In Search for Sunny Grave: official and underground culture in the lyrics of rock groups in communist Czechoslovakia
Abstract
During the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and mostly after the "Prague Spring" in 1968, the artist had to choose: either they will cooperate with the regime and it's official culture and submit all of their work and lyrics to the control organs, or they can stay in the underground scene, which was persecuted. This article is focusing on how this situation was negotiated in the artistic expressions and how the whole blooming Czechoslovakian rock scene was transformed by the so called "normalization" after the Soviet invasion in August 1968.
In ten years the newly developed Czechoslovak rock'n'roll scene underwent long journey from being banned and young musicians repressed from the government in the beginning of 1960', to being accepted and even almost supported by the socialist state in years 1966 - 1968 to be repressed to the underground once again after the Soviet invasion in August 1968. One of the main reasons for the oppression were the lyrics.
Young bands listening to Radio Luxembourg wanted to sing rock'n'roll in its "native" language but Czechoslovak socialist government didn't allow it almost until the verge of "Prague Spring" movement, so the English lyrics needed to be translated to Czech, most of the time with absolutely different meaning. During my research I interviewed some of the still living musicians from the first Czech rock'n'roll generation and also did a lyrics analysis to show the differences between the original and Czech versions.
My goal is to show how the creative process was affected by the political circumstances during short period of time. For this case I chose song Slunečný hrob (Sunny Grave), by Czech band Blue Effect.
The "story" of this song is rather complicated and confusing and shows how fast can things change - after winning the song of the year in live show contest in December 1968, winner was supposed to release the winning song. But as it was in English its lyrics were needed to be redone to Czech.
New lyrics about longing for childhood hasn't been problem at that time and the song was released on a single album in 1969. Song also should appear on a first long play album in early 1970, but at that time even the Czech lyrics didn't suit the taste of new leaders of socialist Czechoslovakia, so finally it appeared just as an instrumental.