Preliminary Programme

The compact cassette reached Finnish markets by the early 1970s. Music listeners found new, active roles in planning, constructing and sharing their listening experiences. These experiences were among the topics of a 2010 internet questionnaire on Finnish cassette memories. Approximately 1000 respondents wrote on their cassette use in this survey conducted by the Finnish Literature Society and the research project Musiquitous. In this paper, I shall apply grounded theory to analyse the Finnish cassette users’ answers on the new control they gained over their musical worlds in the 1970s.

Cassette users frequently remember doing things to and with music that were “not supposed to be done”. These actions were enabled by the recording technology that had become available to the uninitiated consumer via tape recorders. They include cutting up musical works to edit special compilations (e.g. exclusively guitar solos), leaving out tracks from albums, changing the albums’ track order, recording television broadcasts or other resources of wretched sound quality, etc.

When manipulating music to suit their own wishes and needs, several respondents recollect feelings such as freedom, power, or guilt. They also frequently felt baffled or amused by what others did. The “integrity of the album” was at its height within Western popular music listening by the end of the 1970s. Judging by the answers it is evident that tampering with artistic entities was considered improper.

Questions on democratic listening practices need to be asked in studying cassette culture. For example, the meagre proportion of popular music in Finnish radio monopoly, the national broadcasting system Yleisradio, certainly had an effect on home taping activities. Quoting the social anthropologist Bryan Pfaffenberger, the huge amount of home taping from the few radio pop shows can be called making “counterstatements” in a “technological drama” between Yleisradio and the Finnish listening public.

Reminiscing about their progress as music listeners, many respondents point out that they returned to albums later (with cd’s). Digital music listening technology brought back some of the freedom familiar from cassette listening days. However, whereas remixes and snippets from earlier music are a constant feature in today’s new popular music, the power to remix and edit easily has not returned to the average listener. Studying cassette use is therefore significant also in understanding the listeners' expectations for future listening technologies. (Show less)

The advent of mass tourism is one of the phenomena that have marked the history of post-World War II Europe. Despite historians’ growing interest in tourism, youth tourism has received very little attention. My paper is based on an ongoing postdoctoral project of mine, which constitutes a comparative and transfer history of young holiday-makers from the main urban centres in West Germany and Greece in the 1960s and the 1970s. This period witnessed the en masse emergence of peer groups of young people going on holidays without their elders. In this presentation, I scrutinise informal youth tourism, state-sponsored exchange programmes for high school pupils and university students and excursions organized by pro-USSR Communist groups in both countries. I explore youth tourism with regard to three processes that (re-)appeared in the 1960s and the 1970s: mass consumption, globalisation and ‘sexual liberation’. My first question is whether the emergence of mass youth tourism in West Germany and Greece can be described as a facet of market-based mass consumption and, especially, whether it constituted a purely commercial phenomenon. Moreover, I concentrate on excursions of young Greeks and West Germans to the Mediterranean as well as to Eastern Europe and the USSR; I probe the impact, especially of cross-border tourism, on the national identities of young tourists. Did it help them transcend national identification by facilitating broader identities, especially that of the ‘European’? Finally, I explore whether youth tourism actually served as one factor that posed a challenge to sexual restrictions. Similarly, I probe the ways in which mass youth tourism affected gender relations. In addressing this issue, I tackle a number of questions, especially whether it was easy for young women to go on vacation unchaperoned as well as whether young (heterosexual) males were expected to take the initative in flirting.


Drawing on historiographical and anthropological approaches, which emphasise the selective reception of mass consumption trends, I claim that many young people developed a complicated relationship to the tourist industry, being inside and outside of commercial tourism. Furthermore, I aim at demonstrating that the ‘internationalist’ character of the ‘new youth culture’ in the ‘long Sixties’ may be a somewhat misleading assumption. My presentation is premised on the concept of ‘glocalisation’ and shows that the transnational contacts that youth tourism facilitated may have actually helped reproduce national identifications and stereotyping throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Finally, I wish to prove that, either as an intended or unintended consequence, both informal youth tourism and the trips organised by ‘Old’ Left youth groups contributed to a lesser or greater extent to sexual permissiveness during the 1960s and the 1970s. My analysis is based on a wide range of hitherto underexamined sources: statistical data, youth magazines and tourist guides, letters, photographs and oral testimonies. (Show less)

This paper examines the evolution of radical political identities in 1970s France through a close study of the activities of "Bazooka", a graphic design and art collective. The group situated itself at the intersections of youth subculture (and punk in particular) and disputes over the legacies of the radical actions of 1968 (and terrorism especially). Through a series of interventions in post-68 media institutions, they posed a challenge to the presumptions of leftist politics and called into question its relevance for the broader social and cultural crises of the 1970s. (Show less)

In a stunning synchrony with its global outbreak, a vibrant punk-rock subculture arose in the communist Yugoslavia as early as the late 1970s. While strong Western influence and existent rock tradition facilitated its emergence, the subculture evolved primarily thanks to one orthodox propaganda tool: the youth communist media, the network of media produced under the auspices of youth communist organizations. In my paper I will show how this state institution was (mis)used to create and propagate the new punk-rock subculture.
In the first part I will briefly sketch the theoretical origins of this specific media, rooted in the Soviet instrumental view of the press and behaviouristic perception of the youth. Up until the late 1960s, the Yugoslav youth media faithfully followed this original Leninist purpose. From then on, however, it embarked on a long process of change becoming the chief supporter of the evolving student movements, ready to confront the authorities. The subsequent political suppression in the early 1970s halted this process, but only for a while. By the end of the decade, the youth press managed to reinvent itself once again, this time by shifting its focus to seemingly apolitical yet equally subversive subcultural practices.
The major part of this paper will analyze the ways in which the two youth media, Zagreb’s journal Polet and Ljubljana’s Student Radio provided the local punk with the vital media support in its crucial formative phase. Faced with scarce available resources, the two actively build the scene, taking over the creative manipulative roles, comparable to that of Malcolm McLaren. Finally, amidst the non-existent official discourse, they entered the struggle over the meaning of punk, trying to integrate the new music and adherent lifestyle with the state ideology.
The process was hardly unproblematic as the youth media borrowed certain aspects of British punk, such as the politics of marginalization, appropriate for dealing with their immediate concerns. Next to this complex interplay between the global and local incentives, I will point to the telling regional differences among Zagreb and Ljubljana media narratives, whereby punk was portrayed in a wide semantic span, from a rebellious form of pop-culture to an openly politicized movement.
With its wide potential for subversive play and enormous democratizing potential, the incorporation of Yugoslav punk had a deep destabilizing social impact for the regime. Not least, it completed the transformation of the established propaganda tool into a radical alterative media, one that acted as an enclave of media freedom, prone to experiments and opposed to the political and media mainstream. (Show less)