that tracks power and inequality in daily life: “How can we be both realistic about the ugly realities of the world today and hopeful about the possibilities of changing them?” (2016, 60). Many of my interlocutors—like the musicians who create wild new forms of etno-muzyka but do not fight to defend Ukrainian sovereignty with weapons of war—point out the potential futility of any music to do anything. I do not dispute that music has little power against bombs, or BUK missiles.47 But I also assert that the study of music cannot be consigned only to our study of “the good life” since it is so prominently enmeshed in systems of capital, and therefore in the operations of power, and—importantly—because it also holds the affective power to captivate imaginations, move bodies, and support political actions. The politics and aesthetics of wild music allows us to investigate how the good life is imagined in dark times.
ONE
Wild Dances
Ethnic Intimacy, Auto-Exoticism, and Infrastructural Activism
In the very heart of Europe in the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains there live an ancient people, the Hutsuls. Their riches are unique mystic rituals, mountainous rhythms and dances. Ruslana visited them and revealed their mystery. Europe will learn about … Ukrainian ethnic originality, brightness of the highlander’s rhythms mixed with the modern music of the youth … Ruslana is experimenting with genres. There is no right name for it, but it could be either called Hutsul rap or kolmiyka’s hip-hop. In any case … you are reminded that even though “Wild Dances” come from ancient times, they are still the product of the 21st century. DJ dance mixes on the songs of the album make you feel like at the dance floor in night club … Ethnic motifs with electronic elements of house and drum-and-bass make the music sound fantastic. And it also makes us think that hundreds of years ago the progressive young people were dancing to the same beat [sic].
www.ruslana.ua/en, accessed April 28, 2005
Provoked to curiosity by the rhetoric of the pop star Ruslana’s press materials, I embarked to reveal the mystery of the majestic kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains for myself. It was a hot day in July 2005, and my small entourage was nearing the end of a long journey to a village represented as the end point of a slender serpentine line on my large road map of Ukraine. We were en route to Kosmach, a village in Hutsulshchyna, the southwestern mountainous region of Ukraine that borders the northern edge of Romania. Despite earlier journeys on equally remote and similarly pockmarked dirt roads in this region of the world, a feeling of naïve expectance overcame me as the car lurched toward our destination. That morning, I had revisited the press materials first released at Ruslana’s “Знаю Я” (“Znaiu Ya,” or “I Know”) etno-muzyka video premiere in the chic Western Ukrainian capital of L’viv in 2002, where I was fortunate to be in attendance. That event kicked off her “Hutsulian Project” and featured a music video that was touted as a history-making megaklip (rather than a klip, the term for an average music video). The megaklip had been filmed largely in the village of Kosmach. The press materials told the story of how Ruslana had traveled “high in the mountains, where the people live in [a] different time and dimension,” to find her “source of inspiration.” Familiar with the long history of Hutsul romanticization by L’vivan urbanites, and as someone who thinks of herself as allergic to exoticizing rhetoric, I nonetheless briefly entertained the possibility that maybe, somehow, this would be “the place,” as the press release boasted, “where you find true Ukrainian exotics!”
As my friend negotiated the unpaved mountain roads in his small tank-like Soviet Lada, I sat in the back seat and imagined that Kosmach might actually be different from scores of other Hutsul villages that I had visited earlier that week and on previous trips—it was, after all, the end point of the thin, snaking line on the map. After hours passing through scenic mountain vistas and roadside villages, we finally rolled into Kosmach, where a large Ukrainian Orthodox church and a few small cafés framed the center of town. As it started to drizzle, we ducked into the only café that appeared to be open. Inside, three teenagers—two girls and a boy—sat sharing a Snickers bar and text messaging each other with their cell phones from across the table. In my field notes, I jotted the observation that, while Kosmach was geographically remote, its isolation did not preclude such technologically sophisticated—if also technologically alienating—forms of modern teenaged flirtation.
We introduced ourselves, and I shared that I had come to Kosmach to investigate the source of inspiration for Ruslana’s brand of etno-muzyka. One of the teenagers, Lida, who was also the daughter of the café’s proprietors, leaped forward with an opinion that was echoed with differing degrees of intensity, but a notable amount of consistency, by the majority of the Kosmach villagers with whom I spoke later that week. She explained, “Ruslana came in with a huge crew; it went well. We dressed up in our folk costumes for her and staged a wedding. Everything was fine. But I can’t say that people are happy about it—especially about the name of the project, Dyki Tantsi (Дикі Танці, meaning Wild Dances).1 How, in what way, are we wild (дикі)?” My video footage from that summer cuts from Lida to a scene that followed just a few minutes later: a wedding band called Kosmats’ka Pysanka (Kosmach Easter Egg)—composed of many of the same musicians Ruslana had hired for her project—led a wedding procession through the center of town. They waved at us, an invitation to join the parade of partygoers in festive, but not folkloric attire. I fell in line and spent the next two days at the wedding party gathering their perspectives on Ruslana’s representation of their village in her Hutsulian Project.
Now to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held in Istanbul one year earlier. In 2004, Ukraine was the tenth country to take the stage at the ESC, a forum that “notoriously mingles kitsch with geopolitics” (Heller 2007, 199). Ukraine was thought to be in a statistically unfavorably placement, sandwiched between Albania and Croatia in the middle of the competition. It was also one of the two newest participating countries in the 49th annual ESC, having entered for the first time in 2003. Over one hundred million viewers in thirty-six countries were reported to have taken part in the 2004 televised contest, making it the biggest televoted contest in world history at that time. As described in the introduction to this book, Ruslana gave an energetic performance of her song “Wild Dances,” which drew on familiar sonic and visual gestures of Hutsul exoticism, repackaging them as a message of Wildness with a European-facing aspiration. After all of the thirty-six participant national broadcast companies reported their countries’ televoting results, Ruslana and her squad of Wild Dancers were proclaimed victorious. The win rocketed Ruslana to heights of international stardom unprecedented for a post-Soviet Ukrainian pop musician in the early twenty-first century (see Fig. Intro.1).
In addition to the specifically Hutsul stereotypes of “wildness” represented in “Wild Dances,” the performance also trafficked in generic tropes of exoticism. In some cases, it blurred the lines between what was supposed to index Hutsuls specifically, and exoticism globally. This was most evident in how Ruslana’s sartorial choices were perceived. In the aftermath of the competition, her aesthetic was compared frequently to Xena the Warrior Princess, the protagonist of the popular fantasy television show of the mid-1990s. Xena’s violent, ambiguous, and kinky sexualized presentation has been noted (Morreale 1998); Ruslana was careful to distinguish the pacifism of her Wildness: “Ruslana—who has always maintained her work is entirely innovative and original—admitted she could see the parallels between her ‘Wild Dances’ costumes and those worn by US TV character, Xena the Warrior Princess. However, she maintained that unlike Xena, the ‘Wild Dancers’ are not hostile, merely ‘wild in style’” (Eurovision press release, 2004).
Other connections to Ruslana’s depictions of Wildness were made after the competition. One effect of the attention given to the discursive presence of Wildness in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” was that it persistently configured Hutsuls in relationship to discourses
