A PLACE TO PLAY ANOTHER MUSIC: UNDERGROUND MUSIC IN TRANSITION DURING THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET PERIOD IN LATVIA AND LITHUANIA

‘A PLACE TO PLAY ANOTHER MUSIC’: UNDERGROUND MUSIC IN TRANSITION DURING THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET PERIOD

IN LATVIA AND LITHUANIA

MASTER'S THESIS

Author: Frans Robert

Advisor: Professor Valdis Muktupāvels

RIGA 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION                4

1.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY  6

1.1.         Fluid subcultural identities           6

1.2.         Subcultural identities in the Soviet Union and Baltics       13

1.3.         Fluid subcultural identities in oral history               21

1.4.         Conclusion          27

2.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY DURING THE SOVIET PERIOD       29

2.1.         The political Soviet culture           29

2.2.         Affirming an own human identity in Soviet Latvia              38

2.3.         Affirming an own human identity in Soviet Lithuania       45

2.4.         Conclusion          50

3.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY DURING THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD           52

3.1.         The post-Soviet period of transition        52

3.2.         Performing Latvian underground identity in transition    57

3.3.         Performing Lithuanian underground identity in transition             63

3.4.         Conclusion          72

4.            CONCLUSIONS  74

5.            ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 76

6.            BIBLIOGRAPHY  77

6.1.         Sources                77

6.2.         Literature            77

INTRODUCTION

‘When starting Latvian music industry, we in Tornis Records were in opposition, because they Mikrofons Records weren’t interested in music that we played and we didn’t like the bands from Mikrofona Ieraksti. It’s a clear major label and we were underground. … We were protesting against capitalism. In the first years it’s not the freedom that we wanted, freedom without money, with bandits on the streets and dark times. … People changed from very big idealists at the end of the ‘80s to very big materialists …. We played songs about that’

Andris Indāns, musician and one of the founders of the underground record label Tornis Records , describes in the above-mentioned quote how the music underground positioned itself towards the mainstream society and culture in post-Soviet Latvia. Indāns thereby constructs an identity of underground music in opposition to Mikrofons Records and the newly established capitalism, performing this identity through songs. During the Soviet period, however, this identity formation happened in a totally different way as both Latvia and Lithuania were under a totalitarian rule. This research therefore has the goal to reveal how different aspects of the meaning of underground music changed in the transition from a Soviet to a post-Soviet society in Latvia and Lithuania. The main focus lies on the period from 1985 to 1995, yet this time frame is fluid, as underground music does not appear in a vacuum and has repercussions for later developments as well.

                Investigating the change in meaning of underground music, the first task is to define the relationship between underground and group identity, as subcultural identity is not ontologically pre-existent, but constructed and replayed through cultural objects and practices. Subcultural or underground identities thus are not fixed, but fluid. To apply the research method of oral history is the second task of this research, as this method fits best to this performative stance. It pays attention to practices and the fluidity of their meaning according to concrete situations in which they were executed. For this research twelve people, who were engaged in underground music during the Soviet and/or post-Soviet period, from both Latvia and Lithuania were interviewed. These people were selected via snowball sampling and I had a qualitative interview with them, resulting in a little more than 16 hours of recorded material. These narratives of musicians, record label owners and journalists are interpretations of the past, which in their turn, ask for interpretation. The methodology of oral history thus provides a critical insider perspective that emically explores the lived aspects of people’s material and non-material cultures. The third and final task is to make a comparison between the different meanings of underground culture. From the insider perspective it will be possible to compare this meaning, attached to underground music, both in time – from the Soviet to post-Soviet period – and in space – between Lithuania and Latvia.

The first chapter offers an insight in the theoretical framework of this research. The relationship between music underground and group identities is clarified, thereby placing this paper in the field of subcultural studies. Furthermore, a historiography on the topic of cultural resistance through music in the totalitarian Soviet society, with a focus on the Baltic States, is provided. Finally the research method of oral history is explained. In the second chapter the music underground in Latvia and Lithuania during the Soviet period is investigated. Based on the conducted interviews, the actual experiences of underground insiders are related to a general political overview, in order to come to conclusions regarding underground identity in Soviet Latvia and Lithuania. The third chapter has the same structure as the second chapter, yet focuses on the post-Soviet period in Latvia and Lithuania. The comparison of the meaning of underground music in space and time is made in the conclusion.

 

1.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY

In this chapter the theoretical framework regarding the relationship between music underground and group identities is clarified. After positioning this research in the field of subcultural studies, an overview will be given of what has already been written about cultural resistance through music in the totalitarian Soviet society. A similar historiography of Baltic underground music is present in this chapter. Finally, the method of oral history is explained.

1.1.         Fluid subcultural identities

Subcultural studies emerged out of two distinct sociological traditions: the first coherent set of subcultural studies was carried out by sociologists at the University of Chicago from the 1920s to the 1940s, although these academicians did not refer to themselves as subcultural scholars. In Britain, an explicitly subcultural approach to the study of working-class youth was established at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The American tradition of subcultural studies arose out of two strands of academic research: the ‘Chicago school’ and functionalist theories of strain. The Chicago school relied on an ecological model of society in equilibrium and on the belief that subcultures in the United States of America (USA) arose in part as a result of urbanization. The importance of the Chicago school lies in its emphasis on collective lifestyles, the relevance of moral order and social control within groups, and the call for in-depth, qualitative, empirical analysis of how cultural life is experienced.  This early research on youth subcultures in the USA predominantly concentrated on the ‘deviant’ aspects of youth. The focus lay on the qualitative study of ‘deviant’ processes. Social problems such as delinquency challenged the ecological model of society in equilibrium, and the concept of subculture therefore became useful in explaining social pathologies.  Subcultures were defined as ‘relatively distinct social subsystems within a larger social system and culture’. 

                The subcultural theory of the Chicago school was not the only one in the USA. In 1938 Merton theorized deviance within a functionalist framework, stating that disjuncture between the cultural goals of society and the ability of its members to achieve those goals caused psychological strain for individuals.  Relying on unconventional means to achieve mainstream cultural goals or rejecting mainstream cultural goals and strategies promoted the formation of subcultures. In 1955 Cohen developed Merton’s strain theory by claiming that subcultures represented inverted sets of values and norms that participants internalized.  Cohen argued that a new subculture brought psychological and emotional well-being to its members. In the eyes of Cohen, subcultures emerged when ‘a number of actors with similar problems of social adjustment interact with one another and innovate new frames of reference’.  In the theory of Cloward and Ohlin, however, the inability to succeed was not understood as the fault of individuals, but rather as the fault of the system, which caused individuals to lose faith in the legitimacy of the dominant social order.  Whereas Cohen argued that subcultural participants inverted mainstream cultural values, Cloward and Ohlin in 1960 insisted that subcultural participants had the ability to create new alternative subcultural frames of reference.

                In the early 1970s the youth subculture concept moved away from mainstream sociology and into criminology. The sociological study of subcultural youths has since developed in North America within the field of criminology. This first wave of American subcultural studies had several weaknesses. Early ecological and strain theories were too deterministic, conceptualizing the formation of subcultures as reactions to mainstream or dominant cultural forces. Analyses were also limited to poor and minority populations in large cities. In the 1960s and 1970s the development of the subculture concept slowed down in the USA, just as a new and different approach to subcultures was emerging in the United Kingdom (UK).

                The field of cultural studies emerged in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly at the CCCS. There, a group of scholars analyzed a variety of British youth subcultures, including teddy boys, mods, rockers, hippies and punks. Their subcultural theories represented a break with the American traditions of structural functionalism and deviance, preferring a neo-Marxian approach to class and power. More particularly, CCCS’s work explored how subcultures provided symbolic solutions to working-class youth.  Participation in a subculture was no longer understood as deviant, but rather as a form of resistance that reflected larger class struggles: ‘the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though even mediated way, “class cultures”’.  Subculture and class must thereby be understood as two sides of the same coin.

                The CCCS’s goal was to explain the emergence of youth subcultures in post-World War II Britain. They believed that British subcultures represented working-class youths’ struggles to differentiate themselves both from their parents’ working-class culture and the dominant bourgeoisie culture. Therefore, subcultures were not framed in terms of strain but as sites of resistance to cultural hegemony. It was part of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat for cultural and social power. The style of these subcultural youths was seen as a symbolic resource for youth insomuch as the dominant culture dismissed, marginalized or rejected its appropriateness.

Herein lies the major difference between the American and British traditions of subcultural studies: instead of an ethnographic approach, CCCS’s studies were primarily grounded in semiotic analysis of style. The goal was to deconstruct the taken-for-granted meanings that were attributed to subcultural objects and practices. More precisely, the process of how taken-for-granted meanings were created, distributed and consumed was investigated. The meaning of cultural objects and practices arose through hegemony as the ruling and working classes struggled over definitions of reality. Within this struggle, subcultures appropriated and inverted cultural meanings, often through the consumption of clothing, music and other leisure commodities.  Through ‘rituals of consumption ... the subculture at once reveals its “secret” identity and communicates its forbidden meanings. It is basically how commodities are used in subculture which marks the subculture off from more orthodox cultural formations’.

While CCCS theorists argued for the importance of making the distinction between subculture and delinquency, they focused primarily on lower-class culture limiting their analyses to males and whites. Their focus on class restricted their ability to make sense of how different subcultures used different sets of symbols to resist dominant culture from within the same working-class parent culture. Subcultures were also theorized as static and homogeneous entities in opposition to a dominant cultural regime and subcultural variability was explained as an ideological struggle rather than an area to be empirically explored. Despite several weaknesses of both the American and British traditions, each tradition has been fundamental in building theoretical, conceptual and methodological bases for the study of youth subcultures. 

In the 1990s many researchers moved away from the semiotic approach of the CCCS theorists, returning to sociological research approaches inspired by ethnographic and qualitative methodologies. Sarah Thornton’s ethnography on clubbing in 1995, for example, drew heavily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu who understands lifestyles – aesthetic attitudes – as a means of distinction from other classes.  According to Bourdieu symbolic capital – signs of distinction such as language or dress codes, and actions of distinction such as the symbolic consumption of music – equals in importance to the accumulation of economic capital.  Thornton’s focus is rather on how clubbers use subcultural capital as an ideological resource through which to accrue ‘hip’ or ‘cool’ status. Subcultural capital must thereby be understood as the cultural knowledge and commodities acquired by members of a subculture, raising their status and helping to differentiate themselves from members of other groups.

It follows that subcultural capital is valuable by virtue of its exclusivity. Hence, as new subcultural sounds and styles emerge they must be prevented from being continually coveted and appropriated by the ‘mass’. This distinction thus occurs through the construction of a mainstream culture as a symbolic marker against which to define one’s own tastes as ‘authentic’. In such way, Thornton is able to account for the development of subcultures, for the boundaries that distinguish them from the inauthentic and commercial are understood as porous and permeable, requiring constant policing through the ongoing process of classifying and reclassifying certain tastes as legitimate. This diachronic treatment is in contrast with the static portrayal from the CCCS that seeks to identify cultural correspondences between different levels of a subculture at a particular point in time.

Thornton thus understands subcultures as constructed through rather than existing prior to media discourse: ‘communications media create subcultures in the process of naming them and draw boundaries around them in the act of describing them’.  By this Thornton moves away from the CCCS conceptualization of subculture as a rigid, reified and realist entity, rooted in underlying class relationships. It is a ‘flight from fixity’, as Evans has termed it.  This established an anti-essentialist approach to subcultural theory. Evans states that all subcultural identities are not ontologically distinct or pre-existent, but are brought into being, constructed and replayed through everyday actions, dress, adornment and other cultural practices.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described in his research ‘Presentation of the self’ how people, like in a theatre, perform different roles by showing themselves in different interactions.  The concept of performativity refers to the attention researchers pay to bodily actions – including speaking – and to what those actions activate. The notion is about human interventions in their world: it is about actions that provide content to aspects of that world. From a performative perspective meanings are fluid: they come into existence in specific situations by doing. The focus of this perspective is on what people do or not do. Therefore, culture becomes a verb. It is a whole of connected actions. The aim of research is then to recognize cultural categories – such as identities and metaphors – that shape and get shaped through actions.

Bourdieu, on the one hand, understands the actualization of norms as a process of conventionalization. There is a practical sense, termed sens pratique, which Bourdieu perceives as a principle that generates reality with performative magic and shows itself in bodily action. The post-structuralist theory of Judith Butler, on the other hand, uses a conception of performativity that is derived from linguistic theory. Her conception of performativity includes both the reality-generating power of bodily actions and the action-character of linguistic expression. In Butler’s understanding, performativity is not a single or intentional act, but a permanently recurring and self-citing practice with which the discourse produces the effects that it designates. 

Butler shares the thesis of a reality-constituting power through the embodiment of a codex of norms with Bourdieu’s theory of embodiment of the habitus.  Bourdieu describes the body as the storage place of a history and, at the same time, as an instrument of action where practical knowledge is produced and the belief in ‘reality’ is permanently reproduced. According to Butler, Bourdieu’s habitus theory describes a silent form of performativity that is believed in and lived at the level of the body.  Both authors call certain phenomena ‘performative’ to denote that they are not determined ontologically or biologically but produced by cultural processes. Butler and Bourdieu do not search for essentialist explanations but emphasize the meaning of social practices. Both approaches, however, do not deny the existence of phenomena. They acknowledge social, sexual, gender and physical differences, yet interpret them not as ontological essence, biological characteristic or phenomenologically given but as schemata developed in social practices. The use of this model of performativity is useful to accentuate the double aspect of non-essentiality and existence via cultural foundation. But whereas Bourdieu calls the ‘rites of installation’  performative because they legitimize and naturalize social distinction, Butler calls cultural acts performative because they constitute identity with the act of negotiation. Thus, Butler’s conception of performativity describes citation as actualization of a structure of norms.

Recently the fluidity and mobility of subcultures has been emphasized, which can be linked to theorizations of postmodernity. This is apparent in Michel Maffesoli’s conception of a ‘tribus’. This term denotes new forms of sociality that can be understood as ‘post-traditional’. Group identities are, in his eyes, no longer formed along structural determinants such as class, gender or religion. Consumption patterns and practices rather enable individuals to create new forms of contemporary sociality – small-scale social configurations that operate beyond modernist class borders. The ‘tribe’ exists also ‘without the rigidity of the forms of organization with which we are familiar; it refers more to a certain ambience, a state of mind, and it is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favor appearance and “form”’  These new network socialities seem to encourage plural, fluid and part-time rather than fixed, discrete and encompassing group identities.

Maffesoli’s work has helped to overcome the modernist paradigm of the CCCS. Yet his work is now being criticized for underemphasizing the politically emancipative elements within youth culture. Maffesoli argues that tribal members rate their individual needs and satisfactions higher than group values and political utopia. This theory therefore fails as an adequate explanation of new forms of political youth cultural activism.  A similar criticism can be applied to Thornton. She breaks with the orthodox model of the CCCS by which youth cultures are presumed to form an opposition to, and eventually become incorporated by, a dominant culture. Thornton is more concerned with elaborating the elitist hierarchies of tasteful distinction that are at work within subcultures. Thereby she assumes that such subcultures are ‘inherently’ resistant by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis a dominant cultural formation.  There is a move to a position that recognizes the differentiation and multiplicity of points of power in society and the way various cultural formations and elements articulate within and across these constellations of power in complex and non-linear ways to produce contingent and modificatory outcomes.  To this move fits the significant feature of subcultural studies today to provide the critical insider perspective. Subcultural studies seek to emically explore the functional, participatory, and lived aspects of young people’s material and non-material cultures.

1.2.         Subcultural identities in the Soviet Union and Baltics

Several works have been written regarding cultural resistance through music in the totalitarian society of the Soviet Union. There was a particular focus on how the musical underground changed together with the transition from a Soviet to a capitalist society. Before Artemy Troitsky published his ‘Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia’ in 1987, rock had been a dissident in the realm of popular music in the USSR for three decades.  Troitsky, an acclaimed critic and activist in the field, published a history of home-grown rock as an insider. The appearance of this book was made possible by the policies of glasnost and perestroika by Gorbachev. Counted as the first book on Soviet rock, it took an openly critical stance towards the cultural institutional set-up.  Before that valuable contributions had been made by Frederick Starr’s chapter on rock in his book ‘Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union’  and Terry Bright’s studies ‘Soviet crusade against pop’  and ‘Pop music in the USSR’.

                ‘Back in the USSR’ is a personal, yet comprehensive historical account of the changing musical currents, of the most significant events, sites and key figures, prominent musicians as well as prominent enthusiasts, of native Soviet rock music. The book reads like a diary relying on Troitsky’s and his musician friends’ experiences and observations.  This approach is not only a matter of personal choice, it is also a matter of necessity as ‘all that is left from our Soviet rock of the sixties and seventies are memories, photographs and a few odd newspaper clippings’.  Troitsky’s publication was also the first to report in depth on the changes in the media rhetoric on rock and youth subcultures, as well as on the significant shift in conditions, contents and atmosphere of music-making activities at the juncture of political and musical ‘new wave’. The book documented the day-to-day realities of musicians’, fans’ and critics’ struggles with the Soviet bureaucracy. Thereby Troitsky also pointed out different means by which rockers had managed to outwit the authorities and sustain a space of their own, thereby still avoiding giving a romanticised picture. ‘Back to the USSR’ thus served as a good introduction and guide to close encounters with the music.

                In 1990 Timothy W. Ryback, then a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University , published ‘Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’.  Ryback gives an overview of rock culture in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from the emergence of rock culture in 1954 to 1990, looking at both sides of the thirty-year war between rock fans and Soviet bloc governments. The book focuses both on the reception and influence of western rock music among East European youth and on the political responses by the various governments of the Soviet bloc. ‘Rock Around the Bloc’ thereby turns out to be not an examination of rock music or rock musicians, but rather a chronicle of indigenous forms of rock and roll in the Soviet bloc countries. Ryback combines materials from diverse sources, such as the archives of Radio Free Europe, MTV specials, Soviet music journals, and interviews with critics and performers. In ‘Rock Around the Bloc’ the development of rock and roll is not seen as isolated from other popular social movements of the period, such as the Czechoslovakia’s political cabaret. Yet, this is not an academic study of rock music, as Ryback does not offer a textual analysis of songs, nor semiotic insights into the indigenous forms of rock culture and omits a bibliography. Ryback, however, offers a thorough and interesting chronicle of the rock era in Eastern Europe.

                Thomas Cushman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Wellesly College and a Fellow at the Harvard Russian Research Center , provided with his ‘Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia’ in 1995 a more theoretically sophisticated and sustained ethnographic analysis of the Leningrad/St.Petersburg rock community, before and after the dissolution of the Soviet state.  Cushman describes the Russian rock music counterculture and how it was changing in response to Russia’s transition from a socialist to a capitalist society. He explored the lived experiences, the thoughts and feelings of the rock musicians as they met the challenges of change.  This study was based on theories of modernity and public culture. Cushman interprets countercultural rock as a response to the experience of socialist industrial modernity characterized by an extreme extent of rationalization – which Cushman termed ‘hyper-rationalization’. Based on the ideas of Edward Tiryakian and Max Weber, Cushman interprets cultural counter-processes in terms of the dialectic of people’s disenchantment with the social world and its re-enchantment via art, in this case rock music.

                Cushman wonders how the spirit of capitalism affected a cultural form that served to re-enchant the bleak realities of Soviet industrial modernity. He concludes that the logic of capitalism is discordant with the culture of state socialism. Although they were oppressed, dissident artists used to enjoy a certain kind of freedom during Soviet times. Because of the extensive welfare services of the socialist state, artists could sustain themselves on a subsistence level. Artists could therefore devote all their energy to music making. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, however, artists lost this unique form of existential freedom, even if they gained political one. With the dissolution of the state’s welfare net, they could not set themselves apart anymore from the ‘real’ world, regulated by commerce.

                The significance of Cushman’s analysis lies primarily in the rich theoretical and analytical tool-kit he applies in probing the local meanings of music, autonomy, authenticity and identity in a unique set of historical circumstances. The overall theoretical framework, however, is not entirely convincing. Although Cushman recognizes the relevance of music to the constitution of a public sphere, he does not succeed in classifying rock music as a form of emancipatory speech act. The Habermasian idea of the public sphere and the corresponding theory of communicative action leave little space for non-verbal modes of communication. Also, Cushman’s idea of state socialism as a hyper-rational social system can be contested. Research evidence and day-to-day experience suggest that theories of economic planning and social engineering crashed on the ground of reality and therefore produced conditions of irrationality.

In 2001 Anna Szemere published ‘Up From the Underground. The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary’.  Szemere is a Hungary-born adjunct professor at Penn State University and Washington State University, and an independent scholar, focusing on the sociology of culture and media.  ‘Up From the Underground’ is an in-depth inquiry into the fifteen year long collective history of underground rock musicians in Hungary - from the movement’s inception in 1980 through its complete realignment in 1995 - focusing on how they anticipated, precipitated and responded to the Fall of the Wall in 1989.  In fact, Szemere investigated the same as Cushman did, but then for the casus of Hungary and based on different theoretical frameworks.

The main theoretical questions Szemere asks in her work are: ‘what is the nature of popular culture’s autonomy and how is it related to cultural actors’ autonomy? What aspects of autonomy are at play under conditions of structural social change, and how are they played out by cultural actors?’  Szemere argues that musicians, critics, concert organizers, record label owners and music audiences struggled for autonomy via cultural practices, primarily music, via the creation of their own underground infrastructure and via their discourse about their art and the way they interpreted the meaning and significance of rock as a cultural form. In the eyes of Szemere, autonomy has two dimensions: cultural or artistic authenticity and political economic authenticity. The cultural authenticity claims the independence and separation of the arts from other domains of social life, especially that of politics, an idea that goes back to Jurgen Habermas. The political economic notion of autonomy stipulates the idea of cultural freedom and producers’ control over the creative process.

Again, like Troitsky and Cushman, Szemere investigates how the everyday experience pertains to social change. In other words, Szemere did a research on how subcultural life and its institutions mediate macro social transformation for the individual and the group. With the notion of cultural autonomy in mind, Szemere tried to find how music activities encouraged the construction and re-construction of meaning and identity at a time of disorientation and discontinuity. She argues that Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, habitus and symbolic/cultural capital offers a useful framework to capture the shifting socio-historical grounds, yet with certain limitations. Bourdieu’s theory is too static, as he understands the field of cultural production as a relatively solid and bounded entity. Szemere offers an expansion of Bourdieu’s scheme in order to account for the shifting significance in response to the reorganization of the fields of culture, economy and power.

Drawing on the theory of Thornton, Szemere demystifies the process whereby cultural actors strategize to secure symbolic value for specific popular forms and styles as they distinguish it from those deemed inferior in a field traditionally looked down upon by the brokers of high culture. Szemere argues that East-European rockers’ primary means of asserting their difference and freedom was the creation of texts that were subversive, yet still perceived as ‘art’ rather than mere surrogate politics. By establishing an underground infrastructure – concert spaces, a network for the distribution of audiotapes – these musicians ensured a certain amount of creative freedom and sustenance of identity.  So, ‘the ideology of aesthetic autonomy enhanced the political economic space for the production of … politically contentious texts and styles of performance’.  With the transition the whole cultural political arena in which texts, meanings and identities cohered into an underground art scene, crumbled. Establishing a distinctive marginal identity became very difficult by merely composing and performing cultural texts. Rock no longer constituted a privileged terrain of critical consciousness when the political arena opened up to burgeoning civil society activism. Therefore, the rock underground in Hungary experienced a major crisis and began to redefine autonomy as space or infrastructure (political economic autonomy) rather than music ideology (cultural autonomy).

The Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist Alexei Yurchak wrote a book in 2005 about the way young Soviet Russians talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. In ‘Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation’ Yurchak uses memoirs and post-Soviet recollections of the 1970s and 1980s: diaries, letters, written notes, drawings, jokes, slang, music recordings and amateur films. Based on the theories of Bourdieu and Austin’s performative language , Yurchak argues that the paradox of late socialism stemmed from the fact that the more the system’s authoritative discourse was reproduced, the more the system was experiencing a profound internal displacement. This displacement was a result of the particular relationship between authoritative discourse and the forms of social reality for which it could not fully account.  Reproducing the system and participating in its continuous internal displacement were mutually constitutive processes. The changes caused by perestroika did not make it possible anymore to reproduce the experience of the system’s immutability, therefore the paradoxes of late socialism could no longer exist. Perestroika at the same time revealed that by unanimously participating in the system’s institutions, rituals, discourses and lifestyles, everyone was involved in the system’s continuous displacement. This realization was unexpected, as the system appeared monolithic and immortal through its hegemony of form. 

All the previous works dealt with underground music in Russia or Hungary during the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Thereby sociological and anthropological methods are applied to the study of music. In 1982 Joachim Braun (1929-2013), an Israeli musicologist of Latvian-Jewish origin , argued that the sociology of music was neglected in the Baltics.  When giving an overview of the musicology in the Baltic States from 1990 till 2007, Braun looked at three encyclopaedias: ‘Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart’ , ‘Garland Encyclopedia of World Music’  and ‘New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians’.  He observed that on the first Soviet year (1940-1941) there was hardly any information at all. Braun argued, however, that this year rendered Baltic music lifeless for many years to come and shocked the local musical community through the brutal involvement of Soviet authorities in all aspects of musical life.

When addressing the question how Baltic musicologists of the post-Soviet period have dealt with the interpretation of music created under conditions of totalitarian censorship, Braun mentions that this subject is barely touched upon in any of the three encyclopaedias. ‘This is quite clearly a reflection of the present state of Baltic musicology, where in fact we can hardly find … examples of the tragic predicament into which musicologists and musicians were placed during the years of Soviet rule’.  Braun states that if some latent or open critical dissent was noted in the music of this time, it has been attributed to folk music only, which provides a misleading picture of the state of the musical art during this period.

Arnolds Klotiņš filled the lacuna of Baltic music life during the first Soviet year by publishing ‘Music during the Occupation: Musical Activity and Composition in Latvia, 1940-1945’. It is a survey of musical life in Latvia under Soviet (1940-1941) and Nazi (1941-1945) occupation. Based upon government decrees, reports and reviews published in the mass media, concert programs, photographs, letters, diaries and the author’s personal interviews, the book provides a historical context to biographies of twentieth-century Latvian composers and conductors. Klotiņš gives insight into a complex mixture of often-contradictionary cases of resistance, collaboration and/or submission by composers, performers, critics and administrators. Active resistance to Soviet power, Klotiņš summarizes, was more commonly practiced by non-musicians than musicians.  Under both occupations, public musical life was regulated by the occupier’s ideology: the Soviets, on the one hand, intensively stimulated musical production while, at the same time, placing heavy restrictions and requirements on content. The Nazis, on the other hand, saw all non-German musicians and music as inferior and planned to Germanize and colonize the region. Although the content of music performances differed extensively under Soviet and Nazi rule, there are similarities between both authoritarian regimes.

Three other books regarding underground music in the Baltics have appeared in the past decade. Uldis Rudaks’ ‘Rokupacija’ (2008) , Mindaugas Peleckis’ ‘Lietuvos Rokas’ (2011)  and Jānis Joņevs’ ‘Jelgava ‘94’ (2013).  Unfortunately I cannot include these books in my historiography because of my insufficient knowledge of the Latvian and Lithuanian language. In 2014, however, Guntis Šmidchens published ‘The Power of Song. Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution’.  The nonviolent Baltic independence movement was named the ‘Singing Revolution’, a term used by Estonian journalist Heinz Valk. In ‘The Power of Song’ Šmidchens answers the question why the struggle for Baltic independence came to be called the Singing Revolution. He researches what role singing played in the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian campaigns of political mobilization and nonviolent action. The book offers an insight into choral, rock and folk songs in order to interpret meanings that Balts themselves may have imagined when they sang them. The research addresses a well-known problem, the question of whether it is possible to reconcile nonviolent principles with a pursuit of nationalist power.

                Šmidchens concludes that one could not have predicted with certainty that the Baltic independence movements would remain nonviolent. As events unfolded, however, it became clear that Balts were fighting a nonviolent struggle. ‘Somehow, war songs strengthened the public’s resolve to continue on a nonviolent course’.  The singing repertoire of the Singing Revolution included much more than songs of nationalism and liberation. There were also love songs or religious songs. Both religion and nationalism were repressed by the Soviets. National and religious symbolism shared the image of being born again.  Many of the songs of the Singing Revolution did not have political texts. A song’s text did not need to contain explicit ideology. Under Soviet rule, unofficial national anthems emerged, partly because of what they said, but also because of what they did not say. They omitted explicit declarations on Soviet loyalty that were required in official songs. Singing offered a mechanism for stepping away from the officially imposed Soviet identity as music homogenizes social behavior. If many people sing together, Šmidchens argues, Anderson’s imagined community becomes temporarily emplaced, embodied by actions and expressions on the participants.

1.3.         Fluid subcultural identities in oral history

By conducting interviews with musicians, record label owners and concert organizers, talking about the past, I come to the method of oral history. This concept can be understood in four different ways. Firstly, it can refer to the activity of telling about the past and listening to those memories. Oral history in this sense denotes the listening and registering of stories about happenings, experiences, feelings and behaviours from the past. It is assumed that the past is brought back to life while telling those stories. Secondly, the term oral history can also refer to the product of the telling and listening: the oral source that gives a certain, indirect access to the past. The focus is on the recording or the transcript of the interview the researcher made happen. Thirdly, the concept can also mean the result of the research process in which interviews where used. Oral history then is a historical narrative that is based on the stories of the past. It is the book, the exhibition or another finished product that was made with the aid of oral testimonies. Like every history, oral history does not coincide with the past, but is a story about that past. Finally, the term refers to a particular research method. The intention to find answers to a certain historical question or problem is emphasized. It is aimed to give certain insights into the evolutions and situations from the recent past via conversations. In this meaning, oral history becomes a way through which we try to understand the past. It is an attempt to capture that past and the way people handle it.

                In this research I consider oral history predominantly in the last meaning, as a research method. The oral history therefore is not a goal in itself, but rather a tool. Historians make stories that come into being because they allow others to answer questions about the past. To put it differently, oral history serves the knowledge of the past and of the way the past is shaped today. Letting people speak makes it possible to complement insights that were made earlier through written sources. The interview allows nuancing, looking differently at or even correcting information from written sources.

Oral history is a form of qualitative research. It is a method that requires an exploratory and flexible attitude with attention for concrete situations. It is better to use a survey to correlate data in a systematic way with big and comparable data series, which were answered by a representative part of the population. Such a statistic approach does not work, however, when working with people telling stories about their past. Those stories do not need to be measured, but rather interpreted.  Characteristic of a qualitative research method are case studies. Those case studies will never be the average, yet serve to offer a portal to see processes that have occurred in other examples as well. Rather than working with numbers and statistics, the focus is on the discourse or the ways of speaking and thinking that are retraced in the story. Therefore stories ask for interpretation.

Oral history is, per definition, an interdisciplinary method. For this reason the British historian Lynn Abrams calls oral history a crossover methodology that, like an octopus, has tentacles, which stretch to all sides. Historians who use interviews indeed use a lot of concepts, working methods and insights from related fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics.  According to the Italian literature scientist Alessandro Portelli, the method of oral history is best described as a genre: a way to bring the past alive both orally and in a written form.  The method differs from other methods, as it demands its own working methods and interpretation frameworks, which are borrowed from disciplines outside of the historical discipline. Especially the oral source differs from the other historical sources: the heart of the practice consists of a meeting with living people, not with paper documents or other relics from the past.

An oral historian recognizes that people attach meaning to happenings by putting them in a story. People provide content to experiences and seem to get control over their life by telling about their past. That happens more in an associative and imaginative way than in a causal one. Experiences from the past move in a chaotic world that needs stories to get any coherence. The interview brings a story into being that might seem individual, but in reality it is socially and culturally kneaded. People never tell within a vacuum, but use the building blocks of their environment. If they had been born in a different place or time, they would not use the same words or give different meanings to the same word.  This method therefore fits well to the recent performative stance among historians. Without overlooking the greater structures of the course of life, this research method pays attention to practices and the fluidity of their meaning according to concrete situations in which they were executed.  The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs introduced the term ‘collective memory’: societies and groups produce generally accepted narrative repertoires for the representation of their past.  The influence of this collective memory is no problem for the oral historian. By focusing on identities of groups it is possible to understand stories as parts of shared experiences. In this way, the unique is not as unique as it seems at first sight.

Contexts do not exist as a pre-fixed scene, they rather exist as a tangle of spaces in which certain practices and forms of imagination are possible and others not. Processes of change therefore not only happen above and outside the individual, but also in the individual and in the shared way of looking and thinking, acting and moving. Norms and values cannot be detached from social practices that circulate within a society. On the contrary, they are shaped, captured and passed on through practices. It is therefore wrong to think that experiences, like they were really experienced, can be found in a testimony.

According to Portelli oral history is a dialogue. He describes the dialogue as a comprehensive exchange.  Historians have an active part in oral history, but also the people who tell a certain part of their past are actively involved in the conversation. Therefore they are referred to as narrators rather than respondents, witnesses or informants. These three last terms evoke the image of a passive person, of someone who, without interfering, offers a gateway to the past that already existed yet never saw the surface before. Partly they are such gateways, but they are more than that. As historians of their own life they have a scenario in mind and combine fragments into a whole on the spot. They perform the telling in interaction with the audience that is bigger than the present interviewer and is embodied by the recording device, which is the gate through which the story can be passed to others. 

In every research other narrators are present who at first sight do not have their say. The narrator can present the viewpoint of other people in his or her story: by mentioning a name regularly, by talking about ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and by performing dialogues with others. This ‘reported speech’ has a certain shape – ‘then he said:…’ and ‘I thought:…’ - that is recognizable from everyday conversations.  There is also the possibility of a group interview. Group meetings are never the sum of a couple of individual interviews. They reflect the group dynamics, which can work both stimulating and blocking. When investigating a shared past, the act of bringing together former colleagues, friends, etc. helps in activating their memories. Their dialogues can invoke the language, atmosphere and inner relations from the past.

Even before the telling starts, there is a creation of meaning. An oral historian opens the social interaction himself by approaching the narrators in a certain way. For this research I used the method of ‘snowball sampling’ whereby one narrator referred me to other narrators. The downside of this method is that you can unconsciously limit yourself to a segment of narrators. Certain perspectives then become overexposed or even overshadowed.  Yet the persons I interviewed offered me a story that gave me entrance to a rich past world, which I wished to explore. With my selection of narrators, I ended up with an elite oral history, as I interviewed famous people from the cultural life of those and these times.

An oral historian should avoid that his own words and own world drown out the words of the narrator and the associated past world. An open position, therefore, is important, as it signifies respect. The oral historian gives up his authority in order for the narrator to fill in the meeting instead of pushing him or her in a certain direction, which can be unpleasant. This open position includes a lot of silence from the oral historian himself. He listens instead of constantly asking questions. By doing this the narrator is acknowledged as the expert and the historian makes clear to him or her that he is ignorant in many areas. This encourages the narrator to talk about the obvious, about those things that are known to them, but not to others.  An interview about the past is different from collecting facts. It is rather a creative happening, the emergence of a story that is over. In that process listening seems to be more important than asking questions, which can be used to collect as much ‘data’ as possible and to test them on their ‘correctness’.  That is why I did not start my interviews by asking any questions, but by letting the narrators talk freely about their part in the underground music scene.

Oral history is a creative process. ‘Something’ is happening when people tell about the past. Although the act of remembering is very volatile, narrators shape their past in your presence by establishing the world they lived in through a story. In this sense every story becomes a performance. The narrating is performative as it involves a formation: those who tell about the past do not only reproduce the past, they also give meaning to it. The shapeless disorder of the past gets a unity and wholeness by being told. Those who tell about the past change the past. The stories being told are about the experiences of the narrator and therefore not fiction. Yet, there is a creation at work as, before the interview, the story did not exist in the form it got during the interview. That is the reason why oral historians are part of the performance themselves.  The performance of the story about the past, the remembering via words, gestures and objects are meaningful. Therefore, the interview should not be understood as a happening that in itself articulates meanings, but rather as a means to gather material to work with.  Portelli argues that it is necessary not only to pay attention to ‘what’ is being said in order to research the past and the way people deal with it, it is also important to notice ‘who’ is telling something, ‘how’ the story gets shaped, ‘why’ such story is even told and what the coherence of this all could mean.  Therefore, in oral history meaning is more important than information itself.

In the past itself narrators already gave meaning to what they experienced. On the one hand, they could not experience everything what was happening. Every observation is selective. On the other hand, narrators experienced things through their own background. Past experiences do not appear as such. Those stories would not exist without the words narrators use in our times. Language makes these experiences real. By expressing in words the meaning that the experience had in itself, or did not have, narrators enable the listener and a wider community to make those experiences real and reflect on them.  Meanings are not hard facts. They are constantly brought into being and fluid. They only seem to become ‘something’ when the oral historian writes down the told experiences and creates sense out of them.

Narrators interpret the past, rather than reproducing it as it was. How the narrator has understood an event and looks at it in the present belongs to the reality of giving meaning. To put it differently, narratives are interpretations that, in their turn, ask for interpretation.  Those who want to investigate the giving of meaning via narratives, have to deal with a ‘narrative reality’. With such a truth, according to the psychoanalytic Donald Spence, the communication between the narrator and the audience is based on a familiar narrative form, namely the dramatizing of information. This form does not deliver stories that are real because they evoke the past in a plausible way.  From a narrative point of view, the truth lies not in the chain of facts, but in metaphors that form plots through their mutual connection.

                Stories are forms of knowledge: by narrating we gain insights. We create order in our world by making stories in our heads, in the conversations we have with other people or in other cultural activities. Every story consists of actors, their actions, a place and a time within which experiences get a framework, watersheds happen, evaluations are given and dialogues take place.  With these narrative elements – performing of actors and their actions, locating in time and space, evaluating and having dialogues – narrators are able to develop their story. A researcher also uses metaphors, genres and a certain narrative style. Just like the narrators themselves, oral historians want to create order in the chaos. Oral history therefore refers both to what you have heard and what you have said and written yourself.  Oral historians have to deal with the creation of new meanings through language via the use of metaphors that combine the one with the other. Metaphors are omnipresent in talking, thinking and doing. They help to understand one reality by another. The tangible world thereby often helps to grasp something more abstract.

                For this research twelve people, who were engaged in underground music during the Soviet and/or post-Soviet period, from both Latvia and Lithuania were interviewed.  As for Latvian underground music, Andris Indāns, Edgars Šubrovskis, Raimonds Lagimovs, Indriķis Veitners and Uldis Rudaks were interviewed. Andris Indāns (1973) is a music producer and composer who has been an active musician since the late 1980s in bands such as Kartāga  and Gas of Latvia.  Edgars Šubrovskis (1975) was Indāns’ band member in Kartāga and later played in Hospitāļu iela  and Ansamblis Manta.  Raimonds Lagimovs (1968), also known as Dambis, founded Inokentijs Mārpls  in 1987 and has organized many musical events. Jazz musician Indriķis Veitners (1970) was connected to underground music via his contacts with Lagimovs and others. Music journalist Uldis Rudaks (1968) writes for the Latvian newspaper Diena.  With regard to Lithuanian underground music, Arma, Domininkas Kunčinas, Tomas Verbaitis, Dovydas Bluvšteinas, Jonas Oškinis, Rytis Bulota and Jurij Dobriakov were interviewed. Arma (1982) is a sound-performance artist, active since 1998, who has organized several underground music events and has his own record label Agharta.  Domininkas Kunčinas (1976) is the current editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian culture webzine Ore.lt  and has played in Dr. Green.  Tomas Verbaitis (1976) was Kunčinas’s band member in Dr. Green. Dovydas Bluvšteinas (1959) is a former promotor and founded Zona Records  in 1991. Jonas Oškinis (1973) was editor of the underground fanzine Koks Nors Kelias (1989-1993) and contributed to the emergence of Ore.lt webmagazine in 1998. Rytis Bulota (1972) was active in the Kaunas underground scene since the 1980s and played in Pionieriaus garbės žodis, 33% kiaulių pakeliui į Vatikaną  and Mountainside.  Jurij Dobriakov (1983) is an independent culture researcher and critic.

1.4.         Conclusion

This research on underground music in Latvia and Lithuania during the Soviet and post-Soviet period fits in the British tradition of subcultural studies, where subcultures are understood as sites of resistance to cultural hegemony. The meaning of cultural objects and practices is thereby investigated. This study also draws heavily on the opinion of Thornton and Evans that subcultural identity is brought into being, constructed and replayed through everyday actions, dress and other cultural practices. This performative stance enables a diachronic treatment of underground music. This research is also based on Butler’s understanding of cultural acts as performative because they constitute identities with the act of negotiation. The works of Troitsky, Cushman and Szemere fit in this performative tradition, as they all studied how everyday experiences pertained social change. Szemere, for example, focused in her research on how people secured symbolic values through texts and infrastructure. This research wants to implement the same performative stance in studies on music in the Baltics, in particular underground music.

                People attach meaning to happenings by putting them in a story. Therefore, oral history is the best method to investigate underground music in the Baltics, as it pays attention to practices and the fluidity of their meaning according to concrete situations in which they are executed. Oral history must be understood as a dialogue, in which both narrator and the oral historian take an active part. The narrating itself thereby is performative as it involves a formation: people give meaning to the past. Narratives, in other words, are interpretations of the past that ask for interpretation themselves.

 2.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY DURING THE SOVIET PERIOD

In this chapter the music underground in Latvia and Lithuania during the Soviet period is investigated. After a political overview in relation to music, the musical life of underground musicians in Lithuania and Latvia is described further on. Based on the conducted interviews, the concrete experiences are related to the general overview in order to come to conclusions regarding underground identity in Soviet Latvia and Lithuania.

2.1.         The political Soviet culture

Culture, as seen by Stalin and the Soviets, contained a mechanism that would transform the people who remained after the military violence of the aftermath of World War II had ended. Poetry songs and mass events played a critical role in Stalinist and post-Stalinist policies. Government offices were established to administer all arts, including songs. The writers union and the composers union organized the creation of poetry and its setting to music, the philharmonic oversaw professional performances and people’s arts centres organized public singing events. Membership in and cooperation with these institutions was mandatory in order to legally earn money by publishing or performing music. The work of union members was planned and guided by incentives and punishments. Members were paid with money and in other material rewards for art that adhered to government policy. If they did not confirm that policy, however, artists were expelled from the unions, which meant persecution by the Soviet political police.

Each song and each concert programme had to be approved of by the Soviet Artistic Affairs Board before it could be performed in public; organizers or performers who did not obey these orders would be held criminally accountable. Censorship of the mass media was ensured by an administrative network, of which the existence was a Soviet state secret.  The purpose of culture, as imagined by Stalin, was to physiologically condition humans to adopt a new behaviour. Stalin and his ideological followers sought to control the entire Soviet environment and all of the stimuli – linguistic signals in particular - that would condition people’s behaviour. Their goal was the creation and cultivation of a new breed of people, the so-called ‘Soviet Human’.

Beginning in 1932, the principles of ‘socialist realism’ officially defined and regulated culture in the Soviet Union. Art was defined as a political act, with the purpose of constructing a communist society. Its guiding principles were encapsulated in four Russian principles: partiinost’ (party-ness), ideinost’ (idea-ness), kollektivnost’ (collectiveness) and narodnost’ (people-ness). The first stipulated that art’s purpose was to unambiguously submit to the leading role of Joseph Stalin and later, the Communist Party. The second, idea-ness, required that art enacted these leader’s ideas. Collectiveness, the third, aimed to unite individuals in group action. The fourth, people-ness, postulated that art should be accessible and appealing to the masses. Art’s appealing nature would derive from its adaptation of earlier art traditions, either folk or national. Accessibility implied that texts had no hidden meanings that might send confused stimuli to their recipients. An artist thus should explicitly take sides in politics and declare loyalty to the ideas of the Communist leaders.

                Soviet socialist realist art served as an effective instrument of political coercion from the mid 1930s. Specifics were open to interpretation by political leaders and therefore any artist could be found guilty of breaking the rules. The practice of naming persons who purportedly transgressed the rules of socialist realism, was very effective in controlling art. Persons in political power often made accusations of ‘formalism’ – a focus on form instead of content – and ‘western influence’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’, which meant public humiliation, arrest, deportation or death in a prison camp. Being apolitical or passive was also a crime. The fear of punishment was the most powerful reason why composers composed or singers sang loyal songs in the Stalinist era. After the death of Stalin in 1953, his principles of behavioural conditioning faded, but loyal songs still functioned as public displays of submission to Soviet power. The hazy definition of Soviet socialist realism and its enemies thus remained an instrument of official exclusion and an obstacle to free artistic expression until the late 1980s, when censorship collapsed.

                ‘Party-ness’ was manifest at all mass events. Yurchak argues that some people truly felt such loyalty. During the later years of Soviet socialism, repetition of government slogans was a ritual that enabled people to bond in groups ‘outside’ Soviet reality. This was not necessarily in opposition to communist ideals and goals, but rather in the name of these ideals and goals.  Under Stalinism there existed a multiplicity of beliefs pertaining to official ideology and policies, even if disloyal beliefs usually remained out of sight.  The Soviet-era choirs and dance ensembles that performed loyal music, for example, were not necessarily followers of the Communist Party and its ideology. Their repertoires were integrated into the official culture of the Soviet Union and regulated through established processes of punishment or payment to leaders.  However, dancers also felt national pride and, in the words of Šmidchens, ‘perhaps, imagined that they danced and sang for reasons other than state propaganda’.

                Regardless of the beliefs within people’s minds, symbolic displays of submission maintained Soviet power structures, thereby confirming the Communist Party’s leading role in the Soviet Union. Vaclav Havel argued that, for the Soviet system to persist, individuals would not need to believe government spokesmen and slogans: ‘They must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system’.  ‘Living within a lie’ still continued after Stalin’s death as the Soviet system mutated into what Havel calls a ‘post-totalitarian’ system where power over the population was no longer derived from military might and violence. It continued even when formerly forbidden musical forms were brought into the fold of official Soviet culture.  In 1955, for example, a series of articles in the Soviet press signalled that jazz would now be allowed in estrada – a category of light entertainment or dancing music named after the ‘stage’ or ‘bandshell’ on which it was played. The saxophone, banned under Stalin, was rehabilitated, national estrada competitions and music education programmes were established and there began a jazz-fuelled campaign to convert estrada into ‘serious’ listening music.

                In the Baltics, singing traditions are difficult to categorize under the labels of loyalty or opposition to Soviet power. The Lithuanian composer Jonas Švedas, for example, authored numerous songs of Soviet loyalty, among them the national anthem of Soviet Lithuania. But in 1946, he led the Lithuanian SSR Folk Music Ensemble, which often performed ‘We Were Born Lithuanians’. This to the consternation of a Soviet overseer who wrote: ‘The choir’s artistic directors Ilčiukas and Švedas performed these songs, as they say, ‘to raise the spirit’ of the audiences at concerts. But it must be pointed out that such songs only ‘raise the spirit’ of a certain number of listeners, those who have non-Soviet ideology’.  Švedas’ main cultural work lay somewhere between the two ends of the collaboration-confrontation continuum. The ensemble performed mostly instrumental music and traditional dances, neither of which engaged Soviet politics.

                In 1949, Alfrēds Kalniņš openly composed music based on explicitly non-Soviet religious themes. Braun calls this the first Soviet Latvian ‘artwork of dissent’.  The words ‘dissent’ and ‘dissident’ are not appropriate for describing Alfrēds Kalniņš. Havel writes that the people called ‘dissidents’ are not primarily denying or rejecting anything. On the contrary, they have tried to affirm their own human identity, and if they reject anything at all, then it is merely what was false and alienating in their lives, that aspect of ‘living within a lie’.  A black-and-white distinction between ‘dissidents’ and ‘collaborators’ is therefore problematic. Most singers and audiences hardly ever, if at all, sang songs that explicitly attacked Soviet power structures. There were no anti-Soviet texts sung at the Baltic song festivals of the Soviet period, for example. The songs that met particular public resonance had an unclear connection to socialist realism’s requirement of ‘party-ness’. Their truth lay in omission: they did not repeat the official, explicit lie and thereby remained outside of the lie, in a non-Soviet identity. Some songs which otherwise would not have been considered political, became political, precisely because they were not political at a time when political expression was required. Audiences heard explicit texts of loyalty alongside apolitical texts and requested encores of the latter, non-Soviet songs. The singers could feel that they were not participating in the official politics of mass festivals.

                Vaclav Havel wrote that a revolution could be imagined in the post-totalitarian Soviet world if a person stepped out of ‘living within a lie’: ‘He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth …. Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation; you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual’.  After Stalin’s death, such attempts were no longer life threatening, but an individual would still risk career and livelihood by the decision not to participate in the public lie. As more persons stepped out of the Soviet ideological façade, the entire system would melt away.

                The history of rock music in the Soviet Union grew out of the history of jazz. A Lithuanian Komitet Gosoedarstvennoj Bezopasnosti (KGB) report about the repression of rock fans in 1962 called the music ‘ultra-modern jazz’. Post-totalitarian Soviet attacks on rock music indeed resembled earlier Stalinist attacks on jazz. This type of music was considered by the Soviets to have an evil effect on the brain and on human behaviour: it stimulated the ‘basest instincts and sexual urges’, thereby corrupting the rational, non-erotic character of the new Soviet human. Loud rock music ‘possessed’ dancers, breaking down self-control, leading to destructive violence.  Mass media hardly ever mentioned rock, and if they did, only to attack it as a product of the ‘rotting’ West. But just as elements of jazz were absorbed into government cultural programs of the late 1950s, so changed Soviet policy towards rock music a decade later.

                Soviet censorship of public concerts intensified after the 1968 revolution in Czechoslovakia. Electric guitars and drums, however, were still allowed, even if the words ‘rock and roll’ were usually replaced by the euphemisms ‘big beat’, ‘vocal-instrumental ensembles’, ‘contemporary youth music’, ‘electric guitar songs’ or ‘popular dance music’. A harbinger of the new policy was the 1967 film Prisoner of Kavkaz, in which not only music was played on electric guitars and drums but also popular actors danced a variant of the Twist. Troitsky characterized the new official attitude as follows: ‘Of course it’s all nonsense, and the music is for idiots, but let them fool around, it’s nothing terrible’.  What was unacceptable, however, was rock’s tendency to move ahead without official sanction, bypassing the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party and Soviet cultural institutions. Another 1967 rock music film, produced in Latvia, presented a different motive for the new Soviet policy. In Four White Shirts, a Communist Party leader pointed out: ‘The experiments characteristic of youth should not, I think, be stifled, but they should be guided into the correct direction, comrades. Is that not so?’  Talented musicians could be lured out of the underground and into institutionally supported performances that guaranteed a stable source of income in return for submission to the government’s official processes of repertoire control.  They would thus make concessions to ‘party-ness’ and work with the leadership and censorship from above.

                Rock music in Estonia existed somewhere between official and unofficial cultures. Estonian bands played at the cutting edge of 1970s Soviet rock music and many of them, on the one hand, were integrated into the professional music circuit. Some bands, like Apelsin , travelled on concert tours to Russia and other Soviet republics, and their performances were broadcasted on television. At a time when rock was rarely published officially, the Estonian branch of Melodiya  produced many cassette recordings. Illegal night-time access to a professional studio yielded high-quality underground recordings that even slipped into radio broadcasts. In 1979 rock gained an institutional foothold at Tartu University, where Rein Lang, Erki Berends and Riho Illak started an annual overview concert of Estonian bands with occasional guests from outside the country.

                Estonian rock groups, on the other hand, openly broke Soviet social norms and moral rules. On stage only scripted and approved words were allowed, but the rule was not observed. In between songs, for example, the singer of Apelsin would call out the name of the city where they performed and the audience would respond enthusiastically; the singer was told to stop, but he continued until the band’s performance permit was revoked. In Estonia it was considered a mark of honour for a group to have been banned at least once, and most singers and bands were punished repeatedly.  The Soviets attacked other aspects of rock culture with mixed results. Regarding the traditional energy sources of rock music worldwide – sex, drugs and alcohol – little could be done other than policing behaviour at concerts. The words of rock songs were subject to the traditional Soviet rules. There could be no compromise regarding western rock poetry’s ideological core, which rejected an older generation’s political and moral values. Such content challenged the Communist Party’s leading role, and therefore was censored. In the West, rock’s nonconformist essence could be absorbed by the ideology of liberal democracy, but in the Soviet world a single person’s refusal to participate in the official structures was a threat to ‘collectiveness’ and thereby a threat to the entire ideological system. Rock music offered more than simply a youthful rebellion against the older generation.  According to Ryback, it was one of the only available outlets for open expression. For the two decades from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties in the Soviet Union, rock music was a refuge, a place where a person could live within the truth and find others who did the same. William Husband stipulated that rock also gave people rudimentary experience in group mobilization and group protest.

                Change was brewing in the Communist Party and the Soviet government. In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev passed away, to be replaced by Yurii Andropov, a leader whose public image maintained that he enjoyed ‘jazz’ music but who surveyed a wave of repression against political dissidents and rock musicians alike. After Andropov’s sudden death fifteen months later, power passed to the aging conservative Konstantin Chernenko, who himself passed away in March of 1985. Then Mikhail Gorbachev stepped to power and announced a new programme of economic restructuring (perestroika) to be supported by open public discussion of policy (glasnost). Glasnost relaxed the censorship of art and lifted restrictions on rock music’s access to public stages and the mass media.

                The purpose of Gorbachev’s glasnost was to restructure and strengthen the Soviet economy. Open public discussions of environmental policy were allowed within this frame. In the Baltics, however, environmental issues were tied to questions of sovereignty over the country’s natural resources, and public discussion inevitably shifted to national sovereignty. Gorbachev hinted that glasnost could now extend into previously censored ‘blank spots’ of Soviet history. In the Baltics this led to public rejection of the Soviet government’s historical legitimacy. It is not surprising that rock songs quickly filled every crack that opened in Soviet censorship during the early Gorbachev era. Rock musicians could compose, perform, record and broadcast new songs more quickly (and loudly) than choral composers and choirs.  In Estonia rock music was surfacing on public stages, attracting large audiences to concerts organized by leaders who stood outside of official Soviet institutions. In the summer of 1987, a group of nongovernment individuals organized an international ‘heavy rock’ festival, with twenty-six bands and an audience of fifteen thousand. Rock music was liberated, but political expression was restricted to the Soviet frame.  Troitsky elaborated that Antis  was called a ‘Gorbachev’ band in Lithuania, while the name ‘Antis’ is the Lithuanian word for ‘duck’, a word used in slang meaning ‘false story released by the government’.  Rock music was the genre chosen by a singer as it offered means of exposing harsh truths. Antis connected powerfully with audiences in this way.

                In June 1988 the potential for real change was tangible, first of all, in the simple fact that there was true freedom of speech and assembly. Radically new perspectives had opened up a few months earlier on February 24, when, for the first time under Soviet occupation, the Soviet police did not stop a public commemoration of Estonia’s Independence Day. But 1988 also saw the activation of organizations aiming to preserve Soviet power in Estonia, and an intensified surge of anti-Estonian and anti-Baltic propaganda.  In the summer of that year, rock musicians became national standard-bearers all across the Baltics. Antis spearheaded the emerging mass movement in Lithuania. The group awakened civic activism in the ‘Rock March’ of 1987, a national tour of rock bands that raised money for the Lithuanian Cultural Foundation. In 1988, for example, Antis displayed the yellow-green-red flag of independent Lithuania to declare a non-Soviet identity. That year’s Rock March mobilized political support for Sąjūdis and Lithuanian independence. The Latvian singing revolution found its centre on August 23, 1988, at the premiere of the rock opera ‘Bearslayer’. This rock opera offered a vision of a national hero who was not armed and fought to awaken humanity without using violence against his enemies. The rock opera either shaped the public’s values or resonated deeply with values that were already present, but the subsequent political developments derived from this nonviolent ideology of 1988.

                Rock singers also stretched Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national identity to include a shared Baltic unity. Unified political action depended on the coordinated work of the three national nongovernmental organizations, the Estonian Popular Front, the Latvian Popular Front, and the Lithuanian Sąjūdis, which came together to organize the Singing Revolution’s largest mass demonstration: the ‘Baltic Way’ of August 23, 1989, in which a million Balts formed a six-hundred-mile human chain connecting Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, declaring unity while remembering the Soviet-Nazi treaty that had ceded their countries to Stalin on that date fifty years earlier. A memorable mover of this expanded identity was the trilingual rock song ‘Baltic Awakening’, sung by Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian musicians. The song, like the ‘Baltic Way’ human chain, linked national cultures together in a transnational Baltic identity. The singers urged Balts to awaken and defend their nations’ honour.

                The songs of the Baltic Singing Revolution had two political functions. First, they expressed national identity, and second, they proposed action derived from that identity. Sabrina Ramet argues: ‘Rock musicians figured – in the Soviet and East European context of the 1980s – a bit like prophets. That is to say, they did not invent or create the ideas of revolution or the feelings of discontent and disaffection. But they were sensitive to the appearance and growth of these ideas and feelings and gave them articulation, and in this way they helped to reinforce the revolutionary tide’.  Revolution, discontent and disaffection were not common themes in the Baltics after 1988. When censorship dissolved, the anger, irony and cynicism in rock songs did not linger. Instead of expressing feelings of discontent, Baltic rock turned to the construction and consolidation of national identity rather than the destruction of its opponents. Their songs asserted that these nations had a rich heritage of language, culture and history, and they were tied to an ancestral homeland. Songs engaged the nation’s tragic history and projected the belief that the nation was further endangered by Soviet rule. Song texts also constructed a democratic, nonviolent path to a political revolution.  Songs defined goals and tactics, and reformulated nationalism when they placed emphasis on individual conscience and responsibility, or excluded submission to an authoritarian leader. In Lithuania, Antis was not a passive transmitter of public sentiment. The band shaped the political movement when they placed core images of Lithuanian nationalism within a nonviolent frame. In songs Antis forcefully defined a Lithuanian national culture that excluded revenge and violence, and in this way they helped to establish nonviolent ideological foundations for political action. 

Rock songs had always offered refuge to people seeking a life other than that of the official Soviet culture. But the rock songs of the Singing Revolution were a new kind of non-Soviet song. Explicit images of national unity, liberty and a common path toward national independence were not a means of escaping reality into a world of imagination; rather, they formulated and maintained a vision of true distancing from Soviet power. Songs energized people, ‘awakening’ political activism, mobilizing long-term commitment in the large numbers of individuals, who were necessary for the success of the nonviolent, parliamentary path to Baltic freedom. Among all singers, rockers could most easily and quickly adapt to changing political contexts. A song could be written, rehearsed and performed, recorded and then reach a mass radio audience within a matter of days, something that was impossible in national choral traditions and song festivals.

2.2.         Affirming an own human identity in Soviet Latvia

Raimonds Lagimovs, founder and vocalist of the band Inokentijs Mārpls, argues that in the 1960s the music underground movement got started, as a lot of bands were blooming. In 1971, Lagimovs continues, the Soviet regime started to push them down as the regime considered these underground musicians as a force that could bring the Soviet system down. One of the ways to do so were turfing sessions, where government officials listened to the bands, to their texts and so on in order to decide if they could perform in their home city, in their region, in their country, in the Soviet Union as a whole or even perform at all. Some bands got close to the small governments of kolkhoz as these institutions had money and could buy the equipment to perform. But ‘forget about underground, underground in kolkhoz, forget’.  At the same time, self-motivated bands tried to do things on their own, like organizing concerts by themselves. In the beginning of the 1980s the techniques to record and promote got better, so the music reached the public better. It was at these times that bands as Nebijušu Sajūtu Restaurēšanas Darbnīca (NSRD) , Dzeltenie Pastnieki  and Tilts started to arise. Alternative music became more popular among the young people, yet concerts did not happen, as they were not allowed.

                In 1983 the Riga Rock Club was founded, a group of musicians that were considered not ‘normal’ in the Soviet conception and therefore did not pass the turfing sessions. It was said that ‘the Cekists … considered that it is great that they are put in this small organisations, like Rock Club, so they could look after them, what kind of texts they are singing and if they are not stepping over some boundaries’.  Lagimovs remembers how Riga at that time, in the 1980s, was a kind of Russian city, so bands started to sing in Russian as well. There were some Latvian bands playing in the Riga Rock Club, but it were mostly Russian and Jewish bands that performed there. In Lagimovs’ eyes, Latvian musicians did not really like this Russian vibe and only ten per cent of the people in the Riga Rock Club were Latvians.  Music producer and composer Andris Indāns shares this opinion. The Riga Rock Club, according to Indāns, was under the Komsomol as the latter wanted to control the musicians playing there. There were only a few Latvian concerts, like Zig Zag  or Dzeltenie Pastnieki, but 80 or 90 per cent were Russian bands.  Indriķis Veitners, a jazz musician who was involved in the underground for a part of his life, affirms that the same principles were applied to jazz. The only format for playing jazz was the jazz club, an organization musicians had to join, as playing jazz at home would cause trouble. The police would come by after 15 minutes if musicians played at home: ‘You are playing? What are you playing? Jazz music? What is jazz? Aah, this is American music. Why American? Why not Soviet music? We have great Soviet music, why don’t you play Soviet music?’ If musicians did something without officials knowing about it, it was something against the law. The people who participated in the Party used this jazz club into their advantage: they did tours across the whole Soviet Union, as every city had such a jazz club.  Lagimovs recalls that a similar Rock Club existed in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and bands toured these Rock Clubs all over the Soviet Union, like Kino  and Akvarium  for example.  Culture houses were also used for concerts, only if the director of the culture house was friendly with you and if you could promise there would not be any anti-Sovietic messages.

There were other places, however, where underground concerts or gatherings happened. Lagimovs remembers that in the backyard of what is now Cabaret Burlesque in Riga, there were concerts and every Thursday people met and exchanged records. As the press did not mention these concerts or bands, one man from the Riga Rock Club usually told everyone about the concerts that were about to take place. Another place everybody in the underground knew about, was in the forest, near Kino Studija. A lot of people who collected music, gathered there. In the popular music shops it was not possible to get rock music, only popular artists, but on this spot people came together to exchange and swap things for records. Although government instances came and tried to close it down, people still gathered there. People who recorded music from existing material and spread it out, for example, could be found there as well.  From 1987 things were getting a little bit easier with the perestroika of Gorbachev. In the basement of Krāmu iela 4, for example, people organized a basement fest for four to five days, with two to three bands playing each day. Lagimovs was the main gatherer of bands, trying to attract them and get them to play there. This was all parallel to the Riga Rock Club. Young people in Riga during those times stated they ‘didn’t have their own place in Riga where to gather and have their own things’.  So one man, Ziedonis Čevers, proposed the idea of cleaning basements in order to have a place to dance, gather and everything else. Next to Krāmu 4 were some other places in Riga where ‘people could gather and have their fashion events and dancing and playing music and these places for subculture to go’.  Veitners also talks about a festival organized by Andris Černovs at his countryside house: ‘They put the electricity, made this sound and groups came and play … And the ones that know, come. And second day came police, immediately. Everything out’. In the 1980s it was very dangerous to organize something, as you would be considered a ‘pēcvalstiks’, a risk for the state. 

In the eyes of Szemere, the city’s special importance to the subculture is derived from the latter’s political ghettoization. The rock underground’s semi-legal existence implied that these performers were absent from the broadcast media and their life events were surveilled, as mentioned by Lagimovs.  The absence of underground music in the media comes in the picture when Edgars Šubrovskis, who played in Kartāga, Hospitāļu iela and Ansamblis Manta, tells about his experience of Soviet times: ‘There were some festivals and bands and hippies in the ‘70s, but I didn’t hear much about it as it wasn’t on the main media and my parents were not very involved in some extra cultural activities’.  Also, musicians had quite limited access to record production. Lagimovs mentions that musicians could not get the necessary instruments and technical equipment, as the ones that came from the West were too expensive and the ones that came from the Russian side were not of good quality. ‘Many bands that were … good don’t even have any kind of recordings of that time. They were playing, but they didn’t record anything at all’.  Šubrovskis also argues that there were no good instruments during the Soviet times: ‘We didn’t have jack inputs, we had such 5 mini inputs in the bottom of our guitar. This small shitty thing that doesn’t even go deep and of course, what happened, it broke, it fell of, during concerts it always cracked. In all possible ways it was like that’.  Bands who were collaborating with the kolkhoz, however, had the possibility to use technical equipment and proper instruments. Jumprava , one of those bands, sometimes gave their equipment and instruments to one band for a night to record a full album, which, as Šmidchens mentioned, yielded high-quality underground recordings. In the words of Lagimovs: ‘It was a lot better than just guitar sounds and everything’. 

Due to all this, the concerts were seen as outstanding, politically and affectively charged events, instrumental to the existence of the community. Many of the non-commercially circulated audiotapes were live recording rather than studio pieces. Musicians identified these tapes by reference to the name of the venue and the year in which a given concert was held and recorded.  Šubrovskis recorded radio shows on tape, as ‘it was the only way you could get some music records’.  Uldis Rudaks, music journalist for the Latvian newspaper Diena, gives another example of how Katedrāle , the first Latvian rock band, did not have any records, only live recordings.  In the case of Hungarian underground Budapest represented, on the one hand, for many artists, both underground and professional, the contradictionary experience of involuntary membership in late socialist Hungarian society. On the other hand, there was the appreciation of Budapest’s ability to sustain a relatively rich and varied cosmopolitan culture. The city offered a considerable variety and freedom of lifestyles that the countryside – even the larger provincial cities – failed to do.  Lagimovs expresses the same feeling when he identifies Riga as a Russian city, with a lot of bands singing in Russian performing at the Riga Rock Club. This represents the involuntary membership to the Soviet Union, as Latvian musicians ‘didn’t like this Russian vibe’.  On the other hand, it was possible to have a sense of underground community at gatherings at Kino Studija and Krāmu iela 4.

                Lagimovs states that in the 1980s bands had all kinds of subtexts and messages in their songs and that they were standing up against the Soviet regime, wanting to change something. He argues that it was possible to see from the looks of the bands if they had this western independence vibes, these new ideas that were contesting communism. ‘You could tell by the looks that they were the enemies of the nation, cause they were something completely different’.  The subtexts were not very explicit, ‘they didn’t say: let’s drop the Soviet regime, it’s really bad’ because musicians would get into problems by doing that. So people understood the music by the subtexts. Lagimovs also mentions that bands, from the looks and the music they made, would be called to KGB meetings and be told that their music was ‘not really good for our nation and you have to stop’. Lagimovs even gives an example of how KGB agents threatened a musician by telling him they would harm his daughter if he didn’t stop playing music.  Šubrovskis remembers: ‘These Gorbachev times everyone can kinda speak something’. So the hugely popular band Jumprava used a rebellious punk type of lyrics to protest against the subway or against pollution. Another band that was on top, Pērkons , was also socially active, ‘really telling important stuff in songs’. Some steps were taken to hide some patriotic songs about Latvia in music, which was a huge difference from the estrada music. In 1986, for example, Līvi  won a contest with the song ‘Dzimtā Valoda’ (native language) ‘and it was sung like aaaaaa. I remember him TV host getting those letters how you could sing about your language in such a voice, in such a terrible gargling, screaming, it’s total disrespect’.  Veitners argues that there was not a very strong political background to those songs. It was rather something different from ‘stupid’ official culture, as it was ‘not telling the truth, lying, not interesting’. In the eyes of Veitners there is no strong political programme, it was rather telling that people ‘don’t like what’s happening, this is simply stupid’.

Cohen identified four dimensions of style: dress, music, ritual and argot or slang. These dimensions can be categorized into cultural objects and cultural practices.  Style is not an essential quality of any of these modes: ‘The various youth sub-cultures have been identified by their possessions and objects. … Yet despite their visibility, things simply appropriated and worn (or listened to) do not make a style. What makes a style is the activity of stylization – the active organization of objects with activities and outlooks, which produce an organized group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of ‘being-in-the-world’.  In other words, it is the way in which the style is performed what makes it a style. Performing a style shapes the underground identity. For many subculture participants, this performed style operates as a form of resistance. It depends upon a complex relationship between human actors and their social environments. Subculture participants frame resistance as a sign of opposition or alternative to existing power relations. By performing their style, understood as the music musicians made or the way they looked, musicians opposed against the Soviet regime.

Šubrovskis recalls that during the glasnost and perestroika of Gorbachev, small amount of information about western music started to appear on some television shows, though he remembers that these shows often got letters from listeners and viewers who were angry about some heavy rock bands playing. ‘It was about, for example, in ’87 this hard rock band with big hair and they were considered really, really extreme here’.  Their looks thus were in opposition to the Soviet regime. In the words of Lagimovs: ‘They were protesting with their looks as well’.  Another example was how after a performance of Dzeltenie Pastnieki on the television show Varavīksne a public discussion started about how it was possible that people without musical education played music. All the bands had to go through some stratification.  This stratification was the way in which the Soviet regime tried to remain control over the musical life. Musicians could not go to a restaurant to play, because they needed a permit to play in a restaurant. Musicians had to go to a bureau for orchestras for restaurants, pay for the Commission afterwards, which then told them if they could play. ‘There were endless limitations; there was not free market. It means that if you are not in the system, you cannot do anything’. For jazz musicians, there were no jam sessions because they would ‘disturb’ the musicians who played in restaurants. There was one festival though, Vasaras Ritmi (summer rhythms), organized with money from the Komsomol. ‘And when you are not a good boy, when you are speaking bad things, when you are drinking and you are not good for control, then probably nobody invites you’.

Indāns even acknowledges that he was ‘not a musician’ as he was ‘without musical education’. Thereby Indāns performs the Soviet conception of what is a musician. He further on states that his ‘only way to make something is underground’, thus being in opposition to the Soviet identity of a musician.  Veitners also acknowledges the difference between two kinds of music. Veitners was in the third or fourth year of Pauls Jurjāns’ music school in 1982. On the opposite side of the street, there was a culture house where Ingūna Černova wanted to start a vocal instrumental ensemble. She gathered five boys from the music school, among which Veitners, and said: ‘Let’s play blues in F sharp’. For Veitners it was a really hard tonality, as in the school he was learning how to play Mozart and others. So he ‘quickly realized that everything he needed to learn in this music school, actually doesn’t work’.  In this sense, the performing of music itself was seen as a way of expressing an underground, non-Soviet identity.

2.3.         Affirming an own human identity in Soviet Lithuania

In 1972 Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in Kaunas, as a protest against the Soviet regime. After that, people started to demonstrate and the Soviet government replied with a huge wave of repressions. Kalanta was connected with the hippies, although Rytis Bulota - active in the Kaunas underground scene since the 1980s as a musician - argues Kalanta was not one of the active people. ‘He Kalanta looked like a hippie and so afterwards the Soviets turned the screw completely’. Bulota points out that that is one of the reasons why rock music is a little bit better developed in Estonia or Latvia.  As times were quite tough, Dovydas Bluvšteinas, former promotor and the man behind Zona Records, states that all bands stopped playing; everything stopped. One band even had a recording in Vilnius Studio and a master tape ready, but the KGB came and took the tape, ‘even to that level’. Up from that point it was also forbidden for local bands to play at dances, so they lost their stage. Musicians had to choose between not becoming a musician or playing in restaurants. In the early 1980s things got a little bit easier. Saulius Laikrodis, a prog-rock band, even became a state philharmonic band during that period, but it only lasted for one year. Then they were fired and on top of this their album was not released.

                Everything changed in 1985, with the glasnost and perestroika of Gorbachev. Akvarium, for example, was and still is one of the most popular Russian rock bands. They started in 1973 but only released their first official album in 1986, so these facts are definitely connected to perestroika and the changes in attitudes, argues Bulota.  There were almost no bands, only Saulius Laikrodis, Hyperbolé and a few deep underground bands playing self-made instruments. Then the first bands began to appear such as Antis in Kaunas, Fojė  in Vilnius and Bix  in Šiauliai. That was the base for the first wave of rock bands. ‘To call them underground, I wouldn’t do that …. There was nothing, there was a vacuum, then they appeared and at once, they became the new stars, playing to thousands of people’.  Antis started in 1985 and in ‘87 they were already a ‘stadium band’, there was no club stage.  For a long time, there were no young bands. Then a western interest in Lithuanian bands emerged. ‘Antis went a lot to the West and to the States and Bix played in the States and toured Europe’. There even was a festival called Soviet Rock, where Antis and Bix participated together with some Russian bands, remembers Bluvšteinas. With perestroika, the system opened up a little and western bands wanted to come, ‘because it was interesting and ambition, probably’. The organizational side of concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg was very bad, though. ‘So we were middlemen. We were helping western bands to go to Russia, cause we understood what they want and what they need. And we knew local conditions, local problems’. It also worked in the other way, Bluvšteinas helped Russian bands to go to the West. That slowed down and disappeared, however, in 1991.  In Soviet times the musical life was mainly organized around concerts, which became instrumental to the existence of the underground in Lithuania. ‘You never had gigs, like one or two bands playing, you always had festivals with fifteen bands. … you had like 15 minutes for your playing in that festivalconcert’. In Kaunas there was also a Rock Club, where people organized different events. In the beginning of that club, in 1985, it was very important that the authorities approved of the bands that played there. Before 1985-1986, however, it was completely illegal.

                Bluvšteinas continues that he organized one festival in 1985: Lituanica; even Lagimovs mentions this festival briefly. Lituanica was an international club at the university, and they invited bands from universities from all over the Soviet Union. The next year they did exactly the same, but filled the programme with real bands. The problem was equipment; ‘we had almost nothing. Few guitar amplifiers, in all Vilnius there was one bass amp and that’s it. Two drum sets and no proper PA’. They got the Public Address (PA) system for the first Rock March from Riga. Bluvšteinas remembers it was impossible to get a drum set or a guitar.  Just like in Latvia, musicians thus had limited access to record production as part of their political ghettoization, which made concerts even more important. Domininkas Kunčinas, current editor of Ore.lt and vocalist in Dr. Green, recalls about these Rock Marches that punk rock was performed on quite big stages. On this kind of tour, bands played in four to five cities in Lithuania; in the beginning it was purely concentrated on the music, but later on it evolved into a stage for the independence movement. Some punk bands with mohawk hairstyle also participated. The performance of hairstyle, dress and music thus created an underground identity, which collided with the national aspirations of independence. The explosion of punk, in Kunčinas’ eyes, was in these independence years, from 1986 to 1990, as instruments were left in the culture houses and people got those to play whatever they wanted. Bluvšteinas tells that in St. Petersburg people were just playing acoustic guitars and recording it on tape recorder.  There were so-called Kvartininkai, concerts in the apartments of people. A musician would have an acoustic guitar and maybe some small percussion, 50 to 60 people would gather in someone’s apartment and have a small concert.  In Lithuania, according to Bluvšteinas, such things did not exist, because of the wave of repressions.  Jonas Oškinis, founder of Ore webmagazine and sociologist, heard stories ‘from punks stealing instruments from … culture houses, especially the drum kits were popular as you couldn’t buy them. There were some mad prices’.  If musicians had contacts with an institution or a factory, they could ask to rehearse on their premises. Bulota remembers how they had their studio in a sort of engineering institute, ‘in which engineers had a pool table and table tennis table, so we were using that place for rehearsal’. This institute would also buy instruments for the band. 

So it was difficult from the technical side. The promotion, however, was very easy ‘cause everybody knew’. Bluvšteinas organized an Antis’ concert in the Sports Palace in Vilnius and made an announcement in the newspaper. ‘Two days of this concert; we played in these two days four times, twice a day, sold out’. In total five and a half thousand people came to these concerts. During Soviet times, everything went by word of mouth. ‘Such an announcement in the newspaper was enough to fill a hall with twenty thousand people’. This announcement in the newspaper was possible because Bluvšteinas’ company was formally classified under the Komsomol. ‘We had to pay some ten per cents of the profit, never did that of course’. Bluvšteinas remembers that money started to work at that time, so most of the things started to move because of the money.  Kunčinas asked his brother once how people got to know about the concert if there were no posters, if there was not anything. ‘He said: ‘I don’t know; we just knew. Maybe somebody says and somebody says and it goes’.  In the second half of the 1980s, Tomas Verbaitis, musician of Dr. Green, remembers listening to a radio show every Sunday on which Bix and some hard rock bands would be played.  Bulota tells the story of Vytas from his school. Vytas had an older sister who was really into the hippie movement. Bulota even thinks the leader of Akvarium stayed at her place, that is how deep she was engaged in the hippie community in the Soviet Union. So via her, Bulota would get a lot of records. ‘It was even before perestroika, even before it became available’. Also Oškinis’ cousin had a package of LPs of new wave and electronic music. ‘They LPs would travel around and we were recording from each other’. If musicians recorded something, it would not be played on the radio or it would not be showed on television, it was a ‘hand to hand thing’. The passing of these recordings, just like concerts, was instrumental to the existence of the underground community. Bulota and Oškinis also remember that people did not buy recordings a lot, as people did not have so much money. In Kaunas it was possible to get Polish radio 2 and 3, the signal did not reach Vilnius though. As the censorship was not as strong in Poland as in Lithuania, small fragments of information were able to reach the Kaunas youth.

                There was a famous Surmonos festival in 1972, right after the Kalanta incident and also the famous Jesus Christ performance in 1971. The organizers fooled the KGB and moved the time of the performance. In 1972, there was also a hippie jam session in a restaurant, called Sesionai (jam sessions). Bluvšteinas remembers that policemen did not let the musicians in, so they went to play at a wedding party and had a session there. Some people even went to Latvia because in Lithuania it was impossible to play, even at school. Musicians could not get any instruments and foreign songs were not allowed at any place. Musicians had to ‘play shitty songs to play somewhere, and they couldn’t play their own songs, couldn’t play covers, they had to play songs written by Soviet composers. Very strict’. The restaurant and factory bands had to go to those restaurants and factories to ask if they could play concerts, ‘terribly boring and uninspiring’. The movie engineering institute had a Komsomol chief who was a rock fan. Both Saulius Laikrodis and Hyperbolé were under his roof. There was a festival, Opus, organized by the same boys of Saulius Laikrodis. Then one Estonian band came and sang ‘about how fool is my fatherland’. Bluvšteinas remembers that they played that on the stage and it was closed. ‘And some guitar man got half naked, next festival, there was no talk, even when they had Komsomol leader’.  Oškinis also states that the Lithuanian Komsomol was good to musicians, ‘because they supported this band Hyperbolé … They could get a helicopter for the live gig’.  In Kaunas, the singer of the band Antis had a certain position in the Architect Union, which meant the band members were able to get a place for rehearsal and they could get the Architect Union to buy them instruments. They would have some places for playing concerts as well. ‘That’s the main difference between Deanimoje Poezija, a singer-songwriter, and Antis; because Antis, right from the start, it was amplified rock music’.

                Kunčinas states that his involvement in the underground movement started during his last years of secondary school around 1991. He spent lots of nights and days near the television tower with a record player, usually playing old school punk rock. He and his friends were hanging out on that spot to protect the tower. Before, he only knew about this kind of music via an official newspaper, ‘but the content of it was a fanzine …. There was a very good editor and it was really like an official fanzine’. Kunčinas remembers how there were the old school punks, ‘with all these destroy, anarchy, mohawks: traditional punks’. Most of them were in favour of independence, Kunčinas even remembers a poster of a punk with a mohawk and a sticker of the Lithuanian tricolour when it was still unofficial.  Tomas Verbaitis also remembers he knew some guys who were playing in a few punk bands, as punk was significantly present in Lithuania in 1982. ‘The fashion came in, cause I remember teachers at school talking about that and older guys dressed in a proper punk uniform, as it was in this ’82 version, in Soviet Union’.  Performing an own style, as for instance by wearing a punk uniform or having a mohawk hairdress, was seen as a sign of opposition against the Soviet regime. Yet Kunčinas believes that during the Soviet times people did not think ‘we are underground …. They just played and there were better bands and worse bands and most bands were punk bands’. 

2.4.         Conclusion

The goal of culture according to the Soviets was to create and cultivate the ‘Soviet Human’ via the principles of party-ness, idea-ness, collectiveness and people-ness. Consequently art was a political act with the purpose of constructing a communist society, both in Lithuania and Latvia. The implementation of this Soviet culture was done by censorship and by the mandatory membership in and cooperation with institutions, such as the Riga or Kaunas Rock Club and the jazz club. Consequently the rock underground in both countries was subject to a political ghettoization. Rock underground’s semi-legal existence implied that the performers were absent from the broadcast media, that their lives were surveilled and that they had limited access to record production. Both instruments and technical equipment were hard to get in Soviet Lithuania and Latvia. As a result the main way of performing an underground identity was the organisation of concerts, which became outstanding politically and affectively charged events. The creation of Krāmu 4 in Riga, for example, is very symbolic in this sense, as it offered a physical place where festival-like concerts could happen, where underground identity was performed parallel to the official culture of Riga Rock Club. Other ways to express this underground identity were spreading illegal recordings or wearing ‘western independence vibe’ clothes. Style, performed by music and dress, thus expressed an underground identity.

                These performative cultural acts constitute an underground identity with the act of negotiation. The underground community constantly negotiated with the Soviet regime, thereby establishing their identity. Musicians wanted to affirm their own human identity and had, in the words of Veitners, no strong political background. Musicians just played, as Kunčinas states, but because art was considered a political act, affirming one’s own identity implied not repeating the official stand and remaining in a non-Soviet identity. Musicians therefore offered something different than the ‘lying’ official culture.  Yet there is no black-and-white distinction between loyalty and opposition in Latvia and Lithuania. It were the Riga Rock Club people who told others about the underground concerts every month, Bluvšteinas was officially under the Komsomol, rehearsing spaces for underground bands were provided by official institutions and unions and official bands as Jumprava gave their studio for one night album recordings to underground bands. To be completely against the Soviet system was impossible, as musicians got persecuted. That is why the underground identity in Soviet Lithuania and Latvia was a semi-legal identity. The difference between Latvia and Lithuania was the occurrence of the repressions that followed the Kalanta incident in Lithuana, which created a vacuum. For that reason Lithuanian bands such as Hyperbolé, Antis and Bix had instant and huge success, while in Latvia more bands stayed low profile because of the lack of such a vacuum.

 

3.            PERFORMING SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY DURING THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD

 

The music underground during the post-Soviet period in Latvia and Lithuania is the central topic in this chapter. First, an overview of life in the Baltic States after the demise of the Soviet Union will be given. Afterwards, the research about the music underground during this period, based on the conducted interviews, will be presented. In the conclusion the general overview will be linked to the concrete experiences of Latvian and Lithuanian musicians, record label owners and journalists during the post-Soviet period.

3.1.         The post-Soviet period of transition

By early 1991, the Eastern European satellite countries were well on their way toward becoming post-communist states. In the Baltic States there was some violence in January 1991: twelve civilians died in Vilnius when units of the military tried to seize the main television tower, which triggered a massive defensive response in Riga, as hundreds of citizens created barriers around the main government buildings. Four civilians were killed in Riga in a shooting incident involving Special Forces of the Ministry of Interior.  On August 19, 1991, party conservatives and components of the military launched a coup against the reformist party leadership in Moscow, using a moment when Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. The coup failed as they did not have the complete backing of the military and Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, emerged as a charismatic leader of the opponents of the coup. Two days later the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Supreme Councils (parliaments) announced complete independence from the USSR. In Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius leaders of the Moscow loyalists were placed under arrest on the charge of attempting to overthrow a legally elected government. Within two weeks, the three Baltic States had been recognized as independent countries by the government of the Russian Federation as well as by most of the governments of Western Europe and the USA.

                By September 18, 1991, the Baltic States were accepted as full members of the United Nations, which meant that revanchist moves against them would have to be carried out in full light of international public opinion. The likelihood of such moves, however, became remote as the political power was shifting from the USSR to the Russian Federation. Gorbachev resigned from the presidency of the USSR on December 25 and announced the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the same speech. Shortly after the Russian Federation assumed legal control over all the assets of the former USSR and those of the Communist Party.

A few months after the restoration of independence, the excitement about the arrival of freedom had passed as the 50-year occupation had left deep scars. The shards of the old system were still everywhere. More than 90 per cent of the Baltic States’ economy was linked to that of the Soviet Union, which made it hard to start reforms. During the second half of 1991, hyperinflation started within the former Soviet Union, causing a 200 per cent annual price rise within some months. The enterprises that previously focused on the Soviet Union consequently lost their market and went bankrupt. The consequence was that production dropped catastrophically. Russia still had many military bases within the Baltic States and did not hurry to withdraw its troops. Next to the occupation army, there was a civil garrison formed as a result of the colonization policy. The proportion of native inhabitants was over 80 per cent in Lithuania, 64 per cent in Estonia and 51 per cent in Latvia. Citizenship had to be redefined, but the question of who was entitled to citizenship was complicated, far more in Estonia and Latvia than in Lithuania. The decision to simply grant citizenship to all current residents seemed to many a threat to the goals of the independence drives. The faster development of the Baltic States in comparison to Russia, however, made the majority of so-called ‘aliens’ support independence.

                In the beginning of 1992, Russia decided to stop the control over energy prices, which caused an energy crisis in the Baltic States. There was no petrol and the heating of entire dwelling regions was jeopardized. Liberalization of the economy followed, which relieved the crisis. Nevertheless both the Lithuanian and Estonian government had to resign during this crisis.  For the Baltic States to build up a democratic society, it was necessary to adopt new constitutions or to restore the old ones. Latvia chose the latter, restoring the constitution of 1922, which gave the president very limited powers and had a parliamentary character. Lithuania and Estonia decided to write new documents, which required the calling of constitutional conventions.  The first constitutional elections after World War II were held in the autumn of 1992 in Estonia and Lithuania and in the spring of 1993 in Latvia. In Estonia, the right-centre parties, promising radical changes, won the elections. The government started to implement painful and radical reforms, clearing the state apparatus of Soviet-time employees and replacing them by representatives of the younger generation. In Lithuania, the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party - the former communist party – got a clear majority in the Parliament. This majority allowed the party to control the Lithuanian government. The ‘Latvian Way’, an electoral coalition with a liberal character, won the elections in Latvia in 1993. They united reform-minded communists, some of the former personalities of the Popular Front and foreign Latvians.

                The first task of the Baltic States, like elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, was to carry out monetary reform and to stabilize the monetary system. Necessary reserves were obtained with the gold returned by the West to the Baltic States and through foreign credits. On June 20, 1992, Estonia adopted the Crown (Kroon) as its national currency, tying it to the Deutsche Mark at a fixed exchange rate. Consequently, the black market disappeared, shops were full of goods, inflation started to drop quickly and the state budget was brought into balance. Latvia completed its monetary reform on October 18, 1993 when the Lat became the only legal tender. Monetary reform took the longest time in Lithuania, where it was completed by March 1994. The Estonian economic growth, which was brought about by their open trade policy and the successful attraction of foreign investors, has been one of the quickest in Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign investments have contributed to a rapid growth of exports and to the restructuring of the economy. Privatisation has been successfully implemented in Estonia, as it was based on selling majority shares to a core investor. By 1995, over 65 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product was produced in the private sector in Estonia.

                The transition period, however, has not been easy for the Baltic States. The success of the reforms had to be paid for by the people. In the beginning, the reforms brought a drop in the standard of living. For five decades, the populations of the Baltic States had grown accustomed to a Soviet-style welfare state in which most social services were costless. Now, each citizen was responsible for their own personal income, career path, savings and competitive sense.  Inequality in wealth has briskly increased, with pensioners and young families with children in the most difficult situation economically. Unemployment also emerged as a problem. The transfer to a strict monetary policy brought a crisis within the banking system. In 1992 Estonia proclaimed a moratorium on the three largest commercial banks, the banking crisis caused a crisis for the whole Latvian economy in 1995 and in Lithuania a change of government was caused by the banking crisis in 1996.  Another phenomenon connected with the transition period was the unpopularity of those in power. The euphoria of the 1988-1991 years dissipated and the political elite was now expected to provide rapid systemic reforms. Although most people understood that their countries were in transition, they expected the transition to be relatively brief.

The Baltic States’ relations with Russia have developed in a complicated way. Russia has used economic relations to reach political goals, for example by forcing Lithuania to give permission for military transit arrangements through Lithuania to Kaliningrad, for the conclusion of a free trade agreement. The aim of these measures is to preserve Russia’s military-political presence within the Baltic space and to keep the Baltic States within its sphere of influence. In 1992, Russia submitted a close neighbourhood doctrine as the basis of its foreign policy towards the Baltic States. According to this doctrine, Russia had special rights within the Baltic States. The sharpest dispute was about the withdrawal of Russian troops after the restoration of independence. In 1992, the Lithuanian leaders succeeded in reaching an agreement with the Russian military leaders that the Russian troops be withdrawn from Lithuania by August 31, 1993. Later on, Russia did not want to respect the agreed time limit, but due to strong international pressure, the troops were withdrawn in due time from Lithuania. The troop withdrawal was even more difficult in Estonia and Latvia. President Yeltsin repeatedly stopped the withdrawal of troops, yet again through massive pressure by western countries, Russia’s troops left Latvia and Estonia by August 31, 1994.

The Baltic States have worked hard in order to guarantee their security. One way to achieve this was connecting to international organizations, particularly those with a European base. This internationalization thus mainly meant westernization. The Baltic States’ border guards as well as the defence forces have developed rapidly. For that, assistance from the West has been obtained. The formation of the Baltic Peace Batallion in 1993, for example, must be considered as a trump card to participate in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Peace Partnership Programme. Since 1991 the three republics began to lobby for inclusion in the NATO. This was a complicated goal as it involved the security interests of European states, the United States of America and the Russian Federation. The reforms in the Baltic States have advanced more steadily than in other former Soviet Union countries. This has made it possible to integrate the Baltic States into European structures more quickly than originally anticipated. Lithuania and Estonia became full members of the Council of Europe in the spring of 1993; Latvia followed a couple of years later. In 1994, the Baltic States concluded free trade agreements with the European Union. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania applied for membership in the European Union in 1995 and became associate members. A by-product of this membership was the reorientation of trade from the east to the west.   In 2004, the Baltic States were judged to be mature enough to be accepted as full members of the European Union and NATO. Both memberships meant that national independence once again had received reaffirmation by the larger system of existing states.  The accession of the Baltic States to the European Union and NATO signalled the growing irrelevance of the descriptive category ‘post-communist’ and signified that the three republics could now be considered as ‘normal’ European states.

3.2.         Performing Latvian underground identity in transition

Indāns states that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the music business was over. People were not going to the concerts some bands organized in the beginning of the 1990s as ‘they were thinking about material things’. This corresponds to the above-mentioned description of life in post-Soviet Latvia. For this reason the music industry was very silent.  Šubrovskis agrees that the whole music system collapsed. In his eyes, a lot of underground bands played very bad at that time, because no one really thought about the fact that they could have success. No professional would play alternative music, ‘cause there is no point’. In the 1990s, according to Šubrovskis, there was more liberalism, but it could happen that if people had a mohawk, they got beaten on the streets. ‘Being alternative itself was quite unpopular’.  Information about music from western countries was now possible and records of any type of music could be obtained: rock music, heavy metal, pop,… Rudaks states that many people chose to listen to MTV pop.

For Indāns, 18 or 20 years old, it was the right time to make something. ‘We organized the first label in underground ‘Tornis Records’ and cooperated with other bands. And make all those DIY Do It Yourself things; make fanzines and mail order and other things before internet’. In Soviet times these activities were illegal, but during the ‘90s ‘you can do what you want, because it’s freedom’.  Rudaks puts it in this way: ‘Then some young people who didn’t like this dance music and didn’t want to follow MTV streams, they made this Tornis place where young people got a place to play another music’.  An underground identity, performed through a record label and fanzine, thus was in opposition to the mainstream culture, personified by MTV and Mikrofons Records. The latter was a broadcast on Latvian radio, which became independent and later a record label. Veitners tells that he has heard a lot of stories about them: ‘They take what they want only, they don’t pay, they say what you must play and things like that’.  Indāns continues that Tornis Records was in opposition to Mikrofona Ieraksti: ‘they weren’t interested in the music we played and we didn’t like bands from Mikrofona Ieraksti …. It’s a clear major label and we were underground’.  Tornis was, in the words of Indāns, also protesting against capitalism. ‘First years it’s not the freedom that we wanted, freedom without money, with bandits on the streets and dark times. … People changed from very big idealists in the end of the ‘80s to very big materialists …. We sang about that’.  The underground identity is here constructed in opposition to mainstream culture and performed in songs, as Indāns and other people from Tornis (‘we’) sang songs about that.

Tornis started from the work of Indāns, Jānis Daugavietis and Uldis Gedra. The father of the last one had a high position in Rīgas Ūdens, a water service company. That is why they got Alises water tower as a place for rehearsals for five to seven bands, among which Tukšā Muca  and Ir Bijuši Mati un Izbijuši.  Later on they started to make records too. They used Soviet equipment, the big tapes from Latvijas Radio, as they used digital equipment in the professional area and nobody wanted to have Soviet technical equipment. ‘Someone gave me Russian equipment, analogue, and we made something like a studio in the water tower’.  Šubrovskis argues that Tornis was more about people getting together rather than someone organizing that. ‘It was one of the rare places’.  ‘It was a place where to meet, rehearse and later they got some tape recorders and made records’.  Tornis was also making cassette compilations called ‘Eau de Cologne’, yet after 1994 they did not continue anymore. Lagimovs continued this tradition, collecting all those punk indie music, and called it ‘Odekolons’.  Nowadays Tornis does not exist anymore as ‘we don’t have this house’. Still, they organize some activities, make some compilations and digitalize all their archive.

Szemere argued that underground musicians performed what people referred to in their daily conversations as ‘history in the making’. One major form of contribution involved the imaginative expropriation of urban spaces.  Szemere tells the story of how a huge sign, which read ‘SZIRTES FILM’, was put on the façade of a building in the city centre of Budapest. The sign was advertising a barely known experimental filmmaker. Szemere interprets the putting up of this sign as an act of taking over the city, an act of using prominent spaces, which were unavailable before, by the avant-garde community to boldly assert itself and its claim for visibility in the new post-communist society. The sign gave the avant-garde a distinct identity and presence in the larger community. Moreover the sign enacted the ultimate utopia of the avant-garde artist: the aspiration to fame and prominence without sacrificing individuality at the altar of mass society’s dictates. For the short period of time while the sign was up, underground artists could claim Budapest to be their own.  Just like the ‘SZIRTES FILM’ sign, the water tower in Riga gave the underground community a distinct identity that had its physical place in the city. The Latvian music underground thus could claim its spot in the city without ‘sacrificing’ their identity.

                Indāns mentions Tornis Orgāns, a fanzine existing of one to three A4 papers. In total there were 15 to 16 issues. In Soviet times the word ‘Orgāns’ was used to denote the Soviet bureaucracy, so Indāns and his fellow people of Tornis thought of a Tornis bureaucracy. Articles about Russian, American, English and international bands appeared in Tornis Orgāns, but ‘of course we didn’t have that much information as we didn’t have internet’. Yet they received fanzines from others via mail orders, which were exchanged with records or fanzines. ‘We were writing for other fanzines and they for us’; in short, it was an ‘exchange of information’. In all fanzines, information from others, such as phone numbers and addresses appeared. ‘Now we have portals in internet, but in beginning of ‘90s, internet is fanzines’.   Indāns put an announcement in a newspaper, as he wanted to find people who were interested in punk music. ‘And people from Kuldīga started to call me, and people from Riga as well. I lived near Riga, in Ikšķile, we communicated via phone and made meetings a week later’.  Once Indāns played a gig in Vilnius, he started to communicate with Kunčinas. ‘He wrote me about Lithuanian bands and I wrote him about Latvian bands and we sent each other records’.  Veitners remembers a television broadcast for folk music called ‘Siena šķūnis’. Veitners played with Innokentijs Mārpls and when they went on stage, Lagimovs started to sing ‘Blood is coming’. ‘This is really punk rock, it’s social and political message, very strong. I still remember looking in this room and both boss of television broadcast and previous singer sitting with open mouth because they expected anything but that’.  Rudaks states that television and radio still ignored music that was different from pop, different from mainstream.

                In Kuldīga, there was a large local hardcore and punk scene in underground with a fanzine called ‘Wilks’. There were connections between the underground scenes in Riga and Kuldīga. They had the festival Tabuns , made the Nekac organization  and Zabadaks house.  Tabuns, at first, was visited by 200 or 250 people and each year the festival became bigger and bigger. The audience grew to 4000 people and the organizers then realized they could not handle it on their own anymore, yet they did not want to make it into a big event.  The band Vonosonoloppus  was part of this Kuldīga scene, which was very specific and different. The exchange between Riga and Kuldīga travelled fast as there was such a little amount of bands.  ‘The relationship was very tight between Riga and Kuldīga …. The wave of underground music wasn’t so big, so everyone was close and tried to build it up, other cities also had bands and musicians, like Limbaži and later Valmiera, Liepāja’.

                Concerts were a collection of different styles and genres. Indāns remembers that bands from all styles played in one concert, ‘metallists and punks and hippies and people from avant-garde, all in one concert’.  In clubs usually around seven to nine bands played on one night, so it created a mini-festival. ‘The club scene started to appear but still it wasn’t that well developed’.  Only towards the end of the ‘90s every scene could make its concerts with only punks or indie bands. ‘We got all this unheard music in one time, so for some two years music was not separated by scenes’, as everyone who played something different got along with each other, remembers Šubrovskis.  In 1993 or 1994 the first clubs started, like Pulkvedim Neviens Neraksta or Mad Mix (now Aristids). Punk rock, indie, metal and experimental bands played in Mad Mix, three or four days a week.  In Saksofons in Stabu iela in Riga, so Rudaks tells, it was possible to hear live music every day. Two or three bands played every day.  Šubrovskis remembers how there were not so many clubs in Riga, but it was possible to play or even get a little bit of money. There were also contests, a format for new bands by which they could get a price, recording in a studio for example. ‘So we got a couple of successful contests and somehow we started to do quite ok for an alternative band’ says Šubrovskis about his band Hospitāļu iela.  In another place Lagimovs mentions, was a boxing ring and a huge fish tank with fishes in it. This place ended up not having an owner, so alternative music enthusiasts started to organize concerts in this boxing ring, which created a very funny and weird atmosphere, according to Lagimovs.

In the heyday of the underground rock era specific rock venues were important and well-liked because of the bands that played there. Szemere argues that Hungarian bands such as The Balaton and The Committee gave lustre to otherwise faceless clubs or venues run by a college, a district or the city council. By the end of 1990s this trend reversed: new and exciting venues popped up conferring prestige and character to newcomer bands. Underlying this reversal was a shift in the social organization of non-commercial rock culture in Hungary: places rather than performers enjoyed star status in the music scene. These were the places where musicians, as well as their audience, felt to be their very own.  In the words of Szemere: ‘the shift epitomizes the gradual and variably successful accommodation of the underground rock/art community to a new socioeconomic regime, through establishing its own institutional spaces and places’. 

If Szirte’s act of putting out his logo in the city centre stood for the art community’s symbolic re-appropriation of urban spaces, claiming more prominence and prestige, the establishment of new venues – and later on radio stations, magazines and fanzines – marked the ‘real’ and active re-appropriation of such spaces. In the process of social transition, places enabling a previously cohesive community to get together for a musical event had extraordinary psychosocial and political significance. The economic and political dislocation endured by the underground community in the late 1980s sparked attempts to ‘relocate’, that is, to remake social life in new forms, to render creative and meaningful togetherness possible under the altered circumstances of post-socialist Hungary. Only through establishing physically ‘real’ spaces and places, affective spaces and places can be recreated, which are the stuff and goal of music-based social events and rituals. These new places retained a minimal sense of continuity with the past and regenerate a sense of collective identity.

Martin Stokes stated that ‘the places constructed through music involve notions of difference and social boundary’.  The interest, with which new venues and clubs were built, worked and struggled for, represented the cultural and political disputes during and after the transition. It underscores the potential of these places to draw and redraw boundaries where previous ones had lost their validity or effectiveness. At the same time, it marked the capacity of these places to (re)negotiate the difference of various youth groups among themselves, on the one hand, and from mainstream society, on the other. The burgeoning interest in clubs and venues came to be manifested, first of all, in the sheer proliferation of places of entertainment in larger cities since 1989. Parallel to this process was the explosion of record labels that cropped up right after the market had been freed up.  Establishing a rehearsal space and studio in Alises water tower thus was a way of remaking the social life of the underground community after the economic and political dislocation during the Soviet period. Other places, such as Mad Mix, served the same purpose: to enable the underground community to get together for musical events. So, clubs and venues were established to regenerate community and social life – the underground’s sense of identity as a group – under shifting and fluid structural circumstances.

In the middle of the ‘90s interesting festivals started to pop up.  Veitners mentions that underground festivals happened in different places in Latvia in the 1990s. Also in the festivals there was a huge mixture of styles and genres. ‘The groups were whatever, some groups became very famous. Skyforger  for example’. Other groups were Innokentijs Mārpls or played jazz.  In 1994 Saulkrasti Jazz Festival was organized for the first time. Veitners mentions the emptiness after the collapse of the Soviet Union: ‘After cutting radio big band, one year was empty place, nothing happens, because no place, no younger generation’.  In the middle and end of the 1990s the cultural phenomenon of raves, parties featuring performances by disc jockeys, started to appear in Latvia. While Tornis was more about indie and punk bands, Indāns was more going into the direction of electronic music and started to make his own studio in 1996 or 1997. Indāns expressed the translocal character of the rave phenomenon as ‘Russian DJs came to play in Riga and Latvian DJs went to Moscow and St. Petersburg’, while the wave of rave itself came from London.

3.3.         Performing Lithuanian underground identity in transition

Arma, a sound-performance artist and record label owner , got introduced to the ‘worldwide underground network’ via a friend that was publishing a fanzine. That friend gave him, for example, flyers of other zines. That is how Arma came to the idea of publishing his own fanzine; his first zine was published in 1998. Arma decided to write reviews, so he ‘started asking people from around the globe to send him records for review’. Arma’s zine was called ‘Spam Oil’ and was written in English. A local newspaper designer did the design. The zine consisted of a few interviews with Lithuanian and foreign bands, some reviews, some articles and some anarchist related articles. ‘I was always communicating with the foreign world, so I was very interested to write about anything I got’. After publishing three issues, Arma switched to another name ‘Affected by Dementia’. This was more a punk zine, yet the same format: interviews, reviews, articles. Later, Arma published one more zine ‘Introspect’, which was more about experimental music and only had one issue. It went online like a webzine for a little while, but disappeared quickly. Arma was not collecting fanzines: ‘You spread it; you use it, write the letter and spread it; you don’t collect’.  Arma argues that almost every small town had at least one zine or maybe even more. ‘It was such a big production, people were so devoted to do that and such a good network and communication’. Arma got most fanzines by trading. All the copies he published were basically for trade, not for selling. That is the reason why Arma wrote in English, as he wanted to spread more worldwide.  Oškinis also proves that fanzines were not for selling: ‘You made zines for fun but you managed to get some money that I later gave to a band to record an album for 30 dollars’.  Kunčinas agrees that fanzines were pretty popular in Lithuania. In Vilnius, according to him, there were four to five fanzines and almost all bigger cities had their own fanzine. Festivals were also the places where people could get those fanzines. It was possible to get them by post, ‘but it was much more interesting to meet the man who was behind this, talk with him and exchange fanzines. Natural exchange’.

Before the internet, fanzines functioned for decades as ‘the quintessence of subcultural communications’.  Fanzines or zines are typically homemade collections of subcultural news, insider accounts, scene information and first-person opinions, produced in paper or electronic form. These virtual spaces – in print or in digital form – function as sites of resistance. Virtual spaces such as internet forums and zines allow people to keep up-to-date in their local scene as well as facilitate translocal interaction that may be regional, national or global.  Arma mentions he got in contact with the ‘worldwide’ underground community via a friend’s fanzine. That is why he wrote his fanzine in English, to keep in contact with this global community. Fanzines represent what Thornton calls ‘micro-media’: media utilized by subcultural insiders.  Zines are non-commercial, non-professional, small-circulation magazines that their creators produce, publish and distribute by themselves. Fanzines are the oldest category of zines. One can even argue that all zines are fanzines. To put it simply, fanzines are publications devoted to discussing the intricacies and nuances of a cultural genre. Usually, a zine consists of a highly personalized editorial, moves into a couple of opinionated essays, criticizing, describing, extolling something and then concludes with reviews of other zines, books, bands and so on. Zines are put together by hand using common materials and technology – DIY is the prime directive of the zine world. They consequently look the part, with unruly cut-and-paste layout, barely legible type and uneven reproduction. The lifespan of a zine thereby ranges from single-issue ‘one-shots’ to volumes spanning years.  Zines are speaking to and for an underground culture, thereby having a political self-consciousness. Zinesters – people who write zines – consider what they do as an alternative to and strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism. ‘Political’ must be understood as the problems of the present cultural, economic, and political system, including the possible solutions to these problems and the strategies and chances for actualizing these ideals on both a small and a large scale.

                The most important aspect of zines is the freedom to just express. Zines offer a way of communicating that frees individuals from face-to-face interaction. The writer is only known by what he or she puts down on paper, the notion of who and what one is in a zine is potentially very flexible. Editor of the zine The Raven, John Newberry, therefore argues: ‘a zine allows people to become something else, someone else. If they contribute to the zine, they have the opportunity to assume identities of their own choosing, and not to be molded into beings they don’t want to be’.  A zine is thus used to construct an identity. For zine writers, the authentic self is not some primal, fixed identity that precedes them; it is something flexible and mutable that they fashion existentially: out of their experiences and out of subcultural values that they take as their own. What makes their identity authentic is that they are the ones defining it. The underground call for authenticity does not demand that people are who society says they are. Instead, they are who they create themselves to be.  Tornis underground community performed itself through a fanzine, which objected, in the words of Indāns, against capitalism, against a kind of freedom the community did not want. Tornis Orgāns thus had a political self-consciousness. And by having this self-consciousness, it shaped its own underground identity.

But people do not construct their identity in a vacuum, they create who and what they are in conversation with others. This is what zinesters do by writing to each other, sharing their everyday lives, assembling their identity and figuring out their politics. This is why, as Arma and Indāns mention, fanzines are exchanged for other fanzines. There is yet another interlocutor that precedes the underground culture of zines: the aboveground world of straight society. Notions of identity, politics and authenticity are arrived at in discussion with, or rather in argument against, mainstream society and culture. Zinesters construct who they are and what they do in opposition to the rest of society. Their identity is a negative one.  A negative identity, however, only makes sense if it remains tied to what it is negating. Therefore, the authentic self that zinesters labour to assemble is reliant upon the ‘inauthentic’ culture from which they are trying to flee. Zines are a medium of communication, written in order to share with others underground. Through this sharing, the argument with the outside world can begin to be replaced by a conversation among comrades. The network of zines, embedded within a larger underground culture, creates a forum through which individuals may be able to construct their identity, formulate their ideals of an authentic life and build a community of support, without having to identify themselves with mainstream society.

Zines are an individualistic medium, but as a medium their primary function is communication. Therefore zines are as much about the communities that arise out of their circulation, as they are artefacts of personal expression.  Zines allow writers and readers to select communities of choice rather than those born out of circumstance. In the words of William Baggins in the zine Scream: ‘Community, as I see it, is a fluid process by which individuals seek out and choose others with whom they wish to live and mutually enjoy life’.  Every zine is a community institution in itself, as each zine draws links between itself and others. Letters and reviews ensure that zines are not only the voice of an individual publisher, but a conduit for others’ expressions as well.  Christine Boarts from the Slug & Lettuce zine characterizes zines as ‘providing space for communication and networking within underground music and political scenes’. In a way, zines are holding the scene together. The underground is not a tight, formalized and coherent social grouping with firm boundaries, instead it is a non-geographical sprawl that must be mapped out.  In this way zines are continually rehearsed self-definitions.

In a Lithuanian fanzine, Kunčinas recalls, there was a Latvian scene report that included contacts. That is how he wrote to Jānis (Daugavietis), for example. In this way these scene reports served the purpose of networking and ultimately shaped the translocal character of the underground community. Kunčinas started his first fanzine with a colleague from his band. Interviews were included, some of which were not real. Kunčinas ‘tried to write about the concerts, the records, interviews with bands’, while his colleague was more into philosophy, so the fanzine was not only about music. Other fanzines were different, some about poetry, philosophy, politics, fantasy or metal. Kunčinas’ fanzine issues were copied in the Lithuanian parliament, because his father worked there. ‘The parliament contributed to the underground (laughs)’. That is how Kunčinas could make a bit more copies than other fanzines. The fanzine was distributed via two ways: concerts and post. Some copies were given away, others exchanged for records. For a small amount of money, the fanzine could also be sent by post. ‘I exchanged a few with an Argentinian, but it was just for collecting’. Scene reports were frequently done, so people would have the band names and contacts, in order for them to write to musicians.  Jurij Dobriakov, an independent culture researcher and critic, describes zines as a publishing platform that is not aimed at the general youth, but specifically at a certain community. So the zines are ‘distributed between the members themselves’ or what Thornton refers to as micro-media.

Arma got flyers of fanzines with e-mail addresses. As internet became available, Arma started writing e-mails. ‘I didn’t have a computer, but I would go to my friend from school and he would let me use his computer and write e-mails’. Or the same friend brought the printed e-mail to school for Arma to read it. In the beginning, however, there was no big impact from the internet because not many people had it.  In the beginning of making his fanzine, Kunčinas experienced some difficulties regarding getting information, as it was the very beginning of internet. Tomas Verbaitis was one of the first who got internet, so they spent lots of time at his house, searching the internet.  Eventually, Kunčinas concludes: ‘Everything went to internet, no need for fanzine’.  Internet can also contribute to the maintaining of the underground community, as Dobriakov argues. ‘Between the concerts, the maintaining of this sense of community happens online. … This online community is also a place for keeping up with the general processes’. Dobriakov thus speaks about virtual underground communities.  Some subcultural spaces do not fit the categories of traditional geographic sensibilities. Virtual spaces, for example, are formations in which people who are physically dispersed, create a shared identity and culture. Internet, in the eyes of Williams, has enabled new possibilities for subcultural participation, allowing people to participate in subcultures through an internet connection rather than in a face-to-face scene.  In this sense the internet serves the same goal as fanzines once did, providing a space for communication and networking, thereby defining the underground identity. A translocal or even global underground community can be formed in this process of defining.

                In 2003 Arma started his own label called ‘Perineum’, releasing music tapes and CDs. Talking about the relationship between Latvia and Lithuania, Arma states that he did not have a close relation, but he once bought the music collection of Gints Birznieks, mostly tapes, for a symbolic price. This is how Arma started doing distribution. After a while, Arma wanted to get rid of the concept of Perineum. On Perineum Arma released CDs, while on the new label, Agharta, he released only tapes with handmade packages.  Zona Records was the first record label in independent Lithuania, founded in 1991. They started out during Soviet times, licensing albums for the whole Soviet Union. ‘We printed vinyl, we printed them in Riga first, then in Moscow and distributed through the Soviet Union, mostly through Melodija’. When the Soviet Union imploded, however, Bluvšteinas had to drop licensing. In order to keep the local scene alive, Zona continued with cassettes, as they were cheap to produce. In 1992-1993 Zona started to distribute the big indie labels in the Baltic States, until people in Russia started to print bootlegs, unofficial copies, of indie CDs, which killed Bluvšteinas’ business.  Zona Records also organized the Worst Bands Contest, which made some new bands appear in Lithuania at the end of 1993 and in the beginning of 1994. This contest included a trip to Germany where bands could rehearse and record with other bands from England, Denmark, etc. They would deconstruct the band, jam together and record. This is another example of the translocal character of the underground community of the post-Soviet period in Lithuania.

For Zona Records, as Bluvšteinas recalls, it was ‘Kablys time’, a building on Kauno Street number 5 in Vilnius: ‘One wing was occupied by Sniegis, who was trompetter in Antis and the boss of the whole place, the other wing was Zona, we had distribution and so on, our office, it was Kablys time’.  From 1993 onwards it was a real blossoming of the alternative stage, according to Bluvšteinas, as they had a club in Kablys. ‘We … made a small venue downstairs and those contests were there and other concerts, it was the place for the underground’.  In 1995 or 1996 Dr. Green’s guitar player was working for Zona Records. In the same building where Zona was located, Dr. Green established its rehearsal space. ‘We got on the stage of this big culture house and the roof was the stage, and we were under it’.  Verbaitis remembers how they cleared out the trash from the place under the stage and started to make parties with friends there, ‘maybe even publicly announced and not by word of mouth’. Later, they decided to make shows in this place, like proper music concerts.  In the words of Bluvšteinas: ‘they Dr. Green organized a venue downstairs and it was punkish’.  After a fire in 2002, Green Club shortly moved to what is nowadays Menų Spaustuvė. Verbaitis was really happy that Dr. Green was rehearsing ‘in the new space eleven days after the fire, it was really a huge morale boost for me’. After complaints from the people living near-by, however, Green Club moved back to Kablys.

Kunčinas recalls that when Dr. Green got started, ‘there were almost no concerts, clubs or bars’. His band usually played four or five times a year, yet there were festivals that were particularly popular.  Verbaitis confirms this by telling that in the 1990s there was a concert once every three or four months. ‘The bands were mostly rehearsing and releasing tapes and concerts were not that often, so basically if there was a chance to play, everybody jumped into it’. This is how Verbaitis organized a city vibe punk rock festival in his school when he was in 11th grade. Some Latvian bands were even invited.  ‘It was not only about music, but about meeting new friends, exchanging some views’. This is how Kunčinas started to correspond with Indāns, after meeting him at a festival in Latvia. They were exchanging hand-written letters for a few years, sending all news, all records. ‘It was a live connection’.  Kunčinas remembers how he made contact with Jānis Daugavietis, who invited his band to play in Kuldīga. ‘It was our first trip, we only had four or five songs, but we had a very good time’.  Festivals were not only places for concerts, but for the underground community to get together and define their identity. Festivals, just like fanzines, became community institutions.

Considering concert venues in Vilnius, Arma argues that ‘the main point … was Green Club. That’s where I met all the people with whom we were doing something and got into a community. We got a community feeling, this was the main thing’.  Most subcultural studies have tied space and culture together. These studies highlight the significance of bounded geographical spaces for embodied, situated social action. However localized embodied practices may be, youth subcultures can cover wide geographies. Therefore, we distinguish types of subcultural space in local, translocal and virtual terms.  Peterson and Bennett define translocality as ‘widely scattered local scenes drawn into regular communication around a distinctive … lifestyle’.  Translocal subcultures can thus be understood as networks of local idiocultural groups that are interlocked through the distribution of music, travelling groups (such as touring bands), conventions and festivals.

When Kunčinas started the band Dr. Green, ‘it became not only a band, but some kind of community, social movement’. Kunčinas even would describe Dr. Green and that whole community as ‘activists’. When they presented their debut album in their rehearsal space it became Green Club. Kunčinas describes it as a hub for all people who were interested in underground and DIY movement. Green Club became more and more popular. Lots of bands, from all over the world, played there every week.  This community was also a bit into political action. They made an anti-NATO demonstration, for example, when Lithuania was joining the NATO. Verbaitis, working at the State Bank, was asked to leave his job because of this demonstration. Another protest action took place near the Italian embassy after one person had been killed at anti-globalist demonstrations in Genua.  Kunčinas describes being in this community as living in a parallel reality. They called their band and club their own community and own economy. It was ironically described with the Russian word ‘kolkhoz’, in which everyone is in a horizontal ruling, where everyone has its own word.  This community was sometimes called the West Side punks, in opposition to the East Side punks. East Side punks came from Antakalnis – ‘the other side of the river’ - and were into original punk rock. West Side punks, the group Kunčinas and Verbaitis belonged to, came from the new districts, such as Lazdynai, were younger and more interested into hardcore. Kunčinas tells how this older generation thought about the West Side punks as not real punks: ‘I don’t know how they decided how you were real or not, maybe if you got this mohawk, then you are real, so nobody of us was real’. So the performance of style was important in a certain way. This division turned more into a joke as it disappeared when Verbaitis organized the festival in his lyceum and when Green Club got started.

                Dr. Green’s rehearsing space was a squat for a few years since 1992. Then this community started to make a Sunday vegan café there. According to Kunčinas, there was ‘really a lack of these places’.  Verbaitis agrees that Green Club was ‘a cool thing for the city to have’.  Later on, one friend told Kunčinas and his friends that the police had some interest in them. ‘I think this anti-NATO demonstration made some state security guys a bit watching one eye’. But there were no real problems, nothing really dangerous.  Dr. Green was one of the first Lithuanian underground bands that started to play in other countries, not only in Latvia and Poland, but also further away. Some other official bands went to play in Germany before, for example, but played for 5 to 10 people. ‘But they had no community, we had friends who played in our place and then we went to play in their place, so it was like another connection. Not official show-business, but for friends’. Kunčinas and his friends of Dr. Green visited a lot of squats and cultural centres. A big inspiration for Green Club in Vilnius was Fish Fabrique in St. Petersburg, the first visit outside of Lithuania for Dr. Green. ‘They had a club in a flat, with some walls taken away. Very simple, the same people, same atmosphere and we went back, looked around in our rehearsal space and started our place’. 

Dr. Green also played on the Latvian festival Tabuns and they became very good friends with the organizers. ‘They were quite an example for us how to make things officially, how to find funds’. Yet this festival faced the same problems as Dr. Green. The festival became too big and problems started to occur. ‘It was quite a different atmosphere than it is with festivals now’. Whereas nowadays festivals establish a seller-consumer relationship by letting people buy tickets, Kunčinas argues that on these underground festivals people could create their own thing.  The same principles were applied to the Green Club. ‘Usually we never got the personal profit. Maybe sometimes the band has profit, … the band was going on tour, so we were on minuses, then the club helped, sometimes the contrary, the Club didn’t have money, so the band paid back’.  Dr. Green travelling to Kuldīga for Tabuns or to Fish Fabrique in St. Petersburg is a good example of translocality, as there were, in the words of Kunčinas, the ‘same people, the same atmosphere’. The local scenes thus had similar cultural groups that exchanged music and invited similar bands from abroad, thereby defining the character of the underground community.

3.4.         Conclusion

In 1991 the Baltic States gained independence from the USSR, yet the shards of the old system were everywhere and the transition period was not easy. The success of the reforms had to be paid for by the people, which resulted in a drop in the standard of living. This is what Indāns refers to when he mentions that people were not coming to concerts in the beginning of the 1990s as ‘they were thinking about material things’.  Regaining independence meant the end of political ghettoization and the appurtenant semi-legal identity for the music underground community in Latvia and Lithuania. The music underground community had to adapt to the new socioeconomic regime and did so by establishing its own institutional spaces and places, such as concerts venues, fanzines and record labels. The real and active re-appropriation of spaces regenerated a sense of collective identity as they enabled the community to get together for musical events. These places thus rendered creative and meaningful togetherness possible. In Riga, Tornis Records offered a rehearsal space and studio in Alises water tower. It was ‘a place to play another music’.  In Vilnius, both Zona Records and Dr. Green were active in Kablys, which was ‘the place for underground’.

                Fanzines became the quintessence of subcultural communication as a site of resistance in the post-Soviet period. Zinesters could construct an identity, yet always in negotiation both with fellow people of the underground and with the aboveground world of mainstream culture. Tornis Records, with its fanzine Tornis Orgāns, on the one hand, was against MTV, dance music, Mikrons Records and capitalism. On the other hand, communities arose out of the circulation of fanzines. As mentioned in the interviews, both Latvian and Lithuanian fanzines were exchanged with records or other fanzines and often scene reports with contacts were included. That is how contacts between the Latvian and Lithuanian underground communities were established. Zines thus were community institutions, as they drew links between themselves and others. In that sense, zines are continually rehearsed self-definitions. In the act of self-defining, the underground community got a translocal character. Dr. Green toured throughout Europe with the contacts they made, got inspired by Fish Fabrique in St. Petersburg and was in close contact with the festival Tabuns in Latvia. Within Latvia, for example, there was a tight relationship between Kuldīga and Riga. These networks of local idiocultural groups became interlocked through the distribution of music, travelling groups, fanzines and festivals. When internet appeared, the virtual space was another way to create a shared underground identity between otherwise distant regions.

4.            CONCLUSIONS

During the Soviet times in Latvia and Lithuania the goal of culture was to create and cultivate the Soviet Human. Art therefore became a political act with the purpose of constructing a communist society. The music underground consequently underwent a political ghettoization in which it was absent from the broadcast media and had limited access to record production. The meaning of underground was brought into being, constructed and replayed by the organization of concerts or the illegal spread of records. Both concerts and the circulation of illegal records provided a place for another type of music. The cultural act of spreading illegal records was, on the one hand, a way of negotiating an underground identity with fellow people of the underground. By affirming this underground identity, on the other hand, underground musicians started to negotiate their identity with the Soviet regime. Affirming their own identity implied not repeating the official stand and therefore remaining in a non-Soviet identity. Yet, there was no black-and-white distinction between loyalty and opposition to the Soviet regime, which resulted in a semi-legal identity for the underground community in Latvia and Lithuania.

                Regaining independence meant the end of political ghettoization and the appurtenant semi-legal identity. The underground communities in Latvia and Lithuania adapted to the new socioeconomic regime of the post-Soviet period by establishing their own institutional spaces and places, such as concert venues, fanzines and record labels. The real and active re-appropriation of these spaces regenerated the sense of collective identity as it enabled the community to get together for musical events. A physical ‘place to play another music’ thus was created during the post-Soviet period.  This new underground community was negotiated with fellow people of the underground by fanzines, as a community arose out of the circulation of these fanzines. Zines, as continually rehearsed self-definitions, gave the underground community a translocal character. Internet later had the same function. The underground identity was only valuable by virtue of its exclusivity. The construction of the mainstream culture, personified by MTV and Mikrofons Records, became a symbolic marker against which to define one’s own tastes as ‘authentic’.

                The narratives of Lithuanian and Latvian musicians, record label owners and journalists show the fluidity of meaning of practices according to the concrete situations in which they were executed. Different socioeconomic regimes led to different cultural practices that defined an underground identity in Latvia and Lithuania. This research is an implementation of the performative stance, based on the method of oral history, in the studies on music, in particular underground music, in the Baltic States. It would be interesting to carry out further investigations on underground music in Estonia and for other time periods as well, based on performativity. The performative cultural actions are the connection between underground and group identity, as the subcultural identity is performed and constructed through cultural practices. Whereas an underground identity in the Soviet period mainly was performed through concerts, in the post-Soviet period the same identity was performed through the establishment of institutional spaces and places. These processes happened in a similar way in Latvia and Lithuania. The meaning of underground was fluid, as it was constructed through cultural practices, such as concerts, fanzines, the spread of records, festivals and the establishment of concert venues. All these elements are aspects of the meaning of underground music that have changed in the transition from a Soviet to a post-Soviet society in Latvia and Lithuania from 1985 to 1995.

5.            ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the first place, I would like to thank my scientific advisor Prof. Valdis Muktupāvels for his support and guidance in the writing of my master’s thesis. I also wish to express my gratitude to my family: dad, mom, Lies, Karel and Hilde. I am extremely grateful to all the narrators I interviewed, for sharing their stories and making time for me: Andris Indāns, Edgars Šubrovskis, Raimonds Lagimovs, Indriķis Veitners, Uldis Rudaks, Arma, Domininkas Kunčinas, Dovydas Bluvšteinas, Jonas Oškinis, Rytis Bulota, Jurij Dobriakov and Tomas Verbaitis. Last but not least, I would like to thank the State Education Development Agency of the Latvian Government and the Education Department of the Flemish Government in Belgium, as without their financial support studying in Latvia would not have been possible for me.

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TORNIS, TORNIS – IR BIJUSI MATI UN IZBIJUSI, visited 18/05/2015 (http://www.tornis.lv/grupas/ibm_i.htm).

TORNIS, TORNIS – TUKSA MUCA, visited 18/05/2015 (http://www.tornis.lv/grupas/tm/tm.htm).

TORNIS, TORNIS, visited 18/05/2015 (http://www.tornis.lv/).

TROITSKY, A., Back in the USSR: the True Story of Rock in Russia, London, 1987.

TUCKER, R.C., The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, New York, 1971.

WEINZIERL, R. and MUGGLETON, D., ‘What is ‘Post-subcultural Studies’ Anyway?’, D. MUGGLETON and R. WEINZIERL ed., The Post-Subcultures Reader, Oxford and New York, 2003, 3-23.

WILLIAMS, J.P., ‘Authentic Identities: Straightedge Subculture, Music, and the Internet’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35 (2006), 173-200.

WILLIAMS, J.P., ‘Youth-Subcultural Studies: Sociological Traditions and Core Concepts’, Sociology Compass, 1 (2007), 572-593.

WORDPRESS, KATEDRĀLE  Latviešu oriģinālroka pirmsācēju grupas vēstures fragmenti, visited 27/05/2015 (https://katedrale.wordpress.com/).

YURCHAK, A., Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, 2005.

ZIG ZAG, ZIG ZAG, visited 27/05/2015 (http://www.grupazigzag.lv/).

ZONA, Zona Music Group, visited 20/05/2015 (http://www.zona.lt/).

Maģistra darbs „‘A place to play another music’: Latviešu un Lietuviešu underground mūzika pārejas periodā no padomju uz pēcpadomju laiku” izstrādāts LU Humanitāro zinātņu fakultātē.