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2. Music, Form, Penetration The outer influence must be integrated to the national [Russian] culture, and not liquidate it, as many of the aggressive supporters of the West are trying to achieve. —D. G. Gorin (2003) The relative relaxation of geopolitical borders in Russia, post-perestroika, has allowed an intercourse with the West that, although certainly not absent during the Soviet era, or without restrictions in the present, increased the visibility, number, and variety of Western cultural products on Russian soil. During my time in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Western automobiles were prized commodities among those able to afford them (Mercedes and BMW, in particular), and Western “designer” clothing, cigarettes, fast food, or even home furnishings (with entrance of multinational retailer IKEA into major Russian cities), enjoyed a certain cachet for many.1 Anglophone words related to popular culture have become part of the Russian lexicon (e.g., bestseller [бестселлер], khit or megakhit [хит/мегахит, hit/megahit]), in certain cases the entrance of the word into somewhat common parlance indicative of the popularity of specific (Western) genres. For example, both the tok shou (ток шоу, talk show) and realiti shou (реалити шоу, reality show) formats continue to be well represented on Russian television, with numerous offerings directed at varied audiences and demographics.2 Additionally, Russified versions of American television shows were also common—Sex in the City spawned an unofficial Russian version, Bal’zakovskii vozrast, ili vse muzhiki svo . . . (Balzac Age, or All Guys Are Bastards),3 while The Nanny gave rise to a virtual clone, Moia prekrasnaia niania (My Beautiful Nanny)—and American films and television shows were extremely common and consumed by large numbers of people.4 But while Anglo-American and Anglophone products and words were commonplace, it was notable that, in contrast to any Western European country in which I had lived, or which I had visited, the audio portions of almost all imported films and television programs were generally Music, Form, Penetration 31 either obfuscated or obliterated through dubbing, subtitles being exceedingly rare. Russian culture, it appeared, was neither hermetically sealed off from the West, nor entirely engulfed by it. The realm of popular music was also a site of border crossings, with both Western and Russian musics audible and visible on radio and television, on posters advertising upcoming performances or CD releases, and in the wares of both retailers and street vendors alike. It was not, however, simply the propinquityofthediscretelyWestern (aPinkconcert,aBjörkCD)tothediscretely Russian (a Liudmila Gurchenko concert, a Mashina vremeni CD),5 however, butalsotheadoptionand/orRussificationofWesternmusicalstylesbyRussian performers that was indicative of porous boundaries. Such mixtures, increasingly common in a world defined, in part, by the dynamics of globalization, and indicative of the intricacies and complexities of contemporary cultural production, have often led to recourse to concepts of hybridity (or syncretism) in relation to the theorization of popular musics.6 These concepts not only admit to but foreground the various “components” that serve to contribute to formations of new cultural products and new conceptions of self, the very bases through and upon which synthetic or syncretic forms come into being.7 What is requisite in such theorizing, however, is not only attention to the “material” “end-product”—the self, the (cultural) object—but to the processes themselves, processes that occur within defined sociocultural and historical times and places, as well as to the ontological specificity of the “hybridizing components” (here, music) acting with and upon embodied beings; music, it must be stressed, does not act upon or engage a subject in the same ways as text or ideology, although certainly both may be adjuncts of musical phenomena. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between gay Russian men and both Western and Russian popular musics, including a discussion of the formal attributes of the latter that distinguish it from the former, and highlighting the ways in which lived experience—apprehended, in part, as a porosity of borders and operating as both a material and conceptual dynamic—inflects the interaction between these men and audible culture. The material and conceptual aspects of these musical contacts, in an explicitly gay male context, may be seen as operative in two products released in St. Petersburg in 2003 and 2005—the Gay CD and Gay CD Blue Edition, respectively, with tracks assembled into a set by Russian DJs Kosinus and Slutkey via their “good friends from the Petersburg gay groups (tusovki)” (Gaspacho 2006).8 Both packages featured imagery of male-male sexuality resembling the type of images often found in Western-style gay products: the...

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