IASPM Journal

Contemporary post-Soviet popular music: Politics and aesthetics

2024-11-06T04:36:27-08:00

Popular music is produced, listened to and distributed all over the world. While there is no doubt that popular music studies, as well as popular music histories and the commercial popular music industry is predominantly Anglophone, popular music is not. This might seem like an obvious statement but looking at current discussions in the field of popular music studies it is a statement that needs to be made again. While there are exceptions, popular music studies in general have a problem with pseudo-universalism. As if the Western English-speaking mainstream reflected ‘popular music’ as a whole. This special issue of IASPM Journal focuses on popular music in the post-Soviet space, imagined as located between Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but also all over the world in reproduction of sounds and the diaspora. The contributions challenge the Anglophone centre of popular music studies.

Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good

2023-09-08T03:01:06-07:00

Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé

2024-03-04T06:55:42-08:00

Dilla Time: Dan Charnas and Fred Hosken, in conversation

2024-09-13T08:39:17-07:00

Remixing European Jazz Culture

2024-11-06T04:36:48-08:00

A Content Analysis Study of Distortion's Influence on Drum and Bass Music Production

2024-11-06T04:36:45-08:00

This study uses content analysis and draws upon aesthetic theory and technological determinism as theoretical frameworks to explore contemporary approaches to the use of distortion within drum and bass production. To achieve this, it investigates online video tutorials created by professional drum and bass producers and online content creators in order to extract insights into their common working practice when using distortion in their work. The analysis highlights a prevalent use of aggressive distortion to transform bass timbres, which is a trend originating in the 1990s that continues to shape the genre's evolving aesthetic. This research provides unique insights into the evolution. and impact of distortion and shows how established techniques persist while subtly evolving within the ever-changing production ecosystem.

Ukrainian Popular Music in Times of War: National Identity, Transnational Projections and the Musician as Grassroots Ambassador

2024-02-19T06:00:19-08:00

This article investigates the ways in which Ukrainian independent popular music after February 2022 has contributed to domestic nation-building and international nation-branding. Taking as case studies six artists who have extensively toured abroad with their musical projects, the article traces the evolution of the internal imaginings and external projections of Ukrainian identity enabled via musical activity. The article shows that the war has generated a reconfiguration of the relationship between the artist and their social responsibility, in which music has become a fundamental weapon to raise transnational awareness of the Ukrainian struggle and to materially influence Ukraine’s defence. This reconfiguration has prompted the performers to take the role of grassroots cultural ambassadors and create DIY networks of solidarity, largely outside of state initiatives. In this process, ideas about Ukraine did not adhere to a standardized framework for the purpose of articulating unity, but rather reflected Ukraine’s unity in cultural diversity.

Back in the U.S.S.R.: Russian Popular Music in the Times of Military Censorship

2024-02-20T00:37:18-08:00

The article deals with the field of popular music in Russia in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion on 24 February 2022. It focuses on the changing public perception and governmental response towards Soviet music stars as well as younger generation of musicians who have taken an anti-war stance. The article also analyses the efforts of state ideologists to create a patriotic music scene that can silence dissenting voices. The framework used juxtaposes contemporary tactics with Soviet-era practices. The author analyses the current official critical discourse on Russian popular music, exploring the work of modern music censorship, the primary mechanism governing the Russian popular music market since the full-scale invasion began.

Songs of War

2024-10-31T07:45:12-07:00

Russia's war on Ukraine has highlighted how Russia and Ukraine conceptualize differing narratives of the region's history, and how this is reflected in current popular music. This article looks at how popular music is used by both conflict partners by analyzing songs published on social media during the full-scale invasion's first phase. Here, a pattern emerges: songs being reworked, memetic songs drawing on specific occurrences or weapons emerging, and previously existing songs being used as anthems. While these strategies have been heard in past wars, a new dynamic is at work: The output from the current war is interesting due to the use of footage from the battlefield, the speed of reaction and the distribution of the songs aided by social media, and the continuity of musical material as well as support from outsiders. These processes have made social media platforms an important part of the ongoing war.

Negotiating national identity against right-wing nationalism: sonic (re)narrations in Poland

2024-02-23T00:34:05-08:00

This article discusses a set of approaches to national identity that subverted dominant nationalist discourse in Poland during the rule of Law and Justice (2015–2023). Based on a sonic, lyrical, and visual analysis of three popular music case studies, it explores how the populist-enabled mainstreaming of “turbopatriotism” (Napiórkowski 2019) has been criticized and what alternative visions of Polishness have been put forward. I argue that cultural narrations of Polishness as [1] plural, diverse, and cosmopolitan, [2] peripheral, flawed, and complicated, and [3] bygone and mourned, all have unique affective strengths for the continued negotiations of collectivity in post-communist and populist contexts.

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

2024-11-06T04:36:34-08:00

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.

"Karabakh or Death, no Other Way!": Hip Hop and War in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

2024-04-01T23:47:29-07:00

In post-Soviet Azerbaijan, hip hop is the main musical genre that articulates the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that escalated into two wars (1992-94; 2020). The creativity of hip hop artists is a prime example of intertextuality as they reference, quote, and remake texts of previous Azerbaijani hip hop songs, thus offering accounts of the way the conflict unfolded throughout history. Yet their creativity goes further than providing narratives: it becomes a powerful tool to promote nationalist imagery and inspire patriotism. In this paper, I rely on interviews and first-hand experience while doing fieldwork in Azerbaijan when the Second Karabakh War erupted, and analyze popular hip hop songs, focusing on discourses that arise as part of hip hop’s generic intertextuality. Specifically, I focus on the figure of the martyr that continuously reappears to accentuate the topic of sacrifice and to trigger affects at the core of mobilization and patriotism.

“What truth are you telling me about?”

2024-11-06T04:36:40-08:00

This article discusses two Belarusian music videos from 2020, “Shchuchynshchyna” and “Ne Smeshno” (“Not Funny”), both of which were framed by their creators as commentary on the 2020 protests. In “Ne Smeshno,” band Molchat Doma seemingly attempts to wake a city stricken by an epidemic of sleep—and fails, with one exception. The parody video “Shchuchynshchyna” debuted in a satirical web series, where Elena ZheludOk’s performance of state-approved pop entrances a rebellious rock guitarist. I discuss these videos through Almira Ousmanova’s work on defamiliarization in Belarusian art and politics and through Lauren Berlant’s thought on the allegory. I argue that both videos engage with the idea that art’s political potential is in its power to undermine the state’s hegemonic version of reality. However, in both videos, this break in perception is a secondary effect of music, a consequence of the new gendered, intimate relations that music directly sets in motion.

The Leybl as Tusovka

2024-03-08T05:57:41-08:00

As in other peripheral music economies, hip-hop music-makers in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, self-organise their artistic labour in a context of “lack” of institutions and public support. This article takes a closer look at Bishkek’s hip-hop leybly, musical collectives that emerged around 2010. In order to highlight the particularities of these social formations and analyse their inner workings, I use the concept of tusovka – a slang term widely used in everyday Russian-speaking cultural communities. Building on previous conceptualisations of this term as a form of meeting-based, organic sociality, and drawing on two examples of hip-hop leybly in Bishkek I argue that the tusovka can make a theoretical contribution to the wider field of popular music studies in an attempt at “ex-centric” theory building.