Fire still burns and wood still cracks: Jaromír Nohavica and the "crisis" of Czech folk of the 1990s
Abstract
The paper will discuss the discourse of the "crisis" of folk songwriting in the first post-revolutionary decade, based on the foundations of social field theory. It will be shown that this "crisis" is not so clear-cut, and that its forms and causes differ from actor to actor.
The analysis of Jaromír Nohavica's positional trajectory within the mainstream field of popular music will be used to describe the development of the genre in the period under study. In the overall cultural field, where, similarly to the 1960s, several production movements are occurring simultaneously (legalization of the formerly forbidden, the attempt to catch up with missed trends, absorption of contemporary trends in world popular music, ...), which may also be partly one of the factors weakening and narrowing the mainstream space for folk presentation.
Although the majority of songwriters are still active in the observed general cultural field (participation in festivals, book publication of lyrics, interviews, etc.), in many ways the importance of these productions speaks more about the stabilization of the historical value of the performer than about dynamic development. This is not the case for everyone; an example of this is J.
Nohavica, who on the one hand benefited from his popularity in the 1980s, and on the other hand, with his diverse range of themes and expressions, developed his work and managed to reach a wide range of listeners, gradually filling the space that had been reserved for folk. The aim of the paper is to challenge the theses that suggest a strong crisis of the genre (or the end of folk) and to offer arguments that confront the character of a certain decline with the period of searching for ways to form a new folk singer-songwriter who would be a synthesis of the actuality and tradition of Czech folk song.
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