After the Polka

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The primary consumers and creators of disco polo were villagers, the “losers” of the transition to capitalism in the 1990s. While collective farms were dissolved as early as 1956, eastern agriculturalists had been farming collectively until the end of communism, and with its end came a void of governance and the ensuing chaos of rapid market transition.

Not only was the east’s supposedly secure position as Poland’s breadbasket undermined by the opening of the market, but the increasing prestige and importance placed on the cosmopolitanism of the new Pole—multilingualism, emphasis on higher education, willingness to travel, toleration—furthered the gap between the rural and the urban. This space has come to be filled by alcoholism, depression, crime, and increasingly active hate groups. Anger and frustration about the lack of opportunities for advancement and the decreased standard of living in rural areas created a vast societal schism in Poland. In the 1990s disco polo became the sound of the frustrated rural people.

Many lower-income, uneducated Poles find disco polo sonically and lyrically hopeful but also driven by intense skepticism about the integrity of rural Polish life. Disco polo artists’ power comes from celebrating their perceived shortcomings, as in country music or Eminem’s B-Rabbit character in the 8 Mile battle scene. By making weakness obvious, by preemptively exposing redneck tendencies, disco polo flattens its critics by not only understanding its own badness but also basing its whole shtick on this brand of bad. Here’s your punch line. Let’s dance.

Daphne Carr is a New York City–based music writer. Excerpted from Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard (Duke University Press, 2007).

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