Screamed Poetry: Rock in Poland's Last Decade of Communism.

[摘要] While the martial law years in Poland, 1982-1983, are often remembered as a time of fear and repression, they are also fondly recalled as the peak of Polish rock music. ;;Screamed Poetry: Rock in Poland’s Last Decade of Communism” seeks to resolve the paradox of this explosion of controversial music and culture in an authoritarian communist state. Based on an array of sources, including archival documents from the Party and state, music periodicals, underground fan publications, interviews, and music and texts, ;;Screamed Poetry” shows how rock became a fulcrum against which various people, groups, and institutions sought leverage to push socialist Poland in the direction of their own ideals and interests. As rock became popular over the 1980s, debates over its interpretation determined whether the music would be accepted as a form of Polish amateur youth culture, harnessed as a badly needed financial asset, studied as a symbol of social crisis, or suppressed as a threat to socialism and the Polish nation. Meanwhile, young Poles performing and listening to rock sought to prevent their music from being hijacked for these uses by politicians and social activists. ;;Screamed Poetry” tells the story of Polish rock as a struggle to define Polish youth, the nation, and its culture – a debate that took place in Party meetings, in the press, in production decisions at record factories, at performances, and in the sound of a guitar chord. It reinterprets the 1980s – often mischaracterized as stagnant between martial law and 1989 – as a dynamic period that set up the fall of communism and subsequent transition to capitalism. Beyond Eastern Europe, ;;Screamed Poetry” offers a solution to a central challenge in studies of popular culture – that of accounting for the politics of culture without resorting to a binary model based on ;;resistance” or ;;complicity” with power. Using models of power based on the concepts of ;;hegemony” and ;;discourse,” it shows how rock’s meaning and political power was contingent upon the efforts of all those around it – performers, listeners, and the wider public – to shape its meaning.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Eastern Europe

[关键词] Popular Culture;Eastern Europe;Communism;Poland;Punk Rock;Youth Culture;History (General);Humanities (General);Russian and East European Studies;Slavic Languages and Literature;Social Sciences (General);Humanities;Social Sciences;History