Getting By Together

I conclude by considering music’s situated power in cultural and social transformation. I argue that resistance concerns how one resists aesthetics and how this builds one’s immunity to those things that they perceive as unhealthy. As the Underground case suggests, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the social and the musical is essential. Indeed, how we come to define the social is called into question when we “reassemble” it to consider people, objects, and materials acting together. This chapter examines “togetherness,” that is not only about people being together; rather, it is about people, timbres, cassette tapes, backbeats, establishments, photographs, places, transmitters, long hair, legacies, regimes, police, poetry, histories that are ecologically assembled (or rejected) to (re)form a habitable, healthy space where one can live. The chapter reflects on the case of the Underground and how its lessons in building a counterculture via music are valuable for any situation of dis-ease.

Generating New Waves

This chapter engages the broader parallel non-official culture that emerged in Czechoslovak late socialism and moves the timeline forward to address some of the characteristics of the Merry Ghetto, and more generally non-official musicking, in the 1980s. Cases of musicking during the 1980s problematize “generation” by exposing it not necessarily in terms of only age gap but also in how new arenas of being and thinking were generated from cultural resources that were crafted in the 1970s. I explore the mechanisms of “generation” through convergence zones between non-official cultural ecologies by discussing a further core group of musicians and musicking practices during 1970s Czechoslovakia, the Alternatives.

Human Rights, Prison, and Amplifiers

The dance of non-politics during communism was taken into account in its most public form in Charter 77. This chapter begins with the Second Festival of the Second Culture in 1976 and takes us until the early 1980s showing the relationship between dissidents associated with Charta 77 and Undergrounders. The assembly and framing of the relationship between establishment, self, and music in the Underground during the first part of the 1970s provided an entrance point that paired the Underground and the Czechoslovak dissident opposition. I problematize notions of resistance as tied to dissent and protest by taking a critical approach to the paradigm of protest music. The chapter seeks to show how music helps sort out and align groups of people.

Underground Is Life

The survival of the Underground after 1989 rests on the collective memory it has shaped in relation to establishments. This relational pair is the convention that holds the Underground together: the pathway of underground-establishment is continuous, the communist era being articulated into the multi-temporal meaning and use of establishment. This chapter addresses the nature of transformation in the Underground after 1989—although the ecology embraces change and technology, the musical material remains the same. The Plastic People of the Universe have now become the oft-quoted rock group of the Czech Underground, symbolizing Eastern bloc communist oppression, Cold War logics of liberty and freedom, and music’s borderless humanity. The Plastics maintain this legacy in local and foreign discourse while performing repertoire from their forty-five years of ensemble history. Yet the chapter also points to how new musical practices and meanings have grown in the Merry Ghetto, suggesting an Underground Renaissance. The contemporary Underground festival U Skaláka functions as an environment to reaffirm these articulations between musicking and forms of freedom, politics and historical identity. Continuing to play and to listen to Underground music nowadays provides conditions for Undergrounders to continue living within their cultural ecology and thus helps us to understand self-reflexive notions of the political during communism as not ending with 1989 but rather adapting to different forms of creative and political suppression in contemporary times.

From Socialist Realism to the Prague Spring

Chapter 2 explores aesthetic models, forms, and materials of creative practices in Czechoslovakia from the 1940s to the 1960s. It centers on how people made available aesthetic resources: the practice of furnishing an ecology. I examine the historical conditions of artistic production of post–World War II Stalinism’s “socialist realism” to the Czechoslovak Prague Spring and its political direction of “socialism with a human face” beginning with Egon Bondy’s work. I focus particularly on his biography as a producer and early poetry works after the 1948 coup, emphasizing two styles he developed with Ivo Vodseďálek from 1950 and 1951: Total Realism (Totalní Realismus) and Poetry of Embarrassment (Trapná Poezie). These poetic styles and content served as a response to the perceived absurdity of post-1948 Stalinist culture felt by Bondy and Vodseďálek. By examining this body of work, I investigate what Total Realism and Poetry of Embarrassment afforded, solved, and transmitted. On the heels of Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, I continue onto the boom and popularity of rock ’n’ roll during the 1960s and the initial, inchoate formation of the Underground following the Prague Spring of 1968. I analyze people’s engagement with circulating cultural media during this period that contributed to a cosmopolitan music scene in Prague, detailing the proto-underground rock bands of the 1960s and the emergence of psychedelic music in Prague.

The Underground Cultural Ecology

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the music in “Merry Ghetto,” the Underground’s assembled cultural ecology, before moving on to discuss memory in post-socialist Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. I continue by examining associations between music and social activity in context: namely revolutions, memory, and popular music in the former Eastern bloc. The chapter critiques and draws on insights from literature of popular music studies and sociology of music to construct an approach to studying music as a social activity that is grounded in events, peoples, places, and their relations. These are the mechanisms of how music takes on meaning and provides empowering affordances. I analyze these questions using perspectives developed in music sociology and music therapy in order to understand the interactive piece-by-piece assembly of groups, bodies, and consciousness—and thus social power and agency—showing what is possible, what can be accomplished through and with music.

Creativity, Establishment, and the Self

This chapter outlines how acts of state oppression repressed environmental conditions that contradictorily enabled the expressive practice of “truth to self.” This repression heightened forms of collective awareness of an Underground “way of life” and points to how the politics of music-making is an emergent and embodied phenomenon. I trace how musicking came to be crafted within the Merry Ghetto, showing how practices (composing to lyrics, listening to records, playing with spirit, adapting poems as lyrics, writing and thinking about music) were linked to aesthetic phenomena (out-of-tune, rough and ragged sounds, sing-song recitation, heavy bass lines, screamed vocals, raw, unmusical sounds) that provided models, through contrast and comparison structures, for learning dispositions (how to feel and know “establishment,” “truth to self,” historical commitment, rejection) in the Merry Ghetto. This chapter considers some of the core building blocks of cultural ecologies by asking how music mediates knowledge production, commitment-making, and ontological security. I explore the “life sustaining” qualities of a habitat built through music that in fact have more to do with well-being, mental health, and protection than with protest and revolution. In short, it addresses music as a material of “cocooning,” as a form of protection.

Assembling the Merry Ghetto

Chapter 3 focuses on the rich artistic output of the Czech Underground in the early 1970s. This aesthetic material helped frame the Underground through contrast structures and ideological articulations, helping it develop from an inchoate group that emerges from the 1960s bigbít scene into a distinct community. This occurred through a series of events congruent with the Underground band the Plastic People of the Universe’s musical development, all of which was calibrated by police repression and bureaucratic interruption of normalizace. In particular, notions of “establishment” emerged within Underground discourse, understood to be an “oppressor” of a self-determined way of life. The chapter shows how the fusing of cultural resources began to hold together an increasingly clearer network of dispositions, gestures and emotional stances that resulted from a series of social and aesthetic mediators. The chapter concludes by offering a model of how cultural resources are made available, located and put together. This engagement with resources ultimately creates a habitable, health-promoting space for communing and building immunity against things that one seeks to reject.