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254, the Musical Underground * Note on Quoted Vulgarity in Today’S Talk and Slideshow

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254, the Musical Underground * Note on Quoted Vulgarity in Today’S Talk and Slideshow 254, The Musical Underground * Note on quoted vulgarity in today’s talk and slideshow Musical intro The Plastic People of the Universe: “Magické noci” (“In the magic night”) By way of introduction - Clay Shirky is a New Media scholar, he studies social networking, but he also has a great (and famous) quote about something else that will serve as a way of framing – at the level of human identity – the subject of today’s talk: the role of the musical underground under “normalization.” - “All that stuff the elders said about rock n roll? Miscegenation [interracial marriage], teenagers running wild, the end of marriage? They pretty much nailed it.” - We all, I think and hope, know that there is something radical about music, even classical music: it’s not just beautiful and moving, but liberating and freeing; music touches something in us that is pre-rational (although we can rationalize it later if we want to); it is about something primal in us that does not deal primarily or directly with politics (although it can be political). - In other words, it’s not too much of a surprise that music could serve as a catalyst for a revolution (in whatever sense you want to see what happened in Czechoslovakia). - Today we’ll tell that story – two separate and complementary stories actually, of the band the Plastic People of the Universe and of an organization called the Jazz Section. - At the outset, we might point out that these stories represent an intersection of all three of Jonathan Bolton’s “reigning narratives” of dissent: the Helsinki narrative, the Parallel Polis narrative, and the Ordinary People narrative. 1 - It is also a story that embodies the trajectory of dissent as we have been discussing it: from the level of personal identity through the pre-political, interpersonal, and cultural levels, to the level of politics; dissent may culminate in political engagement, but that doesn’t always happen and only comes at a later point – and the story of the musical underground in Czechoslovakia prior to 1989 makes that clear. - Both of the groups that we’ll be looking at today – The Plastic People of the Universe and the Jazz Section – do come into open political conflict with the post-totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, but this is not the intention of either group; the political part is rather a by-product of, to quote Havel’s “Power of the Powerless,” the “aims of life” at the personal and cultural levels coming into conflict with the “aims of the system” at the political level. - This suggests that the earlier pre-political levels are as important as the ultimate political drama that the story culminates in. Some background: literature on Western music in the Soviet Bloc • This is a vibrant field of research, not limited to the Czechoslovak context. - Timothy Ryback, Rock around the Bloc, 1990. - Sabrina Ramet, Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1994. - These two early books looked at the topic primarily through the lens of Helsinki Narrative: a cultural confrontation of East and West with the latter prevailing. 2 - Later research takes a more nuanced approach to the topic and looks at local context: Western music didn’t mean exactly the same thing to Poles or Czechs, for instance, that it did for Brits or Americans. - Note a recent collection of essays, including ones about the Polish context (which we won’t be discussing in the course): Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc, 2015. • Very briefly set the stage with some context that I took from Ryback’s book: - Spring 1964: Beatlemania hits. - Ryback says that it “smashed through the Iron Curtain.” - He notes the “hunger for rock ‘n’ roll in Soviet Bloc.” • “Western rock culture has debunked Marxist-Leninist assumptions about the state’s ability to control its citizens.” - So we’re already back to the Shirky quote and the sense that music liberates, music is radically subversive in some fundamental way. • Before the Beatles, there was jazz. - Ryback’s book details attempts to control jazz – that bourgeois, decadent music – as well as other kinds of music. - We’ll come back to jazz in Czechoslovakia in the course of this lecture. • “Rock music, despite the claims of Communist leaders, was, for Soviet and East European youths, a visceral rather than political experience.” 3 - It was an escape from politics, about which they were utterly cynical. - It was not a way of engaging in political activity, but a way of affirming themselves and finding themselves. - We still think music (and art and poetry) in this way, don’t we? • Two other curiosities in Ryback’s book. - These aren’t the main part of the lecture today, but help set the scene: • (1) Allen Ginsberg – the openly gay beat poet of the (in)famous long poem Howl (1955) – spent two months in Prague in 1965 at the invitation of students from Charles University; he gave readings, attended “happenings” and was eventually expelled from the country; Ginsberg later wrote of the experience: “I was arrested thrice in Prague, once for singing drunk on Narodni Street, once knocked down on the midnight pavement by a mustached police agent who screamed out “Buzerant! [Faggot!]”, once for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dreams opinions.” - Has anyone read Howl or seen the 2010 experimental film (with James Franco)? Howl is interested because its publication becomes a political phenomenon in the US: in 1957, the publisher is put on trial for publishing an obscene book. The ACLU (what is that?), among other organizations, defends the publisher, and the judge rules against the state’s obscenity claim, which opens the door to freedom of speech in literary publications. - This judicial drama in the US runs parallel to the Plastics’ story in the Czechoslovak context: they are eventually put on trial by the state for much the same reasons, although the judge doesn’t rule in their favor (indeed, there was no independent judiciary so that was never possible). 4 • 92) Ryback describes a concert given by the Rolling Stones in Warsaw in April 1967: The first several rows were occupied by communist leaders and their families, and the Stones took one look at them and told them to get the hell out of the concert and free up the seats for their real music fans – and they did. The concert was followed by riots. • Our main subject today is The Plastic People of the Universe – henceforth to be known as the PPU. • Ryback cites one of the PPU’s songs from 1973, the lyrics of which are: Bring your kilo of paranoia into balance! Throw off the horrible dictatorship! Quickly! Live, drink, puke! The bottle, the Beat! Shit in your hand! • And then he juxtaposes this with an inspiring quote from the Czechoslovak official newspaper Rude pravo in 1975: “Our society will not tolerate any forms of hooliganism or public disorder, and quite naturally, will resist any moral filth and efforts to infect our youth with that which every decent man condemns and which harms the spiritual health of the young generation.” PPU • Their name… - comes from the lyrics of a song by Frank Zappa’s band Mothers of Invention. 5 - The Plastics were originally formed – shortly after the Soviet invasion in 1968 – as a cover group to play music by the Velvet Underground and other Western bands (the Doors, Captain Beefheart); at the start, they sang primarily in English. • A musical sampling. - Before we get to the details of the story – and how that story serves as an illustration of our pre-political approach to dissent – let’s listen to some of their music. - We’ll discuss the song we heard just before the start of today’s talk and then listen to parts of two other songs and look at the lyrics. - All three of these songs were based on poetry written by Egon Bondy, a man with a great name who was a banned writer under normalization. Someone who knows Bondy’s poetry well has described it as “awkward poetry that is magical in its awkwardness,” and we’ll perhaps see why. • Magické noci. In the Magic Night Magické noci In the magic night Magické noci počal čas In the magic night time began Kocha snad z toho vezme ďas Koch will be in a devilish mood Magické noci počal čas In the magic night time began My žijeme v Praze to je tam We live in Prague it is there Kde se jednou zjeví Duch sám Where the Spirit himself will appear My žijeme v Praze to je tam We live in Prague it is there - Enigmatic lyrics: Koch was an underground poet and a friend of the Plastics, so there’s a shout-out to him in the second line (although it’s unclear why he’d be in a devilish mood). 6 - One music critic describes the sound of the Plastics as “the sound of a phantasm haunting the totalitarian imagination,” (totalitarianism becomes, in this view, not a political -ism but rather a state of mind!) and we can hear the phantasm part well here. • Toxika. (50secs) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y7qJ2G8BMQ Toxika Toxics Jsem obětí vázanosti I’m a victim of a dependence Toxikomanické Toxicomaniacal Mohlo by to býti ke zlosti It might be enough to make a saint swear Ale je to komické But it’s comical Piju pivo žeru prášky I drink beer I gobble pills Stejně sotva usnout smím Still I can hardly sleep Ráno prodám prázdný flašky In the morning I sell empty bottles Julie mi helfne s tím Julie will help me with that - The theme is serious but it’s approached playfully, which is a Czech artistic specialty (we’ll see more of that when we watch the film Daisies).
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