| Up
from the Underground : The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist
Hungary by
Anna Szemere
What
happens to a community of oppositional artists when the purpose
and meaning of their opposition are undermined by social transformation?
Such was the dilemma facing many underground artists in Eastern
Europe following the collapse of state socialism. In Up from the
Underground, Anna Szemere looks at the rock-music-based underground
in Hungary, showing how it anticipated, precipitated, and responded
to a period of fundamental change.
Szemere’s
work focuses on a community of rock musicians that became popular
with Hungary’s urban youth culture in the early 1980s—groups with
names such as the Committee, Control Group, and the Galloping
Coroners. Szemere reveals the activities, discourse, and group
life of musicians against the background of shifting institutional
contexts. By the mid-1990s the change of regime had altered the
cultural dynamics of Hungarian society, leading to a complete
realignment of the underground music world. Szemere uses the opportunity
presented by these developments to challenge one-dimensional representations
of popular culture and transition in the region. She also addresses
more general questions about the nature and uses of expressive
culture, autonomy, social change, and social reproduction.
Up from the
Underground is an important addition to the scholarship on the
cultural dimension of the most profound societal change in Europe
since World War II. It also enriches the increasingly global field
of cultural sociology and cultural studies by rethinking its central
assumptions and theories in the light of Eastern Europe’s unique
historical and social experience.
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