Estrada: Grand Narratives and the Philosophy of the Russian Popular Song Since Perestroika

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2004 by Siemens, Elena

David MacFadyen. Extrada: Grand Narratives and the Philosophy of the Russian Popular Song Since Perestroika. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. 260 pp. Illustrations. $70.00, cloth.

A follow-up to his earlier book Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991, David MacFadyen's Estrada?! Grand Narratives and the Philosophy of the Russian Popular Song since Perestroïka discusses the fate of the Russian popular entertainment known as "estrada" after the demise of the Soviet Union. The book's central concern is "estrada's raison d'etre after its Soviet history and tradition had vanished seemingly forever." Using critical theory (in particular Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard), MacFadyen examines the relationship between Soviet grand narratives and musical stories that "ran beside and then outlived them." He argues that, unlike the unidirectional grand narratives, estrada promotes "a policy of inclusion," and that while continually reinventing its "rhizomatic process," it produces "a longer, more popular, and better made narrative than any other form in the world's largest nation."

In contrast to Red Stars, which was organized "in a willfully linear fashion," Estrada?! is designed in a "serpentine" manner so as to emphasize the non-linear nature of its narratives. Another reason for this structure, writes MacFadyen, is that it allows him to scrutinize a greater number of performers and to be able to "look for similar, synchronie events involving them, rather than diachronic developments." The book consists of three large parts entitled "Four Predicaments," "Evidence of Two Solutions," and "Russian Popular Culture after 1982: The Big Picture." In describing his selection criteria, MacFadyen states that a performer must be successful and contribute to the lyric song, as well as "be immediately recognizable as working in a wholly Western vein." There are also two appendices, containing biographies of performers and audio-visual sources.

The first part is comprised of four chapters ("The Decline of a Soviet Repertoire," The Absence of Ideology," "Performers' Untutored Upbringing," and "Directorial Work on the Stage and on the Road"), and focuses on the post-Soviet estrada repertoire discussing its transition from the "exclusive Soviet teleology to the inclusive, inflected perception of a musical career." In particular, MacFadyen examines a "respectful" challenge to the icon of Soviet estrada, Alia Pugacheva, as well as discussing the influence of "more flexible traditions, such as jazz and blues," specifically in the work of Larisa Dolina. Other performers featured here include Vladimir Presniakov, Kristina Orbakaite, and Filipp Kirkorov. Overall, this part aims to demonstrate the transition of estrada into an essentially "lyric form." MacFadyen argues that from "a public and occasionally private expression," it has transformed into "one that is now private and only occasionally public."

In the second part, comprised of two chapters, MacFadyen looks into recent songs and video for the evidence of possible solutions to the four post-Soviet predicaments outlined in the preceding portion of the book, namely "repertoire, ideology, upbringing, and directorial work." As he surveys songs by, among others, Dmitrii Malikov, Igor' Nikolaev, Larisa Dolina, and Leonid Agutin, MacFadyen points out that estrada turns the old, "linear history back on itself," subverting "the very narratives that made it what it is today." The chapter on video provides examples of "ways in which aural estrada has used visual representations since the eighties." MacFadyen's central theme here is performers' "desire to see normality-or change as normality." Citing the highly popular Old Songs About What Matters, he says that in Russian videos "the past, be it the forties or sixties, was tucked into the present, where it gained a new significance."

The concluding part examines "some linear governmental or historical narratives in Soviet culture, the forms they took, and why-despite Pugacheva and others like her-they do perhaps still matter." MacFadyen argues that grand narratives have been replaced by a new kind of selfhood, "where one loses traditional subjectivity in order to gain a new individuality." In elucidating this new "paradoxical" subjectivity, MacFadyen uses Joseph Brodsky's "baroque" aesthetic, as well as Deleuze's notion of baroque as a "period of long crisis." In describing it in terms of Deleuze's metaphor of a rhizome ("of a work and growth that are not linear but endlessly change direction"), he states that Russian estrada "has shown itself as the most surprising of activities, as a new type of history: the hard-working narrative that was not."

An important contribution to this relatively neglected field, MacFadyen's volume is well written and provides a sophisticated critical introduction to Russian estrada, or rather one integral facet of it. As the author mentions in passing, the notion of estrada, as it is understood in Russia, refers to a broad variety of genres, rather than just the popular song. In this respect, the book's title is somewhat misleading. Nor does this study incorporate a discussion of estrada's origins and peculiar etymology. MacFadyen's analysis would also benefit from a comparison between estrada and other types of entertainment, and in particular theatre. The book singles out estrada as a domain marked by exceptional longevity and one that takes over other territories. In recent years, Russian estrada and theatre have indeed borrowed extensively from one another. However, the answer to the question as to which of the two takes over is not a simple one and requires further investigation.