Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia

These 11 essays constitute what editor Ramet, who teaches international studies at the University of Washington, calls ``the first scholarly attempt'' to systematically address rock music in Eastern Europe and Russia. The wealth of information presented here should absorb specialists. Ramet asserts that rock was the beat behind the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, and, indeed, the essays, most of which focus on a single country, show how music there is infused with politics. For example, in Czechoslovakia, Ramet writes, a 1976 trial of the group Plastic People of the Universe led to the drafting of the human rights document Charter 77. In East Germany, observes Olaf Leitner, rock music was the art most in conflict with the state. Though essays like Laszlo Kurti's on Hungarian rock lapse into academic jargon, they nevertheless, through analysis of song lyrics, show how musicians have constructed alternative views of sexual and social mores. Particularly intriguing are a 1989 interview with a Sarajevan musician who presciently predicted war and an essay on Dean Reed, an American actor/singer who became an East Bloc star, only to die mysteriously in East Berlin in 1986. Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)