The Cyberpolitics of Music in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution

Abstract

Between November 21 and December 26, 2004, nearly one million people protested in Kyiv against election fraud, media censorship, mass government corruption, and oligarchic market reforms. These large-scale peaceful protests have become widely known as the Orange Revolution, named after the campaign colors of Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate who ran against Viktor Yanukovych, a politician with a criminal record who was backed by Moscow and the sitting Ukrainian government. (1) Music and the Internet played crucial roles in the Orange Revolution. In the five years between 2000 and 2005, the number of Internet users in Ukraine jumped from 200,000 to more than 5 million in a country of approximately 48 million people (an increase of more than 10% of the population). (2) In the two months between November 21, 2004 (the day of the contested presidential elections that precipitated the Orange Revolution), and January 23, 2005 (when President Viktor Yushchenko was inaugurated), the number of Internet users in Ukraine tripled (Delong 2005). The significant role played by Internet streaming of audio and video in the mediation of political information, activism, and communication during the Orange Revolution can serve as a case study for a broader analysis of the relationship between cyberactivism (Kreimer 2001; McCaughey and Ayers 2003) and what I term cybermusicality: an engagement with Internet music and its surrounding discourses that has meaning in listeners' lives both online and off. In remarks before a concert by Ukrainian rock singer and Orange Revolution participant Maria Burmaka in the spring of 2005 at Columbia University, (3) ethnomusicologist Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier argued that music is not political in its essence. Rather, it is politicized through formal, ideological, cultural, and actions, configurations, and processes (Ochoa 2005; see also Ochoa 1997 and Street 2001). I will build on Ochoa's argument by demonstrating that the media through which music is disseminated partly determines how that music's relationship to the political sphere is established and understood within movements. In analyzing the relationship between music, movements, and technology, I draw on the paradigm proposed by Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison who argue that social movements lead to a reconstruction of processes of interaction and collective identity formation (1998:10). Though I will present some of the new popular music styles favored by anti-government organizers during the Orange Revolution, particularly one that I call TAK-techno, I am less concerned with the content on the Internet than with the Internet's use as a vital communication tool within socio-political events and music's function within that framework. In this analysis of the relationship between the Internet, music, and politics in post-socialist Ukraine, I argue that technology is not culturally or politically neutral. Rather, cybermusicality was undeniably vital to the Orange Revolution, drawing millions of Internet users into new online communities. During the Orange Revolution, the Internet offered opportunities for anti-government protestors to express and engage new understandings of self and community through music. The unprecedented use of technology by this opposition movement during the protests highlighted the significance of music as a powerful communicative medium for the expression of individual and collective dissent. More specifically, because the Orange Revolution criticized the reliability and authenticity of government discourse, the revolution's music and recordings invite an examination of the representative power of recorded spoken text in political song. Numerous political scandals involving technology greatly influenced the public's perception of words spoken by various pro- and anti-government political leaders in Ukraine. Protest songs re-inflected the official political discourse by using musique concrete techniques to incorporate vocal recordings of speeches by the presidential candidates. …