„This City is a Faraway Planet”

Representations of Budapest in the Lyrics of the Hungarian Underground Artistic Scene in the 1980s

Abstract

The city has always been a cultural construction and a real place to live. It was able to reflect, to represent and to metaphorise the complexity of social hierarchies, the cultural characteristics of human life by its real spatial relations. The parallel notions of polis, urbs, and civitas can be shown as models of a complex and contradictory form of existence belonging to the representation of a settlement.

The paper examines the representation of the city of Budapest in the context of the Hungarian underground lyrics in the 1980s. The fictionalised images of the city in the texts under discussion move from the particularity of subculture to the universality of culture.

The lyrics of Spions, URH, Kontroll Csoport (Control Group) Európa Kiadó, Balaton, Bizottság (The Commitee) mixed the literary topoi, Foucault’s “heterotopias”, rock and roll pop-cultural clichés and the “effets du réel” sociological reality in order to create a highly complex and enduring vision of Budapest in the particular conditions of the cultural politics of the time.