Popular Music and the Secret Service in Hungary, 19451990: Records, Files and U [Hardcover]

This book is a result of decades-long research into declassified files, offering a unique perspective for writing post-World War Two cultural history through the lens of the political police.

This is a fine contribution to popular music studies. It is a report back from a journey through the archives of Hungarys state security services and valuable for its insights into the problems that faced Hungarys communist cultural policy makers as they sought to control young peoples music making. But it also reads, exhilaratingly, like a hallucinatory version of a pop story I thought I already knew, as it chronicles what happened to the flow of sounds, ideas and images across an iron curtain that was, in fact, always permeable.
Simon Frith, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh

More so than any of its Warsaw Pact neighbours, Hungary developed an extraordinarily rich postwar popular culture  not for want of the states attempts to control or undermine it. Through his exhaustive readings of the secret polices extensive archives, Tam?s SzQnyei has pieced together a well-informed examination of the many ways security officials coercively romanced, bullied and threatened the scenes insiders, be they musicians, organisers or fans, into informing on their comrades, and how some resisted. Regardless of the states attempts to shape the music and minds of its people, not withstanding a few imprisoned neo-fascist punks in the 1980s, musicians came through and the culture was beginning to thrive by the time Hungary threw open its doors to the West.
Chris Bohn, Editor-in-Chief, The Wire, formerly of the NME, for which he wrote about the Budapest scene in 1980: Hungarian Rhapsody And Other Magyar Melodies (NME, 17 January 1981)