‘Rock and its accompanying subcultures, which voiced the rebellious attitudes of young people against the communist political establishments in the second half of the 20th century, expanded to the point of becoming a challenge for the local regimes, and eventually provided the victorious soundtrack to the Eastern and Central European regimes’ domino-effect collapse in the 1990s. These specific cases reveal the potential role of rock music as an appealing part of Western mass culture, and these cases are offered here as research framework for mapping the emerging tension between the aesthetic and social role of Western mass culture that contributed to shaping the identity of young people who were entangled in the strict ideological constraints of communist regimes. This paper draws a comparison between East European (East and Central European, ECE) and contemporary Chinese (People’s Republic of China, PRC) rock music, to explain the quite different political impacts of these musical forms. ‘Rock and its accompanying subcultures, which voiced the rebellious attitudes of young people against the communist political establishments in the second half of the 20th century, expanded to the point of becoming a challenge for the local regimes, and eventually provided the victorious soundtrack to the Eastern and Central European regimes’ domino-effect collapse in the 1990s. These specific cases reveal the potential role of rock music as an appealing part of Western mass culture, and these cases are offered here as research framework for mapping the emerging tension between the aesthetic and social role of Western mass culture that contributed to shaping the identity of young people who were entangled in the strict ideological constraints of communist regimes. This paper draws a comparison between East European (East and Central European, ECE) and contemporary Chinese (People’s Republic of China, PRC) rock music, to explain the quite different political impacts of these musical forms.
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