Book Review: Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe . Edited by William Jay Risch . Lanham, MD : Lexington Books , 2015. 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7391-6693-2

Reviews

The alacrity with which English-language viral news websites have recirculated the list of bands 'banned in the USSR in 1985' (or rather proscribed by the Komsomol of Mykolaiv oblast in Ukraine, informing its district and city committees about the 'ideologically harmful compositions' of 38 Western bands), originally reproduced in Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation (2006, p. 215), demonstrates the typical associations drawn in the West between popular music, youth culture and state socialism in the Soviet bloc: the picture of rock music as an ideological threat and capitalist import liable to repression and even comical overestimation by bumbling Communist authorities. In contrast, as a useful historiographical conclusion by Jonathyne Briggs in this volume makes explicit, the emphasis in studies of Western youth culture has often been on matters of 'leisure and style' (p. 267). Following the lead of scholars such as Yurchak and Uta Poiger, whose Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (2000) is another of the most cited works across the volume, Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc challenges the notions that rock and roll represented a unified culture of youth rebellion against state socialism or that rock and Communism were incompatible. Russia, Ukraine, Poland and East Germany receive most coverage, although two chapters deal with Hungary and Yugoslavia. William Jay Risch and his contributors apply a theoretical framework based on Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu and Sarah Thornton - all firmly established points of reference in popular music studies - to emphasise that 'young listeners to Deep Purple' - or any other musical subculture such as disco or punk - 'may have been influenced...