RED DOOR 31

MUSIC FEATURE BY OLENA POHONCHENKOVA
Fighting a colonial war means rethinking the
past and reorganizing ties within the present.
For a long time, one could even say for the
time of its existence, Ukrainian music has been
kept in the shadows of its Eastern European
counterparts, all mixed up in western optics.
This optics alongside the post-Soviet colonial
narrative about ‘brotherly cultures’ where the
‘elder brother’ is highbrow, knowledgeable
and deep while the ‘younger one’ is a funny
and awkward ‘simple folk,’ always a few steps
behind, has distorted the image of Ukrainian
culture not just from the outside but also from
within.
Ukraine is not a country of distinct music
taste: the roots of unfussy listening habits
can be traced back to overall social apathy
and the lack of a fully functional civil society
typical for post-totalitarian countries. The
problem gained the most resonance after the
full-scale invasion when Russian musicians
(and not even the good ones) kept their
high positions in Ukrainian streaming charts.
The fact proved that ‘not really thinking’
about such things equals colonial thinking.
Although the awareness of an average
Ukrainian listener is growing day by day, the
problem goes deeper than that. I’ll bring out a
few problematic areas, each of them a starting
point for rethinking the big picture.
For many Ukrainians, making music goes
hand in hand with the search for their identity.
Unfortunately, they usually stick to an easy
way of finding one by incorporating the
decorative elements of Ukrainian folk music
into their sound. The tendency goes back to
post-Great Purge times when after a decade
of Stalinist terror, the social strata of artists,
cultural actors and intellectuals of soviet
Ukraine was completely wiped out, once
vibrant Ukrainian culture reduced to ‘safe’
folk art. As a result, for many years (2022 is not
an exception), we’ve had all these Eurovision
contestants in embroidered costumes and
flutes in the song mix. But the superficial
folkiness goes beyond export acts. Musicians
that come from the more underground, ‘artsy’
scene use this very means of self-exoticization
either as the ‘perk’ of their sound or as a way
to cater to an audience that’s been mingling in
the pot of colonial forgetfulness and cultural
ignorance for decades.
Another issue is one of specific genre clicheés
that many countries in the region have shared
since the Soviet era. Those are especially
strong in rock and synth music, since its
Eastern European blueprints were set in the
shared Soviet past, namely during the time
of perestroika. Since then many Ukrainian
musicians embraced the cold monotonous
sound with a distinct bassline, preferably with
lyrics sung in Russian, probably the stiffest of
the Slavic languages. With the 2000s postpunk
revival and minimal synth coming into
fashion, this kind of music got another reboot,
and although there are genuine synth-based
acts, and many post-punk artists switched
to Ukrainian language after horrible Russian
war crimes, the problem of Russian imperial
legacy is much more complex than that of a
shared language. Even the scene that started
out as underground and anti-establishment
embraces the model of colonial dependency
that affects its sound and songwriting
decisions.
Issue number 3 might very well be
the one shared by many economically
underdeveloped post-colonial countries
that look up to the west in search of creative
solutions. Many indie musicians (the term
used broadly) get a little bit more attention
and sell more tickets to their shows by simply
being secondary.
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