The Impact Of Rock And Roll On Western Culture

In a fit of patriotic zeal, American folk musician Woody Guthrie famously scrawled the words “this machine kills fascists” onto his acoustic guitar. It marked the beginning of an era where American rock & roll music would infiltrate politics and alter political realities both at home and abroad. Guthrie’s “machine” was a synecdoche for music, specifically, music’s ability to topple authoritarianism and rattle the political landscape. The epitaph foretold that sometimes a guitar, more than even armaments or peace treaties, had the capacity to reshape the world.
In the years that followed Stalin’s death, Western culture began to penetrate the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s liberalization policies allowed for greater (albeit still severely restricted)
freedom of movement, and in the process, a select few were able to smuggle rock & roll records from the West into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, at the World Youth Festival held in Moscow in 1957, “thousands of foreign youngsters swarmed through Moscow streets and danced rock and roll”, leaving a significant impression on Soviet youth.
From Moscow to the Eastern Bloc, an underground sub-culture of Soviet youth affected with Beatlemania and consumed with the spirit of Elvis, The Stones, Deep Purple, and The Velvet Underground, soon emerged. By the late 1960’s rock & roll became an epidemic among Soviet youth: thousands of bootleg recordings pressed onto used x-ray films dominated the black market, amateur rock groups sprouted at universities across the country, and teens rushed to take English lessons to understand their favorite songs. But rock & roll, despite its prominence, was forced to remain an underground phenomenon. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev specifically, possession of American rock music was expressedly forbidden and concerts were all but illegal. The music that infiltrated the Soviet Union was hardly political; neither the songs nor the audiences cared for political statements or endorsed subversiveness to the state. What rock & roll did do however, was threaten the orthodoxy that the totalitarian state required. It offered a space where culture and individuality could thrive independent of state control, while building bridges of identity with the West that directly countered official Soviet positions. As the State increasingly tried but failed to suppress rock & roll, seeds of resentment against the authority were planted in the consciousness of the youth, and in turn, the infallibility and righteousness of the Soviet project were questioned. While the embrace of rock music was largely an apolitical phenomenon and by no means a movement of overt resistance, rock & roll culture was able to slowly breach the Iron Curtain, undermine the state apparatus, and spark a cultural paradigm shift that contributed to the erosion of the Soviet Union.
A Challenge to State Orthodoxy:
Similar to the bard music coming out of the urban apartments of the intelligentsia, rock music and the subculture it produced (particularly in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s) was not a form of rebellion intended to undercut state power.
Rather than being anti-Soviet however, it was distinctly un-Soviet. As opposed to state-sanctioned music, rock & roll overflowed with authenticity and feeling. Rock & roll was an experience of raw individuality, an explicit contrast to the collectivist emphasis of Soviet mass song. Pavel Palazchenko, chief English interperter for Mikhail Gorbachev described the subtle impact of Western rock
bands:
“We knew their songs by heart …. In the dusky years of the Brezhnev regime they were not only a source of musical relief. They helped us create a world of our own, a world different from the dull and senseless ideological liturgy that increasingly reminded one of Stalinism …. The Beatles were our quiet way of rejecting ‘the system’ while conforming to most of its demands.”

More so, it was alternate mode of expression that undermined the cultural uniformity by establishing communities of belonging that existed independent of Soviet context. Rock, by its nature, meant freedom of thought and freedom of expression, values irreconcilable with the Soviet project. But the means of producing and attaining rock records, possibly more than the music itself, contributed to the subversion of state legitimacy. The blanket ban of rock & roll recordings and performances, rather than stymie its spread, encouraged Soviet youth to invent innovative ways to circumvent Soviet law. Publically, rockers misled Soviet authorities by disguising their performances as “parodies” of American music, youth bought music pressed on discarded x-ray films from the black market, and others huddled secretly in their apartments to listen to illicit Western radio stations. By enforcing strict prohibitions against rock music, the Soviet government inadvertently encouraged and normalized the disregard of its authority. Understanding “The Enemy”:
What the VHS was to the 1980’s and the Internet is to the present day, so was rock & roll to the people living behind the Iron Curtain. For most, rock music provided the first exposure to Western culture; rock & roll presented a window to the outside world unobscured by Communist propaganda. Not only did rock music humanize the “West”, it directly challenged previous assumptions that the Soviet citizenry held about their society. Western music debunked the assumption that the culture was universally controlled by the state, that thought, expression, and morality were regulated by every government.
Soviet youth suddenly wanted Western records of their favorite Western bands. They wanted to wear Western clothing and to talk and make music like their favorite Western artists. And soon, they wanted to be free like them too. The West became an inextricable part of the identities of Soviet youth, and to that effect, created a sense of community among Soviets and their counterparts in the West. This common cultural experience convinced many that there was no reason to fear the people whom they’d been indoctrinated into conceiving as their enemies. In both the United States and Russia, rock spawned a generation of people who suddenly refused to buy into the rigid ideological polarization of the Cold War, polarization that provided the foundation for state legitimacy.
The Soviet Project in Question: The Soviet project was supposed to offer a preferred way of life to its people; much of its legitimacy was drawn by positioning Communism as the most legitimate system by virtue of its unquestionable superiority to the West.
But in the context of rock music in the 60’s and 70’s, it was clear to Soviet youth that the West had clear cultural dominance. Rock & Roll of course was forbidden, and Soviet youngsters collected the music surreptitiously. By the early 1980’s, the Soviet Union was spending over three billion dollars to block Western radio stations that played rock & roll. But in the midst of illicitly acquiring this music, they began to ask themselves, “what else could be wrong with this government that just won’t let me listen to the music I want to?” In the Brezhnev Era, a disconnect between the youth and the government appeared, the very youth that would find themselves in position of power in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Many of the reformers and liberal minds of the 1980’s were those most affected by the curtailment of liberties in the 60’s and 70’s. As Soviet historian Mikhail Safanov
writes:
“the more the authorities fought the corrupting influence of the Beatles - or ‘Bugs’ as they were nicknamed by the Soviet media- the more we resented this authority, and questioned the official ideology drummed into us from childhood…the history of the Beatles' persecution in the Soviet Union is the history of the self-exposure of the idiocy of Brezhnev's rule. The more they persecuted something the world had already fallen in love with, the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology.”

The Soviet Union had positioned the West as a scapegoat for their social, economic, and political woes. Communism maintained its legitimacy by showcasing its preeminence over the West and presenting itself as a safeguard from the woes of Western life. But in denying (often brutally) the youth access to rock & roll, the Soviet state sent the youth a clear message: It was the state itself, not the West that was denying them happiness. The Soviet Union’s insistence on censoring rock & roll to prevent dissidence , paradoxically, undermined the infallibility and the righteousness of the Soviet project in the eyes of the younger generation.
Conclusion:
French philosopher Regis Debray famously proclaimed that there was “more power in blue jeans and rock and roll than the entire Red Army”. Like Woody Guthrie, he too recognized the power of music in effecting change and facilitating freedom. Rock & roll is an act of radical freedom, and every act of freedom in a totalitarian society, is a powerful one. The generation of youth raised in the 60’s and 70’s built bridges and relationships of understanding with the West through rock music, and in the end, was the generation that made radical changes a reality