Anna Szemere and András Rónai's book is the first to explore a Hungarian album as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series. Bea Palya's I'll Be Your Plaything (2010) is a collection of covers, and as we learn from the book, it is not even among Palya's most popular releases, making it perhaps a less obvious candidate for the series. Szemere and Rónai's analysis nevertheless demonstrates that it is indeed a very well-chosen case. It enables the authors to simultaneously reflect on contemporary and state socialist Hungarian popular music, to offer insights into the links between popular culture and (post)socialist collective memory, to consider music industry relations, including global hierarchies, from a particular Eastern European perspective, and finally, to ponder questions of gender, feminism, and ethnicity. Szemere's previous influential work on (post)socialist and contemporary Hungarian popular music (e.g. Szemere Reference Szemere2001, Reference Szemere2018; Szemere and Nagy Reference Szemere, Nagy, Barna and Tófalvy2017) and Rónai's experience as a music critic in Hungary (including a previous publication on Palya; Rónai Reference Rónai, Barna and Tófalvy2017) enable them to present a rich analysis reflecting on each of these issues through a deep and intriguing engagement with musical form and aesthetics. The book also contributes to the growing area of studying popular music ‘covers’, translations or adaptations from an Eastern European perspective (see e.g. Ignácz Reference Ignácz2023, which includes another contribution by Szemere; Lange and Szemere Reference Lange, Szemere and Ignácz2023). Reflecting on the complexity of the practice of covering, Szemere and Rónai distinguish between ‘paying homage’ (pp. 58–9), ‘crystallizing a recording artist's individuality, persona, and performance style’ (pp. 59–60), ‘localization’ (pp. 60–61), and ‘ironic and humorous covers’ (pp. 61–2), structuring their analysis of most of the 32 tracks on the album – which also include shorter interludes – on the basis of these categories.
Born in 1976, singer and songwriter Bea Palya became, over the 2000s and 2010s, one of the most successful solo artists in Hungarian popular music. Her work, as the album demonstrates, has fused folk music (Hungarian, Roma, Bulgarian and various other influences), Indian classical, jazz, pop and contemporary experimental/avant-garde forms in various and unique ways. I'll Be Your Plaything is a collaboration with her long-time creative partner Samu Gryllus. The album covers pop hits from the state socialist era that had been featured on the Táncdalfesztivál (Dance song festival) television talent contest (running from 1966 to 1994), a defining Hungarian popular cultural phenomenon, alongside two global pop hits from the US. In addition to the notion and practice of play in its many senses, which permeates the album – and is thus also integral to the analysis – the book emphasises the concept of dialogue in both its form and content: the introduction reproduces an exchange between the two book authors, a musing on popular music, politics and remembering that serves as a kind of meta-text; the authors then provide a peek inside the history of creative collaboration between the two main creators of the album. This intriguing insight into the creative process mirrors the record's aesthetic approach, one which Rónai (Reference Rónai, Barna and Tófalvy2017) has called ‘gentle deconstruction’ – the analysis reveals the various ways in which the creative process is made visible, or rather audible, in the songs (one of the more obvious examples is a track where a Skype conversation, in which Gryllus and Palya discuss potential copyright issues with an American song to be featured on the album, is heard over various related musical fragments and improvisation, resulting in an ironic musical commentary on authorship and the global copyright regime). The analysis also leads us into a dialogue between the ‘old’ songs and the new versions, the two historical eras, between East and West (represented by popular music from the US), and between social worlds: the village and the cosmopolitan world of cities and their art worlds. Bakhtinian dialogism, together with the concept of the intermundane (Stanyek and Piekut Reference Stanyek and Piekut2010) and Actor Network Theory are mobilised by the authors to make sense of these interactions and relations.
I would like to highlight two central questions raised in the book. First, the theme of remembering: the authors simultaneously address the issue of representation of the state socialist past in a crisis-ridden global capitalist present (notably, the album was released in 2010, in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, a year that also marked a new political era in Hungary), and the issue of nostalgia within global trends of ‘retro-culture’, ‘necro-marketing’ (p. 39) and a rapidly growing global heritage industry. Szemere and Rónai place the album in ‘global trends of retromania and hauntology’, referring to the ideas of Reynolds (Reference Reynolds2010) and Fisher (Reference Fisher2014), respectively, but they also invoke Boym's (Reference Boym2001) concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia – the latter theory, unlike the first two, incorporates a specific Eastern European historical context and epistemology. Being linked to the Dance Song Festival, the majority of the songs covered were themselves already interesting mixes of the Western-oriented ‘beat’ style of the rebellious youth of the 1960s and the conservative estrade-like ‘dance song’ setting on state television, a musical framework – or rather, cage – through which youth culture was domesticated and incorporated. Based on Szemere and Rónai's analysis, the playful, experimental pop/folk/world music/avant-garde approach to these songs on I'll Be Your Plaything stands out in contrast to the masculine, conservative, rock-based culture of restorative nostalgia, which is arguably a more dominant, even hegemonic form of remembering in Hungarian popular music (the latter is illustratively invoked by Rónai in his opening vignette). The album can thus be regarded as a step taken towards the autonomy of remembering within a dual regime of the global industry heritage and local memory politics.
Second, the book reflects on Palya's feminism – the ways in which gender relations, femininity and womanhood are represented by certain songs on the album, as well as the rest of her work and career. Evoking Cixous's (Reference Cixous1976) écriture féminine, the authors present Palya's music as specifically female – a voice articulating a variety of female experiences, also shaped by ethnicity and social class. On the one hand, as the authors show, Palya's stance is a clearly postfeminist, neoliberal one: the album's title, reworking Kati Kovács's defiant original 1966 Dance Song Festival performance of ‘I Won't Be Your Plaything’ (‘Nem leszek a játékszered’) as a more playful and ambiguous track, is highly symbolic of a shift from second-wave to postfeminism. Moreover, as the authors reveal, Palya has responded to the music industry's sexism, as well as the global power inequalities experienced through being signed to a major label, by setting up her own record label and running her career with an independent, entrepreneurial mindset. At the same time, several tracks on the album convey a strong representation of transgenerational female experience: the mother–daughter relationship is placed at the centre, and depicted as part of a line of female heritage, represented most clearly through Palya's duet with her own mother. The lives of working women during the state socialist era and the patriarchal relations prevailing in such contexts of waged work are represented through recording samples from Palya's mother's audio memories from the Szeged garment factory where she used to work. These serve as a poignant ‘meta-commentary on gender relations in socialist-era Hungary’ (p. 91) on the album, sonically interweaving personal and collective, Eastern European women's memory.
