Scholarly approaches to pop music produced in the Cold War period in the Eastern Bloc
tended to focus on musicians whose work somehow crossed lines defined by cultural
policies defined by the Party. Apart from the presumable personal interest and taste
of social scientists, a rationale for this choice can be that norms in action show
with great accuracy important traits of any human association, let it be a teenage
couple or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The period around 1989 was a particularly
rich period for monographs, edited volumes and journal articles about Russian rockers,
Polish punks, Hungarian alter-scenes, or any walk of musical endeavour from Slovenia
to Siberia that could be understood as a certain form of nonconformism or resistance
(Ramet 1994; Troitsky 1987; Bushnell 1990; Ryback 1990). Though these authors had
sought to distance themselves from a romantic glamorizing of these countercultural
efforts, nevertheless one reading still seems plausible, that is, these articles and
books in a way could be read as an acknowledgement of these efforts which often had
to face censorship, or isolation. A strange phenomenon still could be observed. If
one adds up the YouTube views of the ten most popular tunes of the twenty or so alternative
groups, from Ági és a Fiúk (Ági and the Boys) to Vágtázó Halottkémek (Galloping Coroners),
appearing inAnna Szemere’s (2001) thorough Up From the Underground: The Culture of
Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary, this number would be still smaller than the YouTube
views of the most popular song, more than 3.7 million, by Neoton Família, a Hungarian
disco pop band that gained its greatest success around the turn of the 1970s-80s.
In this chapter, employing arguments from the study of pop music and also from media
studies, I outline a few structural arguments for this phenomenon of repetition, that
is, when cultural policies of the 1970s-80s quite curiously repeat themselves in the
context of web2.0/3.0 digital environments due to a dual determination, as matter-of-fact
impacts of cultural policies on musicians’ careers and also as ruthless consequences
of memory politics based on available technologies of audio and video recordings.Doing
Pop in Socialist Hungary: Access and Materialities
