Listening closely to the songs that resonate politically around the continuing Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, this study encompasses a broad range of music genres, repertoires, media, and locales. The four authors pursue related research trajectories that reveal how popular music has played a significant role in hostilities that involve more than just two warring sides: “Ukraine has far too many languages, religions, ethnicities, and cultures, with historical influence from a variety of countries” (40), and the music itself evidences too much “fluidity and versatility” (201) for this multifaceted “war of songs” to be so simple.
The first chapter discusses songs performed in the anti-government protests and the pro- and anti-separatist demonstrations in Kyiv during the 2013–14 Euromaidan, asking about the three months of this struggle: “How did the music change as the demonstrations shifted from a largely homogenous pro-European rally to a multi-faceted large-scale revolutionary uprising, from peaceful protest to deadly street battles and, finally, to contemplation and mourning?” (28) Moving from the Khreshchatyk squares to YouTube videos, the second chapter takes up the topic of musical borrowing in form of activist “answer songs” that critically respond to existing songs in creative ways to inspire dialogue and debate, antagonistic conflict or a bonding communality. The common theme informing these two chapters is the polemical power that popular songs can engage for many performers and audiences across the political spectrum, whether it is exercised in pragmatic and/or prefigurative (idealistic) ways.
The third chapter considers parodies of the Russian national anthem especially in light of the 2016 Russian bill that sought to criminalize any distortion of the words or music of the song. Laws against the desecration of national symbols apply to flags, of course, but how do they apply to musical works in all their varieties of composition, performance, interpretation, and reception? The case of the Russian national anthem is particularly complex given its convoluted history: the music was composed by Alexander Alexandrov for the 1938 Bolshevik party anthem; a statelier march tempo with different lyrics served as the anthem of the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1991; this same song, with other edits to the lyrics, was controversially reinstated as the anthem of the Russian Federation in 2000. This anthem dating from “the height of Stalin's Great Terror” (132) reveals “the uneasy fusion of Soviet and post-Soviet music, words, and imagery” (143), hence its intertextuality of “multilayered and ambivalent connotations” (128). On the one hand it provides “a patriotic narrative of national pride and glory, alongside markers of an ideal national identity, complete with the subtlest markers of normative gender roles, confession, and ethnicity” (143); on the other hand, the memorable melody is deeply ingrained in Russian cultural consciousness, so its former lyrics and historical weight still resonate ambivalently in the present. The inherent tensions within the anthem invite parodic versions that can create “profoundly satirical effects of estrangement” (128). The authors discuss seven provocative Russian and Ukrainian parodies that conflict with official ideology.
The final chapter considers the Eurovision Song Contest as a very popular and prominent arena for staging geopolitical tensions between Russia and former Soviet states, focusing on the comparative differences between Russia's ostensibly peaceful or progressive songs and the more provocative entries from Ukraine and Georgia since 2005. This soft-power competition involves nation-branding and cultural diplomacy exercised through each song's lyrics, music, and staging. The discussion of Ukraine's winning song in 2016, Jamala's “1944,” about the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars, notes the song's Ukrainian-language version “Bizim Qirim” (Our Crimea) as a palimpsest legible to regional audiences, but another intertext for “1944” would be the famous folk song “Ey, güzel Qırım” (O beautiful Crimea), since Jamala quotes two lines from it: Men bu yerde yaşalmadım, yaşlığıma toyalmadım (translated into English as “I couldn't spend my youth there, because you took away my peace”). This chapter relies on existing Eurovision scholarship but puts the song contest into a larger context in dialogue with the earlier chapters on the “hybrid war” being fought between Russia and Ukraine on multiple fronts.
A War of Songs is a thoroughly informative and readable account of “how popular music plays an active part in every aspect of the discourse surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian crisis” with the capacity “to stimulate reflection and enable debates, as well as stage mere clashes of opinion” (199, 200). The index of music videos with YouTube links invites readers to listen to these songs along with the authors as they make their case for the patriotic and revolutionary power of music.
