Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality by Stephen Amico (review)

This is a difficult book to read conventionally. I spent hours balancing it on one knee with a tablet on the other, while searching YouTube for the songs and singers that populate its pages, often not getting farther than a page or two in a sitting. Drag queens, closet cases, and (rather fewer) out-there openly gay performers dominate Amico’s playlist. Few of these performers are compelling artists and, Eurovision apart, their work mostly fails to travel beyond the Russian-speaking world. Why then devote a book to them and what possible links to post-Soviet homosexuality could they have?

Amico’s project is to investigate how Russian gay men relate to what he calls “post-Soviet popular musics” (p. 19). Fundamental to his concept of this relationship is his analysis of gay bodies and spaces. He rejects Foucault’s and Butler’s discourse analysis, although many lyrics, videos, and statements are read critically here, for a phenomenological approach drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Sarah Ahmed that posits a prior material body that yields analyzable sensory experience (pp. 6, 23). In other words, the bodies of Russian gay men and their experience of music, particularly in the dance club, can tell us something about “sexuality, the self, and intersubjectivity in post-Soviet Russia” (pp. 18-19). Over some sixteen months during 2003-2005, Amico conducted fieldwork in dance clubs and other real and digital sites of sociability for gay men in St Petersburg. He lists forty-one informants from the club scene, plus five formal interviewees including djs, the late academician Igor Kon, and long-serving gay activist Aleksandr Kukharskii (pp. 205–206). Methodologically the study is principally based on ethnography, albeit in a very “informal” manner without simultaneous note-taking; Amico presumed that his subjects would balk at such scientistic rituals (pp. 25–26). The prose is burdened with theoretical jargon, sometimes dense and long sentences (pp. 18, 23, 116) and an autobiographical travel-writer voice that recalls Laurie Essig’s 1999 book on queer Russia.

Chapter two argues that Russian pop music possesses a “Russian sound” of specific national tones, cadences and chord progressions. Local pop culture interacts as a subordinated but still “deeply known… homegrown” genre, with international English-language dominated “global” pop music. The queer politics of this hybrid musical ecology are said to mirror the aktiv/passiv/universal (or top, bottom, or versatile) dynamics of gay male sex: through the embodied experience of music, “[m]usic does literally get inside the listener” and the gay male Russian club bunny who loves both Western pop music and the occasional European tourist arguably “somatises” his “understanding [of] penetration as something potentially pleasure-inducing” (p. 57). In his analysis of the penetrated Russian male, Amico unconsciously retraces arguments I first made in works he has not used: a chapter on Russian masculinity (2002) and an article on globalization and Russian gay male pornography (Russian Review, 2010).

The next two chapters examine Russian artists, careers, and pop videos to diagnose the state of gay visibility in the early 2000s. The voices of Amico’s informants recede into the background, often synthesized into broad claims that can descend into gossip (admiration or loathing for certain performers based on their outness or discretion, p. 101; assumptions about the homosexuality of certain performers, p. 107; speculation that they are just lip-synching in videos, p. 121). The readings assigned to Russian music videos and staged performances are content- rather than context-led. Amico apparently assumes that the performers in these complex artistic productions, flirting with sexual ambiguity, have unmediated authorship of their videos and stage performances. But few of these are established auteur-artistes in the Madonna league. Armies of producers, directors, stylists, designers, and accountants stood behind these pretty boys thrashing about shirtless on stage or for the camera. Calculated directorial decisions about the homoerotic allure of the “talent” were critical to the queer...