I’ll Be Your Plaything

Anna Szemere and András Rónai’s book explores Hungarian singer and songwriter Bea Palya’s Én leszek a játékszered (I’ll Be Your Plaything) (2010), an album largely consisting of covers, as their contribution to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series. The album enables the authors to simultaneously reflect on contemporary and state socialist Hungarian popular music, to offer insights into the links between popular culture and (post)socialist collective memory, to consider music industry relations from a particular Eastern European perspective, and to also ponder questions of gender, feminism, and ethnicity. From the many issues covered in the book, the review highlights the themes of, firstly, memories, remembering, and nostalgia, and secondly, womanhood, femininity, and gender relations.