The music sociologists Trever Hagen, Tamás Tófalvy and Gábor Vályi recently edited the book "Down to the Underground: Popular Music and Society in Central Europe". On the website of the publishing journal EastBound you can read it for free and explore cultural practices of eastern subcultures: From Czech Psytrance music or the Slovakian club scene to the role of jazz in Hungarian life during the Socialist Period. Norient wants to make you curious about these interesting papers by posting their abstracts and some videos related to their contents. Enjoy!
The aim of this issue – prepared in cooperation with the Hungarian branch of the IASPM – is to reflect upon contemporary social and scholarly issues and present state of the art research on current and historical themes in popular music in the Central European region. The articles included in this issue examine the Central European imaginations and interpretations of global popular musical trends and locations, the role of the communist past in shaping recent cultural formations, the reproduction of the former political divisions and oppositions as economic, social and cultural inequalities, and the different ways of distributing cultural capital between cultural scenes and communities throughout the former socialist bloc.
EastBound is an open access academic journal with the aim to create an international platform for Western and Eastern European researchers engaged in the multidisciplinary field of media and cultural studies. It is published by the MOKK Media Research, Department of Sociology and Communications, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) Central European University.
Abstracts:
Tamás Tófalvy and Trever Hagen
Popular Music and Society in Central Europe – An Introduction
Emerging underground electronic dance music (EDM) communities delineate and produce relatively autonomous social worlds with distinct discourses, values and aesthetic sensibilities. Such small-scale socialization is typical of the Czech psytrance scene, which throughout its history has managed to remain quite isolated from more mainstream tendencies in both global psytrance, on the one hand, and EDM, on the other. This paper, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2004, focuses on the issues of demarcation and identity construction within the discourses of the scene in the theoretical context of (post-)subcultural studies. After an overview of the theoretical backgrounds, methodological concerns and relevant research results, the discussion emerges from the discursive image of the “mainstream” from which the Czech psytrance scene is differentiated. This mainstream is not only an ideological construct of an imagined and stereotypical other (Thornton 1996[1995]), but is well defined in its socio-cultural reality as part of an intimately experienced but nevertheless devaluated past chapter from the scenic narratives of numerous participants. The second analysis highlights the refusal of a specific aspect of both the global psytrance scene and a particular minority within the local scene, which in turn generates a second ideological other. The discursive formulation of boundaries circumscribes the scenic identity which, however, is not limited to a self-definition through negation, but emerges from the participant’s socialization into an autonomous set of scenic attitudes and discourses rooted in the drug-infused demented experience of the local psytrance party, which I have discussed elsewhere (Vitos 2010).
Trever Hagen
From Inhibition to Commitment: Configuring the Czech Underground
This article takes the case of the Czech Underground in normalized Czechoslovakia and contemporary Czech Republic as fertile ground for understanding conditions and configurations of disposition formation. By examining mediators of musical practice and technologies of self, I attempt to show how Undergrounders constitute and maintain a web of dispositions, their durability and transference. I consider how members of the Underground understood the post-1968 communist regime as “establishment” by examining a widely distributed samizdat text and considering its mediating, furnishing effects. I take into account how constraints of establishment came to reveal political moments and how the Underground used music as a “problem- solving” mechanism. “The political” remains problematized and reconceptualized as something that emerges thru everyday experiences, which among other things, uses music as a medium for configuring, thinking about and achieving a relational state of being.
Zuzana Kepplova
The Paradoxes of Mainstream: Investigating Transition-Era Youth Cultures in Slovakia
This article aims to propose a perspective on the way subcultures have participated in constructing consumer cultures and middle-class sensibilities in a society transitioning from state socialism to market economy. I examine narratives and practices of young people congregated around the popular youth culture called “club cultures”. I argue that the widely used discursive trope of mainstream was important in its performative role to produce imagined others from which clubbers could differ themselves as more sophisticated and progressive. However, in order to differ, they employed traditional strategies widely used by socialist subjects in the nonofficial sphere, strategies known as ways of getting by. Just like the late socialist ‘hunt for commodities’, subcultural labor and strategies of distinction may be studied as a way of cultivating middle-class sensibilities and building middle class fractions during transition.
Gábor Vályi
Treasures and Debris: Differing Assessments and Changing Values in Second Hand Vinyl Exchange in Hungary
Image 13. Junkmen at the flea market, Marosvásárhely 2011. Photo: Péter Berta.
By tracing the circulation of vinyl records through places of second hand exchange in Hungary, this essay explores the gradually declining material culture of recorded music and the related, slowly fading cultural practices and concepts. It is an attempt to demonstrate the diverse meanings and uses of the material culture of music which often remains neglected in the study of the place of music in social research. More specifically it is an exploration of the values attributed to vinyl records, and of the underlying logics of how records are made meaningful and valuable by old and new owners, amateur and professional traders, arbitrary buyers and fanatic collectors, in an age when the individual and collective consumption of music is constantly moving away from physical media. By highlighting the complexity and multiplicity of value it is to call attention to the significance of places, contexts and participants in describing the value of objects, rather than taking it for granted as an inherent aesthetic property, a clear equilibrium of supply and demand, or a social constructed concept that is mobilized in prestige games or as a common currency within particular institutional networks of creative activity.
The present paper explores the ways place and identity can be understood in relation to the Hungarian indie music scene of 2000-2010 as defined in, on the one hand, national terms, through its relation to the Hungarian ‘alternative’ and ‘underground’ music cultures; and, on the other hand, translocal terms, through international influences, global genre aesthetics, and translocal industrial/professional connections. It asks the questions of, firstly, how the relatively new phenomenon of ‘indie’ bands in Hungary is positioned in relation to national rock music history, and within the changing political and economic context following the regime change; secondly, what the label ‘indie’ signifies in relation to other labels such as ‘alternative’ and ‘underground’ in the Hungarian popular music world of the 2000s; and finally, why does a sense of Hungarian popular music being ‘behind’ in relation to the West still prevail in national popular music discourse twenty years after the opening of the market, and approximately fifteen years after the appearance of the internet for the use of the general public? The answers to these questions lie in part in the self-definitions and identity expressions of Hungarian indie bands, which typically make reference to the underground/alternative ‘heritage’ based in pre-regime change culture, carried through to the 1990s and 2000s. Indie bands openly or covertly distance themselves from a counterculture that has arguably become empty, while the formerly political ideology has shifted to be entirely expressed through music genre labels and related symbolic concepts and values. This distancing is manifest in the choice of the language of lyrics, value judgements, as well as aesthetic influences and international professional and music industry connections – in other words, the music network. The relationship of the music scene and social-political change can thus be pinpointed in terms of shifts and continuities in identity and discourse.
Gergő Havadi
An Individual Subculture Reflected in Domestic Spies’ Reports: Hungarian Jazz in the Socialist Period
I investigate some aspects of the Hungarian jazz scene, particularly its reflection as an individual subculture in secret agents’ reports. Through these I try to describe and understand the relation of power (official culture) to the jazz scene, which was an alternative subculture or lifestyle based on pluralism and freedom. So I examine the role of the jazz scene in social life, who identified with the jazz milieu, what kind of values and norms that scene symbolized and how official culture dealt with this in the 60s and 70s, when jazz became a tolerated genre. Connected to this I’m going to discuss some key persons (political leaders) from the 60s who had a deep effect on the jazz scene. Additionally, I try to approach and demonstrate this relationship through the reports of secret agents and spies.
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