SMAR SW Jarocin 93 - The whole world is THEY - gazeta wyborcza

The whole world is THEM

You are free to choose: Do you want to stand, run, live or die? - wrote seventeen-year-old Gizmo from Toruń, a participant of the rock festival in Jarocin that ended yesterday morning, on his leather jacket.

Gizmo (it's a pseudonym, but in Jarocin, few people introduce themselves by name) sits in the middle of the field where the concert is taking place. I ask him to explain the inscription on his jacket. "If someone completely gives up, it's as if they've died. Cowards run away. Those who resist, stand and can truly live. To live, you have to rely only on yourself," Gizmo replies. He's in his third year of electrical engineering. I ask him about school. "There, I'll only learn about professional things. I'll learn about life from other people like me," he replies.

I don't know if, a few hours after this conversation, Gizmo-along with others like him-was battling festival security guards with picket fences. Or was he more likely furious that the equipment demolition would interrupt the concert?

"These young people cannot inherit the past from the older generation. They can only discredit the current actions of their elders. For them, the past is a huge, inexplicable disappointment and letdown," wrote American cultural researcher Margaret Mead half a century ago, and these words have an unexpected resonance in post-communist Poland. Mead describes three types of cultures: those in which the adolescent identifies with tradition; those in which they identify with their generation; and finally, those in which they focus not so much on the future as on "building the future today."

It was at Jarocin that I tried to see what choices young people, an entire generation, face. As Tomek Lipiński of Brygada Kryzys puts it, "the most dynamic, searching youth" come there. Why did some of them choose to confront the police and security guards, and ultimately destroy the Small Stage? Will they choose violence and aggression as they enter adulthood alongside their peers? How can they find alternative paths?

Young people want to do everything themselves. At the very beginning of the festival, the young band Ga Ga announces the slogan that will later accompany the entire event - ​​"Our Festival." These two words are chanted by the singer, accompanied by several thousand people in the audience.

I won't be who I want to be

"The last major youth survey conducted a year ago by CBOS shows that, on the one hand, young people don't recognize authority, and on the other, they are strongly attached to traditional values ​​such as home, work, and a quiet life," says Dr. Mirosław Pęczak, a sociologist and expert on subcultures.

During the day, people in Jarocin lounge under trees, sit on benches, waiting for an evening concert. I approach two ordinary-looking girls, probably sixteen years old. I ask each of them two questions: what will you become in life, who would you like to become?

"I definitely won't become what I want to be," replies Magda from near Elbląg. "I used to dream of being an architect or an archaeologist.

"Going to high school is basically putting off the decision for four years. I'm afraid I'll be unemployed afterward," adds Ulka from Frombork.

I take these questions to the punk crew. Only one girl believes her dreams will come true: "I'd like to work with children in a preschool, and I will."

"I'm studying to be a mechanic, but I don't know what I'll do after school," says her friend. "I don't know yet, time will tell. For now, I'm studying to be an electrician," adds the second. The third punk is silent for a long time. Finally, I manage to squeeze an answer out of him: "I want to know for myself who I want to be. It's my rebellion.

"The greatest rebellion is achieving something through your own thinking," Robert Brylewski, leader of many legendary countercultural bands, including Izrael, who plays soft reggae music, tells me later. "I like the band Ga Ga, but I don't like their fans, who don't even listen to their lyrics, experiencing only atavistic release at the concert.

'If you don't want to be a victim of the system, you have to start deciding for yourself,'" Izrael sang on the first day of the festival, when nothing foreshadowed what would happen the next day at 5:45 PM. Almost nothing.

They took away our festival

Jarocin is primarily visited by punks. They come to hear their bands, their music. This year, the festival's director changed, and so did its musical content. Sure, there was punk rock, but not as much as the festival's veterans would have liked.

On the first night, a group of punks who couldn't afford a ticket tried to break into the concert. They were dispersed by the police, who had already been pelted with stones by the young men. "Why are you doing this?" I asked one of the punks, still panting from the heat of the battle. "We're giving these sons of bitches a hard time because they took our punk festival away from us."

On the evening of the second day, the punk band Smar SW played on the Small Stage, open to the public for free. During the concert, a group of dancing punks invaded the stage. The organizers tried to convince them to leave the audience, but in the end, they let them stay. It seemed the performance would end happily.

Suddenly, halfway through one song, the bouncers pushed the dancers off the stage with a bench. I was standing five meters away from the action.

"What for?" I immediately asked the head security guard, who was standing to the side of the stage.

"Too many people came in, we tried to push a few people off, someone staggered," he explained incoherently.

The band stopped their performance, and the audience responded with a hail of stones. After several back-and-forths, the crowd pushed the bouncers off the stage and then destroyed the equipment. A dozen or so people knocked over speakers and threw drums and cymbals. "What are you doing?" The audience shouted and booed the destructive people. However, six hundred of the most violent punks from the three thousand-strong audience (according to police estimates), armed with bench pickets and stones, gathered near the stage to attack the security guards gathered nearby.

Fifteen minutes later, the police arrived. Together with the security guards, using a large truck as cover, they charged into the crowd. Twenty people were taken to the hospital - 16 were treated and released, three left on their own recognizance, and one stayed. An hour later, the organizers were removing the destroyed equipment. They were assisted by three distraught fans of the band Kinsky, who were scheduled to perform later. "What did you do that for?! Everything's destroyed! Now Kinsky won't play!" they shouted through tears.

Something intangible

The next day, the small stage is empty. Groups of young people are leaning on the boards. I approach the sharpest-looking crew - a girl in a black leather jacket with provocative makeup, a guy in a ratty sweater and his hair spiked up in a "mohawk." I ask about yesterday's demolition.

"Is destroying dreams and ideas comparable to destroying something material?" wonders Ewa from Szczecin. After all, she feels like a "victim of the system."

A police patrol passes nearby. The girl pulls a whistle from her pocket and blows as hard as she can.

"Why are you provoking them?"

"Our appearance, our behavior - you know, we have to attract attention." She's talking about the Animal Liberation Movement operating in the West, "which wouldn't have achieved anything if it hadn't blown up a few fur shops." Suddenly, she gets angry: "What are you going to write about us? That we're dirty, that we look weird. You're insulting us!"

Fortunately, we change the subject - we talk about music, who won Jarocin. I have the results written down on a piece of paper, but they don't know them yet. I give this card to Ewa as a gift. She's as happy as a child, smiling at me.

Maybe no one just gave her something as a gift?

Bombs and authorities

"Youth are becoming radicalized because they have much more freedom now than before. But it's happening on a much smaller scale than in wealthy Western countries, where there are so many bombings, or in Islamic countries, Serbia, or Afghanistan," says Tomek Lipiński, a punk veteran from Brygada Kryzys. He believes that some of the Jarocin audience, "the most dynamic young people who are looking for something," will find meaning in life in society. However, some will end up "with their faces glued to a bag of glue."

"The example of aggression comes from the top. If politicians from parties like Samoobrona (Self-Defense), for example, can do scandalous things with impunity, young people, both football fans and rock fans, will imitate them," says Walter Chełstowski, the festival's long-time director.

"They have a colossal problem with authority. School, newspapers, parents-they don't like it." Television, which often serves as a model, breeds aggression. Watch children's cartoons, says Robert Brylewski.

Walter Chełstowski: "There are certainly authorities, but authority is based on trusting a person, not on fearing them."

Mirosław Pęczak: "It's likely that youth leaders will emerge in the near future. People like Owsiak, only younger. Riding the same wave a few years ago, the Green Party entered the German parliament, and in the United States, Bill Clinton, a "rock president," was elected.

Clinton's generation waited a quarter of a century for their president - ​​from 1968 to 1992. How long will they wait for this Jarocin generation?"

Towards God

"If you don't want to be a victim of the system, you have to start deciding for yourself," sang Izrael. And he continued with suggestions on how to decide: "Jesus is knocking on your heart, he truly loves you; only He can give you the strength to free yourself." "The only way out of this cycle is an inner need for faith. Young people now have substitutes, ideologies and anti-ideologies. Only the spiritual strength that comes from faith in God can help them," explains the author of the lyrics, Darek Malejonek, a musician in the bands Izrael and Houk, a long-haired rocker in patchy trousers and powerful boots.

"I drank alcohol today, so I can't go to confession. I made an appointment with the priest for tomorrow. He wants to change," tells me eighteen-year-old Harry from Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a miraculously converted punk. I meet him as he's leaving St. George's Church in Jarocin. His pants are torn, his T-shirt with the word "defloration" written on it, and he has a safety pin in his ear. He doesn't know yet if he'll change his outfit or hairstyle. "I'll change slowly." For the better. First, I'd like to stop sniffing glue and drinking alcohol.

At the church, girls with "yes to Jesus" badges hand out jam sandwiches to the hungry. "The needy come. They're drawn to bread, then another hunger comes: for love, for joy," says the twenty-something priest who leads the group.

Rhythm of the Trash

The final Saturday concert was decidedly unsatisfactory for the punk crowd. At one point, the disgruntled crowd gathered in the middle of the stadium and, ignoring the music from the Swiss band The Failures, began their own party. They chanted "Jarocin," "Wojewódzki won" (Kuba Wojewódzki - the festival's director), and, of course, "Nasz Festiwal." They began dancing. As evening fell, they lit a bonfire, around which several hundred people gathered - boys and girls, punks and hippies, young and old - gathered in a circle. Two "spontaneous artists" beat out rhythms on garbage cans. Many people danced around the bonfire. They partied like this until dawn at their festival.

Wojciech Staszewski, Photo: Krzysztof Miller, Gazeta Wyborcza, August 9, 1993

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