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Popular music and teenagers in post-communist Poland

Studies in Symbolic Interaction

ISBN: 978-0-76230-851-4, eISBN: 978-1-84950-139-2

Publication date: 18 January 2002

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between popular music and adolescent identity in Poland. I will specifically discuss how this relationship has evolved within the context of complex changes occurring in Polish society over the past twenty years. This analysis is largely derived from interviews with and observations of young people in Wroclaw, Krakow, and Katowice, Poland in 1992 and 1999. Before the revolutionary events of the late 1980s, popular music in Poland reflected the drudgery of everyday life under communism and the severe economic constraints placed on young people's musical experiences. Since the democratic revolution in 1989, the popular music scene has become increasingly complex and fragmented. Styles of music have expanded three ways. First, Polish youth now have access to all the popular music available to American or British youth via the Internet, Euro MTV, and so forth. Second, Polish artists are devising local versions of this globalized music. Third, Polish artists are creating new music that is true to traditional, even folk, musical styles. The net effect of these trends is the availability of the kind of musical resources long used by Western adolescents to create the identity of the “teenager”.

Citation

Kotarba, J.A. (2002), "Popular music and teenagers in post-communist Poland", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 25), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 233-246. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(02)80050-3

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2002, Emerald Group Publishing Limited