Here Be Dogs: Documenting the visual culture 
of the Czech Indie scene 

Michal Nanoru 

The eye has always been suspect in rock culture, after all, visually, rock often 
borders on the inauthentic ... It was here-in its visual presentation-that 
rock often most explicitly manifested its resistance to the dominant culture, 
but also its sympathies with the business of entertainment. (Grossberg 
1993:195) 

For Saturday Night Live he wore the same clothes from the previous two 
days: a pair of Converse tennis shoes, jeans with big holes in the knees, a 
T-shirt advertising an obscure band, and a Mister Rogers style cardigan 
sweater. He hadn't washed his hair for a week, but had dyed it with 
strawberry Kool-Aid, which made his blond locks look like they'd been 
matted with dried blood. Never before in the history oflive television had a 
performer put so little care into his appearance or hygiene, or so it seemed. 
Kurt was a complicated, contradictory misanthrope, and what at times ap­
peared to be an accidental revolution showed hints of careful orchestration 
... He obsessively-and compulsively-planned every musical or career 
direction, writing ideas out in his journals years before he executed them, 
yet when he was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if it were 
an inconvenience to get out of bed. (Cross 2001:2) 

In May 2011 I went to an opening party at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New 
York City, where Hollywood stars and celebrities, including Mickey Rourke, 
Quincy Jones, and Naomi Campbell mingled near amish-mash of Eastern 
European -related artworks, including Robert Crumb's comic book rendition 
of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Vladimir Tatlin's statue "Monument to the Third 
International;' and an exhibition called Revolutionary Film Posters, a trove 
of Russian constructivist imagery from between the wars. I It was a bizarre 
sight for me, a person who grew up in 1980s Czechoslovalda, a satellite nation 
in the Soviet Bloc. In the 1980s, Czechoslovak cultural policy, theoretically 
and declaratively (if not always in practice) respected the norms of socialist 
realism, and it was in the name of the very ideals promoted by these posters 
that Western popular culture (and Kafka, for that matter) were banned as 
"bourgeois" and "decadent" imperialist propaganda. Here in the spectacle 
of a Chelsea gallery, the stars of Hollywood - the most visible exponent of 
American capitalism-celebrated the repurposing of political propaganda 

Current Musicology, No. 91 (Spring 201 1) 
© 2011 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 49 



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into aesthetic objects, as if theatrically reasserting capitalism's victory over 
the ideologies of the Soviet Bloc. 

This victory is not always that absolute in the former Czechoslovakia, 
and although its been more than twenty years since the ideologies were 
officially abandoned, the impact of their pre-1989 influence can still be 
traced in many areas oflife in the Central European region. My aim here is to 
confront some of the issues raised by the above situation, especially attitudes 
towards art, fashion, and popular culture in the context of post-totalitarian 
Czech Republic. My focus will be the relationship of members of the 1990s 
and contemporary Czech independent music scenes to visual presentation 
of their own and others' musical objects and performances. 

As a cornerstone I am going to use Zde jsou psi/Here Be Dogs, a Czech/ 
English book about visual culture of Czech independent music scenes that 
I edited in 2010. (Fellow Czech journalist Martina Overstreet served as a 
producer for the book). The book features thirty-two musical projects now 
active in the Czech Republic, each introduced by a) a studio portrait of its 
personnel by the photographer Adam Holy, b) a representative set of the 
project's visual communications-costumes, album covers, booklets, flyers, 
posters, documentary and promotional photographs, video projections used 
during performances, merchandise, banner ads, computer wallpapers, buddy 
icons, etc., and c) a short text written by a third party author familiar with 
the Czech music scene. The image of the visually compelling part of the indie 
scene is complemented by Dusan Tomanek's documentary photographs, 
which were taken of Czech audiences in the past four years at festivals, clubs, 
and various other venues. My experiences as pop music critic, editor of two 
independent arts and culture publications, and advocate for popular music 
studies within Czech media studies at Prague's Charles University informed 
my enthusiasm for the topic and allowed me to foresee the obstacles in the 
production and reception of this project in the Czech cultural space. There 
were several. The book packed more than forty names in its colophon, with 
some ninety members of bands (plus their designers and photographers), 
and sold out its initial run of a thousand copies. As such it became a useful 
indicator of positions on the role of the image in the indie music sphere. 

I began research for the book in 2009 by examining more than 300 
contemporary Czech acts that had at least some web presence, and my col­
leagues Martina Overstreet and Marie Hladikova also conducted a similar 
scope of research. Most bands I researched got by with the default page 
settings on MySpace, or a profile on its Czech counterpart, WVlTw.bandzone. 
cz. The thirty-two projects included in the book represent only a minority of 
bands, with our primary criteria being that those selected showed interesting 
approaches to their visual presentation or at least showed interest in visual 



Michal Nanoru 

presentation. They were singled out as exemplary and the introductory text 
of the book served as defense of such interests. 

The authors featured in the book come from very different backgrounds: 
they are graphic deSigners, artists, curators, critics, art theorists, and fellow 
musicians. I state in the book's introduction: "Our texts were written by 
experts, however they are experts on something else. We haven't found an 
expert on the visual part of indie bands" (Nanoru and Overstreet 2010:234) 
There are several reasons for this. The book, with its documentary ambition, 
originated partly as a reaction to the vacuum in contemporary Czech writing 
about popular music in its institutional framework and social context. The 
study of popular music had a strong tradition in the Czech scientific milieu 
throughout the second half of the twentieth century, but after the 1989 
Velvet Revolution no one was able to meaningfully build on it and develop 
it further. 2 Books devoted to popular music (other than popular biographies 
and interviews with artists) are virtually nonexistent, and those that do 
exist focus on the history of popular music before 1989 (Kotek 1990, 1998; 
Matzner, Polednak, and Wasserberger 1990; Doruzka 1991). These works 
also use visual materials strictly for illustration. 

The post-revolutionary change of priorities, the transformation of 
funding for the sciences, and the somewhat unchallenged division of high 
and low art prevented wider attention to contemporary popular music in 
the country's musicological research departments. In catching up with what 
was being neglected for the forty years under Soviet command, popular 
music fell behind. The humanities and social sciences departments are 
not particularly qUick to adopt popular music studies into their curricula 
either-my attempts to implement it into media and communications studies 
program at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University were met 
with skepticism. The increasing influence of British cultural studies in Czech 
university classrooms that would suggest the possibility of future changes 
to this situation has not so far resulted in many publications or conference 
papers on popular music. More activity can be seen coming from indepen­
dent enthusiasts than from scholars; for instance the first serious book on 
the history of black popular music, Hudba ohne: Radikalni cerna hudba od 
jazzu po hip hop a dale [Fire Music: A radical black music from jazz to hip­
hop and further], was written by a younger music journalist Karel Vesely 
and published in December 2010 by BiggBoss, a record label specializing 
in hip-hop. The hardcore/DIY scene put its lyrics into a compendium in 
2009, but that was it; the editor and publisher Tomas Weiss gathered the 
verses without context or any introductory text. There is, however, a body 
of literature dealing with pre-1989 "parallel culture;' or "the underground" 
as it is was called in the Czech context (Pilar 1999; Hlavsa and Pelc 2001; 

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Jirous 2008; Machovec 2008). Here Be Dogs picks up from these histories, 
exploring subsequent generations of musicians and fan cultures while dif­
ferentiating between the social conditions of the past and post -89 times.3 The 
lack of relevant Czech literature, together with the fact that the Czech indie 
scene often follows popular culture developments in the West (especially in 
Britain and the United States) also leads me to the use of works published 
in these countries in this article. 

Perhaps the main reason for the lack of interest in the visual culture of 
in die outside Czech academia, and the reason some bands declined to be 
included in the book, is the precariousness of the suggestion that indie bands 
market themselves not so dissimilarly from commercially oriented musical 
enterprises, or the suggestion that members of the bands would stylize 
themselves. In my experience working in and writing about the independent 
scene, and especially putting together Here Be Dogs, contemporary Czech 
indie bands often refuse to acknowledge the role of graphic and product 
deSign, of on-stage or off-stage clothes and accessories, and/or performance, 
or at least they avoid openly discussing it. Their members claim they don't 
feel confident in the areas of visual representation, or don't care about them, 
often also suggesting that showing too much preoccupation with polishing 
visuals could or should have direct consequences for their credibility. 

I will go more deeply into in die ethics and definition of indie later, but 
here I want to suggest that both scholar Wendy Fonarow (2006) and music 
journalist Michael Azerrad's work on indie ethics and discourse work well 
in my analysis, as Fonarow dissects British indie as a symbolic system with 
particular focus on the questions of authenticity. Throughout the article 
I'm going to adhere to her understanding of indie as an ideology, an ethos 
revolving round the idea of creative and sometimes political autonomy, 
rather than as a mode of distribution or a genre definition. Azerrad's book 
Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), an account of the emergence of the 
American indie scene in the 1980s, inspired and strengthened ethic codes 
of the Czech in die scene in the 2000s. Copies of Our Band Could Be Your 
Life has circulated in the scene and on one occasion it was handed to me 
by a member of the Czech promoter team and record label Silver Rocket as 
"the Scriptures:' Fonarow writes that "the indie community has an elaborate 
discourse concerning what constitutes 'authentic' music:' (2006:188) and 
indeed, following Azerrad, the Czech indie scene currently screens its 
members for excess with puritanical consistency under the gUiding principle 
that "the in die underground made a modest way of life not just attractive 
but a downright moral imperative" (Azerrad 2001 :6). Openness about one's 
sartorial choices and general consideration of appearance is considered 
contradictory to pure artistic intention and, in many cases, attracts criticism, 



Michal Nanoru 

often leading to the collective hypocrisy of stylizing one's act only to hide 
the embarrassing fact of such vanity. 

Overstreet discussed the communication with the musicians in Here 
Be Dogs as being fraught with anxiety about even the term 'indie': "Bands 
were bothered by the term 'indie' and they understood 'style' as something 
superficial that might compromise their deep and serious creations. When 
I started using the words 'club scene' instead of 'indie' and 'your visual 
expression, which might also include clothes; everyone was much happier:' 
(Email correspondence, Nanoru, June 29, 2011)4 The leader of one band was 
asked whether their fans could be photographed for the book: 

I don't like the idea anyway. Personally, rather than some hipster poseurs, 
I would prefer photos of keyboards we use, and stuff, and guitars. Make 
great photos of them, because for us as a band they are quite a bit more 
substantial than a bunch of dumb trendy girls that let themselves be 
entertained by [pop singer 1 Peter Nagy on Sunday and by us on Monday. 
Sorry. And thanks very much. (Anonymous email correspondence, 
Overstreet, June 9, 2010)5 

Expressions of reservations towards style and issues of appearance can, to 
some extent, be found in most alternativelindie music scenes (see Fox 1987; 
Muggleton 2000; Gelder 2007; Greif201O), but a scene in a post-communist 
country like the Czech Republic has its specifics, some of them stemming far 
before the 1989 revolution. I therefore begin my article with a brief historical 
exploration, which exposes the tendencies that have shaped and intensified 
the Czech independent scene's perspective-especially the unusually strong 
legacies of 1960s American counterculture and 1980s Czech folk singers, 
both of which were relished as a oppositional forces under Communism. 
From there I approach indie as a moral system and demonstrate how it is 
now used for policing in the Czech indie scene, using voices heard during 
the making of and in Here Be Dogs. Particularly the uneasy relationship of 
Southern-Bohemian band Sunshine with the punk/hardcore scene it came 
from is introduced to point to the in die scenes' quest for authenticity as the 
primarily criteria for exclusion. Then I'm going to investigate the complex 
ways in which in die as a Western concept is adopted in a context of post­
communist country, by both the older and the newest generation. The quest 
for authenticity in the context of the Czech independent scene is complicated 
by the complex information interchange between the sources in the centers 
that determine global popular culture and their local counterparts in the 
periphery that-to a certain extent-make the Czech independent artists 
dependent on whatever information can travel through the traditional and 
often mainstream media and, more recently, via blogs and social media 
in affiliated communities. The aforementioned generational change then 

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represents the increased attention that in the past two years gained artists in 
their early or mid-twenties, whose bands often come from art school and/ 
or regional backgrounds. Such new bands bring important value changes 
into the Czech in die discourse, whether concerning more open attitudes 
towards bands' presentation or their position within the global music scene. 
I conclude with examination of Here Be Dogs's reception and its possible 
implications for the development of visual culture of Czech independent 
music culture. 

The 19805: Laying ground for indie 

There are three periods in the twentieth century during which information 
was flowing with a relative lack of restriction in and out of Czechoslovakia/ 
Czech Republic. The first was the First Republic, from the founding of 
Czechoslovakia in 1918 to the Nazi occupation in 1938; the second was circa 
1963 to 1968, when the relaxation of Soviet grip, and subsequent attempts at 
system reform, allowed for an economic and cultural "Prague Spring:' which 
was followed by Soviet occupation and a harsh crackdown on civil society, 
a time called Normalization; and the last came in the 1990s, following the 
Velvet Revolution in 1989. In retrospect, the movements defining the cultural 
atmosphere of these eras, much debated and celebrated in the wake of the 
post -1989 reconstituted democracy, correspond to the idealism of interwar 
modernist avant-gardes (attempts at art as inseparable from the praxis oflife, 
and art in the service of public good), the liberating sixties, and the 1990s, 
which saw a revisitation of sixties countercultural ideals with the ethos of 
the Pacific Northwest "grunge" rock scene. 

The early 1990s hippie revival was a wider process seen as a reaction 
to the Reagan-Thatcher eras in the West (from acid house to Madchester 
to techno, see for example Smith 1992; Reynolds 1998), but in the Czech 
Republic, the sixties were revived in bookstores, record stores, and in the 
media by way of a publishing frenzy that was stirred by those who remem­
bered the last days of relative freedom in the 1960s, and by a general hunger 
for everything that had been long forbidden. In the early 1990s, formerly 
banned books and LPs were being released and re-released in large num­
bers' and classic 1960s films enjoyed renewed premiers with unparalleled 
audience turn outs. Then, as "Europe fell in love with the idea of sweaty, 
flannel-wearing, blue-collar lumberjacks with screaming guitars rocking out 
in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest" (McMurray 2011:ix), grunge became 
the first "credible" major Western musical happening to hit Czech popular 
music culture without censorship. The public theater of Kurt Cobain's 
never-resolved conflict between the DIY ethics of 1980s punk, "the desire 



Michal Nanoru 

to rail against the dark milieu of the post -hippie early '70s and the calcified 
world of contemporary corporate rock" (ibid.:viii), and the demands of 
mainstream success and major label pressure, were important parts of the 
Czech fascination with grunge. Cobain, as much as the Czech president 
Vaclav Havel and many others on the turbulent threshold of the 1990s, went 
sWiftly from being a dissident to being a commander in chief, blurring the 
barrier between the underground and the establishment. 

Devotion to the ideas of 1960s was not exclusive to the post-revolu­
tionary release. Frozen by the 1968 cutting of ties with developments in the 
West, the Czech underground movement of the 1970s and 1980s organized 
itself around the legacy of the Beats and the 1960s counterculture. Jachym 
Topol, a member of the youngest underground generation, calls the Beats 
their "prototypes" (Topol 2011). The greatest source of inspiration for the 
emblematic band of the underground, the Plastic People of the Universe, was 
the Velvet Underground, followed closely by the Mothers of Invention and 
the Fugs. Books by the Beats and associated writers circulated in samizdat, 
publications reproduced in small numbers on typewriters or mimeographs 
and passed from reader to reader, and translations of the Beats' poetry and 
prose still enjoy great response in the Czech Republic. The poet Egon Bondy, 
one of the central figures of the Czech underground, was named the "The 
No.1 Czech beatnik" (Blumfeld 1992)6 and poets Jan Hane, Milan Koch, 
Zuzana Trojanova, Svatava Antosova, Vaclav Hrabe, and later Petr Placak 
and Jachym Topol also drew inspiration for their literature as well as outsider 
lifestyle from the Beats. For the non-academic public in the early 1990s, Lou 
Reed, Frank Zappa, and Allan Ginsberg remained as cultural icons (see on 
this Pilar 1999, Janousek 2008, Armand 2010). 

The discourse of "the underground" itself was adopted from the West, 
but its form intensified under the totalitarian condition. In the first account 
of the underground literature, Underground, literary historian Martin Pilar 
quotes Canadian Paul Wilson, who at the very beginning of the 1970s 
performed with the germinal Czech underground band Plastic People of 
the Universe. Wilson remembers how, in the Czech environment, he began 
to perceive American avant-garde rock quite differently: "Filled with heavy 
dumplings, sauerkraut and beer, I comfortably sat back and listened to the 
Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and the Doors and the Fugs, and 
as I listened, I felt the depth of the music, which I did never feel before, as 
if I first heard it with the Czech ears" (Pilar 1999:25)? Pilar sees causes of 
this transformation and the strong effect the 1950s and 1960s American 
counterculture had on its Czech counterpart in the "lack of intellectual 
pluralism and free thought, which in the Central European context has 
always been very difficult to promote" (ibid.). 

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Singer-songwriters were a substantial influence on the overall Czech 
cultural atmosphere of 1980s and 1990s. Since the late 1970s, they had been 
more or less tolerated by the regime. They played at summer folk festivals, 
and, in the second half of the 1980s, recorded for the state record label Panton. 
Rock bands, whether "alternative" (those who preferred to play legally, when 
possible) or the more radical "underground" (who preferred to have no 
contact with the establishment, Chadima 1992: 10) however, had more public 
scrutiny. While even banned songwriters (such as Vladimir Merta, Vlastimil 
Trdn<ik, Jaroslav Hutka, or Pepa Nos) could always secretly perform with 
a guitar at private concerts and at the semi -legal art exhibition openings 
(and, if needed, quickly hide traces of it), whereas larger productions or 
louder musicians tended to attract the attention of the authorities. These 
more noticable events were generally reserved for "official" groups whose 
production was prescreened by censors for "objectionable" lyrics, musical 
style, or general appearance.8 The underground acts lacked the permission to 
perform and therefore risked imprisonment, loss of employment, exclusion 
from school, and other penalties (providing they found a space to perform, 
since the management of the venues risked similar sanctions). Continuing 
police repression against underground rockers, and harsh methods of "in­
terrogation" after the 1976 process with the underground band the Plastic 
People of the Universe9 successfully destroyed the radical wing of unofficial 
groups. Soon after, the establishment began to view even the "alternative" 
as a significant risk for the implementation of its "ideological education" 
plans and "ideological supervision" of independent cultural activities, and 
in the 1980s they hardened cultural policy towards popular musicians with 
repeated use of artificial judicial procedures and series of imprisonments (see 
Skvorecky 1983, 1988). In this climate, the bards of the 1980s maneuvered 
between the state-sponsored and underground worlds, and were perceived 
as an island of relative freedom by the audiences, who valued the credibility 
of songwriters' personal beliefs and their self-tortured role as the guardians 
of morals. The critical force of ridicule and liberating humor of their lyr­
ics defied the regime's pathos and its general handling of words. 10 A large 
portion of the production comprised rhymed, guitar-accompanied citizen 
journalism that balanced the popular distrust of the media. Spontaneous 
expression by (at first) amateur songwriters represented an antithesis to 
the kitsch of commercial popular music promoted by the state-controlled 
media. What Azerrad notes in Our Band Could Be Your Life that applied to 
the 1980s DIY movement in the United States applied also to the reality of 
1980s Czechoslovakia (with the exception of the college education, since 
many potential students were not allowed to enter universities): 



Michal Nanoru 

There are interesting parallels between in die rock and the folk movement 
of the early Sixties. Both hinged on purism and authenticity, as well as 
idealism about the power of music within culture and society; both were 
a reaction to shallow, complacent times and their correspondingly shallow, 
complacent entertainment; both had populist roots but were eventually 
commandeered by white middle-class college kids. (2001:8) 

In the Czech mainstream of the 1980s there was consumer socialism, a kind 
of state-controlled mass conformity, where those who did not hide their 
dissenting opinions or simply stood out in any way, personal appearance 
included, were persecuted, and where consumer goods, whether food, 
fashion or music, were produced in state-monopolized, mass-standardized 
forms. The question was then whether goods would be delivered at all, given 
the frequent shortages and generally limited supplies of the failing state­
planned economy. The centralized, nationwide five-year plans and ban on 
private entrepreneurship significantly limited the potential for seasonality, 
for "trends:'ll For an alert minority of listeners in and around the under­
ground, a great many of whom after the revolution became public figures 
in their own right, the folk (and punk) formula "three chords and the truth" 
became sort of formal standard (whatever the truth may happen to be). By 
the end of the eighties and the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc approaching, 
this group grew rapidly. 12 

Vaclav Havel describes the dual nature of life in "normalized" 
Czechoslovakia in his 1984 essay "Six Asides about Culture": 

Something is always banned, now as then; virtually nothing is permitted, 
suppressed journals remain suppressed, manipulated institutions continue 
to be manipulated, and so on. The regime genuinely behaves like a grave dig­
ger, while virtually all that is lively and yet has to be permitted lives almost 
by accident, almost by mistake, almost only on a word of honor, though 
with endless complications and no assurance about tomorrow. What is 
true about the will of the regime, however, is not necessarily true of the 
real spiritual potential of our community. However suppressed beneath 
the public surface, however silenced and even however frustrated, in 
some way that potential is still here ... I see evidence of this in far more 
than the hundreds of samizdat volumes, tens of typewritten magazines, 
private or semi-official exhibitions, seminars, concerts and other events: 
besides, there are theaters crammed full of people grateful for every nuance 
of meaning, frantically applauding every knowing smile from the stage . 
. . queues at book stores when one of [writer Bohumill Hrabal's books, 
emasculated though it may be, was about to appear; expensive books on 
astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find 
that many readers in the USA); young people travelling half way across the 
country to attend a concert that may not take place at all. Is all that-and 
more-really a graveyard? (1987:125) 

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The strength of the folk tradition was not without consequences for the 
visual part of the credible music productions. According to performance 
studies scholar Philip Auslander, both Western and Eastern resistance to 
show business "stemmed from the belief that the dominant culture controlled 
the means of producing socially influential images (e.g., the mass media)" 
(2006:15)Y The 1960s counterculture and its heirs' investment in the idea 
of authenticity and subsequent antipathy to theatricality in music is derived 
from three ideological commitments, argues Auslander: "the emphasis on 
spontaneity and living in the present moment, the desire for community, and 
the suspicion that spectacle served the interests of the social and political 
status quo" (ibid.:IO). Seeing the folk singers and their craft on one hand 
and spectacular popular culture on the other as a part of the "clash between 
an anonymous, soulless, immobile and paralyzing Centropic') power, and 
life" (Havel 1987:133) helped shape the Czech alternative views of what 
was authentic and trustworthy way into 2000s, sometimes resulting in 
paradoxical and counterproductive uncritical formalism. This point was 
clear to Havel: 

At times we encounter something we might call a sectarian view of parallel 
culture, that is, the view that whatever does not circulate only in typescript 
or whatever was not recorded only privately is necessarily bad and that not 
being printed, publicly performed or exhibited is in itself an achievement 
or an honor while the reverse is always and automatically a mark of moral 
and spiritual decay, if not outright treason. (ibid.) 

In principle, not much has changed since. The larger, more elaborate, more 
visible productions in the Czech independent scene attracting attention by 
their design or visual exuberance and not only by lowly musical expressions 
tend to entice examination and risk being associated with social and political 
mainstream. 

Indie is a way of life 

There are many definitions of "indie;' with the original one stemming from 
an independent financial relationship to the-six, five, or four respectively­
transnational major label music corporations (Negus 1999, Azerrad 2001, 
Fonarow 2006), and this is the definition from which Czechs have come to 
use the term, in English. The move from economic descriptor to aesthetic/ 
genre descriptor began, shortly after it did in the United States, around the 
early 2000s (Abebe 2010). As in the United States, the space between the 
two meanings is a site of conflict and self-definition for each artist. Likewise, 
Czech indie music culture has its own narratives and heroes who define and 



Michal Nanoru 

shape the terms of the argument. One legendary instance occurs in the plot 
of Miuiga - Happy End (Zelenka 1996) a mockumentary film in which an 
all-powerful record company turns a simpleminded band into dancing fruit 
to promote an international fruit producer. But according to International 
Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the sales of recorded music 
in the Czech Republic in 2010 were close to $20 million USD. The regional 
branches of major labels 14 operate budgets that wouldn't support many of 
the Western independents and they were almost never able to exercise the 
relative amount of power their parent companies do in their environments 
(Negus 1999; Nanoru -PospiSil 2005; Elavsky 2005). The economic definition 
of indie as matter of access to the corporate distribution networks, however, 
was rather unpractical and limiting even before the music industry collapsed 
under the digital revolution. Indie also cannot be confined to any musical 
genres or styles-the label has been applied to college rock as much as trip 
hop, disco, or dance-punk. Many of the 2010 annual indie "best of" lists in 
the Western media were topped by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a 
best-selling hip-hop album dealing with celebrity and excess, recorded by 
Kanye West, an international celebrity, and put out by Roc-A -Fella Records, 
a subsidiary of Universal Music Group. For this reason it seems most useful 
to define indie as an ideology. 

The moral and ideological system of indie, developed in the United 
States and particularly in Britain and adopted by a select group of fans 
during the past twenty years in the Czech Republic, defines itself against 
"the mainstream" through a set of binary oppositions: small labels vs. major 
corporations, intimate venues vs. stadiums, local vs. global, personal vs. 
impersonal, 10-fi vs. elaborate production, live vs. prefabricated, spontaneous 
vs. choreographed, original vs. mass-produced, natural vs. artificial, utilitar­
ian vs. ornate, individual vs. uniform, authentic vs. constructed ... (ibid.; 
Fox 1987; Muggleton 2000; Gelder 2007). These forms of opposition cohere 
into an ethos similar to that of hippie, and indeed Romantic ideology of the 
artist, and these binaries are mutually reinforcing of one another. Likewise, 
one element of an artist that is on the wrong side of the binary can potentially 
negate all "correct" elements of the group as Fonarow argues: 

For indie, 'authentic' music is personal, live, youthful, organic, self-made, 
original, and motivated by concerns of artistic expression rather than 
commercial acquisition. This aesthetic morality is one of the ways indie 
asserts its music as more valuable than other genres. (2006: 188) 

An indie artist always has to consider what creative decisions could position 
him or her outside of the indie acceptability, and being preoccupied with 
one's image in this equation often has a tendency to do just that. 

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The most important distinction for Czechs is between music produced 
for profit and that which is espoused as being made with pure enthusiasm. 
In this sense, Czech indie in 1990s and 2000s often takes on the attitude of 
rockism, the belief that rock is the best musical form, more authentic than 
the other forms of popular music and therefore superior to them. Rockism 
equates rock fandom as natural or naturalized while other types of fandom 
are artifice, which is in and of itself a systematic denial of the constructedness 
of rock fandom. The term "rockism" had been in use within British popular 
music criticism discourse since the 1970s and entered into mainstream with 
a New York Times article by Kelefa Sanneh: 

Like rock'n'roll itself, rockism is full of contradictions: it could mean lov­
ing the Strokes (a scruffy guitar band!) or hating them (image-conscious 
poseurs!) or ignoring them entirely (since everyone knows that music isn't 
as good as it used to be). But it almost certainly means disdaining not just 
Ms. [Ashley] Simpson but also Christina Aguilera and Usher and most of 
the rest of them, grousing about a pop landscape dominated by big -budget 
spectacles and high -concept photo shoots, reminiscing about a time when 
the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant 
it, even if that time never actually existed ... Rockism is imperial: it claims 
the entire musical world as its own. (2004) 

These views, in condensed form, represent the romantic aesthetic prefer­
ences and values within the generic trope of rock fans as described by Keith 
N egus-favoring "timeless" rock over "consumer" pop, album over single,15 
author over performer or artists that "express themselves" through writing 
their own songs over the ways in which singers or groups of performers 
may work with arrangers, session musicians, and songwriters in putting 
together a composition or project (2002:121). Perhaps not surprisingly 
for a domain almost exclusive to a small, mostly college-educated, lower­
middle class to middle-class white male cohort -and the Czech Republic 
is one of the socially, ethnically, and nationally most homogeneous states 
in Europel6-the in die doctrine often acts as a residuum of high art values 
in postmodern situation. 

One of the high art values reaffirmed within indie ideology is that of 
the autonomous creator. As writes Fonarow, "For many, indie is the spirit 
of independence, being free from control, dependence, or interference. 
Self-reliance, not depending on the authority of others, has been the guiding 
value of indie music, as has the autonomy of artist" (2006:51). With "rock 
musician as an artist;' this "rebellious individualist" is, in this mythological 
context, expected to express his innermost feelings through music and 
without interference. Anything that would resemble established professional 
marketing tricks, such as "superficial" and "extraneous" design or fashion, 



Michal Nanoru 

suggests paying attention to "unessential" elements and losing of the one of 
the most reiterated indie values, individual artistic control. The ideal here is 
"unmediated" expression, or rather, something as impossible as unmediated 
music, unmediated media. One of the important indie binaries juxtaposes 
style not as temporal but eternal, formed by internally held attitudes. 

The indie ideology travels well. By deriding fashion as superfluous, 
equaling attention to visuals as manipulative, saying that marketing tech­
niques are only for commercial (or propagandist) acts, contemporary Czech 
rock musicians and fans are consistent with disparagement of the "low taste 
of the masses:' Actively refining an image is considered cheating and rejected 
on the same grounds the hipster figure is declassed as a pretender because 
of the hipster's adoption of subcultural styles without sharing of social 
conditions or imagined ideologies (see Greif 2010; Hebdige 1979:46-51). 
J akub Adamec, a member of the extravagant Silesian band I Love 69 Popgeju, 
writes in Here Be Dogs about another band known for its visual exuberance: 
"[it's] a frequent Prague phenomenon: the attempt to look and be coolon 
the outside, which doesn't go hand in hand with inner originality" (Nanoru 
and Overstreet 2010:241). By this dismissal he actively sets and defends the 
boundaries of indie as coherent, with core and surface. 

Other artists in the book mobilized their bids for authenticity in a classic 
gesture of negation as outlined by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984). One such 
case was that of Amak, the leader of the darkwave post-punk band Night. 
In Here Be Dogs he states: 

I wear dirty shoes cause I'm a pig and I don't have time to clean them. My 
T-shirt is torn from the guitar, and I wear everything inside out, cause I 
don't like the type on my shirt. If someone needs to wear a blond wig and 
big sunglasses for the same reason and feels comfortable, then it's OK. 
(Nanoru and Overstreet 2010:255) 

Amak is a former bassist of Sunshine, a band formed in 1994 in Tabor that 
had been part of the Southern Bohemian punk/hardcore scene, but which 
was ostracized from the scene for its "inauthentic" style sense and for 
courting mainstream success first abroad then back in the Czech Republic. 
A review of the Sunshine album Moonshower and Razorblades, which 
was released by the American record label Custard (run by mainstream 
pop producer Linda Perry, and distributed by Warner Brothers in United 
States and Universal Music in the Czech Republic), appeared on the DIY 
culture website Czechcore, which prompted a lengthy thread about the 
appropriateness of publishing a review of such an album, regardless of how 
positively or negatively the reviewer evaluates them. Cvalda anticipates this 
in the review: 

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I can already see the discussion, that review of major label record shouldn't 
appear on Czech core (who knows if the review will be even published after 
they rejected my review of the last Mbtorhead album), but I think that 
Sunshine has strong roots in what Czechcore presents, even if it headed 
somewhere else ... I know how many people in the hardcore scene view 
Sunshine, I understand, on the other hand, this album is simply good 
and I'm sincerely glad that in this fuddy-duddy country, where radios 
are dominated by the greatest of musical waste, Sunshine caught on and 
brought the masses something of at least some arty value ... (2005) 17 

A user named Premek posted comments that were echoed by many: 

I don't even know if you're serious about this ... Next time I'll have to read 
reviews somewhere on mtv, they have more pictures there :0) ... I think 
that hardly anybody here thinks that Sunshine leaped further with this 
album ... maybe further into (I hope not only) my ass. (2011)18 

Given this type of reaction to Sunshine within the indie community, 
Amak's assertions in the book project are part of his own present attempts to 
claim authenticity relative to that of his former band, who are still active and 
play primarily in a circuit of "commercial" festivals and club performances 
frequented mainly by Czech teens. 

1he exclusiveness of rockist ideology extents further in its dismissal of 
exterior. One of the more fashion-conscious people on the Czech cultural 
scene is Jan P. Muchow of the mid -1990s Czech shoegaze and later electronic 
band The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Muchow confirms his mistrust of style in 
favor of "taste;' saying in Here Be Dogs: "Style is something you can buy, but 
taste is something you either have or don't have" (Nanoru and Overstreet 
2010:248). In deriding style as easily acquired and corrupt, Muchow aligns 
taste as a kind of ideological superiority (Bourdieu 1984). He denies the 
constructedness of taste and its determination by person's social-economic 
and educational background, implies the existence of category of "tasteless" 
opposing the one and only "good taste" (i.e. the bourgeois taste, in Bourdieu's 
reading), and uses it as a way of actively distancing himself from a social 
group lacking cultural capital. Aesthetics here take the shape of a diSciplinary 
system used to reinforce an elite status, "a cultural turnstile-it admits only 
those with the right tickets and excludes the masses" (Fiske 1989:121).19 

A new generation of musical artists contradicts earlier Czech indie 
tendencies. These younger fans and musicians appearing on the Czech 
independent scene in the late 2000s tend to be exposed to and expecting of 
international travel, have access to post -secondary education abroad, and 
a engage in a direct, instant flow of media. They often have more playful 
attitudes toward the relationship between their work and the presentation 



Michal Nanoru 

"Which is worst off-Czech thrift stores or Czech hip hop?" asks Petr Vizina, the author 
of text about Cokovoko (above) in Here Be Dogs. Cokovoko, part of the Brno scene, make 
explicit parodies of the creation of credibility through flow, dynamic stage presence, and 
the seemingly unmediated transition from street to stage that is a dominant part of Czech 
hip-hop since its inception in the 1990s. © 2010 Adam Holy. Used by permission. 

of themselves. One such person is painter, promoter, and DJ Jakub Hosek 
of Prague's DJ duo Indie Twins and promoters team AMlS0, who says in 
Here Be Dogs: "We don't live ordinary lives. We don't wear ordinary clothes. 
We don't have to" (Nanoru and Overstreet 2010:246). 

The new generation, especially those coming from the art school envi­
ronment, are markedly more open about their aesthetic and sartorial choices. 
"We frequently borrow clothes from each other. It depends on our mood;' 
says Edgar, a member of aggressive electro group Schwarzprior, formed in 
2010 by three students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Ostrava, 
who support themselves by doing construction jobs. "When I'm feeling fine, 
I remember what I was wearing the last time I was pissed off, and that I put 
on. When I'm enjoying myself on stage, I might take my shirt off" (ibid.:241). 
Those Czech artists, whose experience with music and popular culture was 
primarily gained after the digital turn and the collapse of the music industry's 
late twentieth century model, tend to see music less bound by genre rules. 
This development, partly caused by eroding hierarchy of media and rapid 
generation of short-term trends and styles that do not replace each other, 
but exist side by side, manifests itself in more open relationships between 
art forms. Theatrically-sophisticated electronic band MIDI LIDI, taken out 
of the club context, becomes "a conceptual, audiovisual work, whose goal 

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is to do contemporary pop" (ibid.:242). But still, even the most extravagant 
of the young projects on the indie scene, such as Brno's feminist, parodic 
rap duo Cokovoko, continue to view costumes as an evasive action and 
point to music's supremacy over other components of their expression: 
"We won't wear jeans and white tees and play the lute until we know how to 
do something, which is far away in the future. So for the moment wearing 
masks is a necessity for us, just like it is for [mask-wearing shock metalists 1 
Slipknot:' (ibid.:244). However, the new generation of artists entering the 
independent scene in the past two years brings with it vital changes, whose 
consequences will the scene continue to feel in the future. 

Performance 

The Czech indie scene's resistance to sophisticated presentation doesn't stop 
with design and fashion. Performance and theatricality are also subject to 
suspicion in the indie environment. On the hunt for authenticity, fans ap­
pear to perpetuate a systematic denial of the fact that any live performance 
is in great part theatrical, or, as Simon Frith writes in Performing Rites, that 
"all live performance involves both spontaneous action and the playing of 
a role. This is obvious enough in live music: it must involve a combination 
of improvisation and note-following" (1996:207, Frith's emphasis).20 The 
conventions of performance are actually what the performances are judged 
and valued against. As popular music scholar Theodore Gracyk maintains, 
rock exists primarily as recorded music. The audience experiences it mostly 
in album form and as such, "rock is not essentially a performing art" (1996: 
74-5). Gracyk claims that the media represent rock musicians as live 
performers and not as the studio artists they are, marketing rock as live 
even though it circulates mostly recorded, which perpetuates the myth of 
rock as live. Both Auslander (1999:76) and Frith (1996:211) add that most 
rock records misrepresent rock musicians by pushing the artifice of their 
studio recording in the background and posing as if the recording were a 
mere performance. 

The pose reinforces some fans' belief in liveness as the most important 
element of popular music. One instance of this is the story of Cobra Killer, 
a German girl group famed within the much larger and diverse Berlin scene 
primarily for their performances rather than sonic sophistication. Mlada 
fronta Dnes, the Czech national daily newspaper, reported in 2007: 

'Shut up and play!' and 'Here you're not in Germany!', sounded from 
the audience at the performance by the Berlin girl's duo Cobra Killer in 
Prague's club Rock Cafe. Also, broken shards of a broad-shouldered man's 
pint glass hit the stage after his girlfriend's shirt was stained by few drops 



Michal Nanoru 

of red wine, which [Cobra Killer's members 1 Annika and Gina poured on 
themselves during the show. The intolerance of the Prague audience does 
not lie in the rejection of music, but rather in a non-acceptance of the 
theatrical and cabaret element. We cannot assume that visitors would not 
know Cobra Killer's music, they have certainly heard their albums many 
times-but they expect a concert experience where music plays the lead. 
Instead, they are faced with two crazy, exhibitionist girls with a sequencer 
and prerecorded sounds trying to excite reactions that are not entirely 
normal in the environment of a music club. For many Berlin artists it is 
typical not to be ashamed to come to the concert hall with prerecorded 
music, to change into an extravagant costume, run an animated projection, 
sing out of tune and accompany it with, say, a painted maraca. Czech clubs 
are not yet attuned to this game, a concert is considered an event worthy 
of respect on both sides of the stage. (Turek 2007)21 

This example bares the basic elements of Czech rockist resistance to the 
performative component dominating over the music in club environment. 
The audience of the Cobra Killer came with expectations of (gendered) 
musical skills, or at least attempts at such skills, and was upset by the obvious 
disinterest of the duo in technical mastery or musical innovation and its 
concentration on the performance and provocation. The audience expected 
to witness serious on-stage creation or recreation of music they know from 
the band's records, but was met with music only serving a whole different­
frivolous, vaudevillian, willful-idea. For some, the playful distancing carried 
the performance away to the realm of a toy, a trick or magician's deceiving 
paraphernalia. 

The out-there subcultures 

After going through the historical developments and considering the indie's 
concept and the way it is applied by the members of the Czech indie scene 
in its basic forms, it's necessary to identify the specifics of Czech indie as 
opposed to its American or British counterparts in more than just chrono­
logical way. The position of the country on the fringe of world's stage leads 
to regional indie specifics. 

First, independent scenes are characterized by high permeability and 
closeness between those on stage and below it, and the size of the Czech 
scene (Prague, the largest city, has 1.3 million inhabitants and the whole 
country's population is 10.5 million) makes distance impossible, in literal 
terms or in terms oflifestyle. Very few Czechs obtain the status of "stars;' in 
as much as this means the adoration of many and its subsequent requirement 
for removal from everyday society. If indie rock artists are not supposed 
to be remote untouchable rock gods but "one of us;' then in Czech this 

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rule applies absolutely. In the indie scene, fans and performers often swap 
roles, and the sticky environment where members of different subcultures 
must share venues, media, and resources with aesthetic or social opposites 
to survive makes it possible for style and genre ideologies to intersect and 
collide, which lays the ground for misconceptions about the inner work­
ings of style, subculture, or marketing. One example is the curious mix of 
metal, punk, hip-hop, and ska fans who support Prague's DIY venue 007. 
The criteria imposed on a club serving different groups, such as 007, or on 
Radio 1, the first and only FM alternative radio in the Czech Republic, vary 
deeply. For instance, while certain forms of conspicuous consumption such 
as participating in "sneaker culture" are acceptable or even desirable in the 
current Czech hip-hop community, it is generally condemned by (indie) 
rockers or by hardcore/punk fans. However may the Czech hip-hopers derive 
their musical origins and inspirations primarily from the British or American 
mainstream, as does the young Czech grime artist Smack, they share the 
indie scene's minority position in opposition to the Czech mainstream. This 
position is recognized by other alternative groups who often need to form 
coalitions with them. 

Now I would like to address the question of authenticity of the subculture 
that has been transplanted from the West into the significantly different 
environment of a post -communist country. While the purity of the original 
subcultural cores and their ability to isolate themselves from the dominant 
consumer culture must not be overstated and overly romanticized-as 
subcultures are never isolated from their media environment and the 
majority of people who frequent any traditional subculture are followers 
(Thornton 1996; Trowler and Riley 1985:157)-the story of alternative 
culture's constant struggle to retain its authenticity and opposition towards 
mainstreaming is here further complicated by the fact that the position on 
the global cultural periphery means that Czech indie scene is derivative 
from the start. It's difficult to pursue "authenticity;' "originality;' or being 
"natura1"22 and "unstylized" if styles, including the music industry system 
and its terminology (and the very dispute about authenticity) have been 
imported as models from abroad where they originated as a local response to 
local problems. Most of the projects in Here Be Dogs and in the Czech music 
scene during the 1990s and 2000s conform to already established Western 
indie musical styles. Most bands sing in English, and most feature members 
who look up to Western musical heroes.23 Americans or Brits complain 
that Elvis or the Rolling Stones took the "negro sound" and translated it 
into the language of the white teenagers (Leland 2004); that hippies were 
inauthentic children of the middle class who were not interested in jazz, 
literature, and philosophy of the 1950s counterculture, but only in sex and 



Michal Nanoru 

drugs (Greif 20 1 0); that punk was a stylistic game of two fashion designers 
with situationist leanings (Muggleton 2000); that the Velvet Underground 
was a caprice of Andy Warhol; that every known subculture has always been 
nothing else but a romanticized image of poverty or disemboweling styles of 
the inner city ghettos and dragging them out to lush green lawns of suburbia. 
But very little of that critique has made it to the Czech Republic-indeed, 
these "inauthentic" artists are the basis of our own musical countercultures. 
Czech bands and their fans operate in different cultural context to that of 
both the originators and disseminators of the style.24 

Of course the Czech indie culture cannot be entirely dismissed as deriva­
tive. It is impossible to have an "authentic" local culture, which wouldn't 
be influenced by the media, commerce, and poses, because it wouldn't be 
globally interconnected and thus available to us. Nothing would catch on in 
the Czech Republic unless it resonated with local needs and desires, reflected 
or otherwise dealt with something the Czechs are dealing with, in whichever 
idiosyncratic way. Smack, the Czech grime musician, boasts of being the first 
to copy the latest styles from the United Kingdom, acoustically and visually. 
He mocks those who are behind him in the information chain (Nanoru and 
Overstreet 2010:258). The Czech hopefuls fit into the category of "out -there 
subcultures" as Cagle defines them, those who take: 

... styles from mass-mediated sources (out-there) and appropriate them 
in subcultural manner ... [They] may engage in the recontextualization 
of an already commercialized (incorporated) style, but in so doing, they 
also engage in an act that symbolically resists the supremacy of dominant/ 
mainstream culture. (1995:208) 

The blogging boom, that has has created a discursive space where informa­
tion doesn't necessarily have to enter Western mainstream media to enter 
the Czech Republic, is still fairly new and untested phenomenon. 

Whereas it would be easy to align the adoption of traits of American 
and British independent scenes in the context of the Czech Republic with 
Western cultural imperialism, the ways in which the Czech fans acquire 
information about its Western models and the ways in which they are able to 
distribute their music these days suggest a slightly different scenario. There's 
no doubt that after 1989 the Czech Republic became a target for products 
of universalizing cultural industries promoting the hegemonic interests of 
Western, international elite producers, but it is increasingly difficult to argue 
that the ideologies of Western independent scenes were simply imposed 
on Czechs along with other commodities such as food or jeans. Members 
of the Czech independent scene, and especially the newest generation, are 
on a constant look out for coalitions with the outside world. The Czech 

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Current Musicology 

bands may feel more affiliated with musical happenings in other countries 
than in their own immediate vicinage, but their opportunities are limited. 
Fiordmoss, an electronic folk duo formed at the Faculty of Fine Arts of 
Brno University of Technology and included in Here Be Dogs, is one of the 
first to gain minor international recognition through blogs and Facebook 
connections, while being virtually unknown in the Czech Republic. They 
soon realized that MP3s travel far better than a tour van and refused offers 
for international concerts due to lack of resources. The same is confirmed 
by Tomas Kopacek who runs the acoustic project Mon Insomnie, the first 
Czech artist ever mentioned by the influential US internet indie music 
website Pitchfork Media. Kopacek declined to be included in Here Be Dogs, 
because he did not want to be associated with the Czech scene. He already 
defines his community in other than national terms. Correspondingly, he 
also belongs to a generation that ignores the domestic, traditional media. 
'Tve never listened to any radio. I do not know why would I ever want them 
to play my songs;' he said to the Czech news weekly Respekt in July 2011 
(Turek 2011). 

Kopacek, Fiordmoss, or others in Here Be Dogs want to overcome the 
limits of their region, of sounding limitedly "regional;' and anxiously seek 
to be a part of the global music community. For Vladimir 518, the Czech 
rap and graffiti legend, this is done by respecting genre boundaries (Nanoru 
and Overstreet 2010:257). For MIDI LIDI, this means mixing Kraftwerk­
inspired electronic music with Czech folk song. The motivation remains the 
same: a strong desire for affiliation with alternative musical cultures from 
all over the world. 

The art school shift 

Here Be Dogs tries to locate and address some of the contradictions in the 
Czech indie scene and set the agenda for discussing themes we considered 
neglected. The book also reflects several groundbreaking shifts in the past 
two years. With increasing speed, the youngest generation of artists and their 
audiences are adopting tendencies that also shape music, art, and fashion 
scenes in the West. 

The growing affluence of the Czech people, the flourishing of consumer 
marketplaces filled with a large selection of internationally-produced and 
name brand items, and the proliferation of the digital media have impacted 
many elements of Czech society, one change of which is an increase interest 
in fashion. 25 As the society homogenized by the totalitarian regime stratifies, 
consumers, even those the context of an "alternative" scene, face the widened 
supply of consumer goods, and their attention starts to turn to the use of 



Michal Nanoru 

material goods as communicators. Pointing out to the fact that consumption 
of material utilities is also, and now more importantly, a consumption of 
signs (Baudrillard 1981), was one ofthe main aims of the book. This brings 
to the fore musicians born near the year 1989 and highlights the cultural shift 
towards attitudes and uses of art and the visual in the West. The continuing 
aesthetization of societies, mediatization (Krotz 2001; Schulz 2004; Couldry 
2008),26 the pictorial turn (Mitchell 1994), the designing of everything, are 
also increasingly apparent in the Czech Republic. The emerging processes­
and the book itself-are a part of wider movement in the society of spectacle, 
in a "time in which fashion moves from an expression of individual style 
to something photographed, blogged, reported on, turned into a trend, 
marketed, and sold" (Greif201O:27)Y 

British style magazines in the beginning of the 1980s (such as i-D, The 
Face, Blitz, see Hebdige 1988) launched sections devoted to street style, 
which were the precursors to today's fashion blogs, and these magazines 
influenced a new generation of American magazine counterparts in the 
1990s (Ray Gun, Vibe, Spin) to become more explicitly fashion-oriented. 
They became "consumer guides to the latest sounds and styles and places 
written in the language of art history:' as wrote Frith and Horne (1987:4). 
On pages of these and many other magazines, fine art seized rock'n'roll's 
status of the primary source of cool. Fine art since the 1960s continues its 
move from the wall to the performance space or media sphere, and in the 
Czech Republic, art schools have recently become places filled with the 
technologies for producing media and a talented, ambitious young work 
force waiting for new projects. JiH Ptacek, who teaches at the Brno University 
of Technology, writes that: 

... every quality art school has a recording studio, where you can record 
and mix tracks [and] ... in the art community it's easy to persuade your 
colleagues to help you make videos, photographs, projections. (Email 
correspondence, Nanoru, October 9, 2010)28 

Art school bands are becoming an unmistakable force on the Czech indie 
scene. In the West, the art school space as a natural setting for a coun­
terculture and as one of contested but continual presence in rock culture 
is well documented. But in the Czech context it represents a fairly new 
phenomenon. While sharing much of the ethos, art school bands stand 
indie puritanism on its head with the provocative question-why should 
music always come first? In the art school context the visual doesn't come 
after music, offering help, serving the music. They are created together and 
they are created equally. The roles members of such group perform are 
usually highly separated, with one person VJing, one person playing or 

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at least monitoring a stream of electronic music, and one person on vocal 
and dancing duties, with all tasks usually highly independent of what the 
others are doing. 

The fact that the art school band phenomenon, incubated in glam 
rock but fully hitting the Western world in the form of the new wave, was 
repressed in the 1980s Czechoslovakia, increases its current, still unfolding 
impact. In the small Brno new wave scene of the 1980s, some bands worked 
with tempting influences of art rock, punk, and nascent electronic scene, 
however, the amount of information from the West was so limited that they 
mostly had to rely on their own fantasies of how the music sounded and 
the performances would go. Art school projects-1A2Vl, Indie Twins, the 
Silesian/Wallachian, or the Brno scene-have progressed to the foreground 
of the national in die panorama in the past two years. They represent more 
than a third of the bands selected for Here Be Dogs and their approach is radi­
cally different from their predecessors. "[Symbols and costumes 1 determine 
the borders between the human race and those on stage;' states Jaro Haro, 
the sole member of audiovisual project 1A2V1, which came to existence as 
a semester-long project at the Studio of Graphic Design and New Media 
at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (Nanoru and 
Overstreet 2010:242). Haro builds a thin, but clearly visible wall between 
himself and presumed indie egalitarianism-he is in no case "one of us;' 
when performing he is not even human. Compared to older generations 
of Czech indie, namely those of 1990s and 2000s hardcore/post -punk and 
rock, bands coming form the Czech art school environment tend to view 
music as no less a matter of gaining control, but they have a tendency to 
abandon class rhetorics and alliances, and view their work much more as a 
way of achieving broad goals of aesthetic and autonomy rather than moral 
or political ones. 

In connection with art school bands, there has also been an embrace, 
resurrection, and/or update of local Czech or Central European culture 
within the indie scene within the last few years. Until very recently, local 
identity was the source of embarrassment for Czechs. This process is analo­
gous with rise in visibility for regions other than Prague within the Czech 
Republic, especially the Moravian centers of Ostrava, Olomouc, and Brno. 
Long after the 1989 revolution, for most Czech musicians, the label "Czech 
sound" was mostly synonymous with creative poverty and parochialism, 
but now the country is witnessing the rise of a generation that exhibits local 
references openly and tries to take them as a starting point for original work. 
These references however typically don't concern the sound of the bands, 
but their visual presentation. 



Michal Nanoru 

The Kratochvils, or DVA, outside a DIY plastic greenhouse in Padouchov, the village 
where they record their albums at parents' weekend house. Their parents took the casual 
photo just for family use, but DVA took a liking to it and since that time they have 
released a seasonal series of promotional photos posed by the greenhouse. © 2010 DVA. 
Used by permission. 

DVA, a moniker of married couple Bara and Jan Kratochvil, with 
a matter-of-factness that felt subversive, embraced signifiers of Czech 
provincial homeliness such as mushroom picking, gardening, and holiday 
photographs, and cultivated the Kratochvils from Eastern Bohemia, to be 
a working image that's unique but complex, original and contemporary. 
They abandoned the ubiquitous question of the Czech transitional period 
"When do we get to Europe?" (How to be worldly? How not to be provincial, 
awkward and peripheral?), and instead answered the question that until now 
nobody dared to ask-how to re-imagine such signifiers of cultural intimacy 
as cross-country skiing, fruit preserves, and high-waisted sweatpants as our 
own kind of cultural cool? Certain 2000s Brooklyn indie music trends helped; 
for instance, freak folk (with its crookedness, foppishness, and sensitivity) 
was easier to cultivate in the Czech Republic than was the imperial arrogance 
of Britpop in the 1990s.29 

It is exactly the same point, where part of the Czech indie scene decided 
to abandon its long cultivated restrictive puritanism and introduce new, art 
school influenced elements into its realm, where it also started allow itself 
to embrace its local peculiarity. 

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Reception: 'As if the songs were only an accessory' 

There are several points from which a polemic with indie's restrictiveness 
could depart; and several conditions that help to amplify the indie's Czech 
variety-and most of them can be traced in Here Be Dogs's reception. 

The famous cover ofXTC's Go 2 album (1978) was called a "the triumph 
of design" Simon by Frith and Howard Horne (1987:146). It is a text-based 
meta -cover, cheekily proclaiming: "What we are really suggesting is that you 
are FOOLISH to buy or not buy an album merely as a consequence of the 
design on its cover:' But people do buy records by their cover, especially since 
"buying" means waiting for an open slot on any of many of the file sharing 
services, as most of the Czech music lovers do. When albums are "free" and 
come in seemingly unlimited quantities, covers function as an indispensable 
guide, if nothing else. There's nothing foolish in it, as there's nothing foolish 
in iTunes Cover Flow, the way iTunes organizes media libraries as covers 
for faster orientation. But Here Be Dogs argues that the visual is an integral 
part of the popular music experience. 

Image is as a part of the discipline we today call "a band" as, for instance, 
lyrics, and the band that doesn't pay attention to its look wipes out a good 
portion of its vocabulary. Peter Saville, the designer for Joy Division, wasn't 
the only one inspired by Roxy Music, the British band legendary for their 
mix of music, fine arts, design, and fashion: "I saw Roxy Music as a Pop Art 
concept. They were a band, and there was a sound, but I saw the image as an 
art concept rather than dressing-up" (Saville 2003:23). From my ten years' 
experience in Czech publishing, doing work for musicians is popular and 
prestigious amongst filmmakers, designers, and photographers. In 2006 I 
helped Escape, an "indie" subsidiary of Czech EMI, to launch its money­
losing and therefore short-lived singles edition. It was envisioned by A&R 
executive Libor Lisy more as vehicle for design and photos, an outlet and 
a space for realization of dreams of the labels' unpaid photographers and 
deSigners (in a special example offan labor), rather than a teaser to boost 
sales. Although it could certainly count as an investment in the bands 
credibility, the promotional effect (lost on many journalists and suffering 
commercially because only a small number of collectors were willing to pay 
half the price of a regular album for just two songs in a paper sleeve) was 
tiny compared to the rewarding feeling shared by the creative team that 
having a strong visual identity is what constitutes great bands. Great bands 
have (great) collector items, however they might not have, as in this case, 
collectors to collect them. 

Public displays of enthusiasm are a rare Sight in the Czech Republic. 
Vaclav Havel describes in his 1988 essay "Bfemeno 21. srpna;' that there 
was a general malaise and constraint even twenty years after the tanks of 



Michal Nanoru 

the Warsaw Pact ended the liberalization of the Prague Spring of 1968. He 
uses as his example Charter 77, the human rights civic initiative formed in 
part because of the jailing of the Plastic People of the Universe: 

People follow the work of Charter 77-and much more-on foreign radio 
with interest and sympathy, but they would think twice before supporting it 
publicly. Or at all if they were to publicly express their true feelings. Czechs 
and Slovaks are not enthusiasts, they don't get on something too often. In 
1968 they were passionate about something, for a few months they acted 
as citizens enjoying their full rights, but they were hit hard: twenty years 
they were persecuted for their enthusiasm. After this bitter experience, their 
current cautiousness is more than understandable. (Havel 1999:188)30 

Havel follows a view of the national character, of the "famous realism" 
(Havel 1987:125), that resonates in Czech culture throughout the twentieth 
century and further: Czechs are said to generally not be vain, to not risk 
jumping on every wave, to invest in tested quality. They're as wary, practical, 
and resistant to storms and trends as the outdoor clothes they wear. Such 
assessment is here applied to the Czech culture in general (a comparative 
study of the level of spectacle on, for example, Czech, Slovak, and German 
television still awaits deeper academic scrutiny, but it will certainly have to 
consider the areas' protestant or catholic traditions), but what if it is in the 
independent/alternative territory exemplified by aspects of the heritage 
of the 1960s counterculture, folk singers and the investment in the idea of 
authenticity already described above? The legacy of these years can be seen 
today in everyday moments of Czech expression and life: forced hominess, 
the absence of large urban centers, the market where certain needs are 
not yet created, the stagnant economic situation, the restricted access to 
information (at the moment, there is no iTunes Store or any other way of 
legally obtaining digital music this side of Germany?! and still generally low 
level of experience with the language of fashion. These elements combine to 
make what has been called the Czech "cult of casual" (Formanek 2010): a 
way of holding on to the ( seemingly) un mediated, informal, and nonchalant 
as a way of hiding from the spotlight, evading responsibility, and altogether 
disqualifying the uneasy question of appearance. However problematic it 
would be to ascribe this to a nation, it certainly applies to many members 
of bands that we interviewed in the preparatory stages of Here Be Dogs. The 
existence of bands that could be included in the book, that acknowledge 
their work with the visual, proves a substantial shift has happened since 
the mid-2000s. 

Martin Hula, prominent figure of the hardcore/D IY scene, formerly part 
of the post -punk/hardcore record label and promotions group Silver Rocket 
as well as member of several highly credible bands, reinvented himself as 

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Cun-ent Musicology 

rapper in 2010. Hula underwent the controversial move in to the new terri­
tory partly in response to conservativeness of his own scene. As Bonus, his 
rapping alter ego, he perpetuates the national image outlined by Havel: 

A thousand times more crowns spent on beer than music, 
And we still whine that we can't make ends meet. 
It's all new, don't hurry us, 
Coffee and cigarettes, 
Two years to get used to it, 
We want what we know, 
Again and again, 
No attitudes, 
No swearing, 
Or foreign words 

("Ztracime cas" ["Losin' Time"] from the album Konee eivilizaee, Starcastic 
2010; translated from Czech.)'2 

Similarly, one of the final paragraphs of Here Be Dogs's introduction reads 

Here Be Dogs means several things. First, hic sunt leones, here be dragons: 
this is dark, uncharted territory. This area is not even on a map. No one 
before us was exactly eager to explore in die bands' approach to visual 
communication. The Czech Republic is a barbaria, visually illiterate. People 
who deal with covers systematically, or who conceptually control projects 
or labels, are scarce. Critics won't cast their eyes on visuals. The same 
trouble is with fans. (235) 

Repeating and strengthening national stereotypes doesn't help, on the con­
trary, and Here Be Dogs aimed at disrupting stereotypes by exposing bands 
that challenge the status quo. The amassment of such dire assessments in 
the intro was also somewhat corrected by the book's reception. The book 
sold out of its print run of 1,000 copies in eight months (60 percent through 
a national distributor, 20 percent through independent sellers, 20 percent 
online), was reviewed in six publications and it was featured in Uddlosti 
[Events l, the flagship daily evening television news program for Czech 
Television and later also in its analytical news program. Roughly 300 people 
attended the launch party for the book. Similarly, an opening for subsequent 
exhibition of selected photographs from the book was attended by 150 and 
Facebook auction of the prints yielded 12,000 Czech crowns ($730) for a 
Prague dog shelter. The deSigners were selected to introduce the project at 
Pecha Kucha Night in Prague, an international series of presentations by 
deSigners, architects, and photographers. The book has won the second 



Michal Nanoru 

place in the Most Beautiful Czech Book 2010 [Nejkrasnejsi ceske knihy 
roku 2010] competition in the category of books about fine art and photo 
and picture books. It was also selected for the International Photobook 
Award 2011 at Fourth International Photobook Festival, documenta-Halle 
Kassel, Germany. 

This is not normally how a book about popular music would be received 
in the Czech Republic, or in fact, how any book is received. The controversial 
subject fueled popular criticism of the book, and subsequent discussions 
in newspaper and web boards proved that visuality is a contested subject of 
inquiry in Czech culture. One review fulminated: "The publication is nicer 
than the intentions of its origin. The authors of this book like to look at the 
music rather than listen to it ... Fascinated by the surrounding culture, 
as if the songs were only accessory ... They got it a little bit messed up in 
their heads" (Slavik 2011).33 Another wrote: "a little more comprehensive 
Vice Magazine, minus the blather" (Pagoda 2011),34 and the title of the next 
asked: "The new bible of Czech hipsters?" (Waldhauserova 2011).35 Facebook 
user Satanislava Novakova commented on photographer James Mollison's 
series of photos documenting fans dressed up as stars (2008), which was 
posted on the Here Be Dogs Facebook fan page: "Here Be Dogs, according 
to its own words, focused on the 'unexplored' places of the 'independent 
club scene; and yet it admires photos of clones of commercial stadium 
fillers such as Rod Stewart, Dolly Parton, and Iron Maiden:'36 Others were 
similarly resolute, although in a very different way: "Hardly a word about 
music and yet perhaps it is the most that has been ever written about music 
in this country;' wrote DesignGuide.Cz (2011).37 Lidove noviny, a national 
daily, even saw alternative culture and attention to surface as traditionally 
bonded: "The music that stands outside the superficial mainstream, or 
that positions itself as its direct opposite, has always been associated with 
a considerable degree of attention to surface-on stage and in front of it" 
(Stind12010).3s Some simply agreed with the book's intro: "While musicians 
beyond our borders use the visual as a tool in attracting listeners, the Czech 
Republic, after decades of forced uniformity, remains a country where an 
artist caring about his appearance is brushed aside by the majority audience 
as narcissistic freak" (Ded 2011). 39 

There is one comment that needs addressing more than the others. 
Facebook user Lukas Pokorny expressed his disappointment on Here Be Dogs 
fan page, stating that he "imagined more input from the bands-their own 
ideas of their functioning in the society that deserves criticism for its limitless 
consumption, but in which it is impossible to exist without a style:'40 I had 
to confess that we also expected input from the bands and were similarly 
disappOinted. Our experience dealing with the band members informed the 

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assessments in this text. Most of the bands approached, even those included 
in the book, don't have a set agenda regarding the questions of image, style, or 
visuality, on group or individual level, and they refrained from taking a stance 
or saying anything. The mere fact that they let themselves be photographed, 
and submitted some of their own visuals-after many urgencies-was a 
major victory for us. As mentioned in the beginning, some declined to be 
included. This proved us how morally laden the topic of style in indie culture 
is and how important it is to initiate a discussion about it. 

The book aimed to dissociate attention paid to visual presentation of 
musical acts with mere commercialism by showing different creative strate­
gies employed by bands and projects within various subgenres on the Czech 
music scene (from metal to electro to weird folk). It advocated for diversity 
and openness in a reaction to the indie scene's ideological limiting of modes 
of expression. The concepts of verisimilitude and artificiality might be jokes 
for a poststructuralist, but they continue to have real meanings for music 
fans. In defining what is real and fake about a scene, for instance, fans are 
making assessments that themselves constitute new genre categories, or 
new scenes themselves. This can be seen constantly in the history of popular 
music, as in other forms of art: 

White blues fans, for example, redefined the genre in the name of authentic­
ity to exclude anything too jazzy or upbeat, thus enforcing a snobbish and 
racist exclusion of certain blues artists from the canon because they were 
too sophisticated. Instead, they lauded the most primitive blues artists 
they could find, such as John Lee Hooker, from whom blacks turned away. 
(Barker and Taylor 2007:xi) 

The Czech-and any-independent scene faces similar reductionist danger 
by not understanding the role of performance, design and/or fashion, sup­
pressing the varied tradition, and/or by winnowing "its heritage down to 
one single inbred white gene" (Azerrad 2001:498). Those who find success 
at innovating while staying within the indie scene, such as Bonus, are rare 
and their position on the scene is constantly reevaluated and renegotiated, 
with the risk of discrediting always present. However, they increasingly 
manage to create a broader leeway that can be then used by the younger 
generations of artists. 

Conclusion 

This articles describes a situation in the last two decades of history of Czech 
popular music, where the certainties caused by the historical development of 
the country are now undergoing rapid changes due to a new generation that 



Michal Nanoru 

was not substantially shaped by experiences of Czechoslovakian communist 
rule and its immediate aftermath and is weaned on globally networked 
information and communication technologies. A particularly strong form 
of Czech rockism, that finds its sources in the rebellious tradition of 1980s 
folk singers, 1990s idealism, and the exceptional homogeneity of the country, 
has been recently challenged, but still vastly unaltered by the rising speed of 
information exchange and the consequent emergence of art school bands. 
Working on a book about creative approaches to visual presentation of in die 
and alternative bands allowed me to test the applicability of Western critical 
theories to what is increasingly Western-inspired social phenomenon. 

Or is it? Indie has been naturalized in the Czech Republic with surprising, 
if not widespread, vigor. Two essential features come along with widespread 
availability of the internet. The first is a tendency to follow global trends in 
more timely fashion, and with much greater precision in replicating them, 
even if only in a very small group within the indie scene. This includes not 
just musical aspects, but visual aspects of presentation. The second is the 
somewhat contradictory tendency of reconciliation of these trends with local 
culture. The first tendency is evident especially in the recent onset of the 
young generation of music associated with art schools in major Czech cities. 
Simultaneously, the very access to and wide array of information provided 
by the internet leads to growing confidence (and much better exposure), 
that is then evident mainly from the adoption of regional and previously 
repressed elements. 

Academic research of Czech musical culture declined significantly after 
the Velvet Revolution and now only slowly begins, with the institutions 
still in the making. However, its advantage lays in the unique and valuable 
experience of transition from a planned economy with a limited range of 
consumables and consistent censorship to consumer capitalism. The size of 
the Czech market, its relative transparency, and its geographical position 
on the westernmost tip of the former Soviet Bloc makes it an interesting 
ground for monitoring the circulations of ideas naturalized in the Western 
cultural space, and consequently, to see these ideas anew. 

This article manages to capture only a tiny aspect of the complicated 
position of visual communication within the indie/alternative worlds. 
Scholars of popular music studies, visual culture studies, and media stud­
ies would all benefit greatly from further inquiries into the strategies that 
bands and their fans use for dress, fashion, and/ or design in different media 
environments and over time. The Czech bands are keeping quiet for now, 
but the situation is changing fast. 

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Notes 

I would like to thank Current Musicology's anonymous readers for their suggestions and 
editorial assistance. I am grateful to Daphne Carr, whose encouragement, insight and much 
needed perspective were invaluable to this article's completion. I also wish to thank Martina 
Overstreet and everyone involved in the making of Here Be Dogs, as without them the article 
would not be possible. All translations, unless otherwise stated, by myself. 

1.Revolutionary Film Posters, Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-33; 
Vladimir Tatlin, "Monument to the Third International"; R. Crumb, "Kafka"; May 6-July 
29,2011. 

2. SOciology was ostracized as "bourgeois science" by the communists before 1989, but after 
the 1948 coup music and the culture surrounding it were considered to be very important 
ideological tools, and so valuable research was conducted since 1947, see Karbusicky and 
Kasan 1964; Kasan and Kosta! 1990; Lysek 1956. Important works were published especially 
by Josef Kotek, Lubomir Doruzka, or Jii'i Cerny, see Kotek 1998; Doruzka 1978, 1987; Cigler 
1980; Matzner, PoledMk, and Wasserberger 1990. 

3. The only work on post -1989 subcultures, the history of the Czech graffiti, was written by the 
Here Be Dogs producer Martina Overstreet and published as In Graffiti We Trust (2006). 

4. [kapelam vadi vyraz in die a vsichni chapou slovo styl jako neco povrchniho, co by mohlo 
jejich zavaznou a hlubokomltvorbu poskodit. Takze ve chvili, kdy jsem v mailech zacala 
pouzivat slova "klubova scena" a "vas vizualni projev, do ktereho patri mj. i obleceni" jsou 
vsichni spokojeny] 

5. [Me se ten napad stejne moc nezda. A ja osobne bych uprednostnoval spis nez nejaky 
hipstersky pozery, udelat fotage nasich Idaves co pouzivame a veci a kytar a udelat z toho 
super fotky ktery jsou pro nas jako pro kapelu 0 dost zasadnejsi nez banda trendy blbek. 
Ktery v nedeli bavi Peter Nagy a v pondeli nas.Sorry A diky moe.] 

6. The bohemian entourage around Bondy lived in an information vacuum in the 1950s, 
and did not know anything about the Beats. The similarities in approach to life and literary 
production were not due to foreign inspiration at the time. It was a remarkable, but unrelated, 
parallelism. From the 1960s onward however, the Czech underground was well aware of the 
Beats (see Pilar 1999). 

7. [Nasycen tezkymi knedliky, kyselym zelim a pivem, pohodlne jsem se opiel a naslouchal 
Velvet Undergroundu, Captain Beefheartovi a skupine Doors a Fugs, a jak jsem naslouchal, 
ucitil jsem v te muzice hloubku, kterou jsem nikdy piedtim nepocitoval, jako kdybych to 
poprve uslysel ceskyma usima.] 

8. Censors were aware of the "dangerousness" not only of freedom of speech, but also of 
"uncensored feelings;' even if expressed through seemingly apolitical lyrics. As noted by 
FrantiSek Cunas Starek (Kostur and Starek 2011:13), "for the totalitarian regime is danger­
ous even a cricket singing in his own way [pro totalitu je nebezpecny i cvrcek, preludujici 
si po svem]". The regime tried to push songwriters into an acceptable form and those who 
appeared incorrigible were not only prohibited, but also persecuted. In the 1980s deciding 
on the acceptability of the acts was usually left up to individual approbatory organs, so for 
example folk singer Jaroslav Hutka was practically banned in Eastern Bohemia, but from 
time to time could perform in other parts of the country, see Janousek 2008. 

9. The still-active cult legends the Plastic People of the Universe were also included in Here 
Be Dogs. As noted in a study by historians Petr Blazek and Filip PospiSil, Vrafte nam vlasy! 
[Give us back our hair!, 2000], the first nationwide "pogrom on the long-haired" was held in 
autumn 1966. Hundreds of young men were then forced to cut their hair and were beaten 



Michal Nanoru 

for their appearance or attitude, after which other repressions followed. In 1970 the regime 
forbade the use of English language in music: bands could no longer sing in English, take 
English names, or cover songs from British or American bands. The most famous trial against 
underground, however, remains the case of the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the Plastic 
People in 1976. After a series of searches and hundreds of interrogations, seven people were 
sentenced. The Plastic People, inadvertent pioneers of the white label (the secret police couldn't 
link them to nameless things) and guerilla marketing (concert announcements for those in 
the know) went to prison for their Western image. Can there be a bigger acknowledgement 
of its importance? (See Karasek, Hajek and Plzak 1999; Jirous 2008; Laube, Pokorna and 
Sustrova 2010) The legacy of the theatrical new wave costumes of the '80s is represented in 
Here Be Dogs by Karel Haloun, author of one of the texts and a graphic designer considered 
to be a non -playing member ofthe principal Czech new wave band Jasna Paka/Hudba Praha. 
Haloun's work on a cover in the 1980s guaranteed the quality of the music. 

10. In a very similar sense to: "In the nineties, it had become commonplace to assume that 
one could no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright, because all genuine utterance would 
be stolen and repeated as advertising" (Greif 2010: 168). 

11. Whereas in the 1950s and beginning of 1960s the commitment and active participation in 
the building of socialist society was forced on the public, in the 1970s and 1980s the confor­
mation was bought by little allowances. The regime benefited from the political resignation 
of people and their escape to the private sphere. As Janousek points out: "The communist 
regime of the seventies no longer aspired to direct approval, but contented itself with a 
quiet loyalty of citizens whom it tried to offer some kind of standard of living" (2008:15). 
Between the narrow layer of those who actively participated in stabilizing the state after the 
Soviet invasion and the layer of dissidents lived "the gray zone': a mass of citizens adapted 
to totalitarian conditions with which they quietly disagreed. 

12. Jii'i Cerny, the legendary Czech critic, recalls in Kritik bez konzervatofe [The Critic With­
out Conservatory, Riedel 2007: 123]: "When [songwriter Vladimir] Merta, accepting Golden 
Porta Award in 1986, said in front of twenty-five thousand spectators that he wished those 
with whom he started could stand alongside him on stage, everyone knew he was talking 
about [banned singer-songwriters] Kryl, Hutka, and Tfesnak. And to watch the sour faces 
of the central youth unionists in pubs at night, when next to them boys intoned Kryl's songs, 
was very joyous for me:' 

13. This was true regardless of the fact that the status quo and the messages disseminated by 
the media on either side of the Iron Curtain, were, at least technically, as far from each other 
as the Cold War allowed. At its core the conflict of underground and mainstream culture in 
the second half of the twentieth century retained similar traits in both West and the East. "It 
seems that our regime can sniff out far better than many an art theoretician what it should 
consider really dangerous to itself. Hundreds of examples testify that the regime prosecutes 
most vigorously not what threatens it overtly but has little artistic power, but whatever is 
artistically most penetrating, even though it does not seem all that overtly 'political: The 
essence of the conflict, that is, is not confrontation between two ideologies (for instance 
a socialist with a liberal one) but a clash between an anonymous, soulless, immobile and 
paralyzing Centropic') power, and life, humanity, being and its mystery. The counterpart of 
power in this conflict is not an alternative political idea but the autonomous, free human­
ity of man and with it necessarily also art-precisely as art!-as one of the most important 
expressions of this autonomous humanity" (Havel 1987:133). 

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Current Musicology 

14. Warner Music closed its doors in 2010 but Universal, EMI, and Sony remain; Supraphon 
and Popron Music are local labels with second and fifth place in market share (Elavsky 
2006). 

15. According to a study commissioned by eMusic, the alternative digital retailer popular with 
American in die fans, seventy-five percent of its users tend to download full albums, while 
single-track downloads dominate the sales at the big digital outlets (Sisario 2011). 

16. According to the 2001 census Czech ethnicity is claimed by 90.4 percent of the county's 
population (Czech Statistical Office). 

17. [uz vidim diskuse, jak by na czechcore nemela byt: recenze na desku, ktera vysla major 
labelu (kdo vi, jestli se tady tahle recenze vubec objevi po te, co mi zamitli recezi na posledni 
album Miitorhead), ale myslim, ze koreny Sunshine silne vychazeji z toho, co se na czech­
core prezentuje, i kdyz vzdycky smerovali nekam dal ... Vim, ze spousta lidi v hardcore na 
Sunshine pohlizi tak, jak na ne pohlizi, chapu, na druhou stranu tahle deska je proste dobra 
a ja jsem upfimne rad, ze v tehle zaprdene republice, kde nidiim vladne ten nejvetsi hudebni 
odpad, se Sunshine chytli a donesli do masovejsi populace neco, co ma aspon nejakou arty 
hodnotu ... ) 

18. [mno ... :0) ... ja ani nevim,jestli todle myslite vazne ... za chvili abych si cet recenze nekde 
na mtv,tam u toho maj vic obrazku:o) ... myslim si ze malokomu tady pride,ze by se Sunshine 
touhle deskou dostali dal...mozna tak dal do (doufam ze nejen) moji prdele ... ) 

19. "Reading [designer Peter) Blake's Sgt Pepper sleeve-name the faces, spot the cannabis, 
decode the lyrics-was like reading the underground press. This was a skill, which could easily 
be acquired-from friends, from the neighborhood dealer, even across the counter-but it 
was always constructed around a sense of difference from the 'mass' pop audience. Art rock 
was 'superior' at all levels, and fans took seriously the prime romantic axiom: the philistines 
had to be kept out" (Frith and Horne 1987:58). 

20. Performances are not necessarily restricted to art forms-the most obvious reference 
here would be Erving Goffman's classic dramaturgical analysis of social interaction in The 
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), benignly renamed We All Perform [Vsichni 
hrajeme divadlo) by its Czech translator (1999). And the relegating of performance from 
music (and music from performance) is not necessarily restricted to fans: "If cultural and 
media studies of popular music have neglected performance, performance studies has been 
remiss in its general neglect of musical performances. The principal journals in the field 
seldom publish articles about music as performance or musicians as performers, and only 
a small (but growing) number of papers on these topics are presented at academic confer­
ences. At a commonsense level, the absence of music from the array of subjects considered 
by performance scholars seems odd-musicians are performers, after all, and it would be 
eminently reasonable to discuss them as such" (Auslander 2006:2). 

21. [Drzte huby a hrajte! a Tady nejste v Nemecku!, znelo z publika na vystoupeni berlinskeho 
divciho dua Cobra Killer v prazskem klubu Rock Cafe. Nehlede na strepy z rozbiteho pullitru, 
jenz na p6dium mrStil ramenaty tyPek pote, co triko jeho pfitelkyne potfisnilo nekolik kapek 
cerveneho vina, kterym se Annika s Ginou v ramci show polily. Koncert Cobra Killer totiz 
predstavuje zazitek, na kterem ma zhruba stejny podil hudba jako provokativni komunikace 
s navstevniky, dadaisticke proslovy a vtipne testovani hranice, kam az divky mohou zajit. 
Netolerance casti prazskeho publika nespoCivala v odmitnuti hudby, nybri v nepfijeti te­
atrilniho a kabaretniho prvku. Nelze se domnivat, ze by navstevnici neznali hudbu, desky 
maji jiste naposlouchane - ale cekaji koncert, zazitek, kdy hudba hraje prim. Misto toho se 
objevi dYe potrhle exhibicionisticke holky se sequencerem a predtocenymi zvuky a snazi se 
vybudit reakce, ktere nejsou v prostredi hudebniho klubu zcela obvykle. Pro mnohe berlinske 



Michal Nanoru 

interprety je typicke, ze se nestydi pfijit do koncertniho salu jen s cedeckem, na nemz maji 
kompletni hudbu, prevleknout se do extravagantniho kostymu, spustit animovanou projekci, 
falesne zpivat a doprovazet se maximalne pomalovanou rumbakouli. Ceske kluby na tuto hru 
stale jeste neslysi, koncert se bere jako udalost hodna ucty na obou stramkh p6dia.] It feels 
appropriate to state here Lawrence Grossberg's opening citation in full: "The eye has always 
been suspect in rock culture, after all, visually, rock often borders on the inauthentic. ... It 
was here-in its visual presentation-that rock often most explicitly manifested its resistance 
to the dominant culture, but also its sympathies with the business of entertainment. It might 
be objected that the importance oflive performance argue against this view of authenticity. 
However, the importance of live performances lies precisely in the fact that it is only here 
where one can see the actual production of sound ... It is not the visual appearance of rock 
that is offered in live performance but the concrete production of the music as sound. The 
demand for live performance has always expressed the desire for the visual mark (and proof) 
of authenticity" (1993:175). 

22. Natural here means "gradual:' nothing else. "By the very fact that all social phenomena 
are constructions produced historically through human activity, no society is totally take 
for granted and so, a fortiori, is no symbolic universe" (Berger and Luckmann 1967:106; see 
also Foucault 1980). 

23. Fredric Jameson writes, "in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, 
all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the 
styles in the imaginary museum" (1997:7). 

24. For more on cross-cultural readings see Liebes and Katz 1993. 

25. Anyone who would want to study Prague's hipsters could easily do that at any given 
concert by the promoters AM180, usually at a venue the size of a classroom. Vice Magazine 
Czechoslovakia managed to put out three print issues during its three years of existence. 
There are no American Apparel or Urban Outfitters stores in the country. 

26. Forcing Mark Deuze to claim, that "our life should perhaps be seen as lived in, rather 
than with, media-a media life" (2009:468). 

27. "Nothing can resist the force of this current of technical images-there is no artistic, 
scientific or political activity which is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity which 
does not aspire to be photographed, filmed, videotaped. For there is a general desire to 
be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable. All events are nowadays aimed at the 
television screen, the cinema screen, the photograph, in order to be translated into a state 
of things" (Flusser 2000:20). 

28. ["na kazde lepsi umelecke skole je k dispozici hudebni studio, kde lze natacet a mixovat 
tracky" a "v prostredi umelecke Immunity neni problem presvedCit kolegy, aby pomohli s 
klipem, fotografiemi, projekcemr'] 

29. The writer and musician Jace Clayton explains this partly in What was the hipster? (Greif 
2010:25): "Peruvian hipster ism meant that the middle-class kids who looked down on cum­
bia music all their lives were suddenly throwing parties and dancing to it -all because of a 
compilation called "Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru:' "Roots of Chicha" 
was released on a French -run Brooklyn label called Barbes. The cool New York label allowed 
these kids to see this old music in a new light; it wasn't simple recontextualization, it was 
an awareness that this poorly dressed and deeply unhip aspect of their Peruvian-ness had 
entered into a global conversation:' 

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30. [Lide totiz pnici Charty 77 - a zdaleka ne jenom ji - sleduji se zajmem a sympatiemi ze 
zahranicniho rozhlasu, ale velmi by si rozmysleli, kdyby ji meli verejne podpofit. Anebo wbec 
kdyby meli verejne projevit sve skutecne smysleni. Cesi a Slovaci nejsou nadsenci, nenadch­
nou se pro neco ptilis casto. V roce 1968 se pro cosi nadchli, nekolik mesicu si poCinali jako 
svepravni obcane, ale se zlou se potazali: dvacet let pak byli za toto sve nadseni perzekvovani. 
Po teto horke zkusenosti je jejich dneSni opatrnost vic nei pochopitelna.) 

31. TIle website www.i-Iegalne.cz.adigital music store operating since November 2006, 
bankrupted and folded in February 2011. It was struggling thoughout its existence. 

32. [Cely je to novy, na nas se nesmi rychle I kaficko a cigarko I a dva roky nei si zvyknem 
I chceme to, co zname, I a pokud mozno znova I a hlavne zadny postoje I a sprosty I a cizi 
slova.] 

33. [Publikace je hezCi nez zamery jejiho vzniku. AutoN tehle knihy se na hudbu radsi divaji, 
nez ji poslouchaji ... Fascinuje je okolni kultura; jakoby pisnicky byly jenom dopliiek. Trochu 
se jim to v hlavach prehazel.) 

34. [trochu obsaznejsi Vice minus blby kecy) 

35. [Nova bible ceskych hipsterU?) 

36. [Zde Jsou Psi je podle vlastnich slov zamerena na 'neprobadana mista 'nezavisle klubove 
sceny', a pritom obdivujou fotky klonu komercnich plnicu stadionu jako Rod Stewart, Dolly 
Parton a Iron Maiden) 

37. [0 hudbe skoro ani slovo a presto mozna nejvic, co 0 ni bylo u nas kdy napsano) 

38. [K hudbe, ktera stoji mimo povrchni mainstream, nebo se proti nemu pfimo vymezuje, 
vzdycky pattila znacna mira pece 0 vlastni povrch-na p6diu i pod nim) 

39. [Zatimco za nasimi hranicemi hudebnici pouzivaji vizualitu jako nastroj, kterym vabi sve 
posluchace, Cesko po desetiletich nucene uniformity zustava zemi, kde je umelec starajid se 
o sviij vzhled zavrhnut vetSinovym publikem jako narcisistni podivin) 

40. [jsem si predstavoval vetsi vstupy primo od kapel-jejich pojeti sarna sebe ve spolecnosti, 
ktera si zaslouzi kvuli durazu na neomezenou spotrebu kritiku, ale zaroven bez stylu v ni 
nelze fungovat) 

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