Rock in Europe Rich, George W. 1977. Icelandic Rímur (record review). The Journal of American Folklore 90: 496–7. Steingrímsson, Hreinn. 2000. Kvæðaskapur: Icelandic Epic Song, eds. Dorothy Stone and Stephen L. Mosco. Reykjavík: Mál og mynd. Sullivan, Paul. 2003. Waking Up in Iceland. London: Sanctuary. Discographical References Andersen, Steindór, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson et al. Rímur & Rapp [Rímur and Rap]. Hitt/Ömi 011. 2002: Iceland. Sigur Rós, Steindór Andersen. Rímur EP. Krúnk. VECOO-0042. 2001: USA. Discography Andersen, Steindór. Rímur: A Collection from Steindór Andersen. Naxos. 76031-2. 2003: Canada. Filmography Screaming Masterpiece, dir. Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon. 2005. USA. 85 mins. Documentary. TOM EVERRETT Rock in Europe From its emergence in the USA in the 1950s, rock was reinvented in Britain in the early 1960s and thereafter took over in most European countries, where its impact was significantly greater than that of rock ’n’ roll a few years previously. Equipped with appealing features that synthesized a modernist view on music and society better than other artistic forms, rock succeeded in mingling an optimistic/energetic drive with a critical stance, both equally needed by a post-war generation that longed for substantial changes in their everyday life and common interest. The features which made rock a universal language – where pop was more dependent on local traditions – included: the adoption of a state-of-the-art technology, electric instruments and guitar-oriented line-ups; new listening and performing habits built around high volumes; a group approach to composition in which studio recording had a pivotal role; the central importance of records; a self-awareness of its own potential as a new form of expression akin to art; and a pervasive culture able to include various aspects of young people’s lives and pave the way for a universal utopia where music was the glue. Last but not least, the use of English for song lyrics and bands’ names appealed to an international audience attracted, if not fascinated, by everything that came from the AngloSaxon world. All this became somehow associated with the rise of the early rock bands in Britain, the marketing outcome of which was as devastating to both European and US audiences as was its social impact. Rock took root in different ways in almost every European country. Initially an imitation of the British model, it gradually fostered a more original music, and in some cases local artists switched from English to their own language. The language issue was often the hinge upon which cultural and political questions were raised, and the one around which local scenes negotiated and constructed their own identities. In countries in which English was taught from primary school age and functioned a second national language (e.g., Sweden, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands) rock was adopted ‘naturally.’ It was also favored by countries long under the political influence of the USA and the UK, such as Italy, where its impact was, however, slowed down and distorted by a much scarcer familiarity with the language. In the Eastern bloc a different story unfolded. Here Western fads were seen as hostile and thus opposed, but this did not prevent rock from penetrating the social texture and leading an underground existence. Much the same can be said about Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, which endured dictatorial regimes: there rock developed fully after their demise. Rock ’n’ Roll Rock ’n’ roll arrived in Europe at a time in the postwar years in which the alignment of different countries played a highly influential role in the ways in which it was accepted. Countries such as Germany and Italy, for example, were more receptive than others due to their close alliance with the USA (Kouvarou 2015; Merolla, 2012). The context was a complex one, however. The assimilation of records by Elvis Presley and others in the mid-1950s was immediate in democratic Western Europe but was significant also in countries that were under the Soviet influence, such as the former Czechoslovakia, where songs were originally written with English lyrics so as to distinguish them from national popular music, imbued as it was with old-fashioned values. That was not an innocent gesture, however, as many rock bands active beyond the Iron Curtain were persecuted and encouraged to write their songs in their domestic language. In Poland, for example, rock ’n’ roll was tamed by promoting the writing of new songs in Polish, as happened in Hungary, too, in the early 1960s. In Western Europe some original spin-offs developed, as was the case in the Netherlands with Indorock, a genre which 647 Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 11.indb 647 01-09-2017 18:07:14 Genres: Europe drew inspiration from sounds and rhythms from the former colonies. With hindsight, however, European rock ’n’ roll appears largely as a rehearsal for the rock revolution that was to start in the 1960s, and hardly produced music which could stand as original in comparison to the American models. The few exceptions occurred in England, where Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard emerged as the first European rock ’n’ roll stars, although their records sounded more like up-to-date pop; for, as Chambers puts it, ‘British pop, despite the initial shock of rock ’n’ roll and the discovery of the teenager, continued to move in the grooves of show business and the established entertainment world’ (1985, 38). British rock ’n’ roll was influenced by music-hall as much as by Elvis and the like, with the result that it sounded ‘scruffy and cheeky rather than menacing and sensual’ (Laing 1969, 107). Promoted from the inside of the popular entertainment industry – ‘almost all of the British rock ‘n’ roll records through 1962 were shoddy, partly because most of them had accompaniments from musicians who, accustomed to supporting crooners, had no feeling for the rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll’ (Gillett 1983, 255) – and not from a lively subculture, rock ’n’ roll in England represented continuity with the past – more a logical development than a historical fracture. The same applied to most other places in Europe, where only in a few isolated cases – in France with Johnny Hallyday and Italy with Adriano Celentano – did rockers emerge who were to become best-selling artists in their respective countries. Although both Hallyday and Celentano explored many other music and artistic experiences (e.g., from cinema to television), their original ‘trademark’ affected their long careers and still identifies them as ‘rebel’ performers in their 70s. They were and still are widely known outside domestic borders, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, whereas the impact of British rock ’n’ roll performers (such as Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, as well as Steele and Richard) was felt throughout the Anglophone world. (For further information on rock ’n’ roll, see ‘Rock ’n’ Roll,’ Volume VIII: Genres: North America). The Years of Innocence: Beat, Blues and Cover Versions In its beginnings, rock in Europe took the form of beat music. Beat spread from Britain into Europe and beyond from 1963 to around 1969, providing the first generational music widely acclaimed throughout the Old Continent. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, it was named bigbit. This music was both the European response to the planetary invasion of North American music pioneered by Presley and, as in the case of the British blues, an appropriation of the blues on the part of a young generation that had never stepped into a blues club but had learned to love that music through records. The beat takeover was made possible by a powerful and inventive sub-culture that was inextricably tied to music and that proved to be a sort of lingua franca outside Britain, where subcultures were already well rooted. The influence of beat on continental Europe was much stronger than that of the musics that had preceded it, namely jazz and rock ‘n’ roll and it was associated with a lifestyle (look, clothing, attitude, jargon and so on) which became a fad in many countries, generating a movement (for many it was a ‘revolution’) that outlined the first transnational youth culture. One major premise of the beat success was the commercialization of cheap technology, which extended the opportunities for everyone to listen to music (lowfi sets, 45 rpm, portable record players and transistor radios) and to make it in the music business. This latter element in particular affected the musical inclination of a whole generation, who, once they came into possession of a basic instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, mikes and amps), discovered the desire to play in a group in hundreds of garages and basements. For the first time, music (i.e., rock in its early stage) became a mass language and every young person thought he/she could write a song and perform it. Rock ’n’ roll had hinted at this a few years before, but not in Europe, where beat promoted amateurism to unprecedented levels. From Universal Utopia to the Crisis of Fundamentals In the late 1960s rock was a mature language, conscious of a potential that extended from the realm of music to that of society and of its ability to work as a type of mass entertainment, a new art form and a political weapon. In Europe, all these aspects were inextricably linked up to the mid-1970s, finding their best expression in live mass events such as the Isle of Wight Festival (1968–70) – held on the island off the south coast of England – where a mostly young audience (600,000 of whom attended the last of the three events in 1970) celebrated their right to party and to do something more than merely acclaim the artists on stage. This was the period in which progressive rock, a term intended to suggest rock as mirroring ‘progress’ in a human (not ‘merely’ an artistic) sense, reached its peak of popularity. Although widely dispersed, progressive rock was in effect the European version of 648 Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 11.indb 648 01-09-2017 18:07:14 Rock in Europe North American psychedelic rock, the main difference being its more disciplined approach to improvisation within recognizable forms. Progressive rock showed many distinctly European features, especially in subcategories such as cosmic rock, Krautrock and symphonic rock, where electronic and classical music were central, and this distanced these genres from the influence of the blues and other African-American genres. A parallel but contrasting stream was that of folkrock, which explored and revived many local traditions under the push of the folk revival movement in both the USA and the UK. Folk-rock artists shared the same scenes and audiences as other performers (not only rock, but pop, blues and even sometimes jazz) and were not perceived as in any way distinct from them. Thus folk-rock played its own important role in defining the rock community in Europe, while providing an additional style and language to share beyond national borders. When progressive rock started to show its limitations and to be overtaken by its stadium excesses, around the mid-1970s, new opposing genres came to the fore, among which glam rock and punk rock had a huge impact across the whole of Europe, not just the UK, where more minor genres such as pub rock were confined. Glam rock laid the fundamentals for a postmodern rock aesthetics based on a blatant (though deeply self-aware) display of the art gesture as artifice. Glam played with the clichés of popular entertainment by never seeming to take itself as seriously as its predecessors. The recurrence to selfirony and to a willingly ambiguous manipulation of bad taste led artists to exalt the categories of ‘camp,’ by means of which glam created a critical distance between fans and music that helped unveil and mock its commodity quality. Drawing from Pop Art and the French Situationists, by elaborating notions such as trash art and détournement (displacement), glam rock favored the centrality of the ‘fake’ in the construction of the musical product. Its extravagancies gave way to the first embryo of New Romanticism, while its understated project of an aesthetization of everyday life, mostly developed as a reaction against the rock establishment and its ideology of authenticity, was then appropriated by the punk movement in a more politicized direction. This latter development had a major influence on European rock audiences of the second generation, fertilizing many local scenes which had been touched by rock music for the first time, and shaping a powerful subculture widely acknowledged and visible throughout the continent. In the Eastern bloc rock (often in its punk format) stayed on as an underground art, often opposed if not banned until the fall of the Communist regimes (1989–91). From the 1980s to Date: The New Map of European Rock Despite punk’s apparent questioning of the basics of rock music and culture and the observations of some critics that their time was past (Frith 1988), both grew significantly during the 1980s in the wake of the British New Wave, which had a great following in many European countries, thanks also to the increasing degree to which groups exchanged experiences, with local and international groups playing together in venues, festivals and stadiums. As the many subgenres of rock began exploring electronic/synthetic sounds that were more akin to pop and dance, it was heavy metal that developed dramatically out of 1970s hard rock and became rooted in unprecedented ways in many European countries, where its reputation was – and still is – the highest compared with all other types of rock. Gothic rock, too, was highly esteemed and favored the formation of a subculture without frontiers, able to take root in places from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and still operate as a kind of hold-all, able to host experiences that ranged from unplugged rock to minimalist music. The 1980s saw the rise of folk-related rock genres such as etnobeat and its variants, which paved the way to the 1990s boom of local fusions, involving many of those countries where rock had grown with some difficulty and now was finally released, able to play a central role in the resetting of national genres with an international flavor. From Finnish Suomi rock to Swedish bordun rock, from Balkan to Soviet rock, the European rock map has changed consistently since the 1990s and has welcomed many new entries. In Western Europe, where it has been most easily assimilated, rock tends to loosen its local ties in favor of a globalized sound – as is the case in Spain, France, Germany and Italy. In Eastern Europe, rock has shown its more political side and has privileged hard, heavy metal and punk, while in cases such as the Hungarian lakodalmas rock it has absorbed influences from ethnic, vernacular music and commercial pop as a reaction against an intellectual approach. Moreover, in Europe too rock has accentuated its oppositional nature both in relation to mainstream taste (for example, alternative rock), sound (noise rock) and the music business (Indie rock). The Consolidation of Euro-Rock Culture According to Chris Cutler, the first example of Euro rock – i.e., non-black and non-American – was the Shadows (Cutler 1985, 176). Although it is difficult, risky – and maybe pointless – to try to identify common features among its many trends, it may 649 Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 11.indb 649 01-09-2017 18:07:14 Genres: Europe well be around the classical background of many of its musicians that a European pathway to rock may be acknowledged as such, especially during its formative years. Cutler also cites the use of ‘feedback,’ which was not common in what he terms ‘the black heritage’ at the time, and the referencing of contemporary art music (Stockhausem, Berio, etc.) as other evidence (Cutler 1985, 180). The distinctiveness and range of the European pathway is represented on the one hand by Pink Floyd, the ‘official,’ authoritative side of progressive rock, whose early albums marked the British hegemony with an experimentalism that gave a uniquely British touch to the Old Continent psychedelia; and on the other by the Incredible String Band, folkish, post-hippy and world music-oriented, although largely underestimated. Both groups impacted tremendously on rock at an international level. Another common feature in Euro rock is the political attitude understood by the music itself and its capacity to represent a counterculture in opposition to regimes, establishments and broader mainstream habits. Rock in Opposition, the movement founded by Henry Cow, for example, began its activity in 1979 with the slogan ‘The music the record companies don’t want you to hear’ and involved bands from all Europe (Italy, Belgium, France, Sweden) in its festivals. Festivals (of which two of the three of the most important in Europe, in terms of numbers, take place in Denmark [Roskilde] and Hungary [Szigety]), clubs/cafés, radio and television, magazines and fanzines, labels and organizations: all these make up just a part of what has become rock culture in Europe, that is, a consistent ingredient of the music business and the soundscape, as had been the case previously with classical music, folk musics and jazz. In Europe, too, academic work on rock, and contemporary popular music more broadly, was pioneered in the 1980s in places such as the Centre for Contemporay Cultural Studies in Birmingham, and rock was a central subject in the first conferences of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) in 1981 (Amsterdam) and 1983 (Reggio Emilia). Organized between Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK, these events gathered together musicians, students, critics and fans from all over the world. Since then, rock has made its way deep into academia in Europe, the USA and elsewhere with a leading part in the development of popular music studies, promoting the institutionalization of tenures in both theory and performance. After more than 50 years since it first began to take root, European rock is a complement to North American rock rather than a spin-off. In Europe, too, rock offers a chance or a way to make sense out of one’s own life, a means to test one’s creativity, a business to try or simply a way to entertain and have fun, in the light of what has been defined as the empowerment of everyday life (Grossberg 1984). There follows a set of sub-entries devoted to rock in a representative selection of individual European countries (for rock in the UK, see Rock, Volume XIII, Genres: International). In addition, all of the rock genres referred to in the above text are covered in more detail in the following entries in this volume: Alternative Rock; Balkan Rock; Beat Music; Bordun Rock; British Blues; Cosmic Rock; Etnobeat; Folk Revival; Glam Rock; Gothic Rock; Heavy Metal in Europe with sub-entries); Indie; Indorock; Krautrock; Lakodalmas Rock; New Romantics; Progressive Rock (with sub-entries); Pub Rock; Punk in Europe (with sub-entries); Suomirock; Symphonic Rock; VIA Rock (Soviet Rock). Bibliography Bontinck, Irmgard, ed. 1974. New Patterns of Musical Behaviour of the Young Generation in Industrial Societies. Vienna: Universal. Chambers, Iain. 1985. Urban Rhythms. Popular Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan. Cutler, Chris. 1985. File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writing on Music. London: November Books. Ferrara, Antonino Antonucci, ed. 1977. L’Europa non ha dormito [Europe Has Not Slept]. In Top Music ’77. Rome: Arcana. Frith, Simon. 1988. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. London and New York: Routledge. Gillett, Charlie. 1983. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. Rev. ed. London: Souvenir Press. Grossberg, Larry. 1984. ‘Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life.’ Popular Music 4: 225–58. Humann, Klaus, and Reichert, Carl-Ludwig, eds. 1981. EuroRock: Länder und Szenen. Ein Überblick [Euro Rock: Countries and Scenes. An Overview]. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Kouvarou, Maria. 2015. ‘American Rock with a European Twist: The Institutionalization of Rock’n’Roll in France, West Germany, Greece, and Italy (20th Century).’ Historia Critica 57: 75–94. Laing, Dave. 1969. The Sound of Our Time. London: Sheed and Ward. Merolla, Marilisa. 2011. Rock and Roll Italian Way: Propaganda americana e modernizzazione nell’Italia che cambia al ritmo del rock [Rock and Roll Italian 650 Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 11.indb 650 01-09-2017 18:07:15 Rock in Belarus Way: American Propaganda and Modernization in Italy, Changing to the Rock Rhythm]. Rome: Coniglio. Michelucci, Alessandro. 1986. Europa Rock ’80. Florence: Indie. Patterson, Archie. 2002. Eurock and the Second Culture. Portland, OR: DBA Eurock Record Company. Ramet, Sabrina Petra. 1994. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ryback, Timothy W. 1989. Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. PAOLO PRATO See also Rock (Vol. XIII, International) Rock in Belarus Before gaining its independence in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus had no significant rock scene of its own. Unlike Russia or the Ukraine, rock music in the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (as Belarus was known in the Soviet era) was integrated from the very beginning into the repertoire of the VIAs, Vocal-Instrumental Ensembles, the officially accepted form of rock during the Soviet era. Byelorussian ensembles such as Pesnyary (1969), Verasy (1971) and Syabry (1974) actively combined rock sounds, in particular hardrock vocals, with dance rhythms and with folk poetics, as many of the songs were sung in Byelorussian. In the 1970s the bands became popular not only in Belorussia but in the entire USSR, actively promoted through national TV, radio and the infrastructure of state concert organizations. The first independent rock associations were created in the capital, Minsk, at the beginning of the 1980s and in 1986 a rock club was formed, called Nemiga. Again, unlike the situation in Russia or the Ukraine, Nemiga was more oriented towards hard and heavy metal rock, with bands often singing in English. Yet, in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there emerged a number of independent rock groups who hit the charts not only in Belarus but also in Russia, Ukraine and other Russian-speaking countries of the former USSR. Lyapis Trubetskoi was formed in Minsk in 1990s. After six years of local existence the band moved to Moscow, was signed by a Russian major label, Soyuz, and in 1998 released the album Ty Kinula which contained a number of big popular hits. Stylistically, Lyapis Trubetskoi could be described at that time as a pop-rock band with elements of ska. The line-up included brass section, distorted guitars and clean pop-vocals. In the early 2000s a vibrant underground scene emerged in Belarus. In opposition to explicitly apolitical VIAs and bands such as Lyapis Trubetskoi, new underground groups such as Contra la Contra (2001) put politics at the front of their raw and aggressive music. In the 2000s Belarusian punk and hardcore were the most politically engaged music genres in the post-Soviet scene and their songs, predominantly sung in Russian, not only reflect local realities but also touch upon figures such as Russian president Vladimir Putin. In addition to that in Minsk, a huge underground scene developed also in Grodno, where, alongside dominant punk and hardcore bands, prog rock and experimental bands such as Earworm (2004) emerged. The influx of politicized rock in the early to mid2000s was reflected in the radical transformation of Lyapis Trubetskoi, who after the years of silence adopted punk and hardcore styles and recorded two politically provocative albums Kapital (2007) and Manifest (2008), both full of criticism of Belorussian president Alexander Lukashenko. In 2011 the band was banned from touring Belarus and Belorussian media were prohibited from mentioning its name. In 2014 Lyapis Trubetskoi was disbanded. The new band of its frontman, Sergei Mikhalok, called Brutto, remained politically engaged. It is still prohibited in Belarus, releasing its records on Russia’s biggest label, Soyuz Music. Due to the hostile political climate most Belarusian underground bands perform and release their albums outside of their own country – mostly in Russia and Ukraine, but also in Western Europe. Bibliography Bekus, Nelly. 2010. ‘Independent Rock Music: Critical Reflection and Protest.’ In Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative ‘Belarusianness’. Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 241–52. Lovas, Lemez, and Medich, Maya. 2007. Hidden Truths – Music, Politics and Censorship in Lukashenko’s Belarus. Copenhagen: Freemuse. Online at http:// freemuse.org/archives/1004 (accessed 31 May 2016). Survilla, Maria Paula. 1994. ‘Rock Music in Belarus.’ In Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Sabrina P. Rahmet. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 219–42. Survilla, Maria Paula. 2003. ‘Ordinary Words: The Aesthetics of Language in Belarusan-Language Rock Music.’ In Global Pop Local Talk: Music and 651 Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 11.indb 651 01-09-2017 18:07:15