Rocking St. Petersburg: Transcultural Flows & Identity Politics in Post-Soviet Popular Music

ISBN-13: 9783838201009 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 374 str.

David-Emil Wickström; PhD Dr. Andreas Umland

Opis

From the early 1980s onward, Leningrad/St. Petersburg has been home to some of the most influential Soviet and Russian rock bands, emerging as a hub of Soviet and Russian popular music. Today, St. Petersburg presents a vibrant music scene, providing a platform for musical exchange with both foreign bands performing in the city and local bands touring abroad.§Popular music production in St. Petersburg and the manner in which the music is embedded in transcultural flows, specifically the flow to the post-Soviet emigrant community in Germany and the event Russendisko, are this study's main subjects. Based on fieldwork conducted in St. Petersburg from 2004 until 2006, David-Emil Wickström draws on both interviews with musicians and participant observation as a trumpet player in two local bands. He uses these findings for an interpretation of the main discourses within the St. Petersburg scene and how these relate to Soviet and post-Soviet popular music history and to Russia s current relationship to Ukraine, as well as how the music is received in Germany. By charting the German Russendisko-scene, Wickström also demonstrates the filtering processes embedded in transcultural flows and how the music is attributed new meanings within new contexts. §Wickström's book not only promotes a deeper understanding of the role of popular music in society - especially related to migration and transcultural flows -, it also enables a better comprehension of cultural processes in the second decade after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Recenzje

"David-Emil Wickström has given us an interesting ethnomusicological study about the post-Soviet rock/pop music scenes in St. Petersburg (Russia) and Berlin (Germany)." Slavic Review

O autorze

Dr. David-Emil Wickström works at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg - University of Popular Music and Music Business in Mannheim. He is the editor-in-chief of the Norient Academic Online Journal.