Music Matters XXVIII - ELIZAVETA GAUFMAN & ANATOLY RESHETNIKOV: "F*** Tha Police! à la Russe"

“F*** tha police!” á la russe: Rancière and the metamodernist turn in contemporary Russian music

Abstract

Politically-minded oppositional artists and musicians gained nationwide prominence in Russia at least a decade ago. Their rise has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that today one can witness a new and potentially more powerful iteration in the Russian politics of art, which brings political confrontation to a qualitatively new level.

Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles.

In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in the most novel, interesting, and subversive manner. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

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