Going Native/Viral in Russian Popular Music: Aesthetic Populism, Patriotic Anti-racism, and the Quest for Hip-Hop Authenticity in Timati’s Teymuraz Music Video Trilogy

Abstract

This paper critically analyzes the 2010s’ viral music video trilogy featuring Teymuraz, a stage and video persona of the Russian/Tatar/Jewish hip-hop artist Timati. Using hyperbolized stereotypes of a racialized taxi driver from the Caucasus/Central Asia, the hybrid aesthetics of Teymuraz fuses the elements of New East style, post-Soviet cultural recycling, social critique, and appropriates the voices of the subaltern. Contextualizing Teymuraz as a strategy of racial translation of US hip-hop and as a part of the Russian cultural trend of aesthetic populism, I analyze the work of racial signification in the trilogy that relies on multimodal racial metonymy. I read the trilogy as a peculiar Russian patriotic anti-racist project with contradictory implications. Having been haunted by the accusations of ‘copying’ US rappers throughout his career, Timati negotiates the stigma of imitation, transgressing it in Teymuraz, exploiting his own ethnoracial ambiguity, chronic hip-hop inauthenticity, and the aesthetic populism trend.