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MAX CEGIELSKI talks to BOGNA ŚWIĄTKOWSKA

In aesthetic terms, ‘Machina’ had an entirely novel approach to making magazines. There was no permanent layout, nor was it formatted — something that would be unthinkable today

MAX CEGIELSKI: What magazine did you consider the most important in the very beginning of the 90s?

BOGNA ŚWIĄTKOWSKA: For me, the most important cultural periodical of the time was “brulion”, which embodied the entire chaos and search for freedom that was such an important part of the late 80s and early 90s. “Brulion” was uncompromising! If you go back and read the old issues, you’ll see just how encumbered we’ve become with self-censorship, political correctness, and how unwillingly we now criticize certain circles in fear of being ideologically pigeonholed. “Brulion” pulled out the heavy artillery, they didn’t fuck around. Try writing something unflattering about “Political Critique”, feminists, or the Church nowadays!

“Brulion” was started in Kraków in 1986 and quickly become a voice that was highly critical of the salons of the opposition. They would print lyrics by Maciej Maleńczuk back when he was still a busker on the streets of Kraków. They printed Zbigniew Sajnóg’s poem “Flupy z pizdy” (“Flups from my pussy”¹), they ran translations of Celine’s antisemitic writing, and they published articles on Nazi occultism. Perhaps we were freer in that period of systemic transformation than we are now?

Robert Tekieli showed us that we could write our own messages using commonly available tools. Even if I don’t agree with his views, I must admit that Tekieli had — and still has — an amazing gift for finding his own path in the social system, back then and today. 1989–1991 was the magazine’s heyday, it was when “brulion” contested everything that lay at the foundation of the world we live in today. Their strategy was driven by their unwillingness to respect rules set by others, even by the opposition that tore down communism. “Brulion” said: “No, the earth is round, it revolves around its own axis, and it has a shitload of spaces, places, and opportunities that you haven’t even heard of yet.” The articles always left room for interpretation and judgment.

People craved everything, including music. Do you remember when the first private radio station, RMF FM, went on the air in January 1990?

No, but I do remember the early days of Radio Zet, which is what I listened to back then. It was a completely different radio station than the modern Radio Zet: a local station with ideas and a crew that was intelligently led by Andrzej Wojciechowski, not the bland, formatted radio it is today. They played interesting music, and it was a cool time where new people took over the radio. Even if they didn’t know too much about music, they at least had access to lots of records. It was a refreshing alternative to Radio 3, which I greatly respect, but Kaczkowski and Niedźwiecki brought us up on a very homogeneous musical profile, one that we needed to liberate ourselves from, like children of toxic parents. Take the band Budgie. Does anyone even remember them? It was so satisfying to trample all that was sacred to Radio 3, start listening to weird new music and hear it being played on the air! Radio Solidarity was broadcasting weird records as well, they were spouting nonsense, and it was interesting. That’s why I recommended that Wojciech Mann and Krzysztof Materna provide an alternative to that nonsense on Radio Kolor: I wanted to have a radio show that would tell the truth about hip-hop, instead of all that nonsense about who wore what kind of clothing. That’s how “Kolor szok” got started in early 1993.

I remember those crowds of boys and girls that would squeeze into the studio of Radio Kolor — the third private radio, after Zet and RMF FM — to see your show. You became “the godmother of Polish hip-hop” to them.

I was interested in American hip-hop culture, especially its black and rebellious variety. And I was obviously interested in how that translated into the Polish social landscape. I was enamored of the rawness of many of these local attempts at making hip-hop: imagine tracks recorded on a tape deck in someone’s room, with lyrics that often copied American songs, or rather copied the stories you would see in music videos on MTV at the time. What was interesting about Polish hip-hop was its original voice, especially when it came to Kaliber 44. Or even Wzgórze YA-PA–3 from Kielce: the atmosphere of their music was very interesting, but as far as the artistic side goes, Kaliber 44 was definitely the best.

I still remember a few lines from Wzgórze YA-PA–3: “I ain’t got dough for kicks, guns, and hoes.” Or another song of theirs, “Brama ciemności” (“The Gate of Darkness”), which had an anti-heroin message that was typical of the time: “My homie passed the gate of darkness, there’s no anger or violence, the first hit’s always free, once he tried their shit he came back on his knees. […] I’m telling you, shut the fuck up.” Was that some kind of Silesian syndrome? A lot of heavy stuff like that came out of southern Poland in communist times, too, like Ryszard Riedel and Dżem.

I’d chalk it up to strong personalities. They didn’t feel like ripping anyone off, or perhaps the fact that the originals were so hard to come by drove them to come up with their own style. The documentary function of hip-hop was very interesting and authentic. I didn’t pretend to be a sixteen-year-old teenage boy from the hood. The stories told through rap music gave me insight into what these people found important. I found it interesting, I had the feeling that I was listening to an account given by people from a world I didn’t have access to. These are the people that are building the next generation, people I live with, whom I share the same apartment complex, building, and city with, and I want to know what they think.

Did the songs also document the systemic and economic transformations? Kaliber 44’s “Plus i minus” (“Positive and negative”), off their debut hardcore psychedelic album, was about the AIDS scare at the time:

“Fuck all of that,
School, stress, fear, holy fuck
Time to freak out, the time is now, check it out!
Positive and negative — it’s like a fucking sentence
My time is up. Question: do I have to die?
God! Doctor! Somebody help me.”

Yes, it affected young people, and the hip-hop of the time focused on the issues faced by sixteen to twenty-year-olds. But I wouldn’t go too far with the interpretations: the horizons of a teenager’s world aren’t that distant. Placing the songs in a certain context is what gives us an image of that era. Unemployment, the ubiquitous, symbolic street bench, “hopelessness” — all of this forms an image of the period of systemic transformation. If hip-hop artists came from upper-class neighborhoods in Warsaw, they would have performed happy, witty songs instead of gloomy and dark ones. But the time was rife with all sorts of violence. The recent capture of Ratko Mladić reminds us that the 90s were a traumatic period in Europe; that was when the war in the Balkans took place. Meanwhile in Poland, the 90s were the early years of the mafia, which drove around in fast cars while the cops pursued them in Polonez Caros.

The band Apteka had a line about that car, which was first manufactured in 1991: “You have to be really stupid to buy a Polonez Caro.”

The long arm of the law was pretty short back then, and besides, the police denied the very existence of the mafia. It was something you had to deal with on a daily basis, and yet the police claimed there was no such thing as the mafia. Whatever is illegal, borderline, and marginal is typically in the very center during periods of transformation. Suspicious accumulation of wealth and capital; street money changers with tons of cash suddenly became important businessmen. These worlds overlapped, that’s what the 90s were all about. We all experienced it, everyone could plainly see it.

Part of Władysław Pasikowski’s Pigs is still quoted today: Franz says to a member of the verification committee: “The times change, and yet you’re always on the committees. The committee member replies: “Are you prepared to uphold the law of the renewed, democratic Republic of Poland?” Franz: “Unquestionably, until the end. Its end or mine.”

Pigs was Poland’s first blockbuster film, and it was important to me personally. It summed up recent Polish history, giving rise to a new type of character and a new movie star, Bogusław Linda, whose attractiveness I now find baffling. I don’t understand what it was about him that made all those girls fall in love with him, but that just shows how powerful those times were. It was just the spirit of the moment; perhaps the lack of a similar message in contemporary film — and reality in general — will soon lead to a resurgence of that kind of macho, chauvinist cinema, a reaction to the blandness of everything, its lack of expression.

Pasikowski, Tarantino, and other films of the period, such as Natural Born Killers, Léon, and Man Bites Dog, glorified violence while achieving broader acceptance for a new language of film.

Kobas Laksa and Wojciech Koronkiewicz responded to Pulp Fiction by shooting the parody film Fikcyjne Pulpety (“Fictional Meatballs”²) in 1994 in Białystok. Grzegorz Lipiec co-founded Sky Piastowskie in 1990 in Zielona Góra; their greatest achievement, That Life Has Meaning, was actually screened in movie theatres. This was an attempt to take over a medium, to display a bit of their own world. Quality was purely incidental; the goal was to try out a new medium that had seemed unattainable up to that point, but had become available thanks to the falling prices of video equipment. Some of those films are unwatchable today, but what mattered was that they had crossed a threshold in their search for a means to express their own choices. They needed to figure out for themselves what wasn’t right for them before finally choosing their own creative style.

This brings us back to the strategy embraced by “brulion”, which is all the more relevant given that Poland’s first pop culture magazine, “Machina”, relied on similar ideas.

“Machina” was launched in 1996 and was part of the wave of enthusiasm that flooded the country in the 90s, the excitement at being able to finally do what had once been prohibited. There were many people whose sense of community was based on music, film, and a style that mixed entertainment with high culture. “Machina” was an attempt to create something for that numerous group. At its high point, the magazine sold one hundred thousand copies. That would be impossible today, but then again, those were still the early days of the internet.

The cover of the first issue of “Machina”, published in April 1996, features Paweł Kukiz, who had just won an award at the Gdynia Film Festival for his role in Girl Guide and had become an insanely popular star. He was banned from performing “ZCHN zbliża się” (“ZCHN is Coming”³), a parody of a popular Christmas carol with lyrics that tell the story of a drunken priest running over a cat and totaling his Toyota on a fence, to the great dismay of his parishioners, who expect to have to pay for a new car. The photos for “the best magazine about music and more” showed Kukiz decked out in Diesel clothing, sitting wide-legged on the back of a kneeling girl. The photo shoot was a reference to the brand’s catalogs, which were considered rather weird at the time. He looks heavily dressed up, but perhaps that’s what we all looked like back then.

In aesthetic terms, “Machina” had an entirely novel approach to making magazines. There was no permanent layout, nor was it formatted — something that would be unthinkable today. The pages were designed from scratch every time, they had to come up with something new for every article. Nowadays, you just have a single template for each type of content in a magazine — back then, the graphic designers would think up something new for every story. Articles were selected on a “if it’s cool, we’ll run it” basis. Look at the cover: “150 album reviews”. Who boasts about doing stuff like that now? Reviews are something you read online. That was our trump card, we reviewed everything: records, graphic novel, books, computer games, classical music, and pop.

The magazine resembled a punk-rock fanzine in that sense. The cover of the second issue featured the pop star Edyta Górniak, the “jass scene”, Kazik, and Queen. Inside there were pieces on Hasidic Jews and Jean-Michel Basquiat. What made it resemble “brulion” was the column “Public Enemy” that you introduced early on, and which took on Robert Tekieli (after his conversion to Christianity), Mariusz Kamiński, the artist Robert Libera, and Wojciech Cejrowski. Let’s take a look at that last one — he wasn’t always known as a globetrotter.

In contrast to the popular “whassup” style promoted at the time by Jerzy Owsiak, Cejrowski would always say “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen”, and his conservative lifestyle won him great popularity. He appeared on Radio Kolor, where both of us worked, and he had a show called “WC Kwadrans” (“WC Quarter Hour”) on TV. His heavily exaggerated attitude, which questioned various manifestations of liberty, drew a wide audience. He was always openly homophobic, which makes it easy for everyone to have their own opinion about him. I liked him for his bold personality and for not pretending to be anyone else. Especially in a day and age when it’s hard to figure out who’s who. There’s a certain value to being straightforward.

So you would describe it as a period of chaos and confusion, but also a time when order was slowly starting to sink in? The whole situation had settled down by 1996, making it possible to launch “Machina”?

Yes, the magazine was the result of the relative stabilization of the time, as well as the insanity of Marek Kościkiewicz of DeMono, who shelled out the money to run “Machina” for its entire first year! He was the owner and he did it because he believed that we needed a magazine like that, that was his ambition. He came up with the title and pursued his dream. No one did market research in those days; you didn’t look for a niche in the market that you could fill with a product. It was a private project that turned out to be successful, because that niche happened to be there, and it wasn’t until later that free monthlies appeared, like “City Magazine” in 1998 and “Aktivist” in 2000. The internet completely changed the way people accessed cultural information — city dwellers started going online to find what they were looking for. You’ll now find Edyta Górniak on the cover of “Viva!” rather than culture magazines.

Marek Kościkiewicz was also the owner of the Zic Zac music label at the time. “Machina” was a highly professional magazine in terms of marketing: it quickly set up its own website and an online store with gadgets, records, and books. In 1997 you published a column by Kazimiera Szczuka — the soon-to-be-famous feminist — titled “The Orgasm of a Certain Person”, while another issue featured an article about a dominatrix. Sexual topics began to be less taboo in Poland. That’s when you came out with pictures of a model made up to look like Marina Topley Bird on the cover of Tricky’s first album.

The 90s were all about trip hop! I adore Tricky. Trip hop produced sounds that let you hear something that didn’t exist, it touched your imagination. And Nirvana?! Poland was a few years late to that party. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” meant something completely different to us. Wearing a flannel shirt and imitating the sloppy aesthetic of construction workers was a totally different statement in the US. The power of that music was amazing, despite the fact that it didn’t translate into what was going on in Poland at the time. Hip-hop fit into the local situation in a way that grunge didn’t. Rap became this global language that enabled people to express their local rage, while grunge in the US was a form of rebellion, not just another rock genre, like it was here.

I recently reread Mariusz Szczygieł’s coverage of the transformation period. He writes about poor parents dreaming of buying their son a heavy, long-sleeved, lined flannel jacket.

Precisely. That was the time when artists like Hey, Varius Manx, Edyta Górniak, and Edyta Bartosiewicz ruled the charts: women who made a completely different and highly personal variety of music. They each sold around half a million CDs and cassettes. Could anyone sell that many records today?

The albums that sold well were the ones that didn’t discuss social issues or rebel against anything. Two nominees of the 1996 Machinera award were boxer Andrzej Gołota, “for his courage”, and musician Andrzej Piaseczny-Piasek, “for his popularity among teenage girls”. That was also when disco polo came out.

When disco polo appeared in the 90s, the social elite once again expressed their disgust with society — as politicians had done before — for their musical taste, and yet those disco polo channels are still on the air today. We just need to accept it as yet another form of expression. A form that had existed underground in communist Poland, but only came to the surface in the 90s. After the Round Table Agreement, the same distribution channels and media could be used to express a range of artistic preferences. The systemic transformation allowed us to see the proportions between the different cultural preferences of Poles. There’s no point in acting disgusted. I just treat it like any other source of information: that’s how people wanted to spend their leisure time. It existed back in the People’s Republic of Poland, but was less visible then. Artists like Laskowski and Tercet Egzotyczny, the classics of Polish wedding music/pseudo-folk culture, were rejected by the system in the same way that more ambitious, rebellious artists — like punk bands — were. None of that was presentable as the culture of “the working masses of the cities and villages”. All these voices and visions became audible and visible after the fall of communism.

2000 marked a certain stabilization, an order imposed on the polyphony of voices.

That was definitely the case for me, because that’s when I settled down and started a family. That was my personal experience, but maybe there were more people who slowed down and took a look at what it was we had done. That was when the first media company reorganizations occurred, when people who had done just fine for themselves up until then started losing their jobs and had to clear out their desks at a moment’s notice. The chaos brought order and formatting, and many projects that had been driven by enthusiasm, naïve faith, and idealism were cut. Then came the transition to corporate structures, big money started pouring into the country and taking over media outlets. Businesses began conducting market research, and from then on companies such as clothing manufacturers had the final say in Polish tastes. That was the start of the 21st century.

¹ A title that sounds equally cryptic in the Polish original.
² A pun on the original title.
³ A reference to the Christian National Union, a Polish national conservative political

translated by Arthur Barys