Of Dissidents and Dissonance

Last year Soviet rock star Boris Grebenschikov released an English-language album, produced by Eurythmic Dave Stewart. The album wasn't bad -- a little on the over-blown side, but it had its moments.

When the album was done, like any good servant of commodity culture, Grebenschikov made a video and set out for a promotional tour. One of his stops was on Late Night With David Letterman. There Letterman, in the true spirit of frank intercultural exchange, asked Boris, "What happens to the money you're making from this tour? Do you get to keep it? Can you take it back to Russia, or what?"

Grebenschikov tried to explain that he really wasn't making any money from the concerts. Letterman interrupted and said, to the audience's delight, "Boris, I think somebody forgot to tell you something. You see, over here in America rock stars make really, really big money off of their music." But Grebenschikov, not missing a beat, shot back, "Maybe that's why all of your rock and roll these days is so boring." The audience, and the Dave, shut up in mid-chuckle.

Apparently somebody forgot to tell Letterman that Boris Grebenschikov was nobody's flavor of the month. He was, instead, a grown man who had carried the rock-and-roll flame through two decades of privation and persecution. Somebody forgot to tell Letterman, the very archetype of a cynical Baby Boomer, that there are still people on earth for whom rock and roll stands for -- and is -- something worth fighting for.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there were, for a fleeting moment, some few persons who believed that rock and roll could change the world. They were wrong. But their error was not that they overestimated the power of the music, but that they underestimated the obstinacy of the world. Only people -- individually and collectively acting in freedom and solidarity -- can change the world. Rock and roll can only inspire them.

BUT, AS OUR EASTERN COMRADES are reminding us, it can indeed do that. In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, Grebenschikov once recalled the first time he heard The Beatles. Before that, he said, "I was good Soviet boy. After that I could never ever be good Soviet boy again."

A hard-rock outfit called Perfect is the most popular band in Poland. Their most popular song is called "Autobiografia." Perfect bandleader and composer Zbigniew Holdys told The Village Voice that the song was "the biggest hit in Polish history. Number one for three months." The song, according to Holdys, tells "the story of a person born in Poland in the '50s whose father was a member of the Communist Party ... [then the son] hears 'Blue Suede Shoes' for the first time. It makes him a completely different person."

Czechoslovakia recently had a revolution. But for more than 20 years, it seemed the most unlikely place on earth (outside of Romania and Albania) for such change to take place. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968, all opposition was crushed and the political landscape was largely desolate.

The silence was broken in 1976 by the prosecution of members and supporters of the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe. The stubborn resistance put up by the Plastic People caused other, more mainstream, artists and thinkers to examine their own consciences. One of these was a playwright named Vaclav Havel. The next year, with likeminded others, Havel formed the human rights group Charter 77, and the Czechoslovak silence was irrevocably broken.

In the liner notes for the first Plastic People album (quoted in The Nation on March 19, 1990), Havel wrote of the Plastic People trial using words that also speak for rock and roll itself. In fact he summed up the meaning of rock and roll as succinctly as anything I've heard this side of the chorus to "Tutti Frutti."

Havel wrote that the Plastic People represented "an urgent questioning of what one should actually expect from life: whether one should silently accept one's place in the world as it is presented to one and slip obediently into one's preassigned place in it, or whether one should be 'reasonable' and take one's place -- or whether one has the right to resist in the name of one's own human condition."

That refusal to "silently accept one's place" is the heart of rock and roll. Even before the music was called rock and roll, that was what it represented to the generations of African Americans who used it to redefine themselves as free men and women every Sunday morning and Saturday night. That's also what the music represented to the white truck driver in Memphis who became Elvis, and to the black, gay dishwasher in a Georgia bus station who became Little Richard, and to the motherless child in Liverpool who became John Lennon, and to the despised and ridiculed beatnik girl in Port Arthur, Texas, who became Janis Joplin. That's what rock and roll meant to the thousands of young, or formerly young, people who, for the last decade, have marched through the streets of Prague illegally every December 8, the day John Lennon died.

This morning I heard on the news that the Chinese democratic movement is getting ready to launch an offshore radio station. The Chinese spokesperson said that, in addition to banned news and political analysis, the station would broadcast rock-and-roll music. "Rock-and-roll music," the Chinese activist noted, "makes people want to move. And this kind of government doesn't like that." He also said that plans were in the works for an all-star "We Are the World"-type recording to benefit the Chinese democratic movement. For their anthem the Chinese have chosen John Lennon's "Imagine."

Danny Duncan Collum was a contributing editor of Sojourners.