Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  Joy Division were English boys for whom the end of the world as they knew it resulted in bleak fascination with the other side: people under totalitarianism, with whom they felt a secret affinity, making music as if their world was their own. But it also worked the other way round. The morbidity of their music hit exactly the emotions disaffected young people felt behind the Curtain. The extent to which Polish fans identified with Curtis’s cold-war nihilism can be seen in the reaction to his death: the leader of the punk band Bexa Lala hanged himself, also after watching Herzog’s Stroszek! I’m not sure what is more moving about this scene: the literality with which the singer took his own life after his idol, or the fact even the final moment of somebody’s life, the final truth, could’ve been to this extent copied from someone else, someone who was to the guy like a film star, no doubt. I wonder if they realized Curtis life wasn’t that dissimilar to their own?

  Europophilia

  By the late 70s and especially in the 80s, the era of the ‘Second Cold War’, the post-war austerity became a club décor in the New Romantics mecca, The Blitz. When in 1979 a group of future Blitz frequenters made their visit to Berlin, what they really couldn’t wait for was to get smuggled to the East. As it was deadly cheap, they went to the revolving restaurant in the TV Tower and ordered the most expensive dishes in the card, champagne and caviar, later dropping by to the Palast der Republik for a cocktail and ending up eating other people’s buffets, after which, attacked, they comment, “You’d think the Germans would’ve learned by now!”

  The idea of ‘Europe’ within the popular music culture was very new, and has a direct relation to the Cold War. Before, pop and rock bands straightforwardly identified themselves as American. Arguably the first band to openly identify themselves as European were Kraftwerk. But by the 80s, synthesizer bands spread across Britain because the cold sound of synthesizer was the most straightforwardly identified as the sound of the future, it was evoking the industrial or post-industrial dystopia, because the future realized itself exactly according to some of the SF dystopian visions. And where else could this idea could develop better than in the land of George Orwell?

  Today many of the ambitious pop bands from the 70s and 80s are likely to be put under the label of ‘post-modernism’, where postis clearly being confused with the clearly ‘neo’ approach of the renewal of the lost elements of modernity. It wasn’t a gesture of ‘ending’, but the reverse, of reopening. Kraftwerk, by calling themselves simply ‘power plant’ risked ridicule and ostracism in a hippie-driven culture of early 70s. But their plan was to restore the belief in technology, in a growingly schizophrenic world, in which, although technology was ever expanding, the public acknowledgement had increasingly become an obscurantist fear and anti-modern neglect. It was the legacy of the ambivalent 60s, where the modernist ideas of housing and living were bravely introduced into life. ‘Europe’ as a fashionable object is also an effect of the mutual isolation, best expressed by the Berlin syndrome. Trans-Europe Express was a hope that once Europe was this much more organic structure, but now, if we’ll have the technology, finally, the Europe Endless, or rather a certain dream of it, can become a united organism beyond divisions.

  The FACE magazine was the bible of the new pomo aestheticism of the 80s, with the ever-whimsical, period defining graphic design by Neville Brody, borrowing from all avant-gardes, yet capturing something true about it, even if it is an authentic of inauthenticity. In 1983 they ran a special ‘European’ issue, with an article on Vienna describing it as tired, decadent and bourgeois, but noted its avant-garde, Actionists and kitsch postmodern architect Hans Hollein (but no mention of Ultravox!, who made Vienna fashionable), pictures from Milanese and Roman jet-setting, and erratic design works run alongside reportage about Ulrike Meinhof’s Children, her two daughters as well as a metaphorical one, Christiane Felscherinow, in a typical shallow-deep combination. Yet, there’s very little on any of any Soviet Bloc countries. The Wall was where this interest stopped. We shouldn’t underestimate the real political borders. Yet, the FACE remained a product much mythologized and desired, of high demand on the Moscow black market, where old copies could go for as much as 80 smuggled dollars. This paradox of desire and not being able to have it, is most painfully addressed in a UK Levi’s commercial from 1986, in which in a scary sotsrealist hall the 50s rocker-looking delinquent is being searched on the occasion of smuggling Western goods, by the scary looking Soviet customs inspectors in fur hats. They discover an issue of the FACE, but not the trousers, which he enjoys in his socialist tenement. Even the lettering of the commercial is in Cyrillic, yet it’s all a fake: the tenement is Robin Hood Gardens in east London, the sotsrealist hall the Royal Horticultural Hall in Westminster - and of course such a “subversive” commercial would never run in Russia, where it would actually have been subversive.

  The East must’ve been perceived as universally grey, unattractive and scary, yet, when Thatcherism was taking its toll in the mid-80s, The Style Council, Paul Weller’s next outfit after mod-revivalists The Jam, came to Warsaw to shoot their clip to ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’, as an act of solidarity with the persecuted Eastern folk, and the class war in the UK, in the midst of the miners strike. The effect is interesting – we see the musicians, stylishly dressed (or so Weller boasted) in the grey streets of Warsaw, with footage emphasizing the somberness of the Stalinist Palace of Culture, the monument to the Soviet Soldiers and the sheer roughness of the everyday life: shabby trams, poor people, greyness. But the whole clip is interspersed with the band playing for a small enthusiastic crowd in Jazz Club Akwarium, with radiant faces, modernist design and actually everything against the stereotype.

  Depeche-Mania

  We are Depechists the same way others are communists, or fascists – says one of the Russian fans in the DM-mania devoted documentary by artist Jeremy Deller, incidentally blocked by the band itself. In Russia and Germany, the band had a fanatical following, which was a separate subculture. Depeche, vaguely dwelling on various elements that could’ve been identified with the Soviet regime (underdogs, master & servant, heavy industry), especially in Construction Time Again, toyed with workerist visual imagery, along with a critique of capitalist production and perils of selfish, ruthless competitiveness in songs like ‘Everything Counts’. Recorded in the Hansa Studios, mythologized by Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, with recording sounds resembling the everyday toil of the factory in a musique concrete fashion, the songs were centered around endless, hollowing labors which, as in ‘Pipeline’, not only sound like workers poetry: ‘Taking from the greedy/giving to the needy/working in the pipeline’, but also touch on socialist realism: ‘From the heart of our land/to the mouth of the man’. In the last song of the album they even suggest to the world’s revolutionaries, to tear up the map and start all over again, yet, in the end, it’s again just to serve individuality. If there’s a revolution, then it’s pathetically self-centered, Thatcherist self-reliance, not more than an ad slogan: ‘All that we need at the start’s universal revolution (that’s all!)/and if we trust our hearts, we’ll find the solutions’. Yet, Depeche brought solace to millions of fans especially in the Bloc, who, as we can see in Deller’s film, found alternative communities, where they dreamt of a better future.

  Still, the fashion for the DDR never dies, recently confirmed by the Electronic Beats magazine, which compiled a multi-part DMGDR series, centered around Depeche Mode fandom in East Germany. In another regular series, EB does a “24h in (insert a city from the former East here)”, in which a correspondent goes to another burgeoning “creative hub”, asking its creative class (DJs, promoters, copywriters, bar/club PR/owners) to boast about two things: how much it has changed (read: since the end of communism) and how much resemblance their city bears to the obvious ideal, the only one worth comparing to: Berlin. Any political event is assessed according to how much it is going to affect the ‘creative sector’, it behaves as if possessing such sector was the only thing that mattered,
also as something that somehow helps to fight contemporary fascism. If they complain about the recent neoliberal or fascist politics, creatives from Budapest, Prague or Moscow do so only in as much as it blocks the ‘hubs’. Basically, you know how close you are to becoming a modern, creative city if you’re able to approximate it towards Berlin. ‘Nearly like Berlin’ or ‘As good as Berlin’ were the words I heard only too often when still living in Poland (I was later assured by UK friends they heard exactly the same in various artsy colleges around the country). And given the trouble Berlin is now in, and the unique, not really repeatable status it has due to its history, I don’t think this dream is ever going to come true. This is yet what our creatives, if not always our authorities would like to see us as.

  Recently it was young Berliners, that is people who cannot remember it personally, who defended the East Side Gallery, the remnants of the Wall that were preserved around the district of Friedrichshain, preserving the artworks endured as fragments. What keeps attracting the youth to that myth is the sense of community, political radicalism and history attached to the Wall and Cold War, that they feel profoundly lacking in their own lives, in a depoliticized time where there is no alternative.

  System to fight the SYSTEM

  Warsaw during communism was a city that had to change dramatically into a completely different place than it was before the war. It is a miracle, and proof of an extremely strong identity and the love of its inhabitants, that despite this drastic change Warsaw still lives all of its previous lives, and one can easily trace every era of its life. There’s a legend that during his two hours train-break in 1976 Bowie stepped out at Dworzec Gdański, and walked towards the modernist area of Paris Commune Square (now named after Woodrow Wilson), where he allegedly stopped at the record shop and purchased some folk music LPs. It remains unconfirmed by Bowie himself, but very likely one was by Silesian folk dance ensemble “Śląsk”, who were then directed by Stanislaw Hedyna and his original interpretations of native music. Śląsk’s ‘Helokanie’ is shockingly similar to Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’, and the brief visit is to this day mythologized by Polish fans. ‘Warszawa’ was a later, much more mature version of Bowie’s earlier vision of 1984, minus the glamor and camp, but with a dramatic, heavy beauty. For ‘Warszawa’ Bowie reserved a sombreness and seriousness typical rather for modern composition. It remains his most mysterious track.

  And how was it heard in Warsaw itself? The Polish punk rock groups of the late 70s and early 80s tended to draw on other influences than Bowie. Yet it was a touchstone for the later, 1990s poet Andrzej Sosnowski, now our foremost neo-avantgardist, who would use “Warszawa” as a hidden reference in his work. Sosnowski’s Warszawa is always filtered through Bowie’s Warszawa, meaning there’s a mythical, concrete, bleak Warszawa that Bowie had in mind, that only partially is the real Warsaw. In Sosnowski’s vision Warsaw is a late-postmodern, bleak Baudelairean vision (immortalized also in ‘The Waste Land’, quoting his Fourmillante cite… from Fleurs du Mal). In this Warsaw we encounter a similar mixture of flattened eroticism and feelings from different orders, metaphysical, sexual and bluntly mundane, all mixed up. A shop mannequin gives him an erection, and the crotch and the wallet seem to be erect in the same place.

  PRL’s dull fashion somehow went together with punk. In a way the ugly clothes made of poor quality fabrics, badly made angular shoes, suits and shirts were already very punk. The tasteless, shoddy and shabby, cheaply produced Eastern fashion, making things look not obviously pretty, against conventional beauty, turned them into an anti-fashion. To look deprived, to look as if a bomb exploded next to you, was to contest capitalism – but what about countries without capitalism? If in the West the ostentatious fashion a la dispossessed was a political statement against the society of the spectacle (and at the same time, a signal of its material decay), what did it mean in the East? Perhaps both should be put as expression of late capitalism, in their rejection of order and beauty as equally banal and uninteresting, and often hypocritical. Lacking the funds for consumerist transgressions, Polish punks made up their own, often sexual. One of the open secrets of the scene was its sexual excess. Festivals were also not free of such debauchery. During one Jarocin festival gig of the punk band Zbombardowana Laleczka (Bombarded Doll), the vocalist started to perform fellatio on one of the musicians, and photo reporters jumped over themselves to immortalize this scene of ultimate Polish transgression. Yet, despite the band winning the audience prize because everybody hoped for a repetition, sadly this never occurred.

  In Russia the reaction to the system could be in itself reactionary. Yet the strange continuation the subculture world has in Russia until today, means the parallel world called at the time SISTIEMA, the counter, alternative system to fight the other system, is still at play. Yet subcultural life in the Bloc wasn’t always just simply against the system. 50s Stilyagi definitely were contesting it, but the later emerging thaw generation, who often became dissidents, like Yevtushenko, were those who wanted to reform the system, not simply to abolish it. Anyway, the Stilyaga weren’t militant either.

  It is understood differently now in Poland and Russia. Several books, which came out recently capitalizing on the punk legend, usually universally dismiss a system which didn’t allow young people to be the way they were. Censored and often arrested, they still seem not to notice that at the very same time in the dark, industrial Poland of the early 80s another dream was burgeoning: a dream of quasi-efficiency, as if aimed against the authorities. People’s Poland, as is not mentioned enough today, provided a stable cultural system within its planned economy, of Domy Kultury (local culture institutions, helping to find talent), phonography, festivals, creating a circuit in which musical culture could flourish. Everyone in Polish punk who mattered made their début this way. In communist reality, especially the late one, music existed in state controlled festivals. In the punk era, each band had to get an official approval from the censoring organs to get to play at one of the main events of the time, Jarocin punk festival. It was allowed by communist powers in the 70s, including the then-sport minister, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the future president of democratic Poland, some say, as a safety valve, so that after the protests on ’68 and in the 70s the youth got their music and calmed down. Yet it was still often raided by the police with truncheons.

  Simultaneously to this, as a result of the post-Martial Law years of depression, other, independent channels of counterculture emerged. The counterculture was determined by the conflict between the communist authorities and the Solidarity alliance with the Catholic church – punk’s sympathies may have been with neither, and they shared this with several punk-influenced artists who favored a dirty, black realism. Out of that period emerged Łódź Kaliska – a radical movement combining pornography, anti-bourgeois, anti-moralism and political sloganeering for the sake of a loosely understood “freedom”. Then there was the so-called Culture of Gathering. The members of this ‘tribe’ were creating something – lacking means, often endangered by prison, they created out of anything that could’ve simply been ‘gathered’ by the other group members. To this group belonged artists later renowned for Critical art, like Zbigniew Libera. There was also the continuation of the experimental film movement, growing from Polish conceptualism in the 70s, with Jozef Robakowski. In Poznan, Kolo Klipsa applied the dark, punk imagery to late conceptualism, and the blasphemous Group Luxus, experimented with a trashed, impoverished version of pop art, and with striking intelligence and vulgarity analyzed the primary elements of the rough 80s Polish reality.

  In Russia the movement developed differently. Under much more pressure, they only could have the expression of punk late, during the perestroika and glasnost period in the mid 80s. The stylings of the Sov-punks are often astonishingly sartorial and various, as if against the stagnant politics. Described as an “aesthetic war between Soviet couture and black market fashion”, it brought back lots of the early Soviet fashion, which was forgotten in the era of lat
e Soviet blandness, which was to be followed by dull import in the 90s. One of the most intriguing and puzzling elements of the 80s underground look and subculture is a weird revival of the 50s – elegant dresses, clips, neat hair and film-noir trench coats (yearning after the New Wave 50s/60s cinema that missed them). In terms of image, punkers were skilled postmodernists, applying various looks with a chameleonic easiness. The reference to the glamorous female workers with headscarves, ear-clips, and nice knee-length skirts and for boys, the look perfected by Kraftwerk. For the punk generation it meant the rejection of everything hippie – the hippie generation was the one to have it all and exchange it for depoliticized drug-haze. The 1980s version of post-punk was someone who had his mind drugged enough by media and politics, with a much more rigorous attitude towards reality. For the Sov-punks, it means they could catch up with all the decades where they weren’t allowed to flourish: hippies, rocka-billies, metalheads, punks, breakdancers, rockers and New Wavers. A popular trend was wearing “smoky makeup”, dressing as robots. For everything there was a metaphorical name. A ‘nightingale’ meant a heavy drinker, who could stay up all night. A decade later and most of these movements were eclipsed by the commercialism of mainstream fashion. It is characteristic for contemporary times how many glossy, coffee-table punk albums were published, speaking nostalgically about fighting communism with clothes, at the time when all the possibly positive elements of this reality were dismantled. In Poland it was Generacja and in Russia Hooligans80.

  Misha Buster, who authored the latter, says “In the perestroika period many adolescents took up brutal non-Soviet concepts characterised by anti-heroism, bravado and the originality of the hooligan. All this happened as part of the clash between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ and these style images, in turn, protected our own adolescent idealism and became key criteria in the search for others like ourselves on the streets of many Soviet cities.” With that there were bands: Grazhdanska Oborona, Kino, Bravo, and characters: Zhanna Aguzarova, Garik Assa, Alexander Petlyura, Andrey Bartenev, Viktor Tsoi…The variety of photos show the fascinating Soviet city spaces: metro, escalators, railway, bus stops, stadiums…But as the clothes were to shock, or challenge the social conventions, they weren’t creating a real menace anymore. The never-ending, even until this day, rhetoric of ‘fighting the system’ hides another apology, this one of contemporary appropriation, of Russian ‘creative hubs’ that are supposed to change the subject from its grim current politics. As we know, the colorfully dressed punks didn’t actually create an alternative, nor construct any political force in the new Russia. But perhaps that was the short moment, when young people experienced new freedoms, not yet filtered by the capitalist market, possibilities of life-experimen-tation. Of course, it wasn’t their fault, as the fast-changing post-Soviet reality of the country didn’t leave them much choice. Yet I see the current nostalgic trend of remembering punks as largely reactionary. In the Generacja book, characters are largely disappointed with their lives.