The politics and the music mainstream in Central and Eastern Europe: introduction

Abstract

While in Western Europe and the USA the intersection between politics and music mainstream has been studied from theoretical and empirical perspectives for decades, in Central and Eastern Europe this kind of research has been very limited. So far much has been written about how protest, resistance, and the counterculture generated by popular music undermined communist dictatorships (Rybak 1990; Klaniczay and Trencsényi 2011). No less attention has been paid to the spread and adoption of Western popular music in the Soviet Bloc through which East Europeans culturally and politically colonized themselves before and after the fall of communism (Yurchak 2006; Mazierska and Gregory 2015). Popular music also found an important place in the political transformation and transition to democracy (Ramet 1994; Buchanan 2006). The nuanced approach was offered by the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that understands popular music in Eastern Europe as an autonomous product that was developing according to its own logic in the global context (Mazierska 2016). In these works, scholars reflected just partially on the intersection of the political and music mainstream. Following in the steps of Ewa Mazierska, this thematic issue attempts to challenge the Iron Curtain paradigm in popular music studies and more importantly to look at how popular music was produced, distributed, and consumed in the entangled web of political powers that goes well beyond the East-West divide and the capitalism-communism dichotomy. The issue seeks to analyse the role of popular music in a broader scope concerning genres and scenes. Apart from rock labelled as the soundtrack to communism’s demise, the issue tries to cover disco and electro-dance (“disco polo”). Moreover, the issue traces long-term legacies across the political changes in the region. It strives to cover the period from the 1960s when popular music became a key factor in building a mass consumerist youth culture (Shuker 2001) and it seeks to look at dis/continuities up to the present wave of populism and re-nationalization in Central and Eastern Europe. The approach combining politics and music mainstream has been already acknowledged. With a strong starting reference in Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt school, music has been analysed as an artistic expression that both represents and undermines social, political and economic order. Along this line Jacques Attali, a political advisor who congenially coupled political and economic expertise with aesthetic theory, saw the role of the political economy in