Abstract
Zsófia Réti analyses how popular music journalism functioned in the late socialist period of Hungary. She argues that despite the fact that this type of journalism was missing some of the institutional support that was available for the other branches of journalism, it worked well. Hungarian music and youth magazines presented a wide range of opinions, which reflected not so much the Party directives as the views of specific journalists. Hungarian journalists operated as a close-knit community, and the legendary personalities of popular music journalism exerted considerable influence on shaping music fashions. The freedom and flourishing of music journalism reflected Kádár’s relatively liberal stance towards culture, according to which what was not openly oppositional was tolerated.
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Notes
- 1.
He was especially ironic about the ’generation shift’ from traditional beat music and his band Illés to new voices in rock, such as Piramis, the members of which were actually the same age as those of the Illés—around 33 when the interview was made.
- 2.
As it is documented in the relevant report of the Agitation and Propaganda Department, ’comrade Katalin Radics orally notified the committee that a brochure entitled Pop-panorama 1986/1 was published by the Music Press Company in 80.000 copies. The still unsold 68.000 copies are destroyed due to ideological and taste issues. The permit of publication was for a book, and not a periodical.’ (HU-MOL M-KS 288-41/428)
- 3.
For more detailed analysis of journalism in the late Kádár-era, cf. Hegedűs 2001.
- 4.
In 1981, on the first open negotiation between the policymakers and the musicians, Ildikó Lendvai, Head of the KISZ Central Committee Cultural Department, gave the following warning to János Bródy, representative of musicians: ‘When we suggested to the cultural policymakers that it’s a kind of art that should be dealt with accordingly, (…) it doesn’t mean that you will be receiving attention in a way that the state and the cultural policy will embrace popular music as such. It may be even more adverse for popular music, because it would also mean that it receives the same kind of attention as any other kind of art, which entails the three T-s: support, tolerate, ban. And still I think that it would mean a kind of progress, because up until now, there was only toleration and ban regarding the great majority of the genre’ (Szőnyei 2006).
- 5.
As opposed to Magyar Ifjúság, which targeted young people in general, from the age of 14 to 30, Ifjúsági Magazin was specifically meant to involve teenagers from age 14 to 18.
- 6.
For a more detailed depiction of the state’s role in popular music under the Kádár-era, see Bence Csatári’s excellent monograph on the subject matter (Csatári 2015).
- 7.
Once in 1965, right after the founding of Ifjúsági Magazin, then in 1971, and finally in 1972.
- 8.
Counted from 1957, the foundation of the first youth magazine, Magyar Ifjúság.
- 9.
Although all three were under the jurisdiction of the Agitation and Propaganda Department, and all of them were published by the Hungarian Printing Press Company, their limitations and liberties were different – just as well as their popularity among young people. According to a poll/report conducted by Miklós Győrffy, senior fellow of the Hungarian Radio after the request of the critical journal Kortárs, the most popular one in 1986 was Világ Ifjúsága; the readers also liked Ifjúsági Magazin, but they did not really read Magyar Ifjúság because it consisted almost exclusively of politics (Győrffy 1986).
- 10.
Here the notion of popular music is counted from the first appearances of beat in the youth press, which date back to 1964.
- 11.
For example János Bródy, ex-Illés member, became the elected president of the popular music performers’ lobby by the 1980s.
- 12.
Rock was gradually understood as anything within youth culture that is not the equally frowned upon disco, including a whole range of subgenres. At the same time, punk was often used as a fashionable synonym for freshness, playfulness and inventiveness in popular music. Lajos Som, leader of the band Piramis, complained in a 1978 interview: ’punk is spreading as a new trend and much can be described with it. Enough to say, that one of the ‘pop writers’ recently wrote that Szörényi and his band plays punk music in a good sense on their new record. Ridiculous. We must acknowledge that punk only happens under certain social conditions.’ (Sebők 1978a)
- 13.
A very similar process happened in all the fields of journalism. For a detailed analysis, see Takács 2009.
- 14.
While, however, this method resulted in a very metaphorical mode of writing in the literary public sphere, in the case of the popular music public sphere, self-censorship triggered the preference of certain topics over others.
- 15.
A youth subculture of the late 1970s; mostly treated as a criminal, not a youth subculture issue. The term roughly means hobo, bum or dosser, and csöves people were often regarded as the forerunners and primary audience of the specifically Hungarian realisation of the punk movement. The term csöves remains untranslated as it conveys meanings that cannot be fully represented in English. Most often, the self-proclaimed csöves youth were fans of the rock band Piramis.
- 16.
Truth be told, the last punk- or csöves-related article was published in the second half of 1982, and János Sebők, a major nuisance for many in power, could keep his job all along at Ifjúsági Magazin.
- 17.
The restrictions were not unique to the popular music public sphere. In 1983, the entire staff of the literary and cultural journal Mozgó Világ was removed, with an issue banned and smashed in, and in 1986, the Szeged-based literary journal Tiszatáj was banned for 6 months for publishing a poem by Gáspár Nagy about the 1956 revolution and the execution of Imre Nagy. Cf. Müller 2001.
- 18.
Although Jürgen Habermas greeted the end of communism as a ’rectifying revolution’, by the late 1970s a consolidated, tamed and ‘pastiched’ ideology in Hungary mostly overlapped with what the older generations viewed as ’normalcy’.
- 19.
Sándor Révész was the singer of the band Piramis, while János Lékay was an anarchist journalist, who (unsuccessfully) tried to assassinate prime minister István Tisza in 1918.
- 20.
Radio Free Europe Hungary was transmitted from Munich, and later on from Portugal.
- 21.
True, the majority of these works is rather documentary than analytical, rather chronicle than critical. It was only in 1984, that even the youth magazines included any music-based critique of new vinyl records.
- 22.
In theory, the principle of 3T would grant that merely the fact of being published during the state socialist period would not necessarily imply complicity. In practice, however, the twilight zone of tolerated works and artists was so wide that the statement is still true in retrospect: after 1989, the tolerated segment seems to gradually fade away.
- 23.
For a more detailed take on the topic, see József Havasréti’s analysis (Havasréti 2006: 51–59).
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Réti, Z. (2016). ‘The Second Golden Age’: Popular Music Journalism during the Late Socialist Era of Hungary. In: Mazierska, E. (eds) Popular Music in Eastern Europe. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_8
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