“The Struggle over Rock in the Polish Press in the 1980’s”

by Raymond Patton

On December 13, 1981, the declaration of Martial Law in Poland closed the presses, banned the Solidarity labor movement, and reversed the liberalization that had come with Solidarity’s success.  Yet, two months into the year and a half of military rule, a Party commission agreed to sponsor the controversial Jarociń Youth Music Festival.  Nor was Jarociń an anomaly; the Martial Law era falls within a key period of Polish rock.  The cultural creativity of the era has been overshadowed by stories of oppressiveness, in part due to the centrality of Solidarity to most accounts.  Why would the Party encourage a medium that seemingly undermined its authority?  How does the complexity of the relationship between the state and rock music affect the way we evaluate its place in Polish history? 
       
These questions engage with central debates about the political significance of popular culture.  The story of Polish rock encourages us to look beyond the familiar binary that interprets culture as either noble resistance or base incorporation with respect to the dominant order.  The hegemony model, derived from Antonio Gramsci and reworked by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, encourages a more flexible reading of culture’s political significance by emphasizing the meanings it takes on in a specific context rather than any ostensibly objective “liberatory” or “resistant” content.  My presentation will examine just one of the arenas in which rock’s meaning was hammered out – in surprisingly vigorous debate in the Polish popular press in the 1980’s.