– Perhaps there will be wonderful, coincidental meetings when the paths of the crowd of Taylor Swift fans who will come to Warsaw from all over the region, including from abroad, cross on the way to the stadium with people going to the memorial marches. People standing in the queue to the gates at the stadium will hear these sirens. There will certainly be silence there too, questions about this time will be asked. Paradoxically, these may be contexts that are extremely conducive to a deep experience of this moment – said Dr. Marcin Napiórkowski, cultural semiotician, co-writer of the “1989” spectacle, about the coincidence of the Warsaw Uprising celebrations and Taylor Swift's concert.
On August 1, Warsaw will host celebrations commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, as well as the first of three Taylor Swift concerts in Warsaw. Are the Warsaw Uprising celebrations and the Taylor Swift concert two separate realities?
Dr. hab. Marcin Napiórkowski: No. Memory and the present are always intertwined. It is obvious that we always coexist in many calendars: in calendars of memory, religious, patriotic, but also in calendars of current life. And that is beautiful.
Can these realities coexist?
Some believe that a conflict has arisen between these worlds. There are supporters of commemoration, celebrations, reflection, and on the other hand supporters of entertainment, concerts, fun. You said that these are not separate realities. Is this necessary then? Is this an unnecessary escalation?
We have a tendency, which is now greatly fueled by the media, especially social media, to see an element of competition, even hostility, in every form of coexistence. Following this line of reasoning, we have to choose: Halloween or All Saints' Day, commercial Christmas or religious Christmas. The same is true of the celebrations of the Warsaw Uprising, and not for the first time. A few years ago, an identical situation occurred during Madonna's concert, which stirred up exactly the same controversy.
Are we dealing with an escalation of polarizing sentiment?
This is an extension of the polarization that divides us in many different areas: politics, culture, media. It seems that it doesn’t have to be that way. Potentially, these two realities – entertainment and commemoration – could learn a lot from each other. Both the culture of memory and the experience of live music are experiencing a renaissance today. The memory boom and the concert boom have the same sources. The source of both of these phenomena is a very primal, deep and beautiful need that lies somewhere in each and every one of us – the need for a communal celebration of a special time. This is what anthropologists and sociologists such as Émile Durkheim described as collective rituals. Durkheim even spoke of the fact that in special situations, an energy is generated, which he called social electricity, which makes society not atomized. We learn to be together, to cooperate, we learn what is necessary to eliminate or alleviate conflicts and do beautiful and great things together. What is very interesting, the domains that Durkheim, but also many other anthropologists noticed and discussed a hundred years ago, were commemorative rites, that is, commemorating, for example, ancestors, the dead, important events, and musical rites. Many researchers since then have drawn attention to the enormous similarity between these realities – music and memory. It seems to me that this is something that we have to rediscover in ourselves.
Does this mean that this social tension is artificial? Can we even talk about social tension related to these two events?
I will try to refer to a metaphor that music can teach us. Healthy, good social relations are naturally polyphonic, or multi-voiced. This means that, just as in choral music, many different voices resound, each of them may have a different musical theme, but each of them benefits when we hear it in harmony with the others. This is how an opera or a musical is built. Today, when we think about collective memory, we very often think in terms of monophony – what to do to make one true voice sound, to drown out the other voices, other ideas, remove them from this spectrum? We think about what the only right national policy of memory should be and we eliminate the others. Different sides of political, social disputes enter into the same formula – “us or them”, how to win, how to be louder, how to oust other voices from the common space. But memory and community celebration do not have to be like that at all.
What results from this confrontation?
There is no confrontation. If we look at the available sociological data, it is not the case, for example, that the old will commemorate the uprising and the young will listen to concerts. It turns out that young people have been participating en masse in various forms of commemorating the Warsaw Uprising in public space for many years, which is a beautiful, interesting thing. What is more, one of the key forms of commemoration, which the Warsaw Uprising Museum has been effectively and unconventionally promoting for many years, is making music together, singing in public space, listening to music, and also performing popular music together. The disenchantment of the connections between popular music and collective memory is a fascinating thing that has happened over the last two decades. It is really a case of trying to find a wedge here that could be driven into society.
What's more, I remember, during Madonna's concert, how these two forms were even combined. A short clip commemorating the insurgents was played at her concert. It was very well received by the audience gathered at the stadium. I don't know if something similar is planned as part of Taylor Swift's huge international tour, the concert dates of which were chosen completely at random. Perhaps something like this will happen, and perhaps other wonderful, coincidental meetings will happen, when the paths of the crowd of Taylor Swift fans, who will come to Warsaw from all over the region, including abroad, will cross on the way to the stadium with people going to the memorial marches. People standing in the queue to the gates at the stadium will hear those sirens. There will certainly be silence there too, questions about that time will be asked. Paradoxically, these can be contexts that are extremely conducive to experiencing this moment deeply.
How else could this affect the course of both events? From what you say, it seems they will intersect, or maybe even complement each other? Will this concert help even more people learn about the history of Warsaw? Is there anything else we can expect in the course of these events?
I think this is a lesson we can all learn about the natural consonance of the past and the present. Some time ago I was working with archival materials related to the Warsaw Uprising. I spent a lot of time studying the wonderful oral histories collected by the Warsaw Uprising Museum. I was struck then by a thought that appeared very often in the accounts of participants in the Warsaw Uprising years later. It was the thought that the situation they found themselves in was not a situation related to death, it was a situation related to life. It was a fight for the city to be a normal city, where their children and grandchildren would be able to go to concerts, have fun and enjoy themselves, and not be sad. Likewise, later, during the reconstruction of the city, what gave Warsaw the strength to rise from the ruins, which many at the time seemed completely impossible, was not the vision of Warsaw becoming a cemetery city forever immersed in contemplation. It was a vision that it would once again be a beautiful, living city, even more magnificent than before the war. Trying to reduce this time only to sadness, and the space only to a commemorative or cemetery space, we are going against what was fought for then.
Do you think Taylor Swift's followers already form a separate subculture?
This question would certainly be better answered by someone else – I am not an expert in this field. A great many fascinating trends related to the presence of fans in public spaces have occurred in all the cities where Taylor Swift concerts have taken place. The cities were preparing for this event. Some of them reportedly changed their names temporarily in honour of the singer. It is difficult for me to say whether the term subculture applies here at all, but it shows something extremely important. When the widespread availability of music on streaming services appeared, the question arose as to how it would affect other forms of music reception. Using a bit of professional jargon, we researchers wondered which forms of communion with music would be complementary to streaming, i.e. they would complement it, be even stronger, and which were substitutes and would be replaced by streaming. For example, record sales turned out to be substitutes, died out, and only beautiful collector's editions appeared. Live music has proven to be complementary, the more people listen to it on streaming, the more they want to experience the same thing not solo, not in headphones, but together with friends, with family, often very intergenerationally in the public space. This new wave of the renaissance of popular music, stadium concerts by Polish and foreign singers is something fascinating that is happening in the cultural space. This is also a lesson that everyone who holds collective memory dear must learn, because these are forms of common presence in the public space, which in five, ten years will probably shape our collective memory as well.
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