Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and transformed it into an object of "high" culture, fashioning a social identity that distinguishes blues adherents from both the discredited Soviet past and the vulgar consumerism associated with the country's Westernization. While adapting the idiom to their own conditions, Russia's bliuzmeny (bluesmen) have absorbed the blues ethos encoded in the music by their American forebears, using it to invert their social world, thus deriving dignity and satisfaction from those very things that give one the blues.Based on more than forty interviews with blues musicians and fans, nightclub managers, and others, Russia Gets the Blues reveals the fascinating history of blues in Russia, from the initial mimicry of British blues-rock to the recent emergence of a specifically "Russian blues." The gradual mastering of the idiom in Russia has been conditioned by the culture of the country's intelligentsia, a fact explaining why, on one hand, bliuzmeny feel compelled to proselytize on behalf of the music, to share with others this treasure of "world culture," while, on the other, they perform blues almost exclusively in English—which almost no one understands—and condemn any and all efforts to make the music commercially successful.
Michael Urban is Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include The Rebirth of Politics in Russia. Andrei Evdokimov hosts All This Blues, a weekly radio show in Moscow.
What People are Saying About This
Nancy Condee
Tracing Russian blues from the late 1960s to the present day, Michael Urban provides the first extensive account of its history and complex internal struggles. Blues culture in Russia—the First Moscow Blues Festival, the Arbat Blues Club, and the Dr. Blues Radio Show of the 1990s—is situated in a nuanced, comparative argument about the roots of slavery and serfdom, drawing on a range of cultural-studies theorists to foreground its connections to both alternative communities within the second world and to the global music industry. Both scholars and blues aficionados will find Urban's book an engaging read and an invaluable resource.
Mark Slobin
This book riffs on the postsocialist blues, with a groovy blend of ethnomusicology, sociology, and politics. The 'Russian soul' gets a major makeover as Urban places Russia on the world music map for the first time.
