Cult O: Ukrainian Audiotopia of the 1990s: Artistry, Affect, and Agency in Popular Music

Meets in BLOCK 6.  Tues/Thurs/Sat  July 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24
9:00-10:20 am (NY) / 4:00-5:20 pm (St. Pete/Kyiv)

This course contemplates Ukraine’s cultural life in the 1990s through popular music. The course offers a reading of Ukraine’s encounter with the event of post-Sovietness based on close listening of songs by bands and individual performers, and invites a discussion of popular emotions behind this musical legacy. Drawing from Josh Kun’s (2005) definition of audiotopia as “small, momentary, lived utopias built, imagined, and sustained through … music,” we will loop the 1990s into the current moment, to perceive Ukraine’s being-becoming through the imaginative project of popular music. We will also bring the precarious and affective labor of popular culture industry workers, performed in the specific spatio-temporality of the Ukrainian 1990s, into the global context of the decade.