Love, Joy and National Pride - An Introduction to the Forgotten 70’s

By Harry Trelawny-Vernon

If I asked you to imagine the 70s, several concepts would typically come to mind. Perhaps it would be the themes of anti-war found in many of the tracks, like Marvin Gayes’ ‘What’s Going On’, maybe it would be the calls to reject the establishment, like ‘Fight the Power’ by the Isley Brothers or the Sex Pistols -‘God save the Queen’. Potentially it would be the hippie movement and the societal criticisms of John Lennon. Regardless of the specific music, the themes of peace, equality, and radical change are ubiquitous across the decade’s biggest hits.

It is these themes that form the global popular recollection of the 70s in music. Yet this popular recollection is in many ways victim to the Churchillian notion that ‘history is written by the victors.’ These themes were prevalent in the West in the 70s. But behind the Iron Curtain, similar sounds were being produced - yet the themes and values espoused were almost diametrically opposed.

What’s the story of a band in the 70s in the West? They play the odd small gig and a label takes an interest. They make their first album, and eventually, perhaps, they get to tour and have their tracks played across the airwaves. If you’ve seen the film, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, this is a story that should feel familiar. The route to fame behind the Iron Curtain, however, is a vastly different story. It is a story with much more bureaucracy. The biggest Russian pop bands did not arise from groups of friends, but instead from the state. The USSR would pair professional musicians with accomplished composers to form state produced bands, so-called VIAs. Bands that did arise naturally were quickly swamped by bureaucracy.

To make it big in the Eastern European music scene, you needed to have the state onside. So, bands would strive to be officially recognised as a licensed VIA, and with that, the state would provide them a manager, producer, and state supervisor. What should be clear by this point is that whatever your origins, your route to fame was the same - through state sponsorship. This has clear ramifications on the types of music that arise. The USSR’s culture ministry diligently followed Leninist teaching on music that, “Every artist, everyone who considers himself an artist, has the right to create freely according to his ideal, independently of everything, however, we are Communists and we must not stand with folded hands and let chaos develop as it pleases. We must systematically guide this process and form its result”. In practice, this systematic guiding meant that VIAs produced music that bolstered the Soviet state.

Inoffensive themes of love and joy were promoted as well as patriotism, particularly in bands from national minorities like Belarusian band ‘Pesniary’ whose psychedelic folk-rock pushed support for the government. What is particularly interesting about these bands, is that stylistically they were very similar to the sounds arising in the West. There were keytars, hippie fashion, funk, and disco yet all set to lyrics of a vastly different nature. So, while in the West music was encouraging the youth of the 70s to tear down structures, to change society. In the East, it was promoting love for the fatherland and support of the USSR all to similarly disco, rock, and funk tunes.

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