Page 430 [430]
428
Anton Angelov
After the campaign, the hooligan topic in the satirical pictures practically disap¬
pears for about 2 years, but the debate on the Western influence among the youth
becomes more and more intense—dancing the twist and rock nroll around a tape¬
recorder, singing fresh hits of the West in foreign languages. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s, the tape recorder becomes a symbol of youth home parties, known
in the urban slang as kuponi (parties) (Fig. 10). The propaganda starts to use the
phrase magnetofonna mladezh (‘tape recorder youth) (Vuchkov 1963), which was
a light version of the hooligans but this time having fun mainly in the private space
of the home, because they would be sanctioned to do so in public (Fig. 11). Thus
their activities were much more hidden from the public and the authorities, which
made them more difficult to control. From the late 1950s and early 1960s, together
with the strengthening debate on consumption, leisure, style, fashion, and enter¬
tainment, the regime began to focus on the development of a legal national popular
culture to replace the foreign pop models, meanwhile releasing to some extent
the physical and administrative repression known from earlier times. Some images
demonstrate the need for new attractive (but not “decadent” and “twisted”) music
and dances, to be performed in public places for leisure, especially restaurants. The
idea here is to bring the youngsters out of the private spaces of the kuponi and to
bring their behaviour out in the open so that authorities could keep an eye on the
youngsters and their activities.
But the attractiveness of pop culture coming from the West seems to have
spread like an epidemic throughout Bulgarian society—even children caught the
disease of Westernization, singing Rocco Granata’s “Marina” instead of the special
children’s songs written by the Bulgarian composers. Youth's interest in pop culture
was not the only style of entertainment, which was problematic for the official
discourse. The specific local traditional culture of the Bulgarian rural pub and its
specific atmosphere and tunes were also unacceptable according to the new values.
The pub was then formally often related to laziness, low culture, kitschy music, and
primitivism. The case of transformation of a rural cinema into a pub is an example
of the struggle between the official culture and propaganda on the one hand and
the natural tastes of entertainment of the mass public on the other (Fig. 12).
In the new supplement Puls to the main youth newspaper Narodna mladezh, in
the mid-1960s, one can see caricatures and images of Western origin that also sati¬
rize the pop culture in the West. In addition to their humoristic and critical con¬
tent, the very act of publishing of such images suggests to the Bulgarian public the
existence of a “progressive, realistic” and maybe even “anticapitalist” critique within
Western societies with similar ideas that is not related to the socialist regime. Thus
the official anti-pop critique gains a kind of “objectivity” from abroad (Fig. 13).
By the late 1960s, Bulgarian society has already received a strengthening urban
profile. This fact and the regime’s stability result in a new social situation, a new
routine of everyday living (Znepolski 2008: 221-222). The dynamics in modern
tastes and expectations from life, especially among the youth, separates them from