In the United Kingdom and the United States, people tend to be sniffy about the rock and pop music that was made behind the Iron Curtain. Prior to the end of the Cold War, runs the received wisdom, musicians in territories such as Hungary, Poland and the GDR were fawningly in thrall to their western rock-star counterparts. Received wisdom also holds that Eastern bloc artists were hopelessly stymied by political constraints, and that, for the most part, they were no more musically noteworthy than a busker playing Doors songs on Prague’s Charles Bridge.
Naturally, such reductionist and patronising theories are often challenged in Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm. In many cases, argues Ewa Mazierska of the University of Central Lancashire, England, in her introduction, this music was not "the poor relation of music in the Anglo Saxon world", but rather an intelligent and entertaining articulation of its local culture; something more than the sum of western influence plus indigenous political backdrop.
In this collection of essays by various Eastern bloc pop academics, many of whom are from the specific territory they write about, other preconceptions about pop music under state socialism are debunked. The rigid dichotomy that's evoked by the phrase "Leninism versus [John] Lennonism", as coined by Timothy Ryback in his 1990 book Rock Around the Bloc, is seen as problematic, for example. While some musicians under state socialism were imprisoned and exiled, writes Mazierska, others were "feted and promoted by the state". Clearly, battle lines could be blurred – or even erased – when it was mutually advantageous to do so.
The book’s structure needs explaining. Ambitious in scope, it has three sections. Part one shows how different state policies in different Eastern European territories affected the way music was made and consumed, while part two concerns the work of censors, music journalists and DJs – ie the disparate, all-important “gatekeepers” of pop behind the Iron Curtain.
Part three – equally well-researched but allowing the reader something of a breather from the book’s vigorous academic trench work – explores the sharply contrasting careers of some of the biggest Eastern European acts to emerge during the Cold War era.
These include Karel Gott, the Czech-born Schlager (sentimental pop) singer whose estimated 50 to 100 million record sales owed plenty to his prudently cautious image and lyrical content, and Omega, the Hungarian rock band who came closer to worldwide fame than any Eastern bloc act despite state censorship and restrictions on their travel.
The Omega story demonstrates that, more recently, influence between East and West has flowed both ways. But when Kanye West sampled the Hungarian band's 1969 song Pearls in Her Hair for New Slaves, a track from his 2013 album Yeezus, controversy ensued. Former Omega keyboardist Gábor Presser claimed that West gave him a cheque for US$10,000 (Dh36,700) as a holding payment for a more substantial usage settlement. But Presser never cashed the cheque, and when further cash was not forthcoming he filed a lawsuit against West for $2.5 million.
In section one of the book, separate essays centring on Cold War-era music in Albania and Estonia flag up a huge variance in levels of State policing.
Consumption of rock and pop was especially clandestine in Albania, the most isolated of the Iron Curtain territories. Bruce Williams of the William Paterson University in New Jersey records Albanian actor Andrea Lekaj telling of the makeshift antennae crafted from soft-drink cans and transistor radio parts that he and his friends would secretly place on their roofs each night to access music shows broadcast on Italian television.
Williams notes that the inventor of such gizmos, Saimir Maloku, was imprisoned for “subversive activities”, and that teenagers caught singing an Italian song or advertising jingle could be “severely punished” by their schoolteachers.
We also learn of the “lake”, or liqeni bands who would gather at Tirana, Albania’s artificial reservoir, to covertly play prohibited western rock songs on acoustic guitars under the cover of darkness.
The rock and pop music of Estonia, by sharp contrast, was partly informed by uncensored radio broadcasts from nearby Finland and a healthy quotient of indigenous rock bands from the 60s onwards. In his essay Estonian Invasion as Western Ersatz-pop, Aimar Ventsel of the University of Tartu, Estonia, explains how "Estonian Invasion" acts such as Apelsin, Fix, and Jaak Joala came to be feted as an authentic taste of western pop/rock, functioning as what Mazierska calls "a Western enclave within the Soviet Union".
It’s the careers of artists such as the Polish rock star Czesław Niemen and the Polish new wave band Republika, though, that make the most compelling case for Eastern bloc rock as a unique and sophisticated genre with designs on high art.
In the 60s, many of Nieman’s Polish-language songs set their melodies to poems by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Adam Asnyk, both of whom were giants of Polish literature, while Republika’s charismatic frontman Grzegorz Ciechowski drew inspiration from the dystopian literature of Kurt Vonnegut and George Orwell, and went on to compose music for film.
In his illuminating essay on Republika, Piotr Fortuna of Warsaw's Institute of Polish Culture, asserts that the band were scheduled to appear on the influential UK television show The Tube (Fortuna says this was a BBC2 programme; it actually went out on Channel 4.) But when Ciechowski was "drafted to the army after giving an irresponsible statement during an interview", the TV gig – and a support tour with Irish rock superstars U2 – had to be cancelled.
Elsewhere, in the book, Marko Zubak of the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb writes fascinatingly about the birth of the socialist disc jockey in the former Yugoslavia. Zubak systematically debunks the stereotypical image of the DJ as a somewhat impassive figure of no real talent, showing how pioneers such as Domagoj Veršic were a mix of proto-entrepreneur, resourceful record importer and knowledgeable tastemaker.
All told, Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm shines valuable new light on a world that has often been unfairly derided and misleadingly agglomerated.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.
