“Stupid Music for Stupid People”: Negotiating Class in a Small Town in Moravia

In this article, the processes linked with cultural participation are viewed through the lens of a specific region: the environment of Tišnov, a small Czech town on the southeastern edge of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, located roughly 25 kilometers from Brno. I carried out this research among people who were active in various grassroots cultural initiatives in the early 1990s, such as music clubs focused on alternative music, art film screenings, bookstores, or small art galleries. I encountered a narrative of cultural exclusivity. This was articulated perhaps even more powerfully in the context of a small town than in a city or a village, often in relation to the real or perceived injustices experienced during the state socialist era and spelled out in generational and class terms. I argue that in Tišnov, which is regarded as a model of a small town, only a handful of similar-minded people created a relatively strong and coherent taste-based community that needed to compete for its “place under the sun” with rather pronounced argumentation. The aim of this article is to question narratives of cultural exclusivity in the context of a small town after the fall of state socialism and the transformation of its class patterns.

The culturally oriented jazz, rock and alternative scene reflected in this study, which is primarily musically- and partly age-defined, naturally operated within wider networks that extended beyond the small town. Either Brno, Prague, or Vienna benefited precisely from semi-peripheral areas such as this one, which students would leave to begin their studies and only seldom return to. A large part of the economically active population similarly left such regions to work in major urban centers. In large cities, where people with similar cultural tastes were more concentrated, they no longer needed to negotiate their “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968, 1996; Harvey 2003) as strenuously as those living in the context of small towns. There they often positioned themselves in a rather critical and sometimes even conflicting way towards cultural activities perceived as different from their own. These oppositions, which were often mutual, could relatively easily be argued through the articulation of different tastes (Bourdieu 1979, 1984), and were sometimes reflected in clashing worldviews.

Tišnov is located in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, in west-central Moravia. The region is formed by the south-eastern edge of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, adjacent to the relatively deep Svratka valley. This is an extremity of lowlands leading to the Danube. The railway connects it with the two largest cities in the Czech Republic; the center of Brno is located 30 minutes away, and Prague is just over three hours away by express train. The region is very diverse, with some relatively elevated villages situated at an altitude of nearly 700 meters; Tišnov itself is located in the valley, some 250 meters above sea level.

The majority of the European population lives in small towns like Tišnov. Yet small towns are still partially overlooked in academia as well as by various opinion makers, who most often concentrate on either the urban or rural aspects of a presumed cultural fissure. Many of my informers have stressed the importance of cultural networks within the larger region. Networks of small towns in France and the Czech Republic were examined by Luďa Klusáková and geographer Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier (2017). If the threshold for a small town is 10,000 inhabitants, as Klusáková and Ozouf-Marignier suggest, Tišnov would narrowly fall into this category; however, the nearby industrial towns of Blansko and Žďár nad Sázavou would not, as they surpass this number by double. Kuřim, with a population similar to Tišnov but even closer to the Brno metropolitan center with 380,000 inhabitants, could be considered a case apart, as it largely owes its urban structure to the building of housing estates around its industrial plants. Nearby Velká Bíteš, with around half the population of Tišnov and manifesting a blend of historical and industrial heritage, could thus be considered a model small town. Nearby Bystřice nad Pernštejnem and Velké Meziříčí, both with around 10,000 inhabitants, would also owe their overall appearance to both earlier history and industry. Bystřice shares a legacy of uranium mining with Tišnov, whereas Meziříčí has a more pronounced early modern and modern heritage and is currently experiencing an industrial boom, catalyzed by its proximity to the D1 Highway connecting Prague and Brno.

In what follows, I question cultural fissures that have delineated popular music on the local level. While using historical sources from the context of the jazz, rock and alternative music scenes, I try to tackle the issues of cultural elitism of a more general variety. Cultural historian (and my late supervisor) Luďa Klusáková (2017) pointed out in her studies of small towns the often-perceived stigma of “small-town-ness,” characterized by a mixture of shame and patriotism. Her collaborator, urban sociologist John Urry (2002), questioned city life and the senses of visuality, smell and touch, with the aim of recreating the human experience of urban settings. Here I aim to add to their research via my own analysis of culture-based narratives of “superiority” (Skeggs 2003) articulated in discourses around popular and alternative music on the level of a small town, with particular interest in the long period of post-socialist change beginning in the 1980s and ending at the turn of the 20^th century.

As urban anthropologist Giuliana Prato (2018) observes, the incommensurability of town size across Europe must be stressed. The aforementioned 10,000-inhabitant limit of the small town is largely arbitrary and hardly sustainable. Using the criteria of Klusáková (2017), the distinct features of a small town are first its intertwining with the countryside, and second its possession of a larger variety of functions than a village. While a small town has a more direct relation with the countryside, it also serves as a center for its rural environment in regard to public administration, schooling, health care and other functions that require further centralization. According to Karl Marx, the centralization of the town is its unique feature, as “the countryside shows the exact opposite: isolation and separation” (German Ideology cited in Debord 1967, 177). In questioning the ardent vitality of peasant communities, Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre (1970, 2022) pointed to the fragility of historical state forms based on agrarian communities. The small town can also be understood politically. Historian Edward J. Woell (2006) has given a crucial place to the small town in the history of the French Revolution and counterrevolution. Even if many of these important historical events blossomed in the metropolis, they were mediated towards most of the population through translations on the level of the small town. Again in the French case, urban historian John M. Merriman (1991) observed the shift of the urban periphery from early modern faubourg towards the rise of the industrialized banlieue. Historical understanding of the city frontier, which is constantly pushed during the processes of inner-city gentrification, may have important validity for the studied case. Cities polarized around the dialectics of gentrification and ghettoization (Parker 2004: 86) tend to pour out their contradictions into the neighboring areas that are of crucial importance for small towns in the proximity of the metropolis, such as Tišnov, which is close to Brno.

Continuing in the historical vein, architecture historian Martin Horáček (2017) has underlined the extraordinarily high number of small municipalities in the Czech landscape. Furthermore, he has pointed to the issue of the legacy of German nationalism within the Czech Heimatschutz movement at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. According to Horáček, the intertwining of Czech bourgeois culture with that of the Germans resulted in a preference for the small town as an ideal aesthetic form. But if there are small towns or peripheral towns, what is a town or a city? Giuliana Prato (2018, 5) has pointed to the terms aiming to describe the origins of European urban tradition. In her view, the city “should be understood at once as urbs, civitas, and polis; that is, as a built-up area, as a social association of citizens, and as a political community.” Max Weber (1921, 1966) argued that the development of cities in Western Europe as autonomous associations with their own municipal officials was influenced by the religion and the privileged legal position of the citizens, and the decline of the religious sanctioning of kinship and solidarity facilitated creation of a unified urban community.

Urban planner Kevin Lynch (1960) observed that it is precisely the sense of the whole that distinguishes the urban form on both a material and psychological level. Such a holistic vision of the city certainly suggests its resilience, if not an immunity, to conflicts on the urban level and builds upon the urban geography of the Chicago School (Park and Burgess 1925, 1984).

The issue of urban settings sharing the same or similar cultural characteristics was particularly criticized by Marxist scholars, however. Literary scientist Raymond Williams (1973) carefully assembled images of the country and the city in English literature since the 16th century, with particular attention to central symbols for conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development in England. Based on this research, he has claimed that urban culture is “a myth functioning as a memory” that dissimulates class conflict and reproduces the rural-urban divide, justifying the existing social order. For Williams and other Marxist scholars, the city is a symbol of capitalist production, labor, domicile and exploitation, a “dark mirror” of the countryside.

In addition to the urban structure, urban sociologist Manuel Castells (1972, 1977) also questioned urban ideology based on the autonomy and emancipation of the mercantile bourgeoisie from feudalism. Like Williams, Castells has denounced the myth of urban culture. In his view, the cultural cleavage was not rural-urban—the main frontlines were drawn within the urban milieu.

The discussed and criticized estrangement of urban life from rural life started to be observed in the 19^th century by artists and journalists and later also by scholars. These cultural conflicts need to be particularly situated in the context of modernization processes, such as urbanization, industrialization, demographic growth, the incoming migration of rural workers to industrial agglomerations, and the rise of workers’ movements. Differences in mealtimes and other patterns of everyday and leisure culture, but also other more internalized differences between the rising middle classes, formed to a large extent through the embourgeoisement of higher working-class cadres on one hand and the traditional bourgeoisie on the other. Finally, the working class of predominantly rural origin began to play crucial roles.

The issue of the relation between class and culture in the collective psychoanalytic inquiry of the Victorian era was studied by cultural historian Peter Gay (1998), who, in addition to the above-mentioned distinctions, also stressed one of particular importance for the petty bourgeoisie—that of privacy and the home. Given the entanglement of Czech and German nationalisms outlined above, the Biedermeier culture, focusing on the intimate and family sphere, can also be seen as having central importance for large cohorts of the population in small towns in the Czech lands. By turning his attention to music cultures and class, music historian William Weber (1975, 2004) underscored the need to differentiate between the production of classical and popular music, as well as its reception by publics of different social strata within the middle classes of London, Paris and Vienna. In the 19th century, small towns in the Czech lands often mimicked the cultural activities of the metropolis. Theatres, exhibition and music halls, and other cultural institutions started to play a similarly distinctive role in delineating cultural activities along class lines.

At the same time, the relationship between the city / town and the countryside did not remain unilinear with the influx of rural workers to industrial centers. Based on Dutch experience, urban economist Eveline van Leeuwen (2010) presented a detailed account of the urbanization of rural areas, which gradually increased in the second half of the 20^th century. In the Soviet Bloc, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in particular, similar processes of the urbanization of the countryside and class formation under state socialism based on limited yet existing consumption had also been documented since the 1950s by cultural historian Ina Merkel (1999a). According to Merkel, consumption-oriented class cultures in the GDR differed according to the two price categories for state-backed commodities.

In another study, Merkel (1999b) analyzed distinctive lifestyles in the GDR that, in addition to hedonism, also manifested specific styles of social networking and were further stratified also according to the urban-rural axis along the lines of age, gender, family relations, and connections. The state socialist regimes backed the population rise of cities and based it on both income migration from peripheral regions and the founding of not only districts and housing estates, but also brand-new towns and cities around industrial plants and mining areas. However, this was far from being a pattern only found in state socialism. In this context, Manuel Castells mentions an example in the French city of Montpellier, where the company IBM, profiting from the highly skilled manpower from the local university, invested largely in its local plant there in second half of the 1960s, triggering the urban development of the whole metropolitan area. As Castells (1977, 65) notes, however, the socialist city was a transitional social formation aimed at creating the conditions for future communist society, with the political project taking primacy over the economic one.

As urban geographers Mikhail Ilchenko and Diana Dushkova (2018) argue, the post-socialist urban space was shaped by its past: “housing policy standards, the layouts of new developments, the shapes of green spaces, as well as religious practices, local identities, cultural imagery and many more.” Two interlinked—and from a sociological perspective, highly forced—processes can be documented here since the 1990s: first, the depopulation of the countryside, and second, suburbanization resulting in urban sprawl. The latter was predicted for advanced capitalist societies by the prophetic vision of Situationist theorist Guy Debord:

With post-socialist change, much of the Czech countryside, particularly in the proximity of urban centers, has become such a liminal space, neither city nor village. Small towns were only rarely spared these changes in the landscape formed by similar “non-places” (Augé 1992, 2009). Another means of overcoming the urban-rural dichotomy and participating in the process of urbanization of the countryside can be understood through the role of public transport's integration into large systems around metropolitan areas. Trains or buses enabling short transfers between different neighborhoods integrate large parts of the territory into the metropolitan system. As such, villages connected to these systems became practically equal to metropolitan neighborhoods, with small towns playing new roles as nodes in different flows of money, goods and people.

When linking contemporary urban issues with those of culture, one first needs to be aware of the sharp rise of entertainment and the environment as deeply political topics, and second, of the simultaneous decrease in the importance of workplaces. On the urban level, consumption and entertainment in these circumstances often drive urban development (Nichols Clark 2011). Participatory approaches to culture (Jenkins 2020) can be understood as an expression of grassroots activities, particularly in the context of the post-industrial city and community revolution (Castells 1983, 97–172). From a historical perspective, the weight of popular culture in the life of late capitalism can hardly be overstated. In addition, the capitalist system of production, with its ever-changing façade and endless possibilities of renewal, has managed to fully integrate many of its countercultural critiques (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 2005). Alternative culture and music have become successful commodities (Frank 1999) and even if some of my informants stressed the legacy of the underground culture, with its concepts of a “parallel polis,” (Benda 1988) and counterculture (Roszak 1969), their experiences might also easily confirm the totalizing visions of a mass culture (Adorno 1981, 2001) “without alternatives.”

The research methodology of this article partly consists in the research of the private archives of participants in the cultural activities of the small Moravian town of Tišnov in the 1980s and 1990s. These archives contain material linked with the activities of the “Jazz Club”, such as materials linked with its funding and the different attempts at writing its history; the programs of its activities, flyers, and posters; and scripts of its different events and print production aimed at the participants in the events and informing them of the musical acts. The second part of the primary sources is based on three oral history interviews conducted in the winter and spring of 2022 with two formerly-active organizers of the Jazz Club, both males now in their sixties, and one active participant in the revived activity of the re-labeled “Rock & Alternative Club” in the late 1990s, now in his forties, who is also the son of one of the formerly mentioned informants and my gatekeeper for this community. As a mid-to-late 1990s participant in different music-related activities in Tišnov as a high-school student and a partial insider in the described community, I also used some ethnological qualitative methods such as observation and the use of my own memory.

I grew up in a village located in the region on the margins of Southern Moravia and the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, between Tišnov and the even smaller town of Velká Bíteš.

In 2001 Tišnov had 8,310 inhabitants and Velká Bíteš 4,889 inhabitants. Between 1991 and 2011, the populations of both settlements remained relatively steady, with no dramatic increase or decrease in inhabitants (Czech Statistical Office 2013).

In the mid-1980s, my parents bought a Japanese television set on one of their trips to visit relatives living in Vienna, and because of our relative proximity to the Austrian border and the excellent reception conditions for television and radio signals, my family and I—despite not understanding much German—would tune into Austrian programming. I preferred American TV and commercials, and later perhaps the few music videos I found there. However, similarly to the Austrian radio, which could be tuned into on a regular receiver, I noticed a great similarity between the Austrian Volkstümliche Musik and the kind I was trying to avoid. For a schoolboy addicted to the German dubbing of Knight Rider, which I did not understand well but appreciated above all for its style, this was a complete disappointment. This was not how I dreamed of my “imagined West” (Yurchak 2006), and I was rather delighted to find similar-minded musical connoisseurs in small towns nearby.

The phenomenon of music clubs had for participation in the music scenes of the 1990s in the Czech lands cannot be overestimated. The clubs were often tuned to a specific worldview that reflected various subcultural styles. The topic of rock clubs in the Czech context has long been the focus of publicist and historian Radek Diestler, who works with Popmuseum, the Prague-based Museum and Archive of Popular Music. The local Jazz Club was established under the aegis of the factory organization of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement of the Czechoslovak Uranium Industry in 1980. The official backing of autonomous cultural activities was not uncommon during the last decade of socialist Czechoslovakia (Houda 2019) and can be understood through the perspective of state socialist self-willedness (Eigensinn, Lindeberger 1999). Until the last quarter of the 1980s, the Tišnov Jazz Club remained very active and deeply informed about global music scenes. Between the late 1980s until the second third of the 1990s, the activities of the club “Pod kinem” (Under the Cinema) and the “Rock & Alternative Club” followed the activities of the Jazz Club in the same location in Mlýnská street, close to the town cinema. Since many organizers of these three grassroots institutions overlapped, they could easily be merged under the umbrella term Klub.

The main types of events of the Tišnov Jazz Club were “listening programs”, and their organization was accompanied by the publication of pamphlets aimed at informing listeners about the lyrics and overall context of musical expression. Despite its name, which was chosen for tactical reasons, the Jazz Club focused on artists as diverse as The Doors, Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel or, as early as February 1983, the post-punk British band Joy Division. Listening programs in general had a great influence on 1980s Czechoslovakia. On a nationwide level, the so-called Antidiskotéky, organized by music critic Jiří Černý, gained especially great influence since the late 1960s thanks to their high educational potential, which was welcomed by music lovers and connoisseurs. At the same time, the activities of the Tišnov Jazz Club also documented an increased interest in Polish rock, described in one of the interviews as musically revelatory, even despite the turbulent internal political situation of 1980s Poland. A listening program devoted to the Polish rock scene characterized as the “music of the young generation” was organized in June 1985. In the accompanying words of the listening program “Contemporary Polish Rock”, its authors especially appreciated the straightforwardness of the musical expression of the “Polish rock ferment”, but also the possibilities brought about by the removal of the state monopoly on recording that existed in Poland at that time.

In addition to these listening programs, the Tišnov Jazz Club also organized live performances. Around 50 concerts in total were organized by the Klub, including one by renowned Czechoslovak folk singer Jaromír Nohavica, later controversial for his collaboration with the Czechoslovak State Police (Státní bezpečnost, StB). One important concert was that of the band led by alternative musician Mikoláš Chadima. His performance at the Tišnov Jazz Club in April 1985 was held under the conspiratorial title “Prague Guest” in order to fly under the radar of the StB, and part of the recording from Tišnov was used in the release of the recording “MCH Band 1982–1986”. Further concerts included the underground band Atomová mihule from nearby Žďár nad Sázavou, the allied Free Jazz Trio from Olomouc, Prague-based blues band Krausberry, and new wave acts Žentour and Yo Yo Band. From the second half of the 1980s until the mid-1990s, frequent visitors to the club Pod kinem came from the vibrant Brno alternative music scene, which included bands such as Dunaj, Ošklid, or Z kopce. Finally, at the end of the 1990s, the Rock & Alternative Club put itself on the map of alternative music culture with major Czech acts such as Už jsme doma and Psí vojáci; Prague-based expat bands Fatal Shore and Deep Sweden also made appearances.

In addition to music, people active in the Klub manifested their interests in performing, visual arts and cinematography. The larger network of sympathizers also included people active in books and working at the municipal library and bookstore, and bars, cafés, as well as those involved in the local printing company, local media, and elsewhere. In this sense, these musical activities were a node of a specific culture-based community. Some of them were also involved in sports – particularly one of my older informants is a passionate long-time cyclist who has also organized cycling tours for people associated with the Klub. According to the narrative of this informant, one of the participants of the cycling trip fell on a fence in a nearby village and destroyed it. My informant highlighted this event sarcastically as the “impact of the Tišnov jazzmen in the neighboring countryside.”

During the interviews, I tried to situate the importance of listening to or even producing music in the overall concept of lifestyle. One of my informants associated music with expressing emotions, and with tuning into a frequency that resonates with a vibration that can take the form of a collective experience of shared energy at a concert or party. Another linked music with the value of freedom, and the last one pointed out the advantages of music, which can be listened to both collectively and individually.

The symbolic significance of style and music in adolescence was emphasized by one of my informants when he emphatically nodded in response to my suggestive inquiry as to whether his interest in music during adolescence was not based on the possibility of making potentially intimate contacts at musical events. In the case of this informant, said contact was with the opposite sex, and to tersely rephrase the original statement, we might claim he was interested in music “because of the chicks”. At the same time, all informants highlighted the gender of Lenka Zogatová, the legendary female promoter in Brno in the late 1980s. Interviews with participants associated with jazz, rock, and alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s also indicated a decline in interest in culture in the early 1990s related to the opening of the seemingly infinite possibilities of musical taste but also to new demands on leisure time resulting from economic and social changes.

Discursive oppositions articulated by musical tastes reflected contemporary socio-economic transformations of the region, which were marked not only by the significant legacy of uranium mining, but also by paper milling, woodworking and other light industries and agriculture. There was also a gradual disintegration of many larger enterprises during the period under study, and a significant emergence of mainly small and medium-sized businesses. After the political, economic and social changes of 1989–1990, processes of commodification and commercialization clashed with the aforementioned countercultural ethos and attitudes in everyday reality.

Little by little, during the first half of the 1990s, a new generation of entrepreneurs emerged from the legacy of grassroots and fan cultures. For example, in Tišnov, among the people linked with the Klub, a producer of posters founded a professional PR agency for billboards, and a fan of DIY computers translated his activities into a professional IT company selling hardware and software. Other possibilities, albeit more limited to music production, arose for amateur sound engineers and DIY promoters. With the attempts to professionalize the Rock & Alternative Club at the end of 1990s, conflicts arose with the director of the municipal cultural center, particularly concerning the programming of the cinema and necessary investments in its modernization, which at the time was also organized by the founder of the Rock & Alternative Club. This was followed by further conflicts with the mayor and the municipal administration, which resulted in both of my older informants retiring from organizing cultural activities in Tišnov altogether. These professional shifts, along with the omnipresent neoliberal morale, which was particularly fervent in post-socialist contexts (Makovicky 2016), resulted in hegemonic discourse favoring entrepreneurship before employment. More pronounced tensions on the level of ideology and cultural critique were also articulated, often in contradiction to the widely held “myth of Czech egalitarianism” (Večerník and Mysíková 2008).

One of these discursive rifts arose around pop-folk music, which in emic terms was perceived as being backed by the state socialist regime led by the Communists. As pop-folk was popular particularly among older music listeners, it could also be framed as being a site of generational conflict, but there was also a clearly overlapping class position.

Pop-folk music genres can be localized in the hybrid forms of Czech popular music and folk music. This music was either produced by brass bands, which became synonymous with this kind of music (dechovka), or with the use of electronic synthesisers (lidovka)—these genres are often referred to in English as “folk-like music”, “folksy music” or “newly composed folk music” (Vidić Rasmussen 1995; Suna 2013). In Austrian German, the term Volkstümliche Musik may be the closest (Achhorner and Steinbrecher 2020). A relatively rich tradition of exploring this phenomenon stems from Poland and particularly the countries of former Yugoslavia, where cultural studies have thematized a specific version of socialist modernity and its subsequent disintegration since the mid-1970s. Cultural theorist Irena Šentevska (2020) works with the terms novokomponovana muzika/glazba, pop-folk, neofolk, and turbo-folk. In Poland, such music is labelled disco polo (Borys 2015, Socha 2020).

Not surprisingly, none of my informants expressed either sympathy or empathy with this kind of music. On the contrary, as expected, their reactions when mentioning this music genre during the interviews were very hostile. Using what he alleged to be a quote by Frank Zappa, a younger informer even described this genre as “stupid music for stupid people.” Furthermore, it would not be entirely correct to frame this opposition in terms of ageism, as both informers in their sixties also expressed a similar hostility when discussing dechovka. The generational transmission of anti-Communist stances needs to be stressed at this point, with the critique of pop-folk testifying to a class conflict rather than a generational one. With a certain degree of exaggeration, following a concept from Peter Gay (1998 47), who discussed the psychoanalysis of the “bourgeoisophobia” of Gustave Flaubert, their critique of dechovka expressed a bourgeois horror of the rural proletariat jouissance.

Although it was also possible to make full use of the different brass instruments in jazz, ska, or alternative music, the trumpet and other wind instruments became synonymous with the heated and unceasing debate about music, which was directly related to views about society and its transformation. Generational distrust brought with it a form of disdain for groups’ cultural consumption, which was understood as incompatible with the demands placed on them, first by the final phase of socialist modernization and then by the subsequent post-socialist transition to the capitalist mode of production. The critique of these social classes was projected precisely onto this form of musical expression that combined elements of folk and popular music. The critique of brass band music thus helped my informants distance themselves from the aging populations of its listeners, which were also generally associated with rural and conservative worldviews. One of my informants from Tišnov (a small town), who profiled himself primarily as a fan of alternative music, even dismissed reggae by pointing to his reading of the genre as “Jamaican dechovka”.

Similarly, other urban music scenes perceived as non-elite, in particular heavy metal and discotheques, were also seen as expressions of worldviews that were incompatible with those of my informants. In the 1994 Czech Television documentary “Disco or Rock”, clubs were contrasted with discotheques, and reporters gave the visitors of these establishments the opportunity to explain the reasons for their preferences. The disco-goers interviewed in the documentary expressed hints of hedonism, while the rock club attendees, in contrast, seemed more thoughtful and sometimes slightly pretentious. The documentary focused on examples of venues in the capital, but the disco phenomenon also reached deep into the regions. In this geographical distribution of discos, the Czech space was no exception, and the cultural history of rural discos in southwest Germany has recently been reflected upon in a comprehensive monograph (Fischer 2020). In the Czech context, cultural historian Jakub Machek (2022), who has published several studies summarizing archival work in the regions, has been the most prolific in his work on the transformation of discotheques.

There were at least three famous discotheques in the Tišnov region. A distinctive summer and outdoor disco scene in the mid-1990s developed on the dance floor at the Tišnov swimming pool (koupák), which largely reflected the contemporary interest in Eurodance music. It is noteworthy that, similarly to the examples described in south-west Germany, discos were located in more remote places, and visiting them required either a long night walk along already quite busy roads or a drive, most often by private car. This, in turn, raised issues related to drunken driving and, at least in the contemporary perception, the fact that night-time trips to dance parties and discos were responsible for increased accident rates. My informants, again without surprise but possibly with less hostility than that expressed towards dechovka, took a stance that was almost completely opposed to the discogoers. Lines of discord could be found in almost everything, from different dress codes reflecting flashy colors for disco fans and to the predominantly dark t-shirts and jeans of my informers.

As seen above, music practice and consumption were often perceived as part of a more general lifestyle philosophy. Most of my informants explicitly evoked reflectivity as a part of their personality, possibly in opposition to the perceived frivolity of those not forming a part of their in-group. When discussing the period of state socialism and the dictatorship of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, despite obligatory and generationally strongly-transferred anti-Communism, they did not narrate their individual or shared suffering under the repressive regime, but rather positioned themselves as tricksters who knew the right ways to organize musical events, even under such unfavorable conditions. With a certain anecdotal lightness, they narrated the founding of the Jazz Club within the framework of the Communist Party-controlled trade union, the conspiracy surrounding the concert of the “Prague guest,” and many other similar stories. They certainly internalized the value of individualist freedom, but at the same time they expressed a strong sense of community. This could be expressed by the description of a cycling trip organized for friends and participants in the Jazz Club, by the transgenerational ties reproducing their cultural references towards younger musical audiences, and by the understanding of their activities within the framework of like-minded cultural centers in the region and beyond.

As Ilchenko and Dushkova argued in relation to the post-socialist city rooted in the legacy of state socialism, and as Merkel discussed, the methods of the social networking of East Germans, which strongly differed from those of the Wessis, and the social capital and practices of everyday life (arts de faire) acquired by my informants under state socialism were equally transferable to the new economic and political regime. The taste distinctions examined in this chapter certainly did not come to light with the new post-socialist reality, but they could be used to emphasize the class differences that were previously existent yet perhaps attenuated under state socialism. At the same time, two parallel processes can be identified based on the studied case. First, the studied taste-based community delimited its borders using non-compatible music genres and audiences. Secondly, with the aim of its own reproduction, the community also needs to be understood in terms of openness. It was not only generationally divided, but also wide open by definition, due to the variety of eclectic yet carefully chosen and curated music played and performed in the Klub.