Are rock’n’roll and authoritarian regimes compatible? The question may sound too frivolous for serious political analysts to ponder, and the answer too obvious for tattooed youngsters with Mohawk haircuts or tight leather pants, but there’s more to it than a stereotypical subject for a PhD in Cultural Studies.
Sergei Zhuk, an associate professor of history at Ball State University, in Indiana, has written a suggestive book about the vagaries of popular culture and its Western influences between the swinging khrushchevian sixties and the brezhnevian “stagnation” in provincial Ukraine.
The title says it all: “Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: the West, Identity and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk”.
Dniepropetrovsk is an interesting case since it was a “forbidden city”, site of the biggest missile factory in the Soviet Union and closed to foreigners since 1958. It is also the place where such bigwigs as Leonid Brezhnev, Leonid Kuchma or Yulia Timoshenko accumulated their first political capital.
The history of daily life and consumer culture in the Soviet bloc is a recent academic trend that has given us very interesting insights. Mainly about what Eastern European communism really felt like, without embellishing the harshness of collective and individual experiences of oppression and control.
Zhuk uses all the material now accessible to historians of Soviet society, from recently opened Party and KGB archives to oral history and personal diaries.
What he explores is not only the relation between East and West, but the relation between the cultural centers (Moscow and Leningrad) and periphery in the access to coveted markers of worldly sophistication. He also examines the complex and ambiguous dialectics between Soviet ideology and Ukrainian nationalism, which could be simultaneously perceived by the authorities as a threat of “bourgeois nationalism” and used in a rather innocuous folkloristic manner as a resource against the “pernicious” influence of Western consumer culture.
Zhuk shows that there was not a strictly defined boundary between dissident counter-culture and officially approved forms of entertainment. The Komsomol, the trade unions and the student organizations would not always follow the Party line in matters of popular music and some of their cadres would actively participate in the diffusion of “ideologically dangerous” material.
Though countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and, of course, East Germany –a very specific case– had often an easier access to Western cultural products than provincial Ukraine, the general pattern was very similar there. I spent a lot of time in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, and I remember that inside the SSM, the Czech equivalent of the Komosomol, sleek young bureaucrats were eager to demonstrate their relative hipness by exploring the boundaries of the permissible.
They were of course deeply despised by the self-appointed representatives of the “authentic” local counter-culture, but in the domain of arts and entertainment, the actual relation between the real East and the “imaginary West” implied not only moments of antagonism and repression, but also phases of intense circulation and negotiation between various actors: apparatchiks, smugglers, musicians and more or less rebellious young consumers.
Interesting parallels can be drawn with the contemporary situation in the Islamic Middle-East. In his 2008 book, “Heavy Metal Islam”, US scholar and musician Mark LeVine investigated music-centered youth culture in Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan. In terms of cultural dissent, conformity and repression, what he describes has a lot in common with the situation in the former Soviet bloc. In Muslim countries, though, the landscape is also rather more complicated because of an intricate and contradictory tangle of relations between social conservativism, security obsessed governments, fractioned religious authorities, Western and local corporate interests and, of course, the internet.
Writing before the Arab revolutions and noticing that famous Egyptian dissident bloggers such as Alaa Abdel Fatah and Hossam El-Hamalawy had roots in the local heavy metal scene, LeVine observed that “music might just be the true democratizing force.” But the relation between youth culture, political dissent and democracy is not a simple one. Young people might be naturally more restless, but this trivial truth doesn’t tell us if they are really able to deeply delegitimize established authorities or even topple governments.
Heavy metal, hip hop and other musical trends are not inherently subversive, as both their fans and their detractors would often like to believe. In authoritarian societies, though, they certainly function as a kind of seismograph of larger trends, at the intersection of global consumer capitalism, local patterns of traditional authority and state control and the emergence of new forms of individual expression.
That’s why it is always useful to keep an eye on Iron Maiden female fans in Islamic headscarves banging their heads in improvised concerts venues around Cairo, as it was instructive to keep track of what happened in Komsomol sponsored discos in Ukraine in the 1980s.
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Globalization might already sound like a stale catchword, but the new interconnected reality it describes still has surprising tricks up its sleeves. So what do you do when you’re a leftish French writer born in Africa and living in South America, with a background in Slavic Studies, a worried fascination for emerging Asian powers, and interests ranging from classical political philosophy to Bollywood film music? Read, travel, wonder. And send scattered dispatches from modernity’s frontlines.
Marc Saint-Upéry is a French journalist and political analyst living in Ecuador since 1998. He writes about political philosophy, international relations and development issues for various French and Latin American publications and in the international magazines Le Monde Diplomatique and Nueva Sociedad. He is the author of El Sueño de Bolívar: El Desafío de las izquierdas Sudamericanas (Bolivar’s Dream: the Left’s challenge in South America).
