Voicing freedom,sounding dissent: Popular music,simulation and citizenship in democratizing Albania,1991–1997

Democratizing Eastern Europe

For many analysts in the eastern bloc and beyond, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall heralded Eastern Europe’s transition to ‘democracy’. Local transitions generated a range of procedures targeting local institutions and populations for processes of ‘democratization’, which were underwritten by certain conceptualizations about the natures of ‘democracy’ and ‘communism’. Classic theorizations of democracy seeking to identify the conditions by which ‘good’, ‘healthy’, ‘stable’ and ‘free’ political orders emerge and ‘thrive’ (e.g. Huntington, 1991; Lipset, 1959; Rustow, 1970) depended on an understanding of formerly socialist states’ populations as ‘captive nations’. In pursuing reforms, diverse coalitions of local and western agents thus began problematizing previously state-administered political, economic, social and cultural fields as characterized by their lack of ‘freedom’, as well as necessitating processes of liberalization, normalization or de-communization. Elites imported and adapted a range of technologies for managing local transitions to democracy, and an expert vocabulary to describe local postsocialisms in terms of their levels of freedom vis-à-vis the past. In the political sphere, techniques comprised measures to ensure ‘free’ electoral processes, while in the economic realm, elites sought to shape and protect a ‘free market’. Democratization, however, also targeted local populations for transformation. In aiming to shape the conditions by which a particular kind of citizen–agent, the subject of freedom and the building block of a ‘healthy’ democracy, might emerge and flourish, procedures to liberalize the economy or to normalize political participation articulated to diverse human technologies of citizenship.

In Powers of Freedom, Nikolas Rose distinguishes between two notions of ‘freedom’ with regard to Soviet-style societies. Freedom may be understood in one sense as ‘an ideal, as articulated in struggles against particular regimes of power’, ‘a potent weapon in “saying no to power”’ (Rose, 1999: 64; cf. Scott, 1985). Pre-1989 social movements and reformers, for example, often critiqued state-socialist governments in terms of their incompatibility with liberal constructions of ‘freedom’, or enunciated dissent by elaborating ‘free’ spaces and practices of truth – as in Solzhenitsyn’s famous injunction to ‘live not by lies’ (Solzhenitsyn, 1974; cf. Havel, 1985; Kennedy, 1994: 19–20). Post-1989 efforts to shape free societies in the eastern bloc, however, also point to a second sense of ‘freedom’: ‘as a mode of organizing and regulation’, ‘a certain way of administering a population that depends upon the capacities of free individuals’ (Rose, 1999: 64–65). It is this sense that characterizes democratization as an apparatus comprising techniques by which freedom might be registered and cultivated, or conditioned and promoted – a broader strategy, or ‘art’, of government (Foucault, 1991).

The ‘agenda for democratization’ proposed in 1996 by then-Secretary to the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali suggests the post-1989 links between democracy, government and a ‘healthy’ culture of citizenship. The Secretary defined democracy as ‘a system of government which embodies, in a variety of institutions and mechanisms, the ideal of political power based on the will of the people’ (Boutros-Ghali, 1996: 1). Democracy’s basic unit, the ‘free citizen’, necessitated particular forms of care. Individuals must be free from ‘governmental manipulation’, Boutros-Ghali (1996) noted, but the United Nations may aid ‘States engaged in democratization to help encourage and facilitate the active participation of citizens in political processes, and to foster the emergence of a productive civil society’ (p. 2). A key category in democratization discourse, the Citizen–Subject occupied a particularly tenuous position in newly democratizing states. On the one hand, ‘good’ institutional, juridical and material conditions had to be ensured in order to produce ‘free’ citizens. ‘The previously unfree subjects of (newly democratic) societies’, Rose (1999) notes, ‘cannot merely be “freed” – they have to be made free’ (p. 65; cf. Cruikshank, 1999). In Boutros-Ghali’s agenda, the keywords ‘facilitate’, ‘foster’, ‘encourage’ and (elsewhere) ‘empower’ point to how democratization discourse itself enjoined postsocialist elites to problematize their local ‘cultures of citizenship’ as domains necessitating oversight. On the other hand, democratization discourse posited a citizen that is not so much created, but developed through ‘healthy’ stewardship. The free subjects implicit in this formulation – the ‘people’ whose will comprises legitimate political power under democracy – thus in some way precede democratization as the raw human material on which reforms are to be exercised.

‘Uncertain transitions’ from state socialism, however, have not necessarily led to ‘capitalism’ or ‘democracy’ but to other flexible arrangements of governance (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999). Transitions in postsocialist contexts nevertheless depended on globally circulating notions of democratic citizenship. An understanding of democratization as a technology that locates the ‘free’ subjects so necessary to nominally liberal orders provides one entry point to critique the formation of new cultures of citizenship in democratizing states. Here I am not concerned with those techniques by which individuals came to ‘invent’ themselves as liberal or capitalist Citizen–Subjects (cf. Rose, 1998), whether by engaging in new economic rituals (e.g. Musaraj, 2011) or psy-disciplines (e.g. Matza, 2009), or by pursuing novel citizenship practices (e.g. Bakardjieva, 2012). Instead, I focus on how an idealized form of citizenship – itself embedded within the discourse of democratization – must also be imagined, located and promoted.

‘An Albania like Europe’: democratization’s program in Tirana

The Albanian state’s ‘transition’ (tranzicion) has often been portrayed as a uniform and popular refutation of a Stalinist communist ideology, sometimes termed ‘Hoxhaism’ after Enver Hoxha, the de facto leader from 1944 to his death in 1985 (Fischer, 2010; Lubonja, 1994: 132). The idiosyncratic blend of Marxism–Leninism cultivated by leaders here has been taken to index the state’s anti-Western nature. In 1944, communist guerrillas established a one-party state and, over the next two decades, a handful of Labor Party officials and their family members consolidated power (see Blumi, 1999; Mëhilli, 2011). Initially dependent on Yugoslavia, Tirana first abandoned Belgrade for Moscow, then Moscow for Beijing. Foregoing even China following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Tirana-based elites adopted strict isolationist and protectionist policies under the slogan ‘by our own strength’ (me forcat tona). Lacking foreign subsidies, the country entered a deep economic crisis in the 1980s that did nothing to soften the Party hierarchy’s uncompromising stance.

Appointed in 1985, Hoxha’s handpicked successor, Ramiz Alia, initially pursued a policy of ‘continuity’. Political and economic isolation from both ‘East’ and ‘West’, in tandem with growing domestic discontent caused by chronic shortages, nevertheless obligated officials to announce small-scale reforms within the year (Biberaj, 1990: 42–49). Change came too late. In summer 1990, several thousand citizens stormed Tirana’s western embassies seeking political asylum. Some elites criticized the asylum seekers as mischief-makers, possible security agents, or alabakë, Tirana slang for ‘lowlifes’; in a televised statement, Alia dismissed ‘those who had left’ (të ikur) by saying ‘They are not Albania’. The intelligentsia’s weekly newspaper, Drita (‘The Light’), began publishing articles proposing reforms, while in October, Tirana’s foremost writer, Ismail Kadare, defected to Paris. In December 1990, university students staged mass demonstrations. Within days, students and leading intellectuals had formed Albania’s first independent political organization, the Democratic Party (Partia Demokratike, hereafter, DP), which the government quickly recognized. Outside Tirana, waves of refugees began leaving for Greece and Italy. Between March 1991 and October 1992, almost 10 percent of Albania’s population migrated (see Vullnetari, 2012).

Between summer 1990 and early 1992, ‘transition’ thus proved to be a messy, sometimes incoherent process, characterized by fleeting solidarities among pragmatic party officials, reform-minded intellectuals, university students and ordinary citizens, all of whom had competing visions for the future (see Clunies-Ross and Sudar, 1998: 53–62). Emerging from frantic political machinations were several dozen new political parties, of which the DP came to secure broadest popular appeal. Intraparty struggles, however, soon forced several early student activists out of the DP, even as a handful of former communist elites successfully reinvented themselves as top ‘Democrats’ – the capitalization here and after denoting DP affiliation. ² Schismatic and prone to internal power plays, the DP’s leadership asserted its legitimacy in large part by defining what ‘democracy’ would mean for ordinary Albanians. With its accession to power following the March 1992 election, the DP initiated far-reaching reforms that reshaped the country’s political, economic and cultural fields. Initially formed by protesting students chanting ‘We want an Albania like the rest of Europe’ (E duam Shqipërinë si gjithë Evropë), the DP adopted a broad platform emphasizing rapprochement with ‘Europe’. Institutional reform, political discourse and a nascent program of de-communization elided successful democratization with the nation-state’s ‘return to Europe’. In his acceptance speech in late March 1992, DP leader and new President Sali Berisha thus greeted supporters and the international press by saying, ‘Hello Europe, I hope we find you well!’

A sphere especially deemed to necessitate de-communization, popular culture came to be targeted in ways that depended on the adoption of a particular, nonlocal stance toward ‘communist’ culture and socialist realism. To western observers, Albania’s cultural policies had provided compelling evidence of the state’s dystopian tendencies. As one anecdote informed the incredulous western reader, ‘[t]he long-haired or full-bearded among [foreign visitors] are forced to shed their displays of bourgeois decadence at the airport barbershop’ (Aschenbach, 1980). Beginning in 1973, protectionist policies on imports and media strictly curtailed Albanians’ consumption of western products and popular culture. The domestic electronics factory produced receivers that blocked the reception of foreign signals, and the state banned large antennae (see Musaraj, 2012: 183), while RTSH enforced a strict media quota promoting locally produced content (see Hajati, 1998: 89–90). A 1976 constitutional statute on ‘agitation and propaganda’ effectively criminalized the consumption of foreign media. Urbanites and younger members of the cultural field felt especially isolated by these cultural policies and, clandestinely consuming Italian and Yugoslav media, many began ‘turning their desiring gazes away from the official, moralized, naturalized mediascape’ (King and Mai, 2008: 57).

State-subsidized intellectuals in Tirana, however, had not necessarily conceptualized ‘culture’ as having been dominated or repressed. Elite older musicians especially understood themselves to have exercised a measure of artistic agency due to the semantically slippery nature of music. Political officials had largely ceded oversight of musical production to leading composers, which in turn enabled the music field to administer itself according to artist-generated codes of professional conduct enforced by ‘artistic commissions’ that often functioned more as a peer-review system than a censorship board (see Mato, 2001: 254–257). By the late 1980s, the elite musicians who had come to direct musical life did not simply feel hindered or creatively confined by anti-western cultural policies, but had a more complex relationship to the state. ³ Calls for debate in 1989 and 1990, however, enabled a heterogeneous coalition comprising younger intellectuals, artists peripheral to Tirana, and a small cohort of performers ‘denounced’ in the 1960s and 1970s, to begin characterizing ‘communism’ as a form of artistic bondage while conflating ‘democracy’ with ‘normalcy’ (cf. Kennedy, 1994: 4). At the same time, moves to less closely police media consumption decriminalized foreign popular culture, in the process providing individuals with new resources for framing and making sense of accelerating political and social changes. Finally, the appointment of young, pro-DP musicians to key positions at RTSH after 1992 elevated an understanding the transition as process of normalization-cum-westernization as a guiding principle of media policy.

Sounding dissent

In August 1991, a regional branch of the recently legalized Republican Party (Partia Republikane) staged a concert-rally featuring Besnik Taraneshi, Justina Aliaj and Sherif Merdani. Following the concert, journalist Ilir Zhilla interviewed the three popular singers whose ‘songs’, he wrote, ‘had been left unfinished’. ⁴ Popularly understood to have been targeted for performing in a ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ (të huaj), meaning ‘western’, style, each singer had undergone formal denunciation (dënim) following performances at RTSH’s premiere national singing competition, the Festival of Song. Taraneshi was banned from live events in 1964, and Aliaj, a RTSH employee, dismissed and reassigned outside the capital in 1974. Merdani served 9 years in a prison camp followed by 16 years in internment. Published as a 2-page feature accompanied by photographs, Zhilla’s (1991) piece focused on the singers’ responses to two questions: ‘Were you political?’ and ‘What was the cause of your denunciation?’ (p. 6). Each denied having ‘been political’. ‘For me’, one stated, ‘life was song, friends, poetry’; another asked rhetorically, ‘Can politics occupy the time of a young man who leaves one dance early to go to the next?’ (Zhilla, 1991). Each further framed the logic behind their denunciation as irrational, or inscrutable: ‘I pronounced [my text] in [a regional] dialect, which is where my mother is from’, ‘I tapped my foot to the rhythm of the music’ and ‘They gave me no reason at all’ (Zhilla, 1991: 6–7).

By framing ‘denounced’ performers as bearing eyewitness testimony about the socialist period, statements such as these shaped a range of retrospective ‘truths’ about the past. While commentators promoted certain performers as having been the victims of an irrational regime, performances of popular music were also proposed to have enabled a potentially subversive space for voicing covert dissent. Even state-broadcast performances, from this perspective, could be analyzed as having diagnosed repression. In a 1997 article on the socialist-era Festivals of Song, for example, young journalist Henri Çili (1997) wrote that the event had indexed illiberalism, serving as ‘the Barometer of the Dictatorship’:

The Festival was a mirror of the day’s politics in the field of the arts and morality, of liberalization or repression. To where was [singer] Vaçe Zela’s skirt [hem] raised or lowered, how low was [singer] Liljana Kondakçiu’s décolletage, how would [singers] Luan Zhegu or Tonin Tërshana hold the microphone. (p. 43)

Performers’ ‘natural’ affinity for a western popular aesthetic over a socialist realist one, manifested below the level of discourse in sartorial or gestural terms, the author proposed, quite literally broadcast their symbolic resistance – at least to those viewers who understood how to ‘read’ such performances.

The representation of an essentially pro-western creative intelligentsia engaged in an ideological game of cat-and-mouse with the anti-western, repressive state attested to the essentially anti-European nature of ‘communism’, but also suggested a novel spatialization that disarticulated ‘society’ from the ‘state’ (cf. Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). In foregoing de-Stalinization processes, the Albania party-state, unlike other eastern bloc countries, had suppressed the emergence of even rudimentary civil institutions. Commentators used popular music to imagine a socialist-era civil domain. In a 1996 essay on the history of popular music, musicologist Fatmir Hysi, a new Democrat appointed head of the state conservatory after 1992, thus situated Albanian song within a chronology extending to the presocialist 1920s, ‘when progressive forces aspired to a democracy of the western kind, with all the accessories of its culture’ (Ciko et al., 1996: 5). But while popular song during that period had ‘demonstrate[d] a special affinity for Italian, French and, to a certain extent, British song, showing in this way a clear Mediterranean sensibility’, the ‘communist usurpation of Albanian life’ – and the ‘systematic pressure of official orientations’ – ultimately ‘deformed the European aspiration of Albanian light song’ (Ciko et al., 1996: 8–9).

The ‘natural’ antagonism between ‘western’ society and the ‘eastern’ system posited a binary distinction between ‘society’ and ‘state’, which Hysi further suggested had derived from a deeper dualism constitutive of a ‘schizophrenic’ national psychology. The socialist-era Festival of Song itself expressed, Hysi wrote, this essential dualism at the core of social life in general, and the communist subject’s psychology in particular:

For almost thirty years of its life, the Festival survived through a dual existence […]. Everybody saw in the Festival something from his [sic] life and, in this sense, [the Festival] remains a double face of that which we lived, what we suffered, and what we won together in those 35 years. Naturally, it is a dual face, enthusiastic and fatal, fragile and arrogant, sincere and provoking, but it is nevertheless our face […]. (Ciko et al., 1996: 5)

A social domain proposed to have existed in tension with the ‘official’ and ‘deforming’ political orientations of ‘the state’, popular culture here constituted a potential site for resistance, enabling commentators to retrospectively describe even the Festival of Song, a RTSH-organized event attended by Tirana’s nomenklatura, as a ‘Trojan horse’ that had portended ‘suicide for the regime’ (Ciko et al., 1996; baritone Avni Mula, quoted in Çili, 1997: 40).

Claims about the split between society and state paralleled ones about socialist-era subjectivity. If the ‘dictatorship’ had sought to totalize ‘society’ by infiltrating essentially anticommunist persons, pro-western artists were proposed to have been able to secure a measure of personal ‘freedom’, albeit in imaginative terms. In one exemplary anecdote, often repeated in the media and in popular discourse, singer Sherif Merdani (2010) has described how western pop music enabled him to access a psychological space beyond his prison cell’s walls. In 1979, an earthquake shook the region near the jail. Inmates scattered in the chaos, but when the guards had rounded them up, two were missing. Merdani and an older, sickly man had remained in their cells. The frail man had been too senile to react, while the singer had not noticed the prison walls shaking. This narrative concludes with a description of how, ‘lost’ in the sounds of western pop music pulsing in his head, Merdani had been unaware of his physical surroundings. Whether read figuratively or literally, Merdani’s anecdote powerfully framed western pop music as productive of an interiorized, psychological condition of emancipation.

The implied metaphor of the previous anecdote was made explicit in popular songs that aestheticized the internalization of citizen–prisoners’ hidden dissent. The opening to this essay introduced singer–songwriter Françesk Radi’s 1996 ‘Jailhouse Rock’, composed in collaboration with lyricist and active Democrat, Agim Doçi. An homage to a 1950s Elvis Presley-style rockabilly never widely popular in Albania, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ musically and discursively referenced a generic ‘rock and roll’ sound purportedly generative of space to which persons metaphorically imprisoned by communism might have escaped. ‘Under rock’s rhythm I get lost in myself’, Radi sang, ‘Freedom seems so far, and yet so near’. Doçi’s lyric described a system characterized by ‘chains everywhere’ and ‘so little freedom, so many guards’. ‘Through rock’s rhythm’, the prisoner–narrator nevertheless maintained in the refrain, ‘I protest’. Framed by Merdani as firsthand testimony, and Radi as metaphor, foreign popular music in each instance proved emancipatory to ‘communism’s captives’ as a means to access a universal, albeit internally located, condition of ‘natural’ dissent.

Voicing freedom

Popular music and musicians not only retrospectively testified to a history of illiberal bondage, but also articulated the complementary freedom of democracy. Media legislation, which forestalled the emergence of non-state-owned radio-television outlets, in tandem with policies aiming to ‘de-communize’ RTSH, created space for Democrats to voice the freedom of postsocialism. Following the March 1992 elections, RTSH’s archivists were directed to perform a ‘check’ (kontroll) of the audio holdings, and to mark ‘do not transmit’ on recordings ‘with politicisms’ (personal communication, former RTSH employee, 10 November 2009). New personnel policies also enabled a pro-Democratic cohort of musicians to assume key posts at RTSH. Older culture specialists found themselves unemployed, barely subsisting on meager pensions or obligated to emigrate, while new employees viewed themselves as holding a mandate to bring programming ‘up to date’. Thus Zhani Ciko, artistic director of the first postsocialist Festivals of Song between 1992 and 1997, described heavy metal, rock, R&B and dance genres to have ‘mirrored with sensitivity the transition’ (quoted in Kushta et al., 1994). Festivals under his direction began to promote these genres as indexical of political pluralism, or part of ‘the process of the liberation of our music from the past’s narrow norms’, as one musicologist put it (Kushta et al., 1994).

At Festivals of Song, organizers especially promoted guitar groups. Two interrelated social groups were the basis of this phenomenon, which spread from Tirana to other cities between 1989 and 1992. First, urban high school students oriented toward western popular music began forming small ensembles featuring piano, guitar, electric bass, drum-set and flute. Student groups initially performed concert music arrangements on RTSH broadcasts as part of the media’s small-scale liberalizations in the late 1980s. In 1989 and 1990, several music students from Tirana’s performing arts high school and Conservatory were selected to perform compositions by established composers at the Festival of Song. Second, a small group of under-and unemployed nonconformists, who came to be known as ‘the lake guys’, began forming rock groups. So named for congregating near the artificial lake on Tirana’s Grand Park to perform cover versions of western rock songs, these individuals benefited from liberalized strictures on the consumption of popular music. At the 1991 Festival, a special evening ‘for newcomers’ (për të rinjtë) was organized for these groups as well as student ensembles.

If socialist-era events had broadcast a symmetry redolent of stability and order through carefully balanced programs and strictly choreographed performances, this organic unity disintegrated with the selection of 51 compositions – far more than the usual 30 or so – at the first ‘democratized’ Festival of Song in December 1992. More than a dozen guitar-based metal and hard rock groups participated, including a number of ensembles led by young nonconformists wearing long hair, beards, jeans and leather jackets. Groups with names like Akullthyesit (the Icebreakers), Djemtë e Detit (the Sons of the Sea) and Shook (referring to the English word ‘Shock’) presented original compositions, while rock vocalists from other groups, such as Aleksandër Gjoka of Grupi X, performed songs by Tirana composers. Organizers programmed only a handful of songs submitted by formerly elite socialist-era composers.

Rockers’ participation heralded a new creative pluralism, but the Festival jury consecrated a particularly Democratic vision of transition. Staunch Democrats Osman Mula, an intellectual who had supported the student movement protests, and Alqi Boshnjaku, a lyricist and one of Tirana’s first cultural entrepreneurs, received first prize for their composition ‘Pesha e fatit’ (The weight of destiny). A lay passion play about the transition, the composition featured two conservatory-trained vocalists and one nonprofessional ‘rocker’. Tenor Viktor Tahiraj voiced the part of an omniscient Narrator, and his conservatory classmate, soprano Manjolla Nallbani, that of a Mother–Wife figure whose husband had left Albania as an economic migrant. Aleksandër Gjoka, a long-haired rocker associated with ‘the lake guys’, voiced the main character, the Husband–Migrant.

The composition began with an orchestral swell leading into a piano accompaniment. Conservatory-trained Tahiraj then referenced the mass migrations of the previous 12 months in his opening lines: ‘O my spirit, succumb not to despair/Our dreams were not drowned in this turbulent sea, in this endless misery’. Continuing in a wistful, minor mode, the Narrator addressed the audience with poetic tropes on light and darkness adapted from 19th-century nationalist poet Naim Frashëri: ‘Let us make just a bit of light’, Tahiraj intoned, ‘however little, in this long darkness’. Here the Migrant abruptly interjected, reprising the Narrator’s musical material, albeit with a choppy, pointedly unpoetic text delivered in an impassioned growl:

Mother, I’m so far away, my yearning is killing me! Though I’ve got money I’m poor, ‘cuz I’m not near you!

I feel it, sleep pains me – I see your eyes in my dreams, and scream like a madman.

‘For the first time’, Narrator and Migrant exclaimed in turn during the coda, ‘our eyes saw the light’.

In rendering audible the nation’s postsocialist condition, ‘Pesha e fatit’ articulated a particular politics of transition. Tahiraj’s Illuminist–Narrator explicated and framed the Migrant’s experiences, but the composition’s most emotionally charged moments were set for the rocker Gjoka’s gravelly voice. To composer Osman Mula, Gjoka’s performance sounded a ‘natural’ break with socialist-era aesthetics, voicing what he heard as an authentic form of social commentary on the postsocialist condition – a ‘purity’ and a ‘necessity’ for 1990s listeners, the composer claimed (interview, 16 February 2010). In hearing the untutored directness of the rocker’s voice as bearing both musical and social authenticity, Mula’s perception resonated with longstanding western understandings of rockers as capable of expressing social ‘truths’ (cf. Gracyk, 1996). Mula’s interpretation in turn depended on a construction of the figure of ‘the rocker’ as exemplifying a particular kind of individualistic subjectivity, albeit one that contradicted socialist-era emphases on ‘beautiful’ performance in favor of a politics of sincerity.

Some rockers portrayed themselves as voicing the ‘truth’ about the present, albeit in staunchly apolitical terms. The inaugural edition of Tirana’s first postsocialist alternative newspaper, E për7shme (Appropriate), published by students and young rockers, stated its mission as follows:

[Our paper] will condone only Truth, and thus will realize the publication of the Beautiful and the Ugly, as the only two manifestations of the Truth. Its pages will be open for all creators of the Beautiful and the beautiful Ugly in art, since it is a cultural artistic newspaper.

More often, young musicians refused any explicit positions. As a high school student in 1990, early rock musician Saimir Braho formed a guitar group with the English-language name Friendship and Love, later renamed Ritfolk. Braho illustrated his feelings about transition politics with the following just-so anecdote. When protesters toppled Tirana’s statue of Enver Hoxha on 20 February 1991, Friendship and Love was rehearsing in the central Palace of Culture. As chanting began penetrating the rehearsal space’s walls, the band members peered out to see crowds overwhelming the towering, golden monument standing just 200 m away. ‘[W]e discussed with one another, “Whoa, they pulled down the statue!”’ Braho related. ‘People were running here and there, but we just returned to our rehearsal’ (interview, 21 April 2010).

If some rockers felt ambiguity toward, or even distaste for, roles as spokespersons for ‘democracy’, post-1992 Albania’s dearth of performance and broadcast opportunities nevertheless linked them to the DP-led government’s emerging program of cultural democratization. Lacking private radio-television media, the state continued to hold a monopoly over the broadcast of local content, and RTSH editors programmed television shows for Western-style rock groups and singers to promote their MTV-style music video clips. While discontinuing several state-subsidized ensembles, festivals and institutions for folk and art music through sweeping austerity measures, the government allotted funds to national popular music concerts, and even founded several new ‘spectacles’, meaning shows (spektakël): an annual Festival of Rock, recital-concerts by rockers at the national Theater of Opera and Ballet, and national beauty pageants, which often featured guitar groups as guest performers.

Popular music and Albania’s postsocialist culture of citizenship

By promoting an ideal Citizen–Subject, a particular kind of social and political being, popular music performances and discourses about Western-style music contributed to the simulation of a postsocialist culture of citizenship in 1990s Albania. Performances neither suggested techniques by which individual listeners might act on or form themselves as ‘citizens’, nor did they enable democracy’s ‘assimilation’ to ‘an existing political cosmology’ (Karlström, 1996: 485). Popular culture instead articulated to a ‘fetishistic’ politics of representation (cf. Aretxaga, 2000) by which the DP-led government framed itself as ‘European’ and anticommunist – a means of ‘doing the democracy dance’ (Roberts, 2012). Democracy’s obligation to symbolically register ‘freedom’ and to advance certain kinds of individuals as ‘free’ subjects – in the Albanian case, the socialist-era figure, protesting under western rhythms, or the long-haired, truth-speaking postsocialist rocker – represents a broader phenomenon in many postauthoritarian states, where knowledge about the past’s bondage and the present’s freedom may help maintain which is often a fragile legitimacy.

In such contexts, political power may be shored up by decidedly nondemocratic means. Between 1992 and 1997, DP officials pursued legislation at odds with their pro-democracy rhetoric. The government blocked moves to privatize and decentralize radio-television broadcasting, while turning public media into, as one critic put it, ‘a thought police whose purpose is to hinder information and reduce political convictions and opinions to uniformity’ (Ymeri, 1996). International observers raised concerns about the relationship between government officials and private print media journalists, especially following high-profile incidents of intimidation, censorship and arrest (see Fischer, 2010: 427–429). More widely, austerity measures and a hands-off approach to cultural institutions led to the disintegration of the socialist-era field of cultural production, especially in district towns outside the capital. Forced into early retirement or emigration, older culture specialists across artistic fields found their voices marginalized. The state’s severely reduced capacity for subsidizing the arts, a condition analogous to the near-crippling contraction of the public sector more generally (see Kajsiu, 2010: 42–46), left individuals without relationships at RTSH few platforms for producing and broadcasting new works.

In broader terms, the widespread unemployment, clandestine migration and property dispossession caused by the ‘success’ of the DP’s neoliberal shock therapy reforms resulted in a ‘fragmented and alienated population’ (Kajsiu, 2010: 237; cf. Fuga, 2004). Faced with a growing legitimacy problem caused in part by these social problems, Democrats turned from framing constituents positively, as once-and-future ‘Europeans’, to framing them negatively, as citizens bearing fragile freedoms threatened by communism’s potential return (Kajsiu, 2010: 236–237). Broadcasts of popular music performances by RTSH thus entered into both a pro-European and anticommunist politics deeply implicated in Democrats’ claims to be democracy’s sole guarantors. As the government forestalled reforms that might have led to a more active ‘culture of citizenship’, diffuse projects promoting a Citizen–Subject that registered the contemporary order’s ‘freedom’ vis-à-vis the past’s repression proliferated.

The ideal Citizen–Subject simulated through popular culture, however, remained unrecognizable to many listeners. Efforts to promote an anticommunist and ‘always already European’ identity (see Nixon, 2010) resonated with specific urban constituencies. But other groups’ experiences of ‘democracy without alternatives’ (Krastev, 2002) could, as elsewhere in postsocialist Eastern Europe, be less emancipatory than disorienting (see Ghodsee, 2011). Viewers sometimes challenged media representations. Following the 1996 Festival of Song, RTSH broadcast a montage mocking socialist-era popular music. The satirical clip edited together pre-1991 footage of star singers performing among farm animals, tractors and rolling green hills. Intended to demonstrate the ‘backwardness’ of the socialist period, especially, perhaps, when juxtaposed with the ‘modern’ contemporary performances, the segment backfired. Viewers besieged RTSH with complaints, while a journalist reproached organizers for making beloved singers the ‘object of ugly humor’. When the Socialist Party (Partia Socialiste; the reformed Communist Party) took over from the DP-led government in 1997, its government spearheaded legislation to liberalize the private media market, which resulted in an explosion of new radio and television outlets (see Muka, 2008). One of the first private radio programs to capture a wide audience broadcast the top ‘songs of the century’, and especially those classic socialist-era compositions previously banned or ignored (interview, radio disk jockey and composer Miron Kotani, 11 June 2010).

Early postsocialist performances did circulate compelling ways of knowing ‘communism’. A middle-aged musicologist (b. 1952) whom I interviewed told me that she was writing down ‘memories’ (kujtime) about growing up in the 1960s and 1970s so that her university-age children would know ‘the truth about what it was really like – the bad and the good’ (personal communication, 9 December 2009). She shared with me several representative anecdotes that focused not on experiences of repression, but rather girlhood friendships or student days. She primarily ascribed small instances of ‘ugliness’, such as a classmate’s punishment for a western hairstyle, to individual human failings rather than an immoral ‘system’. However, when I asked if she felt a return to state socialism could be good for Albanians, she disagreed, despite being a longtime critic of the DP. Not citing her firsthand experiences, the musicologist responded by relating an anecdote, widely reported in the mid-1990s, about the repression of a sculptor in 1975 (ibid.; also related in Sokoli, 2003: 18–19).

Conclusion: cultures of citizenship in democratizing contexts

In democratizing Albania, popular representations of music before and after ‘communism’ provided key frames for understanding how the past might, or perhaps, should, have been experienced. The retrospective simulation of a certain experience of ‘communism’ depended on a range of notions: about the resistant potentials of popular culture; the Western-oriented performer’s body as a locus of individualism, and his or her voice as a means to articulate social truths; and the ‘naturalness’ of a universal, dissenting subjectivity before 1989. But the ‘free’ subject dissenting from ‘the State’ necessitates historicization as a figure that, like other models of ‘communist’ subjectivity, is fraught with ‘unarticulated assumptions that underlie the Cold War view of human agency’ (Krylova, 2000: 2). An understanding of socialist-era individuals as holding a ‘dual’, even ‘schizophrenic’ subjectivity resonates strongly with pre-1989 representations of ‘communism’ and its effects on social bodies (e.g. Alexeyeva, 1985; Wnuk-Lipinski, 1982), representations that fit easily into postsocialist politics at moments of rupture.

Democratic citizenship’s simulation at such moments cannot simply be ascribed to incomplete processes of ‘democratization’, or what has been termed ‘authoritarian legacies’ (Hite and Morino, 2004). Simulation instead may emerge from the democratization process itself. In the Albanian case, the relationship between popular music and an increasingly hegemonic politics of ‘anticommunism’ represented a conditional response to democratization’s reforms. Democrats’ political ascendancy installed a younger cohort of intellectuals sharing a particular, anticommunist set of values in key positions at the state broadcaster, while the simultaneous disenfranchisement of many socialist-era musicians silenced potentially alternative perspectives. This example, perhaps, presents an extreme outcome. Significantly, Albania had no proto-civil society groups as found in Central Europe or the Soviet Union (e.g. Solidarity in Poland) and, lacking these fertile spaces for the cultivation of nonsocialist values, a postsocialist rationality endeavored to produce and promote them. The lack of organized dissent – that ‘specter haunting Eastern Europe’, in Vaclav Havel’s exemplary statement (1985) – thus itself obligated the imagination of an interiorized, psychological ‘freedom’ that both depended on and formed a grounding for a postsocialist culture of citizenship. The location of dissent within performers’ bodies powerfully naturalized knowledge about both past and present, constituting and promoting understandings of socialism, as having forced underground widespread dissidence, as well as democracy, as safeguarded by the stewardship of the postsocialist order.

Since 1989, democracy’s advocates have ever more forcefully promoted liberalism as humankind’s ideological endpoint (e.g. Fukuyama, 1989). As nondemocratic forms of governance prove increasingly difficult to legitimate after ‘the end of history’, new hybrid orders mixing both democratic and nondemocratic features seem to be emerging (see Levitsky and Way, 2002). Paradoxically, the post-Cold War consensus that liberal democracy constitutes the sole legitimate form of government thus may encourage simulation, as the promotion of ‘freedom’, especially in cultural terms, becomes increasingly significant for nominally democratic orders the world over. Indeed, this may be part of a broader story. Wendy Brown (2003) has forcefully argued that ‘the displacement of liberal democracy by neoliberal governmentality’ has led to ‘a political condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned or end-run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically’ (pp. 25, 31; cf. Klein, 2007). The analysis of ‘cultures of citizenship’ at such a historical moment suggests the necessity of attending to not only the positive, constitutive features of citizenship, but also its erosion, gutting or – to use the term employed above – simulation. Often occurring in the sphere of ‘culture’, such processes may repurpose those popular practices in which have been embedded a range of liberal values, or to which have been ascribed particularly compelling constructions of agency. The historicization of such notions about popular music, performers and their voices provides one potential means to critically examine the emergence – and normalization – of contemporary politics of citizenship pursued under the sign of ‘freedom’ in democratizing states.