A Band from the Caribbean Islands

prof. Masha Salazkina (Concordia University, Montreal)

Boney M was a West German-produced disco group of Caribbean performers, almost unknown in the United States, whose hits "Rivers of Babylon," "Rasputin," "Sunny" and "Daddy Cool" made them one of the most widely heard acts in the world in the late 1970s and 1980s — across the socialist bloc as much as anywhere else. Their music permeated daily life, from youth discotheques and kitchen radios to the soundtracks of feature films. Mostly permitted by socialist cultural authorities and enthusiastically consumed by audiences across the bloc, Boney M were simultaneously apolitical and transgressive, postcolonial and commercial, collectively euphoric and saturated with the imagery of individual freedom. Their acceptance required productive misreadings — ideological alibis that reframed their music as anti-colonial solidarity, European light entertainment, or harmless fun — yet produced real affective formations, consumer desires and social practices that exceeded any institution's intentions.
This talk takes the group's ubiquity as a methodological problem. Record sales, the standard measure of success in popular music, become largely meaningless outside Western Europe and North America, and radio play is scarcely more tractable once broadcasts cross borders. Boney M's circulation through the socialist world ran instead through non-identical pressings, flexi discs and sound postcards, programme exchange between socialist broadcasters, concert tours, film soundtracks, and an informal economy of reel-to-reel and cassette copying. Tracing that circulation from the Yugoslav discotheques and the 1978 Moscow concerts to the Czechoslovak song covers, the talk asks two questions. How do we assess popularity beyond quantifiable industrial markers such as record sales? And how does an intermedial, reception-centred method change the way we think about cultural globalization, its chronology and its mechanisms?