By circumventing these tropes of Ukrainian nationalism, then, Wild Music takes up a challenge set forth by postcolonial and decolonial theorists to provincialize the master narratives of history (Chakrabarty 2000, 41). Alexei Yurchak, in his project to “rehumanize Soviet life,” asserted that “in the case of socialism, especially in Russia, the object of ‘provincializing’ would not just be ‘Europe’ but, more specifically, ‘Western Europe’” (2005, 9).44 In Ukraine, however, where even the premodern myths of Russia and Ukraine are bound together through shared sites and figures such as Saint Volodymyr/Vladimir the Great, the urgent need to de-provincialize Ukraine hinges first on its relationship to Russia.45 By provincializing Russia, then, one can glean something of how Ukrainians deploy wild music to reimagine the layered imperial and neo-imperial histories that inform contemporary discourses of Ukrainian sovereignty (cf. Fowler 2017, 11).
The unexpected outcomes of the Maidan Revolution have led Ukraine into a seemingly perpetual condition of “war without war and occupation without occupation” (Dunn and Bobick 2014, 405). Despite this, the prospect of a better future is being actively and creatively reimagined by an internet-savvy generation of activists, creators, and performers, who are attached to the idea of Ukrainian statehood and are finding new ways to make and amplify political claims through wild music. This generation tends to reject the creeping authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but they also do not fully embrace faltering European models of nation-statehood. They are suspicious of voracious capitalism and understand the dangerous precedents of “actually existing socialism.” These actors take the Ukrainian past and present seriously on its own terms by attempting to decenter master narratives from both European and Russian perspectives, decoupling nation from state, and privileging patriotism over nationalism. This affords the possibility to consider that, while the Ukrainian state may be considered “fragile” or even “failing” (by some outside metrics and by the account of many of its frustrated, alienated citizenry), it nonetheless remains at the center of the sovereign imaginaries that its citizens are conjuring in wild music.46
FIGURE INTRO.4 Graffiti of the word “Revolution” in Independence Square in Kyiv, 2014. Photo by Franz Nicolay.
The six body chapters of Wild Music elaborate on such sovereign imaginaries through examples that reveal the situated knowledges and mediated forms of Wildness that permeate various musical and social contexts of contemporary Ukraine. The following two chapters center on the representation and reception of Western Ukrainian Hutsuls in the Ukrainian mediasphere: first through Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” (Chapter 1) and then through the remediated video of the “freak-cabaret” collective known as the Dakh Daughters (Chapter 2). I then move to analysis of avtentyka singers who compete on the popular reality TV singing competition called Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Nation). Here, I examine how the politics of undisciplined vocal timbre reject logics of success according to the standards of reality TV “democratainment” (Hartley 2004). Their untamed singing remakes failure as an act of refusal of the limited musical forms that dominate Ukrainian media and an assertion of the ungovernability of Ukrainian rural expression. Chapter 4 focuses on the liminal sovereign imaginaries of Crimea as they relate to the “Eastern music” that was branded and broadcast by Radio Meydan, the Crimean Tatar radio station that operated in Simferopol from 2005 until 2015. I demonstrate how the presence of “Eastern music” in the semipublic spaces of microtransit motivated competing sovereign imaginaries among distinct Crimean populations, including the Crimean Tatar Indigenous minority. In Chapter 5, I interpret the sounds of “ethno-chaos” in recordings by the group DakhaBrakha, whose commercial success in the North American and European world music markets positioned its members to speak as “Ambassadors of the Maidan” to the world. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of “soundmarks of sovereignty”—sonic markers of history, territory, and temporality, embodied and subjugated knowledges, and postcolonial reclamation—and examine their relationship to emergent citizenly solidarities. The conclusion develops the idea of acoustic citizenship and explores it as a form of volitional, and therefore limited, citizenship that may have particular salience in imperiled states.
Despite the embattled status of Ukraine and its citizenry during the era that this book examines, I hear many expressions of tentative hope for the future in this wild music. Ortner recently questioned how one might balance an “anthropology of the good life” against the “dark anthropology” that tracks power and inequality in daily life: “How can we be both realistic about the ugly realities of the world today and hopeful about the possibilities of changing them?” (2016, 60). Many of my interlocutors—like the musicians who create wild new forms of etno-muzyka but do not fight to defend Ukrainian sovereignty with weapons of war—point out the potential futility of any music to do anything. I do not dispute that music has little power against bombs, or BUK missiles.47 But I also assert that the study of music cannot be consigned only to our study of “the good life” since it is so prominently enmeshed in systems of capital, and therefore in the operations of power, and—importantly—because it also holds the affective power to captivate imaginations, move bodies, and support political actions. The politics and aesthetics of wild music allows us to investigate how the good life is imagined in dark times.
ONE
Wild Dances
Ethnic Intimacy, Auto-Exoticism, and Infrastructural Activism
In the very heart of Europe in the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains there live an ancient people, the Hutsuls. Their riches are unique mystic rituals, mountainous rhythms and dances. Ruslana visited them and revealed their mystery. Europe will learn about … Ukrainian ethnic originality, brightness of the highlander’s rhythms mixed with the modern music of the youth … Ruslana is experimenting with genres. There is no right name for it, but it could be either called Hutsul rap or kolmiyka’s hip-hop. In any case … you are reminded that even though “Wild Dances” come from ancient times, they are still the product of the 21st century. DJ dance mixes on the songs of the album make you feel like at the dance floor in night club … Ethnic motifs with electronic elements of house and drum-and-bass make the music sound fantastic. And it also makes us think that hundreds of years ago the progressive young people were dancing to the same beat [sic].
www.ruslana.ua/en, accessed April 28, 2005
Provoked to curiosity by the rhetoric of the pop star Ruslana’s press materials, I embarked to reveal the mystery of the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains for myself. It was a hot day in July 2005, and my small entourage was nearing the end of a long journey to a village represented as the end point of a slender serpentine line on my large road map of Ukraine. We were en route to Kosmach, a village in Hutsulshchyna, the southwestern mountainous region of Ukraine that borders the northern edge of Romania. Despite earlier journeys on equally remote and similarly pockmarked dirt roads in this region of the world, a feeling of naïve