Calendar

Summary:

What can music do to battle against the unspeakable violence of war? Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February 2022, Ukrainian musicians of all genres, from all regions of the country, have asked themselves this question. Expanding upon my previous work applying feminist theories of the “emergency time” that emphasizes a present “at once both empty and full—empty of historicity and full of a mythical future” (Hesford and Diedrich 2008; Plakhotnik and Mayerchuk 2019), this project analyzes how musicians of various popular genres have been instrumentalizing the politics of musical aesthetics to articulate visions of Ukrainian futurity. From the self-proclaimed “ethno-chaos” act of DakhaBrakha, to the new etno-hip-hop partnership of rapper Alyona Alyona and Tik Tok star Jerry Heil, to the viral pop re-imaginings of a century-old Ukrainian patriotic song, to emerging collaborations across ethnic and genre lines, I tease out some of the irreducible paradoxes and the agonistic processes that mark these experiments in using pop music as a weapon.