http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02132-2.html
Anna Szemere
Up from the Underground
The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary
November | 2001
Hardback: $60.00 short | 0-271-02132-2
Paperback: $19.95 short | 0-271-02133-0
What happens to a community of oppositional artists when the purpose and
meaning of their opposition are undermined by social transformation? Such
was the dilemma facing many underground artists in Eastern Europe following
the collapse of state socialism. In Up from the Underground, Anna Szemere
looks at the rock-music-based underground in Hungary, showing how it
anticipated, precipitated, and responded to a period of fundamental change.
Szemere's work focuses on a community of rock musicians that became popular
with Hungary's urban youth culture in the early 1980s--groups with names
such as the Committee, Control Group, and the Galloping Coroners. Szemere
reveals the activities, discourse, and group life of musicians against the
background of shifting institutional contexts. By the mid-1990s the change
of regime had altered the cultural dynamics of Hungarian society, leading to
a complete realignment of the underground music world. Szemere uses the
opportunity presented by these developments to challenge one-dimensional
representations of popular culture and transition in the region. She also
addresses more general questions about the nature and uses of expressive
culture, autonomy, social change, and social reproduction.
Up from the Underground is an important addition to the scholarship on the
cultural dimension of the most profound societal change in Europe since
World War II. It also enriches the increasingly global field of cultural
sociology and cultural studies by rethinking its central assumptions and
theories in the light of Eastern Europe's unique historical and social
experience.
Anna Szemere teaches in the Sociology Department, Emory University.
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