-
Epilogue
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Epilogue “Pravo na Schast’e” Khoroshie pesni, veselye tantsy Good songs, happy dances Tak khochetsia zhit’ i vliubliatsia [We] so want to live, and fall in love Byt’ vmeste i nikogda ne proshchat’sia To be together and never say good-bye Vezde uspet’ i vmeste spet’ To arrive everywhere on time, and sing together —Mitia Fomin, “Khoroshaia pesnia” (“Good Song”) I my budem vmeste And we’ll be together Kak tselogo chasti As parts of a whole Khoroshie pesni Good songs I pravo na schast’e And the right to happiness I vse interesnei And everything is more and more interesting I vse budet luchshe And everything will be better Khoroshie pesni Good songs Ty tol’ko poslushai Just listen —Hi-Fi, “Khoroshie pesni” (“Good Songs”) With the collapsing of both time and space brought about by an increasingly (if not yet fully) digitalized media society, work on studies dealing with popular music and popular culture—to say nothing of those dealing with post-Soviet space—takes on a growing sense of immediacy and urgency. Temporal and spatial bracketing become highly problematic, and the velocity with which changes in musical sounds and images, allegiances, and scenes take place suggest to those of us chronicling, researching, and interpreting popular music that fantasies of a neatly defined and quiescent contemporary 190 Epilogue “object of study”—if it ever existed—must be once and for all jettisoned. Indeed , even attempting to find a semistable node on the rushing continuum of musical trends and practices may leave one with figurative rope burns on one’s palms, as that which we attempt to grab simply speeds into the distance, a mocking “catch me if you can” whistling in its wake. It appears that only by moving with infinite expeditiousness will we have even the remotest chance of catching a “thing’s” essence—a time, a place, a genre, a scene—of doing explanatory or interpretive justice to it. Such motility and velocity seem the antitheses of the very academic and institutional apparatuses in which such popular musics are often studied; if mediated sound is ever more quicksilver evanescence, then the dictates, strictures, and structures of scholarly analyses and publications, encompassing years of library research, fieldwork, funding proposals, manuscript submissions, drafts, revisions, and galley prints seem marked by a type of charmingly archaic plodding lassitude that is destined to produce work that is ever only historical in nature. But although many transformations have occurred in the cultural, political, and musical land- and soundscapes from the time of my initial visit to Russia and the final draft of this manuscript, there have been continuities as well. With a desire again to eradicate any hint of a suggestion of an ethnographic present, and with cognizance of time’s forward progression and repeating refrains, it is to both that which has changed and that which has remained the same that I wish to briefly turn my attention in this epilogue. One of the most profound changes to the shifting LGBT landscape in post-Soviet Russia was the death of Igor’ Kon in April of 2012. I was greatly saddened to read of Kon’s passing, not only because he had been so generous and helpful to me while I was in Moscow conducting fieldwork as a PhD candidate, but also because his death is certain to leave an audible, visible, and textual void in the chorus of oppositional voices seeking to combat homophobia. As an academic, public intellectual, and theoretically engaged activist, Kon’s written works, teaching, and lectures contributed greatly not only to a more nuanced, less puritanical understanding of sex and sexuality in general, but also to efforts to depathologize homosexuality and eradicate discrimination against all “others” in post-Soviet space. As I have noted earlier, Kon was somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of equal rights—or even increased social approbation—for LGBT persons in Russia in the near future, owing to what he saw as the growing alliance between the Orthodox Church and the entrenched political apparatus and the discourse of “morality” that barely masked the undertones of xenophobia and homophobia inherent in [54.205.238.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:48 GMT) Epilogue 191 their rhetorics. Kon was skeptical that either group would decrease in power or influence in the coming years. Has there been political change in Russia since the turn of the century? When I left the country, Putin was firmly in charge and, if one was to believe the...