The Party also struggled with the effects of popular music. Kids in Poland and East Germany proved to be little different from kids in San Francisco or Liverpool. The more the Party cracked down on jazz and rock and roll, the more giddily defiant the music’s youthful consumers became. As in the West, adult disapproval grounded the otherwise free-floating notion that there is something rebellious and world-changing about the rock-and-roll beat. If people were trying to silence it, it must be threatening to someone.
“The Wild One,” “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rock Around the Clock” caused youth riots in both East and West Germany in 1955 and 1956. In the notorious “cultural Cold War,” during which the C.I.A. covertly supported—and the State Department and American museums and foundations overtly funded—the dissemination of American art, books, literary and intellectual journalism, dance, theatre, and music, the one product that can plausibly be argued to have made a difference in the eventual overthrow of Communism was rock and roll. Bill Haley and Frank Zappa likely did more to inspire the dissidents in Eastern Europe than Jackson Pollock or the writers at Partisan Review.
Bloc Heads
Books: „Life behind the Iron Curtain”.
Louis Menand
Tu i tam.
Categories:
