Music Poles: 10 Albums & 5 Decades of Popular Polish Music (part 1 of 2)

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I’m just an academic interested in the political geography of rock music.

— Luc Ampleman

[/nk_block_quote][nk_text]When I was recently invited by the editor of Kraków Music to prepare a column under a title which would sound like ‘The 10 Polish albums that…’, my first reflex was to answer: ‘Yes, but no!’. I guess that most popular music lovers would consider this kind of exercise not only a challenge but above all a trap!  As a non-Polish enthusiast of Polish popular music (and I like to think that I rather cast the net far and wide in this matter since I love popular Polish music from Mieczysław Fogg to Behemoth) the task of selecting a few albums for a blog sounds more like a punishment than an opportunity. Secondly, not coming from the musical industry nor being a music journalist, I don’t believe I have any sound credibility. To put it forthrightly, I’m just a damn academic interested in the political geography of rock music. And let’s be honest, musicologists excepted, musical journalists will most often have this sound advantage over any scientists interested in the popular music scholarships for the simple reason that they usually have learned to listen and connect to musicians. Besides my lack of self-confidence, however, there is more; and this has more to do with a certain reluctance to rank musical acts.[/nk_text]

[nk_text]Like almost anything, music is political. To a certain extent, it could be considered as a field where forms of control operate through a series of interdictions and authorisations or within a blurred zone of non-authorisation and non-interdiction. Within this logical matrix all musical stakeholders from musicians, fans or song listeners, producers to musical journalists, critics and scholars, cultural influencers, muses and even policymakers, engage in the negotiation of positions. Like in musical ranking, music is all about negotiating a position, be it a message, a popular stance, an image, an opportunity to be played on the radio or to be associated with a new musical genre. Hence, musicians may want to convince an audience or a label about their popness, or they may want au contraire to defend their undergroundness, because being underground (we all know this) is always cooler than being popular. In the same way, metal bands want to make sure that their bad-ass logo will fit the semiotic of their metal subgenre.  Broadcasters’ direction may also have to decide what song can be played or even put on the top of the Friday’charts as we’ve witnessed recently in Poland. From another perspective, musical critics finetune their rhetoric to show they have more credibility than the average Joe while grilling the most recent project of an artist.

Being a provocative or conciliatory musician; to censure a song or not; to get on the stage or not; to write sharp lyrics or futile catchphrases; most of what is done in music is related to negotiating a position or a standing. This is also true for music listeners for whom any musical act can be understood within a certain frame of opposites: know-unknown; like-dislike; morally acceptable-unacceptable; popular-unpopular; innovating-conventional; politically engaged-apolitical, etc.[/nk_text][nk_text]

I recently had the chance (read delight) to teach a class on the political geography of popular music of the Nordic Countries. Despite the pandemic and the use of an e-learning model, to my great joy students showed a fantastic level of engagement by attending, participating and contributing in class. Among other things, I’ve asked them to reflect on the following general questions: How do musical actors (bands, artists, musical projects) negotiate (explicitly or not) their social/esthetical/political position? How do audiences rely socially on these musical acts (or not)? How does a political context shape the positioning of popular musical acts and products? While the task in hand required students to decode, evaluate and justify the political character of Nordic musical acts, I have also asked them (a few weeks before) to practice by sharing with me their understanding of the ‘political intensity and ‘popularity level’ of a few Polish bands.

The result was the plotting of a series of albums on a four-quadrant coordinate system. [/nk_text]