Table Of ContentPALGRAVE EUROPEAN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES
Eastern European
Popular Music
in a Transnational Context
Beyond the Borders
Edited by Ewa Mazierska · Zsolt Győri
Palgrave European Film and Media Studies
Series Editors
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University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
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University of York
York, UK
Mette Hjort
Hong Kong Baptist University
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Ewa Mazierska · Zsolt Győri
Editors
Eastern European
Popular Music
in a Transnational
Context
Beyond the Borders
Editors
Ewa Mazierska Zsolt Győri
University of Central Lancashire University of Debrecen
Preston, Lancashire, UK Debrecen, Hungary
Palgrave European Film and Media Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-17033-2 ISBN 978-3-030-17034-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17034-9
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C
ontents
1 Introduction: Crossing National and Regional
Borders in Eastern European Popular Music 1
Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri
Part I Bringing Foreign Music to the European East
2 Loopholes in the Iron Curtain: Obtaining Western
Music in State Socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s
and 1980s 27
Adam Havlík
3 Quiet Fanaticism: The Phenomenon of Leonard
Cohen’s Popularity in Poland 49
Ewa Mazierska and Xawery Stańczyk
4 Authenticity and Orientalism: Cultural
Appropriations in the Polish Alternative
Music Scene in the 1970s and 1980s 75
Xawery Stańczyk
5 Eastern Europe as Punk Frontier 101
Aimar Ventsel
v
vi CoNTENTS
Part II Eastern European Music Crossing the Borders
6 Success, Failure, Splendid Isolation: Czesław Niemen’s
Career in Europe 119
Mariusz Gradowski
7 Yugo-Polish: The Uses of Yugoslav Music by Polish
Musicians 137
Ewa Mazierska
8 Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music Production
Between Hybridity and Class Struggle 155
Slobodan Karamanić and Manuela Unverdorben
Part III Liminal Spaces of Eastern European
Music Festivals
9 The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial
and Pan-European Alternative to the Eurovision
Song Contest 173
Dean Vuletic
10 Between Utopia and the Marketplace: The Case
of the Sziget Festival 191
Zsolt Győri
11 A Tale of Two (or #EverMore) Festivals: Electronic
Music in a Transylvanian Town 213
Ruxandra Trandafoiu
Index 239
n C
otes on ontributors
Mariusz Gradowski (1979) studied anthropology of culture and musi-
cology. In 2005, as a lecturer, he joined the Institute of Musicology at
the University of Warsaw. After the defence of his Ph.D. dissertation,
‘Styles and Genres of Polish Rock and Roll Music (1957–1973)’, he was
offered a position of assistant professor. He has published articles on the
reception of rock and roll styles and genres in Polish musical culture, his-
tory of rock, history of Polish jazz, theory of film music and anthropol-
ogy of music. He is also a radio journalist, hosting programmes on film
music and history of jazz standards on Polish Radio Channel 2.
Zsolt Győri is an assistant professor at the University of Debrecen,
Institute of English and American Studies. He edited a collection of
essays on British film history (2010) and is the co-editor of three vol-
umes dedicated to the relationship of body, subjectivity, ethnicity, gen-
der, space, and power in Hungarian cinema (Debrecen University Press,
2013, 2015, 2018). His monograph in Hungarian, offering a critical
introduction to Deleuzian film philosophy and analyses of selected films,
appeared in 2014 [Films, Auteurs, Critical-Clinical Readings]. He is the
co-editor of Travelling Around Cultures: Collected Essays on Literature
and Art (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), Popular Music and the Moving
Image in Eastern Europe with Ewa Mazierska (Bloomsbury, 2018), and
is the editor of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.
Adam Havlík is a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles University in Prague,
where he received his master’s degree in 2012. In his dissertation, he
vii
viii NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
analyzes the issue of the illegal money changers and the black market in
state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Since 2016, he has been a research asso-
ciate at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague,
where he currently is working on a project related to the history of the
Czechoslovak secret police after 1968. other fields of his work include
the social and cultural history of postwar Czechoslovakia and the history
of subcultures.
Slobodan Karamanić is a researcher and theoretician based in Munich.
He defended his doctoral dissertation about Althusser’s conceptualis-
ation of subjectivity at Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis—Ljubljana
(2013). He has also studied and worked at universities in Belgrade,
Tromsø, New York, Konstanz, Munich and Edinburgh. He has authored
more than thirty articles that range from philosophical concepts of
political subjectivity, via Marxist critique of ideology and analysis of art
practice, to the historical legacy of Yugoslav socialist revolution and
postsocialism. With Daniel Šuber, he edited Retracing Images—Visual
Culture After Yugoslavia (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2012). He is a
co-founder of Prelom (Break)—Journal for Images and Politics (2001–
2006) and an active member of Edicija Jugoslavija.
Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, at the University of Central
Lancashire. She published over twenty monographs and edited collec-
tions on film and popular music. They include Popular Viennese Electronic
Music, 1990–2015: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2019), Contemporary
Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with
Lars Kristensen, Sounds Northern: Popular Music, Culture and Place
in England’s North (Equinox, 2018), Popular Music in Eastern Europe:
Breaking the Cold War Paradigm (Palgrave, 2016), Relocating Popular
Music (Palgrave, 2015), co-edited with Georgina Gregory. Mazierska’s
work has been translated into over twenty languages. She is also principal
editor of the Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Xawery Stańczyk is an assistant professor in the Institute of Philosophy
and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences where he participates in
the project Cultural Opposition—Understanding the Cultural Heritage of
Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries. He received his Ph.D. from the
Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University in 2015 for a thesis about
alternative culture in Poland in the years 1978–1996; it was published in
2018.
NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS ix
Ruxandra Trandafoiu is Reader in Communication at Edge Hill
University. A former local news reporter for Transylvania, she now
researches identities, migration and creativity in postcommunist
Eastern Europe, in relation to music and visual arts. She is the author
of Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants and the
co-editor of The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Musical Migration
and Tourism and Media and Cosmopolitanism.
Manuela Unverdorben studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Munich, where she currently works as an academic assistant. She also
studied at Bauhaus Weimar and had residencies and fellowships in
Ljubljana, Stockholm, Tokyo, Graz and Helsinki. She produced and
collaborated on various projects in the field involving art, politics and
theory, which were exhibited in German and European cities. Selected
exhibitions/projects include: Haidhausen onAir—Micro Radio, Public
Art Program City of Munich (2017 and 2018), “Piracy as a Business
Force”/Third Space Helsinki (2015), “Free Market Road Show
Istanbul”/Platform Munich (2014), “Liberty Café”/Academy of Media
Arts Cologne (2013).
Aimar Ventsel is a social anthropologist from the University of Tartu,
Estonia. He has studied music scenes and youth cultures in Russia,
Estonia, Kazakhstan and Germany. Currently he is working on a mon-
ograph on East German contemporary punk. His publications include:
Daniel Briggs, Ivan Gololobov, Aimar Ventsel, 2015, “Ethnographic
Research Among Drinking Youth Cultures: Reflections from observing
Participants”, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, Vol. 61, pp. 157–
176; Ventsel, Aimar, 2008, “Punx and Skins United: one Law for Us
one Law for Them”, Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 57, pp. 45–100;
Ventsel, Aimar and Peers, Eleanor, 2017, “Rapping the Changes in
North-East Siberia: Hip-Hop, Urbanization, and Sakha Ethnicity”,
in Miszczynski, Milosz (ed.), Hip-Hop from the East of Europe, Indiana
University Press, pp. 228–242.
Dean Vuletic is an historian of contemporary Europe who works in the
Department of East European History at the University of Vienna. As a
Lise Meitner Fellow, he currently leads the research project, ‘Intervision:
Popular Music and Politics in Eastern Europe’, which focusses on the
Intervision Song Contest. He is the author of Postwar Europe and the
Eurovision Song Contest (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), the first scholarly
