The Ithaca Music Forum will sponsor a talk on Ukrainian punk music by Maria Sonevytsky, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music and Bard College. The talk, entitled "Trolling the Komsomol: The Irreverent and Anti-Imperial Critique of Soviet Ukrainian Punk" will be held Friday, Oct. 27, at 5 pm in the Nabenhauer Recital Hall in the Whalen Center for Music, fourth floor. A reception will follow. The talk is free and open to the public.
The Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, played an often paradoxical role in constraining and enabling the musical subcultures of the late Soviet period. In this talk, I describe how the Ukrainian punk band Vopli Vidopliassova (known to fans simply as V.V.), participated in the absurd bureaucratic procedures of the Communist party-state during the last years of its existence. Their manager in the late 1980s told me that V.V. delighted in “trolling the Komsomol,” playing games with official censors, gatekeepers, and other apparatchiks. I will consider the stakes that were attached to these games, and how the irreverent music of V.V. contributed to an anti-imperial critique of Russocentrism that has resonances in the present day.
