ADRIANA LUKAS remembers the Velvet Revolution. “A couple of weeks ago I was visiting Eastern Europe and despite the trickle of bandwidth available where I was staying, I found myself watching old clips from the communist era on YouTube. The most surreal was not the absurdity of their content, the ridiculous gravitas of the communist propaganda but the memory of this rubbish being taken seriously and accepted as the norm.”
Some of the things she links remind me of a song I used to listen to a lot: “Czech This Out,” by Frequency X. (Real names: Nicolai Vorkapich & Ray Castoldi). It takes a phrase from Moscow radio in 1968, “The defense of socialism in Czechoslovakia is more than the concern of the Czechoslovak people,” and gradually remixes it to “The defense of Czechoslovakia, the defense of people, the defense of the Czechoslovak people.” Subversive. And you can dance to it!