Popular Music and Society on Popular Music in the Post-Soviet Space

A happy summer announcement: The journal "Popular Music and Society" (32:3 2009) titled "Popular Music in the Post-Soviet Space: Trends, Movements, and Social Contexts" of which Yngvar Steinholt and I, David-Emil Wickström, were guest editors is now out. Concluding about two years of editorial work (and a lot of really interesting submissions) the journal includes the following articles ranging from Russian pop and rock over Uzbek Estrada and Kazakh music videos to Georgian world music:

• Yngvar B. Steinholt; David-Emil Wickström: "Introduction"


• David-Emil Wickström; Yngvar B. Steinholt: "Visions of the (Holy) Motherland in Contemporary Russian Popular Music: Nostalgia, Patriotism, Religion and Russkii Rok"


• Polly McMichael: "Prehistories and Afterlives: The Packaging and Re-packaging of Soviet Rock"


• Stephen Amico: "Visible Difference, Audible Difference: Female Singers and Gay Male Fans in Russian Popular Music"


• Tanya Merchant: "Popping Tradition: Performing Maqom and Uzbek “National” Estrada in the 21st Century"


• Megan Rancier: "Resurrecting the Nomads: Historical Nostalgia and Modern Nationalism in Contemporary Kazakh Popular Music Videos"


• Lauren Ninoshvili: "The Poetics of Pop Polyphony: Translating Georgian Song for the World"

The article abstracts and – for those who have access to the journal through the university library – the articles can be found at
www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=issue&issn=0300-7766&volume=32&issue=3

happy reading! ;-)

"Rock in the Reservation" as a pdf-version

A pdf-version of Yngvar B. Steinholt's dissertation "Rock in the Reservation" (currently out of print) can now be downloaded from Yngvar's homepage: www.hum.uit.no/a/steinholt/p3.html.

For more information on the book see Sergio's post "Steinholt’s Rock in the Reservation (a review)".

"Drive-ethno-Dance" and "Hutzul Punk": Ukrainian-associated Popular music and (geo)Politics in a Post-soviet context

A short mention that my article on Haydamaky, Ruslana and Svoboda was just published in ICTM's Yearbook for Traditional Music. This article focuses on how the Ukrainian groups Ruslana and Haydamaky fashion themselves based on their country of origin and what role history and traditional musics play in that process. Using a post-colonial perspective I argue that the identity constructed functions to assert Ukrainian sovereignty and thus distinguish the Ukraine from its former colonizer Russia while at the same time Ruslana draws on similar methods of representation when appropriating the Other (the Ukraine in Russia's case and the Hutsuls in Ruslana's case).

The complete reference to the article is:

Wickström, David-Emil: "'Drive-ethno-Dance' and 'Hutzul Punk': Ukrainian-associated Popular music and (geo)Politics in a Post-soviet context"", Yearbook for Traditional Music 40 (2008), p. 60-88