Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine by Sonevytsky Maria A War of Songs: Popular Music and Recent Russia-Ukraine Relations by Hansen Arve (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 355 Sonevytsky, Maria. Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine. Music/ Culture. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2019. xxii + 249 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.50: $27.95 (paperback). Hansen,Arve;Rogatchevski,Andrei;Steinholt,YngvarandWickström,DavidEmil . A War of Songs: Popular Music and Recent Russia-Ukraine Relations. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 203. Ibidem, Stuttgart, 2019. 250 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00 (paperback). Given how enmeshed popular music has been in Ukraine’s key political transformations of the past thirty or so years, it is perhaps surprising that this rich material has not come to scholars’ attention more often. Since Adriana Helbig’s pioneering monograph, Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Bloomington, IN, 2014), until recently, no dedicated booklength study has addressed the intersections of popular music and politics in contemporary Ukraine. That is why the appearance in 2019 of two such volumes at once constitutes a particularly important addition to the field. The two books span roughly the same decade, that is the years between 2004 and 2014, which in Ukraine were marked by two waves of mass anti-government protests, both culminating on the capital’s main square known as ‘Maidan’: peaceful in 2004, marred by violence a decade later. While Maria Sonevytsky focuses solely on Ukraine and its internal others, the co-authors of A War of Songs, Arve Hansen, Andrei Rogatchevski, Yngvar Steinholt and David-Emil Wickström, conceptually pitch Ukraine against Russia, exploring the fraught relationship between the countries through various musical stand-offs. Sonevytsky’s Wild Music is the product of the scholar’s ten years of fieldwork in Ukraine. One of her study’s strengths is the polyphony of voices she includes — from professional musicians to community activists, fellow ethnographers and people on the ground. In one of the book’s characteristically immersive passages, Sonevytsky, for instance, transports her readers into a packed intercity microbus (marshrutka) in Crimea where two local fishermen react to a Crimean-Tatar radio station blaring from the loudspeakers. However, beyond the richness of its ethnographic material, the book offers a meticulous theoretical exploration of the notions of sovereignty and citizenship, as well as their explication as lived experiences of Ukraine’s multiethnic population. In this volume, Sonevytsky offers a re-examination of the notion of wildness in the Ukrainian context, capitalizing the word when used as a symbolically loaded term rather than in its everyday meaning. She explores the concept’s subversive potentiality and the way in which Wildness ‘informs emergent sovereign imaginaries by destabilizing the hegemonies of the present’ (p. 179). In the first chapter of her book, Sonevytsky examines perhaps the most famous explicit take on Wildness in Ukraine’s contemporary popular music — pop- SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 356 singer Ruslana’s 2004 win in the Eurovision music competition with the song ‘Wild Dances’. Sonevytsky traces the evolution of the concept through several of Ruslana’s interlinked projects over half a decade, from a self-exoticizing shtick based on the visual and musical motives of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian region to a de-ethnicized approach reflecting Ruslana’s ecoactivism on her 2008 concept album, Wild Energy. In chapter two, Sonevytsky reads the performance of the all-female Dakh Daughters band during the Euromaidan protests in December 2013 as an expression of what she terms ‘the Wildness of ambivalence’ (p. 84). Their song ‘Hannusia’, while including ethnic elements, aims for a more complex, hybrid performance of femininity and rurality. To Sonevytsky, this performance is an attempt to claim the space of Wildness as the Bhabhian ‘third space’ between the binary political choices of West or East, Europe or Russia. Where ‘Hannusia’ incorporates the ethnic through hybridity, the form of authentic folk singing known as avtentyka refuses to hybridize or restraint itself in order to fit into the sonic framework of reality TV. In chapter three, Sonevystky addresses the unbridled, even while professionally cultivated voices of avtentyka performers on Holos Krainy (the Ukrainian version of the global Voice franchise). Sonevytsky sees these singers as gesturing towards the Wildness that is local rather than national in nature and as such, reveals ‘the inadequacy of simplistic...