Russia Gets the Blues: Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times (Culture and Society after Socialism) FREE DOWNLOAD
- Series: Culture and Society after Socialism
- Paperback: 200 pages
- Publisher: Cornell University Press (April 8, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0801489008
- ISBN-13: 978-0801489006
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.
