After the Polka

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Polish disco is the ultimate sonic oxymoron. First, there’s the Polish. Polka-dancing, pierogi-eating, pope-loving Poles in the United States have for more than a hundred years been the besotted and bumbling protagonists in all manner of blonde, lightbulb-turning, boat-sinking jokes and other abuses that aren’t so funny. To be Polish in the United States today is to be part of a history of arguably incomplete assimilation from the marked ethnicity of the “dumb Polack” to a less conspicuous shade of white.

Then there’s disco. A great crop of relatively new books have documented disco’s cosmopolitan credentials; it’s also gay and black, and proud of it. So disco polo, a 1990s post-disco musical hybrid created by Poles, seems to be not only a sonic smash-up but also potentially an intercultural carnal sin.

 Poles know they shouldn’t like disco polo, but many do. They enjoy it and enjoy it in public but will not admit to enjoying it when they’re asked. For them, it is that bad. In 1998 the Warsaw Voice characterized disco polo as “music that has thumped the legacy of Chopin well and truly into the gutter.” This is one of the most often stated reasons that Poles hate disco polo: It is perceived as a frontal attack on high culture. Played on digital synthesizers by amateur musicians, it is simple in concept and execution and has lyrics that appeal to multiple generations of listeners, including the most uncool—children and the elderly. In short, it displays to the world the bottled blonde of the wildest ethnic stereotype, and Poles perceive the world as waiting to make them into a punch line.

The polka, the mazurka, the polonaise. These are the dances of Poland. In the spring of 2005 I was invited to a folk costume show in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, home to a large Polish immigrant population. A group of local children in traditional peasant costumes from preindustrial Polish villages danced the polonaise. In these same villages in the 1990s, one would be less likely to see peasant skirts and more likely to hear disco polo, which became the dominant sonic expression of village life in the 1990s and remains such in the lives of Polish expatriates in the United States. Christenings, weddings, name days, and other holidays all have a disco polo sound track. Although disco polo is folk in origin and folk in use, upper-class, urban Poles recoil at the thought of it as an expression of national identity, perhaps because it tells of a Polishness they wish to leave unarticulated.

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