The Two Types of Rock Stars

When one mentions rock stars, evidently means musicians, mostly from the 1960ies on. Rock and roll came and took it all. For us – here in Eastern Europe – it was a miracle from the real world, accessible through blurred radio stations like Radio Free Europe and the distant Radio Luxemburg. Those rock stars looked at us from bad quality black and white concert shots of magazines reporting on the scandals of the ’decaying of imperialism’ – from concerts here, concerts there, festivals here, festivals there  They were rolling all over the world – outside ours.

For us all that mobility was out of reach. So we made a virtue out of this – we looked up on those who were enduring the historical infernos and heavy political winds of our reality by trying to remain immobile, solid as a tree or a rock. We did not have too many ‘rock’ stars of that kind, some poets (formerly imprisoned), filmmakers (sometimes banned) or journalists (sacked at some point). ‘Compromise’ was one of the most negative expressions of those decades, as there were few, who did not enter some kind of a compromise, and then that was it. We wanted our martyrs, we created our martyrs and then we went to their burial en mass – we have a tradition of magnificent burials, and re-burials. And then the graveyards of these rocks have become shrines – even if not as majestic as that of Peter the Rock in Rome. An excellent description of the phenomenon is given by Bertrand Russell on ‘The Moral Superiority of the Oppressed’ in his lean volume ‘Unpopular Essays’.

Those days are gone. Some of those legends have visited Eastern Europe, giving us 2-3 hours of that rock and roll, and we can watch the new rock stars, wherever they give a concert nowadays. Our own rocks seem to be gone. I can’t decide, whether it’s a good sign or a bad sign.