The Czechs in a Nutshell

There seems to have existed an unwritten contract between Karel Gott and the communist regime. Its essence can be described as follows: by churning out millions of records with “optimistic” and “positive” music, the pop star helped to cement the shameful lie that the neo-Stalinist comrades were normal rulers just as in any other normal country. The communists, for their part, could finally boast a pop star with the same reputation and calibre as those in the West, from where he, without any inhibitions, “borrowed” many of his biggest hits.

Thanks to this pragmatic symbiosis, Karel Gott managed to defend his position as the very icon of Czechoslovak pop culture for an incredible period of 30 years. Not that people seemed to mind. In a society as stagnant as Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, time went so slowly that one could get the impression that it almost had stopped.

The truly amazing thing, however, is that Karel Gott managed to survive the Velvet Revolution. More than that, on Wenceslas Square in November 1989, thousands of Czechs heard him sing the National anthem together with artists who had been banned for almost 20 years. Karel the collaborationist had suddenly been transformed into Karel the convinced democrat! Those who found this miracle a bit too stiff were quickly silenced. The new democratic leaders were also eager to use the pop-star’s popularity to promote national unity and, not to be forgotten, their own political goals.

So, instead of applying for retirement together with his Bolshevik protectors, Karel Gott is still, 40 years after his breakthrough, the unrivalled king of Czech pop music.

True, neither dyed hair, an imposing number of face-lifts, nor an army of young mistresses can hide the fact that the Maestro, Elvis Presley’s junior by only four years, is getting older. And even though his repertoire has been slightly refreshed (his former svazácko-vekslácké hity — tunes that were politically correct enough to please the regime, but rough enough to please the baddies from the black money market — have been replaced by a Tom Jones-like sound), music critics still accuse him of degenerating common people’s taste.

Yet no show at the immensely popular TV Nova, no gala-concert or national beauty contest is imaginable without Karel Gott’s participation. Otherwise serious newspapers present interviews with him every other week, and the pop star is happy to demonstrate his newly-discovered talents as painter and political commentator (“Jews and freemasons are ruling the world”).

Logically, when Maestro Gott some years ago, after an especially cruel critic had compared him to “a zombie who causes acute depression to innocent radio listeners”, decided to stop performing in protest, the situation was considered so grave that the Minister of Culture himself went to console the deeply insulted star.

Could this have happened in another country? Hardly. Both Tom Jones and Julio Iglesias have, admittedly, accomplished a kind of comeback, but neither of them would be voted their countries’ most popular singer, as Gott is almost every year. Old stars such as Uriah Heep or Alla Pugachova are still worshipped by fans in their home countries, but most people consider them to be marginal acts or living fossils. So what’s the explanation for Karel Gott’s indestructible popularity?

Clever marketing undoubtedly plays an important role. Take, for instance, Maestro Karel’s habit of kicking out a blond, 19-year-old mistress a couple of weeks before his latest CD is to be launched. Usually, the media instantly swallow the bait, with the result that the often-negative reviews of his mediocre music are completely drowned in the bombastic gossip about his sexual escapades. What’s more, it’s no secret that Gott is dosely connected to the small group of people who have run the Czech music business for the last 35 years (he has himself been called the “Gott-father”). As any other local businessman, Gott takes the advantage of a combination of lowbrow media and an un-transparent business climate (see: Balkans; Personal Connections).

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

The ultimate explanation, however, of the Czechs’ worshipping of Gott might lie in the tendency to prefer the familiar and safe to the unknown and challenging (see: National Identity; Ocean). This goes double at times when the nation is experiencing large and far-reaching changes. However provincial and musically outdated, Karel Gott has become one of the few fixed and unalterable points the common Czech can cling to in a crazy world.

Besides that, during the communist regime, he made the same humiliating compromises as most other people, but he has still sold more than 30 million records and CD’s during his 40-year career. Can a former electrician in any other country beat that?

Havel, Václav