Abstrakt
In this chapter, I examine the phenomenon of "hardbass", a distinct style of music and performance which takes place in public spaces, both physical and virtual, and has been produced and propagated mostly by people with links to far-right social movements in eastern, central-eastern and south-eastern Europe since the beginning of the 2010s. Hardbass is one of the rare cultural developments of the last decade that may, for various political, demographic, economic and social reasons, be seen as a result of an East-to-West cultural transfer.
Given the mass accessibility of audiovisual recording tools such as smartphones, recordings of hardbass performances - typically 3-4 minute videos of masked dancers in a public space promoting a pro-healthy lifestyle, anti-drugs message - have circulated on YouTube, Facebook and other online platforms, making them viral and also replicable. Drawing on examples of DIY music videos shot and circulated between 2010 and 2012, my analysis seeks to contextualize these scenes in a processual understanding and on an intersection of the social categories.