Music Trade in the Slipstream of Cultural Diplomacy

Western cultural diplomacy significantly influenced the musical preferences and listening habits of music fans in Eastern Bloc countries. Throughout the Cold War era, policy-makers in the capitalist democracies of the West used the popular appeal of genuinely Western genres from jazz and blues to rock, pop, and disco for the purpose of disseminating Western values and ideals in Bloc societies. In the early decades of the East-West power struggle, American authorities including the Department of State and the United States Information Agency (USIS) cooperated with private sponsors to send distinguished jazz and gospel performers on live concert tours through adversarial countries (Davenport; Eschen; Fosler-Lussier). To the excitement of young music listeners in particular, radio stations of countries including the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany transmitted the latest in contemporary hit music deep into Bloc territory (Nelson; Cummings; Schlosser). This chapter looks beyond the direct agency of Western policymakers, showing that the performance of Western sounds on stages and their omnipresence on the ether impacted the production of records and consumption of music in the Eastern Bloc. Although the state-owned music industries of communist countries had a mandate to promote ideologically unproblematic popular music performed by domestic artists, the familiarity of large audiences with Western pop shaped the repertoire of those record companies. Because of the country’s close proximity