Czechs Just Want to Have Fun
By George Cerny

PRAGUE — When the song starts, the place goes wild. Girls squeal, guys pump their fists, and everybody charges onto the already packed dance floor. It's Saturday night at the Lucerna Music Bar in downtown Prague, and hundreds of people are united in their love for a song. They sing along with the words they all know as they dance to "Video Killed the Radio Star."

"Video Killed the Radio Star"?

In the U.S., the sole semi-hit by the Buggles may be the answer to a trivia question (first video played on MTV), but in the Czech Republic, it is an anthem. Ten years after the fall of communism, they remain, at least musically, in the 1980's.

Czech radio can't make it an hour without recycling at least one 80's "classic." The Eurythmics blares from passing cabs. A different 80's tribute band is playing every night of the week. Travelers, even in rural and sedate Kutna Hora, are woken up by "The Final Countdown." And the Lucerna, one of the oldest, largest, and most famous clubs in Prague, built by President Vaclav Havel's grandfather, sells out almost every Saturday for "80's Night," just one of many similar theme parties held throughout the city.

It is as though much of a nation's youth has opted for MTV's heavy-rotation play list from 1985.

80's revivals are, of course, common in the U.S. and Western Europe. But there is a world of difference in how the sounds of the Reagan era are appreciated in the Czech Republic. In the West, going to a club on 80's night is an exercise in nostalgia. It is part of the cultural legacy, or curse, of the baby-boomers, who by their example taught every generation that came after them to endlessly recycle the music of their teenage years.

For us, it is also an excuse to indulge in post-modern archness. "Oh my God! I'd forgotten all about Kylie Minogue. I actually had this tape when I was in the 8th grade! Do you believe what we used to listen to?"

This is not the case in Prague. The music is listened to with sincere, un-ironic affection, even love. While much of Prague's nightlife is dominated by tourists and expatriates, the crowd at the Lucerna is almost completely Czech. Here, they take their Kylie Minogue seriously. It is as if they got all the references in "The Wedding Singer," but do not get that those references are supposed to be funny.

What do the young Czechs see, or hear, in 80's music? Why does the relentlessly, almost pathologically, upbeat music of twenty years ago find a home in the land of Franz Kafka? Why this love for music produced at a time when the Czechs were politically oppressed, culturally isolated, and waiting in lines for toilet paper?

When asked, the revelers tend to be a bit defensive in their answers. "We like it," I was told repeatedly, in both Czech and English. Even many of the more intellectual Czechs who do not like the music are at a loss to explain it.

"I don't know, they just do," a friend, a Charles University history student told me when I brought up the topic during a general discussion of America's cultural influence. But I think that, while there is no accounting for taste, there are some reasons for this nation's affinity for the Go-Go's.

First of all, there is the Czech taste in music. While the Czech Republic was the home of great classical composers like Dvorak and Smetana, popular music has, at least since the Second World War, favored the sweet and light. Perhaps even the saccharine and insubstantial. Karel Gott, for forty years the most popular Czech singer, is often called the "Czech Sinatra." Actually, he is closer to Wayne Newton, only with less sincerity and more cosmetic surgery. In this cultural context, "I Ain't Missing You at All," often played on the radio, makes a certain kind of sense.

It must also be remembered that Western pop-culture was popular in the 1980's. It just wasn't available. Or not easily available. Tapes were obtained from the relatively few tourists, the Voice of America was surreptitiously listened to for the latest hits, and songs were bootlegged and passed around. Being both new and rare, the music became precious.

After 1989, and the Velvet Revolution, the trickle became a flood, and the Czech people found themselves in an immersion bath of Western Culture. McDonald's sprang up everywhere, Marlboros became the cigarette of choice, and, inevitably, Madonna ruled the airwaves and the discos.

This flood of Western pop, and Western culture in general, seemed to sweep away everything in its path. Techno, country, jazz, and, especially, whatever happens to be charting in the States, all have their followings in Bohemia. It became difficult last summer, for instance, to have a beer in Prague without learning all the words to "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

But despite the wide variety of musical genres and styles now available to them, the Czech people retained what can only be called an exaggerated esteem for the 80's bubble-gum pop. Perhaps this reflects a nostalgia for the relative freedom it symbolized when they first heard it illicitly. Indeed, one of the main appeals of the Lucerna is its giant screen, on which the videos are projected. "See the music you listened to in the 80's," their ads boast.

But in my research (a technical journalism term that means, in this case, drinking a lot of beer and talking to young women at a nightclub), I began to realize a deeper, more compelling reason than the ones I have suggested. As the night wore on, and song after song that I had half-forgotten played, and the people danced, the research began to take its toll. I stopped observing the party, and began to take part in it.

The Lucerna is a large, almost cavernous, dance hall. It is still, despite the passage of time, an art-deco palace. The Communist Party used to have some of their meetings here. Young women in the 50's and 60's used to attend their first dances on its hard wood floors made for ballroom dancing.

Now, many years later, the dance floor, with the aid of a few glitter balls and the giant screen on the stage where the orchestras used to play, has turned into a hasty semblance of a Western disco, complete with nervous teenagers scoping each other out from the tables that ring the floor.

I found myself on the dance floor. My, ah, rudimentary dancing skills stood out less in "Soul Train" deprived Central Europe than they did in my own adolescence. The d.j. played Kim Wilde's "Kids in America." I laughed. "God," I thought, "I haven't heard this song since the 8th grade."

Everyone else at the Lucerna, who had heard the song last Saturday night, and will hear it again next Saturday, cheered. The already full dance floor became packed. As they danced, with more enthusiasm than grace, I found myself listening, for perhaps the first time in my life, to the lyrics.

I search for the beat in this dirty town ...
Downtown, the young ones are going
Downtown, the young ones are growing ...

The Czechs have a long and glorious history, but a history that is also filled with defeat and despair. From the Battle of White Mountain in 1619, straight through to the end of World War 1, they were under foreign control. The First Republic of Czechoslovakia was created by the Treaty of Versailles, but only to be undone again by the Munich Pact and the Hitler. And after the Germans, came the Russians. It was only in 1989 that this terrible cycle of history seemed to end.

We know life is tragic,
Life is never kind

Even 10 years after the fall of communism, there are still reminders of the past. It is this past, with its defeats and obligations that they wish to escape from. It is time for them to have, like Cindy Lauper says, fun. The music of the 80's strikes a chord precisely because of its mindless frivolity and lack of lyrical complications. These Czechs have hit the "reset" button. They have imported a music that appeals to them because it has no relation to their own history.

A powerful contrast was apparent in September, when the IMF met in Prague. With it came five thousand protestors, most from the West, to make their stand against "globalization." The protestors were, with their Che Guevara t-shirts, gas masks, and banners, fairly self-conscious 60's throwbacks. They found themselves in a land of un-self-conscious 80's throwbacks.

The protestors got little sympathy from the Czech people by waving red flags and smashing McDonald's windows. How could they from a people who are, for the first time able to enjoy the materialism that they were condemning?

80's music is almost entirely, apolitical. Remember "Don't Worry, Be Happy"? But, given their history, the pursuit of uncomplicated personal pleasure in the Czech Republic is, in some way, a political act.

80's music, however banal, even idiotic, it may be celebrates that pursuit of happiness. And it belongs to them, the young Czechs who love it and what it stands for.

Or, as Kim Wilde put it:

Outside a new dawn is coming
There's a new wave coming ...

E-mail George Cerny at gacfreelance@hotmail.com.