Such a Strange Vibration: Rock Music as the Affective Site of Divergence among the Soviet Estonian Nonconformist Youth

Abstract

While Timothy Leary was preaching “Turn on, tune in, drop out” in the late 1960s in the United States, young people in the Soviet Union were practising another kind of tuning in. Radio Luxembourg and other foreign radio signals leaked through the Iron Curtain, bringing with them “the strange vibration” that sparked new social arenas and affective engagements. Iconic hippie-era albums were illicitly distributed, copied on reel-to-reel tapes, and exchanged within the networks of music lovers. In Soviet Estonia a distinctive rock music scene evolved. Rock music was the key source and the means of divergence for the nonconformist youth of Soviet Estonia, many of whom identified as or were connected to the hippies. The radically different sound of psychedelic rock prompted ecstatic states of mind and triggered new imaginaries. The affective engagements with music created a sense of connection with the global pop culture and youth movements and, ultimately, fostered the sense of an imaginary elsewhere. Since these engagements diverged from the predominant discourses, and the Soviet authorities often regarded them as dangerous for societal well-being, the affectively loaded practices and experiences of music guided the youth to redefine their relationship to the daily reality and ideology of Soviet life. Hence, the rock music milieu became the site in which certain affects (interest in rock music), affective states of mind (kaif) and expressions (practices of style, artistic languages) fostered the agency of the nonconformist youth by creating a space of sensory divergence.