Table of Contents

Rock music in the GDR - an epitaph, Olaf Leitner; the big beat in Poland, Alex Kan and Nick Hayes; rock music in Czechoslovakia, Sabrina Petra Ramet; rocking the State - youth and rock music culture in Hungary 1976-1988, Laszlo Kurti; the rock scene in Yugoslavia, S.P. Ramet; the Bulgarian rock scene under communism 1962-1990, Stephen Ashley; the Dean Reed story, Nick Hayes; the Soviet rock scene, S.P. Ramet et al; rock music in Byelorussia, Maria P. Survilla; rock music in Ukraine, Roman Bahry.

About the Author

Sabrina P. Ramet is professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She is the author of six other books, among them Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe (1997) and Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (1998). She has also edited a dozen books, mostly about Eastern Europe and Russia.

Reviews

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.)