Bea Palya's I'll Be Your Plaything

✍ Scribed by Anna Szemere; András Rónai

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 169
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

For decades, the state-run music industry in Hungary has artificially isolated musical worlds. The 2010 album I’ll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary’s most popular hits from the socialist era. The album exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Halftitle page
33 1/3 Global
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
A Conversation Between the Authors
1 Playing Music, Playing with Music: Bea Palya and Samu Gryllus’s Musical Partnerships
1.1. Coming of Age Together: The Early Years of Musical Collaboration
1.2. Graduating with Psyché
2 Memory Work with Souvenirs, Bronzes, and the Tunes of State Socialism
2.1. “Let’s Make a Clean Slate of the Past”! And the Pop-culturization of Memories
2.2. The Dance Song Festival as a Metaphor of János Kádár’s Hungary (1956–1988)
3 “Play it One More Time, Play it All Night Long”: Recycling, Re-working, and Reflecting in Popular Music Discourse
3.1. Retroculture, Hauntology,and Necro Marketing
3.2. The Critique of the Hauntological Reason
4 Start Making a New Sense
4.1. Traces of the Past and the Present
4.2. The Creative Process
4.3. Deconstruction and Dialogues
4.4. Uncovering: Types of Cover Songs
4.5. Translations and Radical Hybrids: Cover Songs on “I’ll Be Your Plaything”
5 “A Babe in Toyl and”or Popcultural Feminism in Be a Palya’s Music and Early Career (2005–2014)
5.1. What is Popcultural Feminism?
5.2. Charting a Path of her Own
5.3. Gender Themes on “I’ll Be Your Plaything”
6 In the Aftermath of “I’ll Be Your Plaything”: A Woman Writing her Self
6.1. Writing a New Story
6.2. Navigating Music Making, Business, and Feminism
References
Track listing of “I’ll Be Your Plaything”
Discography
Index