Below is a look at the nine-minute song / video by the Polish rap group Slums Attack that juxtaposes a 1964 film, “This is Radio Free Europe” and rap music and text. According to historian Yulia Komska's analysis:
‘Radio Wolna Europa,’ performed in as many as eight languages: Polish, Czech, German, Russian, Italian (including Neapolitan), French, Swedish, and English. Each rapper gets a near-minute-long part, recited against his native urban backdrop
Known for its focus on current issues, rap and hip-hop may come across as unlikely conduits for nostalgia. Indeed, Slums Attack, one of Poland’s oldest and best-known rap collectives, is famous precisely for spotlighting the bread and butter of European and Eastern European rap: life in the projects, unemployment, corruption, neoliberal delusions, and youth without a future
Within its framework, RFE is not just a community-building agent, a sensorial pastime, or an aggregation of quaint broadcasting technologies. Instead, the station’s prominent role in the song is a symptom of nostalgia for the beginnings – and the unfulfilled promise – of rap itself.
Participants in ‘Radio Wolna Europa’ interpret RFE precisely as a recognisable icon of freedom and protest to script a hip-hop manifesto of sorts. From this vantage point, it makes sense that the performers’ native city names flash on the radio set’s station scale to indicate that hip-hop, too, can and should broadcast.
With the camera lingering on Poznań’s memorial to the ‘black Thursday’ (June 28, 1956), when the town’s populace took to the streets to demand better working condition, ‘Radio Wolna Europa’ affirms this young, ‘rogue,’ uncontrolled RFE, coming to its audiences ‘always uncensored, live, directly,’ as Azyl announces. Just like rap ought to do.
Here is a short outtake from the video:
The full video can be viewed on youtube here:
For the full text of the song review and of two films about Radio Free Europe ("Cold Waves" in Romania and "Listen" in Bulgaria), see Yuliya Komska essay, “The Blurred Object of Communist Nostalgia: Radio Free Europe”, Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History, Issue 11, Autumn 2016
