ABSTRACT
In the case of a group culture, a collective way of thinking which manifested itself mainly in pop music, it would seem appropriate from our perspective to approach it through audio recordings and-it being a youth subculture-through articles in youth magazines of its time. The problem is that no such things were, or were allowed to be, made in Hungary (the “happiest barrack of the socialist peace camp,” as the contemporary slogan asserted), because punk was mostly graded “prohibited” in the threefold category system of György Aczél’s cultural policy of “prohibited,” “permitted,” and “promoted;” or reluctantly, disapprovingly filed under “permitted,” but then tightly controlled and squealed on. At the beginning of the 1980s, authorities tried their best to confine punk musicians and their audience to small community halls through administrative measures, demoralization and a creative employment of the divide and rule tactic. Therefore news regarding punks and the insults they endured reached only a very limited readership, and mainly through the underground press: samizdat1 publications and
(from the second half of the decade) pages of hand-copied, self-made fanzines. However, in spite of prohibitions, daring editors sometimes published articles about the new trend in Hungarian pop music even in mainstream magazines directed and edited by the Communist Youth League, such as Ifjúsági Magazin (Youth magazine) and Magyar Ifjúság (Hungarian youth).2 It is a general phenomenon in the world of art that the interpreters and evaluators of new forms and pioneering generations emerge from the class of contemporary critics. The same is true for Hungarian punk, which was first described in longer, book chapter-sized texts by music journalists of the 1980s. Indeed, even today there are hardly any interpreters of the ’80s Hungarian underground who did not belong to the circle.
