Hungarian Ambassador Discusses Western Music at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

AP ^ | Nov 9, 2003 | M.R. Kropko

[BenLurkin]

Rock music played lead in giving Hungarian baby boomers the resolve to bring down their country's totalitarian regime, says one of those reformers who today is a government official. Andras Simonyi, Hungary's ambassador to the United States, spent an hour Saturday night discussing the impact of Western songs on Eastern European politics before an invitation-only audience of 250 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Simonyi, 51, was a devoted fan of the Beatles, Cream, Traffic and Jimi Hendrix when their releases weren't officially permitted in Hungary. Records and tapes sometimes were smuggled in or recorded from foreign radio broadcasts.

"By keeping in touch with the music scene in the West, it kind of kept me sane and with the feeling I was part of the free world," said Simonyi, an economist by training.

The ambassador was introduced by defense and anti-terrorism consultant Jeff Baxter, who once played guitar with The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan.

Baxter and Simonyi said they would like to establish an institute to study rock music's global influences.

"There is a commonality to the music and freedom," Baxter said. "To Andras, Western music was an open window of fresh air in a very repressive society."

Simonyi impressed an audience member from Hungary.

"He represents quite well his generation," said Judit Gerencser, a 27-year-old student at Cleveland State University. "I have heard about this from my parents, but I never really heard about just how much this music was influential."

[chilepepper]

Sadly, if the effect of sixties and seventies rock was to make people question their world, it seems to me that both the purpose and effect of today's so called rock (or rap, or anything in MTV europe, MTV Japan, MTV Latin America, MTV India or whereever there is some kind of MTV) is quite different...

The MTV world, with its its coordinated attack on the senses with videos using pretty much random and very nearly chaotic colored flashing lights, sounds, images, and sexual themes to me seems a methodical and deliberate attempt by the ____ (guess who runs MTV) to

HYPNOTIZE youth into a state of passivity and from there a state where it is easy to CONTROL youth to buy both the products of the sponsors and the ideology of "cool" Hollywood... (ok, I'm giving away a big secret -- MTV is a tool of Leftist Hollywood, you are surprised, aren't you?)

[BenLurkin]

"Hungarian Ambassador Andras Simonyi, left, jams with his daughter, Sonja, center, and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Alexander Vershbow, at Simonyi's residence in Brussels in 1999. Simonyi is coming to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Saturday, Nov. 8, 2003, to explain his belief that when rock music found its way into Hungary, it sparked a yearning for freedom and an eventual end to Communism. (AP Photo/Daniel Simonyi, ho)"

[chilepepper]

Nice pics. I play guitar too (poorly - have just been playing for a couple of years). I practice on an old korean Epiphone strat copy that looks just like the one the gent in picture is playing!