Welcome to CDLocker.com - Information on History of rock music

Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary Anna Szemere Pennsylvania State UP, University Park, 2001 253 pp. (paperback), ISBN 0-271-02133-0, $19.95, (hardback) ISBN 0-271-02132-2, $60.00

Over the last decade or two, popular music studies have been characterized by a growing understanding of the significance of the action "on the margins'--that is, away from the Anglo-U.S. axis that has dominated the rock/pop industries. Cultural power blocs that, so to speak, write the rules, are always likely to have a reasonably comfortable and unsurprising relationship with them. It is when the protocols of production, consumption, and taste-formation are transplanted from their point of origin that revelatory cracks begin to open up in the prevailing assumptions, and I have particular recollections of such revelations when working in what might be called "fault-line regions" straddling borders with such places as the former U.S.S.R. and the former Yugoslavia. Those explorations into the margins can be geographical, demographic, or methodological: the music of hitherto unnoted places and classes, and through means other than traditional hermeneutics.

We have all of these in this book. Hungary is part of the Finno-Ugric axis that encompasses also Finland and Estonia, in which music in general has a distinctive prominence. In this case, there is a further line of force--namely, a history of Communist control that disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As in similar cases, it is as though suddenly all the cards were thrown up into the air, and where and how they land is what makes this kind of study so instructive regarding the realignment of the relationship between global and local.

Anna Szemere sees the ambiguities latent in the "cathartic moment of liberation," which "simultaneously produced a new kind of existential insecurity" (8). She also understands the dangers of trying to "read" her material from the outside. The book thus draws on an intimidating range of cultural theory relating to such areas as the construction of community, but it weds these to an ethnographic approach that takes us into the phenomenology of the moment. Without compromising scholarly rigor, Szemere writes from the inside linguistically, culturally, and also as a closely informed fan. This not only gives her access to the literature, but also the interpretative skills to decode its "allegorical and allusive texts" (37) that would otherwise be unintelligible. At the same time, she has been able to assume a perspective that "defamiliarizes" the culture, so that she can recognize what is distinctive about it, as in her discussion of the differences between the way Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany "experienced the fall" (chapter 3).

Working from a position, I find that in many ways popular music scholarship leads the way in (and beyond) cultural studies, having assimi lated significant insights that, for example, literary approaches are still having great difficulty with. This book embodies all that muscular curiosity and constantly threw light on my own current research. As soon as I read it, I began it again, and it will not be the last time. One small point to help you keep it in good condition: turn the pages carefully--some of mine were uncut. It deserves a feature review, but here I must focus on the nub, which is: buy this book. It is essential reading in the role of popular music at the turn of the millennium.

Bruce Johnson

University of New South Wales, Australia