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This article argues that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has established a monarch-like celebrity status and exploited it to systematically dismantle the checks and balances of democratic pol...

For decades, the state-run music industry in Hungary has artificially isolated musical worlds. The 2010 album I’ll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary’s most popular hits from the socialist era. As such it is a testament to music as a medium’s aptness to reflect on public and personal pasts. The album moreover exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock, and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices, and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.

Richard Elliott. 2015. The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

This paper focuses on some salient features of the Hungarian “long sixties” through the rear-view mirror of a highly-acclaimed popular musical album by Tamas Cseh and Geza Beremenyi entitled “A Letter to My Sister” (1977). The article argues that the “Letter” owes its enduring success to its unique chronological and narrative arch: the years of childhood set in the sombrest Stalinist 1950s, while the opening up of the country's political and cultural landscape in the 1960s shaped the freedom and hope intrinsic to modern teenage life. Finally, in the portrayal of the crisis-ridden young adulthood set in the 1970s, it is impossible to set apart the failure of the “great generation” from that of Hungarian society and, more broadly, east European socialism. Implied in this narrative arch is that this local version of the “long sixties” carried the unprocessed legacy of the “short fifties.”

‘I think that no one really wants pop music to become art because it is enough as entertainment, and if it were just a bit better, one could not look at it with an indulgent smile…’ In this bitter way János Bródy, a member of the once legendary beat group, Illés, formulated his opinion about the institutions responsible for the production, function, reception and, last but not least, the quality of pop (rock, beat) music, that is to say, the music of the young in Hungary. Whether rock or pop can be regarded as art at all or whether it is by nature an inferior genre is a question beyond the scope of this article. I am concerned here with some of the basic functional principles of the institutions of pop life and their impact on the music itself in this country in the past fifteen to twenty years. I would like to discuss these problems in terms of autonomy and self-expression rather than in terms of claimed aesthetic values, since I find the former a basic condition of producing values in this type of music.t This belief is supported by a close look at the history of Hungarian pop: it seems that under favourable social and political conditions, that is, in a period of social and cultural dynamism, characterised by an open, tolerant or relatively supportive media policy, pop music can produce (as it obviously did in the second half of the sixties) artistic values too, and give authentic expression to the aspirations, attitudes and ethos of a very large segment of the young population.

This article explores the structure of pop music in Hungary, focusing on social factors under which the music has developed. A distinction is made between the mere existence of a musical idiom and that of the culture built around it. An understanding of this distinction helps explain points of pressure on the pop music industry in Hungary and offers a possible answer to the question of how an inherently anti-authoritarian type of art may develop under the control of authoritarian cultural politics.