The last two decades have been both freeing and challenging for studying east European popular music. The Cold War state versus society and Soviet empire versus nation frameworks that long dominated English language scholarship of popular culture in eastern Europe are receding, creating a space for new approaches that examine specific scenes and artists. Yet, this openness creates the challenge of finding an alternative framework to build a volume around. What do east European states have in common if not the experience of state socialism, and what about popular music merits study beyond its function in challenging or reinforcing the authority of the region's state socialist regimes? This edited collection coalesces around using transnational connections to explore popular music in socialist and post-socialist eastern Europe (excluding Russia), with sections on music's flow from west to east, its circulation within eastern Europe, and the transnational dimensions of east European festivals. Refreshingly, alongside literature of globalization, many of the chapters draw from musicology (British musicologist Allan Moore's work on authenticity and on genre is frequently cited), affirming that popular music in eastern Europe merits study as music, not just a vehicle for politics.

Examining east European popular music through its transnational connections is a promising and potentially radical move. The editors’ introduction frames the book's contribution modestly, however, seeking to amend rather than challenge the longstanding paradigms of the west-to-east flow of musical culture and the political nature of music under state socialism. Some chapters continue along established Cold War lines of inquiry, such as Adam Havlík's richly sourced but thematically familiar account of the circulation of western records in Czechoslovakia and Dean Vuletic's comparison of institutional structures, government intervention, and cultural openness in the communist Intervision and capitalist Eurovision song contests. Other chapters employ the transnational paradigm as it has been used in other regions, emphasizing hybridity, appropriation, and the intersection of the global and the local—for instance, Ruxandra Trandafoiu's chapter examining intertwining global Electronic Dance Music and local Transylvanian culture in the Untold Festival, or Ewa Mazierska's and Xawery Stańczyk's examination of the translation of Leonard Cohen's music into the Polish context, transforming according to culture, politics, and individual agency.

It is the core-periphery dynamic that emerges, however, as the most salient and contentious aspect of eastern Europe's transnational context. In the introduction, the editors ask whether eastern Europe has joined the international popular music core or drifted further into the periphery, and the chapters provide different answers depending on the direction of their gaze. Looking to the south and within eastern Europe, respectively, Stańczyk's chapter on the appropriation of reggae in Poland and Mazierska's chapter on the use of Balkan sounds and imagery to penetrate the Polish music market adapt the classic framework of orientalism to the complex, multidirectional dynamics of eastern Europe. Looking from eastern Europe to the west, however, the answer is more pessimistic and one-sided. At best, eastern Europe is a frontier—as in Aimar Ventsel's chapter examining the region as the “punk frontier” (a fruitful concept meriting additional exploration). Seen from the west, it is eastern Europe that is orientalized—or even postcolonial (for instance, in Mariusz Gradowski's postcolonial reading of Polish singer Czesław Niemen's later career).

Asymmetry between eastern and western Europe merits analysis, particularly given the resurgence of populist nationalism in the region. Zsolt Győri's chapter offers a compelling case study, showing how the collision of west European capital, tourism, and mass marketing with local bands and audiences at the Sziget festival has increased tension between European liberalism and Hungarian nationalism. Slobodan Karamanić's and Manuela Unverdorben's analysis of “high” and “low” Balkan folk genres (also invoking orientalism) is more provocative, arguing that critiques of excessive nationalism in Balkan pop-folk stem from the class privilege of west European liberal elites. Examining eastern Europe's peripherality with respect to western Europe is a productive but risky undertaking. If lenses like orientalism, postcolonial studies, or cultural imperialism are applied unidirectionally, they can feed into familiar narratives of east European victimization, with western Europe replacing the Soviet Union as the perpetrator.

For the most part, however, Mazierska and Győri keep the politics of resurging nationalism from dominating the book's subtler musicological contributions. Paradoxically for a book on transnational connections, perhaps its greatest strength is its authors’ ties to the scholarly conversations of their respective regions, bringing new debates, information, and approaches to the English language reader. As such, it is a useful resource for scholars of eastern European and of transnational popular music and culture.