantly adopted and adapted, are further proof
that music has always been defined by the interplay between the fixity and
fluidity that characterizes identities (Connell and Gibson 2003: 10) and
that music festivals enhance the ‘community pride and destination image’
of cities (Richards and Wilson 2004: 1932) (Fig. 11.5).
230 R. TRANDAFOIU
Fig. 11.5 Armin van Buuren brandishing the Romanian flag at Untold 2017
Most fans seem happy with the annual descent of foreign travellers into
the city, who colonize the space and temporarily transform Cluj into a
cosmopolitan global city. However, as ‘major cultural and tourism indus-
try hubs’, festivals can also be viewed as contested sites (St John 2015: 3).
Roxana (24 August 2018), one of my informants, was very keen to empha-
size that, in her view, Untold is ‘not specific or multicultural’, so it is not
Romanian or Transylvanian in its choice of acts, music genres or practices,
neither is it inclusive. She deplored that Untold divides the city between
those more mature, who are more community minded and worry about
sound pollution and the festival’s negative effects on residents and those,
usually younger, who love the atmosphere the festival creates and its periph-
eral but fun activities. Roxana could see why fans loved it. Although not
unique in terms of musical genres and line-up, Roxana observed that it was
unique in that it is organized in the middle of a city, the music and drinking
carry on through the night, it offers additional opportunities for those who
follow certain DJs around the world to experience them in another setting,
and it is safe, in the absence of security threats and hard drugs. However,
Roxana criticized the fact that despite the money it raises, Untold does not
seem to have a palpable and long-lasting effect on the city or community,
unlike Electric Castle, the annual music and arts festival taking place since
2013 on the nearby Bánffy Castle estate, 23 km from Cluj.
Fig. 11.6 Untold and Electric Castle 2016 posters in comparison
Electric Castle sells itself as specifically eclectic and so in addition to

electronic music, it also showcases indie and rock. Visual artists participate
with installations, although there is an emphasis on lights and electricity.
There are opportunities for local crafts to be displayed, a practice which
showcases the cultural richness and the area’s specific traditions. Pottery
and wood carving workshops also feature. At certain times, political protests
have been staged, via clever signage, cartoons and art installations. The
emphasis on being smaller and local also connects with one of the festival’s
main drivers: showcasing local and up and coming talent, rather than relying
on mega stars. The below comparison between the 2016 line-ups at Electric
Castle and Untold is unambiguous (Fig. 11.6).
To a certain extent, this difference is purposefully constructed. Electric
Castle was shortlisted four times for the Best Medium Sized Festival by
European Festival Awards, so it is not necessarily small, and it has so far
attracted Fat Boy Slim, Franz Ferdinand, Morcheeba, Rudimental, Jesse J.
and The Prodigy, among other big names. The visual difference is also obvi-
ous and another attempt to brand the festivals as quite different. Untold’s
232 R. TRANDAFOIU
poster emphasises the night aspect of the event that mostly happens under
the moon (which takes centre place in the poster) and stars and therefore
could happen anywhere when the night falls. It is a universal, less locally
specific image. Electric Castle, on the other hand, is a round the clock event,
with a variety of activities that happen throughout the day in a continuous
cycle. The colour orange exults the vibrancy of the place when the festival
comes to stay. The castle ruins and its rural location, among cottages and
oak trees, is clearly referenced in the drawings at the bottom of the poster.
Electric Castle sells itself as more Transylvanian and Romanian and there-
fore ‘authentic’, and its line up seems indeed to be populated by more
Romanian musicians than one could find at Untold. The difference is also
in the prominence that Romanian musicians get. At Untold, Romanians
are mainly relegated to the smaller stages and scheduled during the day,
not at peak night times, as Roxana, a Cluj resident with a more critical
outlook, pointed out. There are few exceptions, such as Tudor Chirilă and
Vama, a popular soft rock band in Romania, which played the main stage at
Untold in 2017. Despite this marginalization of Romanian music, both fans
Eva and Roxana thought that Untold gives Romanians a chance to shine
among top foreign guests. It also showcases Romanian hip-hop, in particu-
lar, which is a genre with an accelerated development currently in Romania.
Eva especially talked about opportunities for new Romanian bands and she,
a diehard fan, could not see a perceivable imbalance between Romanians
and foreign musicians at Untold.
Electric Castle, on the other hand, has supporting local talent as one of
its main missions. In 2017, almost 100 Romanian artists took part, their
contributions ranging from techno and dub to alternative rock, post-punk
and electro-jazz. Among them, big names locally, such as Şuie Paparude,
Subcarpaţi, Golan, Coma, Luna Amară, Robin & The Backstabbers, The
Mono Jacks, Macanache & The Putreds. 2018 also saw and heard well
known acts Petre Ispirescu, Vunk, Class, Ocs, Histria and the famous
Romanian alternative rockers Viţa de Vie, together with newer names per-
form. Because of its more heterogeneous nature, with genres ranging from
hip-hop and alternative rock to indie, electro and reggae, there is more
opportunity for Romanians to be part of the festival. The smaller Roma-
nian musical scene seems to inhabit better the smaller festival space.
The size of the Electric Castle festival location, on the edge of Bonţida
village, breeds a sense of intimacy, with camping being thrown into the price
of the tickets, which at just over seventy Euros for four days, is cheaper than
Untold (although prices keep rising). In an evocation of Glastonbury, but at
a much smaller scale, Wellington boots have become a standard emblem and
a fashion item. Through camping or hiring rooms in the village, there is a
clear connection with nature, land and rural life, in a return to ‘authenticity’
and (threatened) traditional ways of life. The festival has had a positive
economic impact on the area, with many houses being restored with the
income that the festival produces. The festival organizers also donate some
of the proceeds towards restoring the mainly seventeenth-century Bánffy
Castle building, which fell into ruins after World War 2 and was retroceded
to the Bánffy family after the fall of communism. Electric Castle therefore
sells audiences the promise of a different experience.
What Electric Castle has achieved and Untold may lack, is the commu-
nity legacy, the more obvious political stances and the feeling of kinship
achieved through effective communication strategies, such as mobile light
installations that allow people to communicate remotely. However, fans of
Untold argue that the money the festival brings to the city of Cluj is one
of the most important aspects of the festival, coupled with ‘national and
international exposure’ (Eva and Dan, 28 September 2018), although the
financial effect is pervasive and not concentrated.
Untold and Electric Castle play the Transylvanian and Romanian card
differently. Because of its location, Untold can aim for size and interna-
tional exposure. As a result, it has to adopt global clichés of identity from
Transylvania’s stereotypical arsenal (blood, vampires, forests, mountains,
wolves) or adapt local identities for global exposure opportunities. The
result is a festival that is not necessarily ‘stop watch’, because the life of the
city carries on regardless, but a festival that takes attendees into a parallel
and fun universe, where adults can revert to being children in an immense
theme park. Electric Castle, on the other hand, is limited by its location (the
village of Bont, ida and the Bánffy Castle estate), that dictates its size and the
connection with the land. This could be a disadvantage, but in the context
of current concerns about reconnecting with the environment, the drive to
preserve local crafts, cuisines and natural ingredients, as well as the empha-
sis on sympathetic historical restoration, it has become a selling point. As
a result, local identities are reconstructed in a slightly different way, with
more emphasis on authenticity and less concern for global exposure.
Conclusions
Untold makes a clever play on appearance and reality. In the way it is
branded and sold, Untold is indeed unique, as it taps into Gothicism,
234 R. TRANDAFOIU
fantasy and story-telling, elements that are not typical for EDM music.
The experience itself is also uncommon and differentiates Untold from
other international EDM festivals: it takes place at the heart of a historic
city, not on the outskirts, yet it is allowed to carry on almost non-stop
for four days and nights. In many real and practical terms however, this
is a typical festival. There is a similar line-up to other EDM festivals like
Tomorrowland (Belgium’s ‘ultimate EDM fest’), and hence the music and
experiences are also similar. There is an emphasis on the quality and magni-
tude of the show, with technology playing and important part. ‘Everybody
is online, looking at what goes on in Belgium and other countries, trying
to copy it here’, observed Marius (23 August 2018).
This universal quality has allowed it to breed the Neversea clone. Orga-
nized since 2017 on the Black Sea coast, near the city of Constant, a, by
the same team that produce Untold, Neversea is billed as a fantasy land
that includes a magical arc, sea vessels and marine creatures, on a quest
to find a secret island (Candea 2017). With its beach location, Neversea
has more in common with Goan raves, but the music and artists would be
very recognizable to Untold audiences. If one takes into account all the
other EDM festivals in Europe and beyond, it seems that a global festival
‘scape’ (Appadurai 1990) is emerging, made up by a network of festivals
that allows fans to party non-stop by moving from one location to the
other. Ever more festivals seem therefore likely.
Untold is not free of controversy. The sound pollution and the even-
t’s negative effects on many residents who seem unconvinced by pre-
sumed financial benefits, the marginalization of Romanian musicians at
the expense of star DJs and the standardization of the EDM scene are real
issues and a clear consequence of globalization and neo-liberal marketiza-
tion, but for a previously unknown place and musical setting, hosting a
major European festival is a major achievement.
Without a pre-established international image, Cluj has successfully
tapped into a number of ready-made symbols, which help the town and
the festival become brands in their own right. Relying on what one could
describe as cultural clichés, but also very successful franchises, such as magic
beasts, vampires and demons, Untold creatives have engaged in a battle
over representation and, through it, over authenticity and hybridity, fixity
and change. Untold is also attempting to make somewhat outdated clichés,
like Transylvanian vampires and other fantastic creatures, modern and rel-
evant to younger audiences. Romanians do not seem worried that much of
the stereotypical knowledge about Transylvania is projected onto them by
outsiders and are happy to embrace the myths, making them their own. It
is a classic example of invented identity, appropriate for specific purposes,
where any imported tropes are internalised, then resold as unique heritage
on a global stage.
Special Note The author is grateful to Daiana Sălăgean for the information and
title suggestions, and also to all the fans and critics of Untold, who were happy to
impart their experiences.
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Index
A Bešlić, Halid, 162

Afrojack, 213, 224 Bijelo Dugme, 138, 140, 141, 159
Agnostic Front, 105 Black Eyed Peas, 213, 224, 229
Althusser, Louis, 166, 167 Black Sabbath, 34, 41
Amiga, 21 B.my.Lake, 194
Aoki, Steve, 227 Bohemian Betyars, 208
Appadurai, Arjun, 78, 234 Bonţida, 214, 232, 233
Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Boruń, Katarzyna, 50, 55, 58, 67
174, 183, 184 Bourdieu, Pierre, 29, 30
Avicii, 213, 216 Bratkowski, Piotr, 49, 50, 55, 56, 58,
67
Bravo (magazine), 43
B Bregović, Goran, 17, 137, 140–152,
Bajaga & Instruktori, 151 157, 159, 165, 167
Bajagić, Momčilo ‘Bajaga’, 147, 151 Brygada Kryzys, 92, 94, 139
Bajrami, Selma, 163 Brzozowicz, Grzegorz, 139, 141, 145,
Balaton Sound, 194, 208 146, 150
Balkan Beat Box, 157
Balkanton, 21
Basia, 21 C
Belau, 208 Ceca, Svetlana Ražnatović, 162
Berlin Wall, 4, 5, 14, 17 Chess, Leonard, 21
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 239

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9
240 INDEX
Chlebowski, Piotr, 123 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), 18,

The Clash, 113 167, 173–185, 187, 188
Cohen, Leonard, 9, 15, 16, 49–71 Eurowoodstock, 193, 196
Colours of Ostrava, 192 EXIT Festival, 192
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, The Exploited, 110
27, 183
Control, 22, 28, 35–37, 40, 78, 80,
102, 120, 182, 183, 198, 201 F
Corecom, 4 Félsziget, 194
Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth, Fisher, Charles, 21
44 Fran Palermo, 208
Czechoslovak Society for the Protection
of the Rights of Music Authors
and Publishers, 33 G
Czechoslovak Television, 176, 178, Gerendás, Károly, 193, 194
179, 181–184 Gierek, Edward, 18, 53, 56, 184
Czerwone Gitary, 21, 129, 146 Gogol Bordello, 157
Gołaszewski, Sławomir, 92
Golden Clef Intervision Contest, 176
Golden Prague International Television
D
Festival, 176
Dacia, 220, 223
Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, 44
Deep Purple, 33, 34, 41
Gott, Karel, 174, 176, 182, 184
de Koning, Jacques, 94, 95
Gramophone Club, 33
Depeche Mode, 32
Grotowski, Jerzy, 85, 87
Deriglasoff, Olaf, 150
Guetta, David, 213, 216
Diskoton, 21
DJ Shantel, 157, 158, 163, 165, 167
Drzewucki, Janusz, 65 H
Dubček, Alexander, 18, 183 Hegedűs, László, 21
Dum Dum, 34 Helsinki Accords, 184
Dylan, Bob, 51, 57, 60, 69, 76 Heresy, 105
Hołuj, Tomasz, 89
Huiabella Fantastica, 108
E Hungarian Cultural Centre in Prague,
Electric Castle, 192, 205, 214, 216, 32
222, 230–233 Hungaroton, 21
Električni Orgazam, 138, 150 Husák, Gustáv, 27
European Broadcasting Union (EBU),
175–179, 183–185, 187
European Union (EU), 4, 6, 102, 112, I
156, 194, 199, 203 Ilić, Miroslav, 163
Eurovision Network, 175, 177 Illés-Együttes, 20
INDEX 241
International Broadcasting Organisa- Kovács, Kati, 20

tion, 173, 175, 176 Krawczyk, Krzysztof, 17, 61, 137,
International Broadcasting Union, 175 145–151
International Organisation for Radio Kryl, Karel, 43
and Television (OIRT), 18, Kurtis, Milo (Dimitrios), 21, 84, 88,
175–179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 89, 92
188 Kusturica, Emir, 140, 142, 165
Intershops, 4, 34
Intervision Network, 175–177, 181,
183 L
Intervision Song Contest (ISC), 3, 11, Lady Gaga, 165
18, 173–187 Laibach, 9, 10, 20
Irie Maffia, 208 Lama, 111
Ivan & the Parazol, 208 Led Zeppelin, 11, 29, 39, 41
Lepa Brena, 18, 158, 159, 161
Liepaja, Latvia, 103, 107
J Light and Dance Music Festival, 175
Jackowski, Marek, 84, 89, 91, 92 Like Mike, 216, 224, 229
Jakubowicz, Andrzej, 92 Linda, Bogusław, 61, 64, 145
Jakupcsek, Gabriella, 204 Lipa, Dua, 3, 193
Jancsó, Miklós, 204 Locomotiv GT, 20
Janklovics, Péter, 204 Lukić, Lepa, 158
Jazz Section of the Czech Musician’s
Union, 32
Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 91, 96 M
Jugoton, 21, 138, 150 Maleńczuk, Maciej, 150, 151
Jürgens, Udo, 181, 184 Malicki, Jacek ‘Krokodyl’, 88, 89
Mandoki, Leslie, 21
Mann, Wojciech, 53
K Marek, Piotr, 91
Kaczmarek, Jan, 21 Marković, Boban, 149, 157
Karpiński, Maciej, 53, 54, 58, 62 Marx, Karl, 164, 167
Katapult, 30 Mary PopKids, 206
Kayah, 17, 137, 140–151 Mazierska, Ewa, 9, 14, 15, 17, 79, 80,
Kelus, Jan Krzysztof, 55, 66 122–125, 130, 135, 185
Khrushchev, Nikita, 176 Melody Maker, 43
Kleszcz, Włodzimierz, 87, 96 Metro, 20
Kleyff, Jacek, 55, 65, 66, 71, 93 Michalski, Dariusz, 120, 124, 127,
Kłosowicz, Krzysztof ‘Kaman’, 91, 92 128, 134, 168
Kočani orkestar, 157 Milošević, Slobodan, 161, 162
Koncz, Zsuzsa, 20 Močnik, Rastko, 164, 165
Konsumex, 4 Moore, Allan, 81, 82, 97, 130
Korzeniowski, Abel, 21 Müller, Péter Sziámi, 193, 196, 209
242 INDEX
Muslimović, Halid, 163 Punk Rock Holiday, 108

Mustafov, Ferus, 157 Putin, Vladimir, 187
Mute Records, 10
R
N Ráday, Dávid, 204
Neue Slowenische Kunst, 20 Radoszewski, Roman, 120, 124
New Musical Express, 43 Ramadanovski, Džej, 141, 149, 163
Niemen, Czesław aka Czesław Wydrzy- Reed, Dean, 16, 21
cki, 9, 16, 17, 22, 64, 119–135, Regev, Motti, 8, 10, 12, 124, 126, 131
138, 185 Riistetyt, 111
No To Co, 21, 87, 129 Rock’n Roll Club, 103, 106, 110
Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 17, 64, Rolling Stones, 3, 30, 33, 41, 138
130–135 Rung, Marion, 179
Rzepczyński, Sławomir, 121, 122, 130
O
OFF Festival, 192 S
OiPolloi, 111 Said, Edward W., 78, 79
Opus, 21, 33 Sakić, Sinan, 163
Ostaszewski, Jacek, 84, 89 Schelinger, Jiří, 34
Outlook Festival, 192 Scorpions, 20
Sex Pistols, 113
Sipińska, Urszula, 13
P Sipowicz, Kamil, 88, 91
Pawlak, Antoni, 50, 55, 56, 58, 66, 67, Skorpió, 20
71 Słomiński, Jerzy ‘Słoma’, 90, 92
Pelikán, Jiří, 183, 184 Solidarity Movement, 54, 70, 174
Pevex, 4 Sopot International Song Festival, 176,
Pink Floyd, 11, 29, 39, 138, 159 184, 186
Plastic People of the Universe, 43 Stabro, Stanisław, 55, 56, 67
Pohoda, 192 Stachura, Edward, 65
Polish Cultural Centre in Prague, 32 Stanković, Milan, 167
Polish Television, 31, 177, 179, 181 Steczkowska, Justyna, 149
Polskie Nagrania, 21, 123, 128 Strand, 208
Polton, 21, 80 Street Dogs, 105
Porter, John, 21, 53 Subcarpaţi, 224
Positivus Festival, 192, 205 Suljaković, Šemsa, 163
Prague Spring, 14, 27, 28, 174, 183, Supraphon, 21, 33
184 Syrius, 20
Project Dekadenze, 110 Szczepański, Maciej, 185
Przemyk, Renata, 61 Sziget Festival, 7, 19, 192, 194, 197,
Pugacheva, Alla, 181, 182 200, 201, 203, 206, 208, 209
INDEX 243
Sziget Kulturális Menedzseriroda Kft, V

193 Vágtázó halottkémek, 9
Sztevanovity, Zorán, 20 van Buuren, Armin, 213, 216, 224,
228–230
Vegas, Dimitri, 216, 224, 229
T Vondráčková, Helena, 180, 181
Tankcsapda, 207 Vorkuta, Russia, 104
Taraf de Haiducks, 157 Vučković, Severina, 167
Tarkowski, Michał, 94
Tarlós, István, 199
Tartu, Estonia, 101 W
Taylor, Charles, 80 Waglewski, Wojciech, 84, 90
Tekieli, Robert, 83 Waniek, Henryk, 50, 53, 56
Telekom VOLT Fesztivál, 207 Warzone, 105
Tiesto, 224 West, Kanye, 20
Till, Attila, 204 Wilhelmi, Roman, 62, 63
Tokarski, Stanisław, 76, 77
Tomorrowland, 215, 234
Transylvania, 14, 194, 213, 215, 216, Y
218, 222, 223, 233, 234 Yugoton, 17, 42, 150, 151
Turczynowicz, Andrzej ‘Amok’, 88, Yurchak, Alexei, 29, 50
89, 92
Tuzex, 4, 34
Z
Zembaty, Maciej, 50, 53, 54, 57, 58,
U 61–66, 71
Untold, 19, 213–235 Zygadło, Tomasz, 53, 62

Eastern European Popular Music in A Transnational Context

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PALGRAVE EUROPEAN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES

More information about this series at

Palgrave European Film and Media Studies

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover image: Kamila Kozioł/Alamy Stock Photo

1 Introduction: Crossing National and Regional

Part I Bringing Foreign Music to the European East

2 Loopholes in the Iron Curtain: Obtaining Western

3 Quiet Fanaticism: The Phenomenon of Leonard

4 Authenticity and Orientalism: Cultural

5 Eastern Europe as Punk Frontier 101

Part II Eastern European Music Crossing the Borders

6 Success, Failure, Splendid Isolation: Czesław Niemen’s

7 Yugo-Polish: The Uses of Yugoslav Music by Polish

8 Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music Production

Part III Liminal Spaces of Eastern European

9 The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial

10 Between Utopia and the Marketplace: The Case

11 A Tale of Two (or #EverMore) Festivals: Electronic

Mariusz Gradowski (1979) studied anthropology of culture and musi-

Ruxandra Trandafoiu is Reader in Communication at Edge Hill

monograph on the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, which he

Fig. 2.1 Music market in Španělská Street, Prague, ca. 1974–1975

Fig. 11.4 Ursus sponsored T-shirt, with a modernized version

Introduction: Crossing National and Regional

Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Tappert described

© The Author(s) 2019 1

protected by and embedded in national institutions, such as orchestras,

popular rock musician from countries such as Hungary, Poland or

Mapping the Field

‘global core-periphery’ dynamics pertaining to popular music at large

continuities and disruptions in the popular music produced and consumed

managers in Berlin or Brussels and approach foreign labels. Some artists

role of Eastern European music compared to the free-market—oriented

Another problem encountered in discussion of the international dimen-

of culture demanded that cultural activity fostered personal growth, rather

successfully into international circuits, regularly toured in Western Europe;

authors tend to favour one of two approaches. One is known as a the-

Structure and Chapter Description

and professional smugglers was significant, demonstrating that the Iron

identities—through the skillful use of technology—the international

The Avenues of Further Research

However, there are numerous difficulties in conducting such investiga-

Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Buckingham: Open University

Bringing Foreign Music to the European

Loopholes in the Iron Curtain: Obtaining

© The Author(s) 2019 27

scrutiny and were heavily affected by the reinstatement of censorship and

dissemination. Moreover, I will explain what the possession of precious

The Fetish of Foreign Music Records and Their

have inauspicious consequences, especially for those who borrowed them

The Role of Radio, TV Broadcasts and Cultural

Live Concerts and Official Press

festivals, allowing numerous Czechoslovak alternative rock bands as well

Licensed Albums, Cover Versions

Carrying Records Across the Border

Strict as these guidelines appeared, the common practice at the state

travelled there a lot because he could—unlike in Czechoslovakia—attend

clothing, audiocassettes, cassette players, sunglasses, Indian scarves, digital

Eastern Bloc countries (Döinghaus 2001: 65–66), since postal packets

Illegal Music Markets

organized officially by the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth, amongst

Part III Liminal Spaces of Eastern European

Fig. 2.1 Music market in Španělská Street, Prague, ca. 1974–1975

Fig. 11.4 Ursus sponsored T-shirt, with a modernized version