Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality, by Stephen Amico

Abstract

Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality, by Stephen Amico. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2014. xii, 316 pp. $60.00 US (cloth). This is a difficult book to read conventionally. I spent hours balancing it on one knee with a tablet on the other, while searching YouTube for the songs and singers that populate its pages, often not getting farther than a page or two in a sitting. Drag queens, closet cases, and (rather fewer) out-there openly gay performers dominate Amico's playlist. Few of these performers are compelling artists and, Eurovision apart, their work mostly fails to travel beyond the Russian-speaking world. Why then devote a book to them and what possible links to homosexuality could they have? Amico's project is to investigate how gay men relate to what he calls post-Soviet popular musics (p. 19). Fundamental to his concept of this relationship is his analysis of gay bodies and spaces. Fie rejects Foucault's and Butler's discourse analysis, although many lyrics, videos, and statements are read critically here, for a phenomenological approach drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Sarah Ahmed that posits a prior material body that yields analyzable sensory experience (pp. 6, 23). In other words, the bodies of gay men and their experience of music, particularly in the dance club, can tell us something about sexuality, the self, and intersubjectivity in Russia (pp. 18-19). Over some sixteen months during 2003-2005, Amico conducted fieldwork in dance clubs and other real and digital sites of sociability for gay men in St Petersburg. Fie lists forty-one informants from the club scene, plus five formal interviewees including djs, the late academician Igor Kon, and long-serving gay activist Aleksandr Kukharskii (pp. 205-206). Methodologically the study is principally based on ethnography, albeit in a very informal manner without simultaneous note-taking; Amico presumed that his subjects would balk at such scientistic rituals (pp. 25-26). The prose is burdened with theoretical jargon, sometimes dense and long sentences (pp. 18, 23,116) and an autobiographical travel-writer voice that recalls Laurie Essig's 1999 book on queer Russia. Chapter two argues that pop music possesses a Russian sound of specific national tones, cadences and chord progressions. Local pop culture interacts as a subordinated but still deeply known ... homegrown genre, with international English-language dominated global pop music. The queer politics of this hybrid musical ecology are said to mirror the aktiv/passiv/ universal (or top, bottom, or versatile) dynamics of gay male sex: through the embodied experience of music, [m]usic does literally get inside the listener and the gay male club bunny who loves both Western pop music and the occasional European tourist arguably somatises his understanding [of] penetration as something potentially pleasure-inducing (p. 57). In his analysis of the penetrated male, Amico unconsciously retraces arguments I first made in works he has not used: a chapter on masculinity (2002) and an article on globalization and gay male pornography (Russian Review, 2010). …