After the Polka

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The sonic genealogy of disco polo began with Giorgio Moroder, the Italian dance music producer. Moroder’s signature production style swapped the strings and organic funk of disco for synthesized melodies, drum machines in basic four, and English-language lyrics (often more like utterances) simple enough to transcend national boundaries. This became the formula for Italo disco, the first truly popular European electronic dance music, which made its way to Poland and the rest of the continent—Iron Curtain or no.

Disco polo’s cultural roots trace back to a genre called piosenka chodnikowa, or sidewalk music. During World War II, Polish musicians had few opportunities for public performance and would travel door to door playing and singing songs to raise money. As part of the resistance movement, young children committed the “little sabotage” of writing graffiti and singing anti-occupation songs in the streets. These melancholic, patriotic sidewalk songs continued to be sung through the 1950s and 1960s and were recorded by small private record labels. Sidewalk music became the ubiquitous rural wedding band music of the late 1980s, and the most popular songs became standard fare for local bands playing at receptions and country fairs. As these bands became more popular through the distribution of cassettes, they began to add their original songs to the repertoire but still played from the tradition.

The patron saint of sidewalk music was Slawomir Skreta, an entrepreneur who realized that this homegrown form had an audience but no industry. He coined the term “disco polo” and founded the Blue Star label in 1992. Foreign-owned labels like EMI wouldn’t sign disco polo artists, but by the mid-1990s the genre’s three main labels—Blue Star, Green Star, and Omega Music—sold huge volumes without the benefit of traditional print, radio, and television advertising.

In the 1996 disco polo documentary Bara Bara, Skreta defended his artists from the criticism that they were primitive, saying, “We don’t want bands to create music too professionally, because this professionalism can kill the authenticity of the songs and would for sure reduce the public.” That Skreta feels the genre’s authenticity (here meaning amateur-style songwriting, populist lyrics, and unmannered musical performance style) actually ensures a continued audience is a populist music business articulation of the folk model.

Another reading, that of the Frankfurt School, would be that the genre ensures its widest reach by producing work of a lowest common denominator of complexity, depth of emotion, and sophisticated expression. The lowest-common-denominator reading expressed the deepest anxieties of urban Poles in the 1990s, then finally free to engage in the consumption not only of Polish music but also of music from the international marketplace. Disco polo was really bad and really popular. It threatened to overtake Poland’s serious cultural expressions, so championed by the international literary, music, and theater communities during communism.

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