Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc PDF Author: William Jay Risch
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739178237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc PDF Author: William Jay Risch
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739178237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Back in the USSR

Back in the USSR PDF Author: Artemy Troitsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
First hand account of the history of rock music in the Soviet Union.

Red Wave

Red Wave PDF Author: Joanna Stingray
Publisher: Doppelhouse Press
ISBN: 9781733957922
Category : Music and youth
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A memoir by an American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world, [...] Stingray, who wrote this memoir with her daughter, Madison, nicely captures her daring amid an atmosphere of liberation and fear, and she's a study in moxie and enthusiasm. --Kirkus Reviews As one of the first American musicians to break through the Soviet scene, and one of the few women to be seen as an equal amongst Leningrad's pantheon of rock superstars, Stingray's perspective on the development of late Soviet rock is probably the single most important source for those who want a birds-eye view of late Soviet youth culture, and Stingray's stories are as entertaining as they are relevant and illuminating. --Alexander Herbert, author of What About Tomorrow?: An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot Wild and vivid -- a rollicking memoir of romance and rock 'n' roll in an era of upheaval and transition. From Los Angeles to Leningrad and back again, Joanna's story is borne along by her infectious, headlong enthusiasm. It's quite a ride. --Patrick Radden Keefe, creator of the Wind of Change podcast and author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland The history of Russian rock music could have been very different without Joanna Stingray. Joanna was friends with rock musicians, recorded songs with them, shot their videos and brought them clothes and instruments from the West. Her video footage, capturing young icons of Russian rock like Viktor Tsoi, Sergei Kuryokhin, Timur Novikov and Boris Grebenshchikov, is rare evidence of the golden era of the Soviet underground. --The Moscow Times Red Wave is a warm and conversational autobiography about a lost world, peopled with courageous artists risking their freedom for the ideas of expression, art, and rock 'n' roll. [...] We root for her and her friends to overcome bureaucracy, oppression, isolation, deprivation, and the heavy footsteps of the KGB. [...] In a readable and personable way, Red Wave helps shine some light into this remarkable corner of rock history. --Tim Sommer, Guernica Joanna Stingray's appearance in St. Petersburg in the early 1980s must have been God's response to our unconscious prayers. Her naive bravery, curiosity and generosity created a kind of a lifeline for us rockers: she brought in things we needed to play our music, and took out not only our recordings but the very message of our existence. Had it not been for her and her Red Wave, it would have taken Aquarium many more years to have official records on Melodiya and Kino to start touring Europe. This fearless maiden broke through the siege that looked hopelessly unbreakable. She threw a life-saver into our waters and she changed everything. No matter how many times we thank her -- it's never enough. --Boris Grebenshchikov (Aquarium), 2018

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground PDF Author: Thomas Cushman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791425442
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Describes the Russian rock music counterculture and how it is changing in response to Russia's transition from a socialist to a capitalist society. It explores the lived experiences, the thoughts and feelings of the rock musicians as they meet the challenges of change.

What about Tomorrow?

What about Tomorrow? PDF Author: Alexander Herbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621064046
Category : MUSIC
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Punk arrived in Soviet Russia in 1978, spreading through black market records before exploding into state-controlled performance halls, where authorities found the raucous youth movement easier to control. In fits and starts, the scene grew and flourished, always a step ahead of secret police and neo-Nazis, through glastnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. Despite a few albums smuggled out of the country and released in Europe and the U.S., most Westerners had never heard of Russia's punk movement until Pussy Riot burst onto the international stage. Includes never-before-published photographs of many of the bands"--Back cover.

Rock Around the Bloc

Rock Around the Bloc PDF Author: Timothy W. Ryback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Rock Around the Bloc presents an in-depth history of rock music in communist Europe from the mid-1950s to the present, touching on such highlights as the Elvis craze in the late 1950s, Beatlemania in the 1960s and 1970s, and punk and heavy metal music of the 1980s. The reader comes to realize that in some ways, life in the Soviet bloc was surprisingly similar to life in the West. But there are striking differences as well, most notably, the thirty-year war between rock fans and party officials. Book jacket.

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture PDF Author: Mark Lipovetsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197508219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1081

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts.

Rock and Roll in the Rocket City

Rock and Roll in the Rocket City PDF Author: Sergei I. Zhuk
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421423142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground PDF Author: Thomas Cushman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438400209
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Notes From Underground offers the first Western sociological study of rock music and counterculture in Russian society. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and life-history analysis, the author provides a detailed ethnographic examination of the origins and local meanings of rock music and the countercultural way of life of rock musicians in St. Petersburg during the socialist period of Russian history. Rock music served as the basis for alternative forms of individual and collective identity which stood as beacons of difference and resistance in the bleak cultural environment of socialist industrial society. Cushman explores the experiences of members of the St. Petersburg musical community after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in order to shed light on the following questions: What happens to oppositional "underground" culture when it "comes up from the underground?" What is the fate of Russian rock music and those who make it under new conditions of the rapid capitalist rationalization of post-Soviet Russian society? The book traces the experiences of musicians in new capitalist culture markets, both in Russia and in Western societies to illustrate the more general process of "commercialization of dissent" which is taking place in post-communist societies. Russia's entrance into the path of Western capitalist modernity is viewed not so much as a path to freedom and cultural autonomy, but as the intersection of two trajectories of modernity that has given rise to new and unique cultural dilemmas. It concludes with an examination of important theoretical issues about the problematic relationship between capitalism, cultural freedom, and democracy in contemporary Russian society.

The Psychic Soviet

The Psychic Soviet PDF Author: Ian F. Svenonius
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617757845
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A reissue of Ian F. Svenonius’s cult-classic debut essay collection, including brand-new writing in this expanded edition. “Everything author-slash-punk-icon Ian Svenonius says is interesting, and this book of satirical essays—originally published in 2006, now back in print—proves it . . . You’ll laugh until you cry.” —Washington Post A new, expanded collection of essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC, underground rock and roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is Ian F. Svenonius’s groundbreaking first book of writings. The selections are written in a lettered yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, how Seinfeld caused the bankruptcy of modern pop culture, and the status of rock and roll as a religion. The pocket-sized book is bound with a durable bright-pink plastic cover, recalling the aesthetics of Mao’s Little Red Book, and perfect for carrying into the fray of street battle, classroom, or lunch-counter argument.