Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

The Rock-and-Roll State: Popular Music, Mass Media, and the Collapse of the USSR

Thu, November 5, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 4

Abstract

This paper is part of a lightning round, "The Post-Soviet Public Sphere: Assembling a Digital Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s." Once considered an ideological threat to the state apparatus, rock music became an officially sanctioned galvanizing cultural force in the decade bookending the collapse of the Soviet Union (1986-1995), which culminated with rock music culture’s sudden ubiquity in mass and mainstream media. Through an examination of both alternative (popular music samizdat and bootlegging) and mainstream media artifacts (feature films, television programs, radio broadcasts, print media, and commercial goods) that present rock music as a cultural mainstay, rather than nefarious agent of pro-capitalist propaganda, Safariants argues that by the end of perestroika, government authorities had shifted their policy towards rock music from control and curation to that of a protective “symbiotic” promotion and collaboration. By effectively popularizing late-Soviet rock music and inscribing its personalities into the ranks of national heroes, state-controlled public media promoted the very Western influences it once battled, providing a blueprint for “soft” government intervention into popular culture after 1991.

Author