Exhibition will mark communist persecution of rock music

A Prague-based museum of pop music, the Popmuseum, will open an exhibition on Wednesday which will focus on the communist persecution of rock music during the 1980s. The exhibition, entitled “New Wave with Old Contents”, marks 25 years since the publication of a party-line article, under the same heading, denouncing rock musicians in communist Czechoslovakia as primitives managed by “western diversion agencies”. During a campaign that followed, many Czech and Slovak rock and alternative bands were banned; others had to change their names to be able to continue performing in public.