top of page

How is art a form of protest today? The story of the Plastic People of the Universe

  • May 10
  • 9 min read

Can art be a form of protest? Does art really work as resistance? And how can you make protest art?


In times like these, it's natural to wonder if art is really important. If writing, music, performance, and other creative work really matters.


I find hope and inspiration from looking at stories of artists using their work to resist the status quo. The story of the Plastic People of the Universe in Soviet Czechoslovakia in the 1970s is a powerful example to show the way.


Listen to this story!



Let’s say you love playing music. Let’s say you form a band because you love playing music. Let’s say you are a man who wears his hair long, because that’s what your musical influences do. And let’s say you play loud, weird, surreal rock and jazz songs because that’s the kind of music you like.

 

Great.   

 

Now let’s say you do all that in a country that has laws against it.

 

The government owns all music equipment and studios. Bands must have licenses to use them and play official gigs. And to get that license, you have to keep your hair short, play soft, positive pop music, and be grateful for the opportunities.

 

So what happens when you don’t follow those rules? When instead, you follow the long line of musicians around the world and across time that defy the status quo. That want to express themselves in their way.

 

What happens then? You might accidentally start a revolution. 

 

How did a band in soviet Czechoslovakia kick off a revolt against repression? How did young Czech people in the 1970s look to the counter culture of the U.S. for inspiration? And what can we learn from the band The Plastic People of the Universe, and their role in the Velvet Revolution, about the role of art in resistance?


 

PART 1: THE NEW SOVIET STATES

To understand Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, we first need to back up a few decades.

 

In 1945, the Allies had liberated western Europe from Nazi rule. And the Soviet army had liberated eastern Europe. World War II was over.

 

But after the war, Stalin and the Soviets kept control over eastern Europe. The soviets installed communist leaders, and for all intents and purposes, the new country of East Germany, along with Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, became part of the Soviet Union.

 

Among many things, that meant repression of speech, culture, and political freedoms.

 

Over the years, these states would try to push back. But in 1956, when Hungarians protested and Soviet tanks crushed, fear spread across the satellite states.  

                 

PART 2: PRAGUE SPRING

Then, in 1968, things started changing in Czechoslovakia.

 

Alexander Dubček became the new Communist Party leader in the country. But he was a reformer at heart. He wanted to create "socialism with a human face.” The best of both world. Keep the socialist soviet framework, but allow more political, economic, and cultural freedoms.

Alexander Dubček
Alexander Dubček

 

The changes came at the right time. Students in particular were increasingly speaking up, testing the limits on art and culture. Artists and writers had become increasingly unwilling to accept censorship.

 

So immediately under Dubcek, limits on the press lifted. Citizens could meet openly to discuss politics. Human rights groups and other long outlawed groups restarted. Western culture was welcomed in, with its artistic expression and rock music. The Prague Spring was here.

 

But Soviet leadership in Moscow was not happy. They thought loosening their grip, even a little, would mean rebellion in the Czech state, which would spread across their eastern Europe empire. They thought it would the perfect opportunity for Americans to pounce, make another battlefield in the Cold War.

 

So in August of 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. Tanks plowed their way through the streets of Prague. And to ensure others countries didn’t follow the Czech example, Soviets also invaded Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

Soviet forces invade, 1968
Soviet forces invade, 1968

 

The Czech people pushed back against in the invasion in nonviolent and annoying resistance, like removing road signs so that the invading troops would lose their way.

 

But ultimately the Soviets won. They expelled Dubcek and installed a conservative soviet leader. All reforms were reversed. Normalization was the new catch word, meaning back to the normal of censorship and repression.

Soviet tanks in Prague, 1968
Soviet tanks in Prague, 1968

  

PART 3: THE PLASTICS

A few weeks after the invasion, Milan Hlavsa, a bassist, formed a band. They called themselves The Plastic People of the Universe.


Milan was heavily inspired by the U.S. musicians The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, among others.


So the music the Plastics played was dark. It was hard rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock, played by musicians speaking both Czech and English.  


But the music was also silly and surreal. The performances were camp and theatrical. The musicians wore lace gowns and capes, makeup on their faces. They kept their hair long.


And all that was a problem right off the bat.

Vratislav Brabenec
Vratislav Brabenec

In a 2017 interview, band member Vratislav Brabenec said "We found ourselves being persecuted as troublemakers or partisans, which none of us ever were. We were never partisans or resistance fighters."

 

In the new hard line Czech government, musical acts had to get a license to perform and access state-provided instruments. And to get that license, they had to follow some very tight rules:

  1. They were required to play soft pop music (not hard rock) and follow “gentle melodic lines”

  2. Lyrics had to be submitted for approval

  3. Performers were mandated to maintain a conservative appearance. (e.g., no long hair for men)

  4. Bands were not allowed to sing in English.

  5. Bands were not allowed to play music genres with “life destroying effects” and “unacceptable excessive levels of noise”


The Plastics broke all these rules. And even though their lyrics weren’t explicitly anti-government, the group became political simply by their failure to cut their hair, to sing in only Czech, to play soft pop. They were political because they played music that was against the rules.


So their license was revoked.


That didn’t stop the band, though.


They performed at illegal underground venues and private parties. They played at weddings and school discos. Sometimes they advertised their shows as ‘lectures’ about the Velvet Underground so they could fly under the radar.


In 1972 they were outright banned in Prague, so they moved to smaller villages and towns in the country. They played in barns and farmhouses. Members left, new members joined. But fans kept coming, traveling wherever the band might pop up. They wore their hair long like the band, an instant marker of rebellion and a dangerous act in a time that police were looking for long hair.


The band recorded an album in an old castle in the countryside, filling the record with music that was surreal, experimental. The finished record was scratchy and poor quality. It had to be, because they couldn’t access legal recording equipment or studios. But fans didn’t care. Just like the samizdat underground of outlawed books, now thriving, fans of the Plastics passed along poor quality dupes of the album, like a samizdat of music.


Although the band was underground, over the years police would invariably find them, raiding the events and beating and interrogating concertgoers.


Brabenec said, "If they had left us alone, we would have disappeared, like a lot of groups. The fact that they started stirring things up, I think that was a mistake in the script – the script they had written."

 

Then in 1976, after playing the Festival of the Second Culture, police arrested the entire band. Plus dozens of other musicians. They also interrogated over a 100 fans at the festival.


The arrest of the Plastics made big news, in the country and outside. The trials weren’t open to the public. But. Many people showed up to the courthouse anyway. They sat in the foyer or milled around. They were fans, they were writers, they were people sick to death of the government’s crackdown. All of them, sitting around. Talking to each other.


The Plastics were quickly sent to prison for singing “vulgar lyrics” and “organized disturbance of the peace.”

But another story had started.

 

PART 4: CHARTER 77

Many of those people who showed up at the Plastics trial, who had connected with one another over their love of culture and anger at the government, got together in 1977 to write a manifesto. In this Charter 77 document they stated the need for basic human rights, and a government that honored them.


Brabenec said, "When I first read it (charter 77), I said to myself, it’s such a normal letter. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. It wasn’t a call for revolt, that we were going to bring everything crashing down. But I did have a feeling that it was going to cause a lot of trouble, which turned out to be the case."

 

Among the organizers of Charter 77 was Vaclav Havel. He was a playwright in the 1970s, one in a burgeoning underground absurdist scene. After the arrest of the Plastics, he came to the trial with all the others. And he spoke out in favor of the band.


He said  “an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on the most elementary and important thing, something that bound everyone together... The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom ".


Havel and other signatories of Charter 77 were arrested and sent to prison.


Among the Plastics, members spent up to eight months in jail, and their manager spent 18 months. After release, one band member was deported, and others left the country, including Brabenec.  


He said, "The police came to our apartment at night. On top of that, they nearly kicked a friend o ours to death. I told the secret police that we’d leave. And they said, we’ll be the ones to decide if you go or not. It wasn’t easy. Leaving your country, and for all you know, it could be forever."

 


PART 5: THE VELVET REVOLUTION

The years went on. The Plastics still played, with new members and more secrecy. And Havel and others continued to meet and write.


By the mid 1980s, though, the Soviet Union was changing. Gorbachev was leading glasnost, scaling back censorship and restrictions, particularly in art and culture. He was also taking a hands-off approach to the Eastern European countries under soviet rule. And in each of these countries, the communist leaders had grown corrupt and complacent.


The combination of these things, along with growing dissent in many of these countries, meant 1989 was a wild, historic year.


One by one, the people of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria revolted. Hard line leaders, most of whom were convinced they were untouchable and that the people loved them, were forced out or stepped aside.

 

And in Czechoslovakia, after mounting pressure, the communist party ceded control. Soon after, Vaclav Havel, that writer and fan of the Plastic People of the Universe, was elected president of his country.

President Vaclav Havel
President Vaclav Havel

CONCLUSION

So – what does this mean for us?


The Plastics weren’t setting out to start a resistance movement. They weren’t actively speaking out against the government. They just wanted to play music that they liked, that they felt excited about. They knew it was weird and odd and all the things, and that’s what they loved about it.


Their resistance to tyranny came from simply wanting to stay true to themselves. They didn’t want to play the type of music that was mandated by the government. They didn’t want to look like the moral and upstanding soviet. They didn’t want to follow the rules. What rock musician does?


The government demanded conformity. The Plastics defied that conformity. And by staying weird and odd and even silly, that became an act of resistance. One that inspired legions of young people and secret nonconformists, looking for a better way.


The Plastics created a place for thinking, seeing, and being different. A place where the weirdos and the resistors could play. And then, think bigger.


Just being who they were, the Plastics inspired a playwright and future president. They set off a chain of events that would lead to that boring, conformist, dangerous government’s end.

The Velvet Revolution; hundreds of thousands of Czech protesters
The Velvet Revolution; hundreds of thousands of Czech protesters

Art sparked a nonviolent means of protest that lasted for years, and finally won out.


It was called the Velvet Revolution because it was nonviolent, smooth. But also because it had a catalyst of a band inspired by the Velvet Underground.


That’s the power of art as resistance too. Just by its existence, it can set an example, and create a rallying cry. It can show us that there’s another world out there, one where we can be ourselves.

 

 

OUTRO

The Art of Resistance is a podcast from Rebel Yell Creative. To make art that matters, every creative person needs support. Find yours at RebelYellCreative.com.


This is Amy Lee Lillard, and I wrote, narrated, and produced this show. Check the show notes for all sources. And head to rebelyellcreative.com for full show transcripts, art, and more.


I’ll see you next time.  

 

 

SOURCES

MUSIC





 


 


 
 
 
bottom of page