The Emergence of the Hungarian Musical Underground in the State-socialist Youth Press (1969-1971)

The term ’underground’ appeared in the state-socialist cultural press at the end of the 1960s. From the early seventies it became a signifier of a new style of Hungarian popular music in the youth press. The term was also associated with progressive rock, Western counterculture and the hippie movement. However, the reception of Hungarian underground music at the time did not include the political and social connotations. Questions of creative and receptive behaviour, aesthetics and musical knowledge dominated. The youth press used the word ‘underground’ in a musical context and shaped the meaning of the term according to the guidelines emphasised in contemporary sociological writings. The following paper examines the reception of Hungarian underground music in the period between 1969 and 1973, when interlinked paradigm shifts were taking place not only in youth culture and music, but also in cultural policy and science. This change was reflected in the discourse of the cultural press. The paper explores the cultural-political and music-historical context in which the term appeared in the cultural press, which was also omnipresent in contemporary music sociological writings, and which partly determined the field of musical-aesthetic meanings around it. It analyses the early use of the term, the cultural connotations associated with it and the emergence of the Kádár-era musical underground through the sources in which the term appeared in the youth press of the early 1970s.

Released: Replika 129, 191–217.