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‘There’s a riot going on’: Notes on Pussy Riot, music and politics – Adam Behr

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The dust on the Pussy Riot case is resolutely refusing to settle completely, or at least every time it does someone or something kicks it back up into the air. Figures as far apart as Yoko Ono and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev kept the issue alive recently, the former awarding them a Peace Prize, the latter stating that although he was “sickened by what they did, by their looks, by the hysteria that followed what had happened” he believed that to keep the jailed members in prison was “unproductive”.

‘Unproductive’ in terms of negative publicity for the present Russian government, certainly, and it’s publicity and the nature of the protest itself that have thrust this into the spotlight, even if the nature of ‘democracy’ in Putin’s Russia is at the heart of the original matter (and I use the possessive case here because he, at least, often seems to think it applies).

One of the main effects of the Pussy Riot trial has been to shine a spotlight on repression and patriarchy in Russia but away from the limelight it also raises questions about the differences and overlaps between performance and protest as well as between political and artistic action. Coverage of the case has generated a good deal of heat but little light so far on such matters as these that lie beneath the headlines regarding music and politics, which is perhaps understandable for those concerned about the jailed musicians who are at the sharp end of such questions, but they warrant further mention.

It’s difficult to entirely disentangle pop and (certainly in this case) punk from politics, even when it claims to be ‘non-political’. As Robin Ballinger has pointed out, we can, “think about music and politics by approaching music as an activity embedded in relations of power”. Content owners’ lobbying of governments for extensions to copyright – in law – is a case in point here of how even mainstream ‘non-political’ music in our comfortable West has a political dimension.

A related question arises from this, which concerns the relationship between a musical performance and a political statement. The furore surrounding Pussy Riot, insofar as it has been effective, seems to derive in no small measure from the fact that it has been billed as a musical performance and the activists as musicians, or artists at least. Problems for journalists for example, up to and including the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, have attracted nowhere near as much mainstream international notoriety. The legion of stars lending their support is testament to the fact that the musical nature of their protest has done Pussy Riot’s cause no harm, although its members scant good in terms of practical outcome insofar as they are either in jail or hiding. That same array of stars – from Billy Bragg, through Sinead O’Connor, Bjork and Paul McCartney to Madonna – is also an illustration of the complications involved here. ‘A Punk Prayer’ is obviously at the other end of the spectrum to the copyright lobbyists I invoked in response to Ballinger’s point above, in terms of both ideological and, broadly, aesthetic priorities. But a spectrum rather than a dichotomy it assuredly is.

Pussy Riot, in many ways a collective more than a band, have politics and protest as their primary raison d’etre, over and above music – or at least as the primary motive for making music, or the main way in which it’s presented. This puts them on a slightly different footing from, say, Billy Bragg. He might not thank me for me for suggesting that his music is less than utterly indistinguishable from his politics – and I’m not suggesting that two can or should be divorced – but musical aesthetics clearly play more of a part in his modus operandi than for Pussy Riot. I don’t want to get into a game of taxonomy here, but there are obviously different levels of integration between the musical and the political act. At the other end of the scale would be, say, Madonna for whom the music (or product) more plainly comes first, although can be a vehicle onto which controversial images can be tagged as part of a stage show.

And that’s just commercial popular music. The overlaps between musical performance and political statement are maybe most evident in strident punk declarations and protest songs. (It’s perhaps cold comfort for punk that the Pussy Riot case has brought its oppositional aspect back to the forefront.) But there are any number of musical utterances and performances that are scarcely likely to be reviewed on aesthetic grounds, or even perhaps regarded primarily as such in the first place. Any number of demonstrators singing songs is, at some level, a musical performance. And it was the provocative decision to play music at a specific location (also by a church) on a march that sparked recent trouble in Belfast.

It’s also worth remembering that things change over time, political contexts and artists alike. Even cuddly, State Event Resident Rock Knight Paul McCartney once found himself faced with a ban from the BBC for ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, and Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ has gone the distance from a vehicle for the band to empty a bucket of water over (then) Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the BRIT Awards to the soundtrack for a TV advert for personal injury lawyers via the National Accident Helpline.

McCartney, however, was very obviously a musician making a political statement rather than an activist using music. One could say much the same of Bono or Geldof, although there are different levels of commitment that see some artists moving into full-time politics. Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, for example, is currently Australia’s Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. (A journey in the other direction seems much more rare. I’m struggling to think of a successful politician who has moved into music on anything approaching a full-time basis. Maybe the broad based cultural capital and appeal that accrue to music, and which politicians of all types are keen to have rub off on them, tend to evaporate in the heat of daily political compromise)

McCartney, Garrett et al are (or were) also operating in or near the mainstream, politically and musically. The vexed question of musicians’ involvement with political questions isn’t new, and it’s easy to criticise them for dilettantism or even hypocrisy, especially if they’re on major labels involved with the corporate behaviour implicated in such problems as third world debt. But music remains a potent rallying cry. As John Street, Seth Hague and Heather Savigny have pointed out, “it is important to note how music and musicians help to constitute — by way of organisation, legitimation and performance — the platform from which particular instances of public action emerge.” (2007: 16).

Their case-studies, particularly Live 8, deal with organisation and infrastructure on a rather different level to Pussy Riot, along with a rather different type of legitimation. But they make the valuable point that musicians and musical performances can serve as the locus of participation. Of Rock Against Racism, they note, “The NME legitimated and promoted the idea that musicians had a right and a responsibility to engage with politics” (2007: 11). Of the process leading to the grander scale of Live 8, they mention the use that NGOs and campaigning organisations, had to make of celebrity to address the issue of third-world debt.

“As one of its leaders commented, ‘It’s not apartheid; we don’t have Nelson Mandela behind bars. It’s a really hard issue to make visual’ (Ann Pettifor, Rolling Stone, 11 November 1999). In attempting to address this problem, Jubilee 2000 (as is now common practice in many NGOs) committed resources to liaising with celebrities, particularly those in the music business. They created a post for which the main responsibility was to telephone musicians or their managers in an attempt to recruit them to the cause.” (2007: 12)

In some respects, the Pussy Riot case has worked the other way around. Their own fame springs more from their predicament than their music. But it’s difficult to doubt the role of high profile musicians in keeping the issue newsworthy, and therefore alive. Taking into account all of the actors and ramifications at play here means opening several cans of worms. For a start, Pussy Riot’s own politics are wildly at odds with those of many of their celebrity supporters – and certainly the businesses behind them.

The band’s own statement thanking such supporters makes explicit mention of this, “We’re flattered, of course, that Madonna and Björk have offered to perform with us. But the only performances we’ll participate in are illegal ones. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets.”

Russian analyst and journalist Vadim Nikitin has pointed out that some of their previous stunts would have resulted in arrest anywhere, not just Putin’s Russia, and expresses disquiet at the ease with which they have become figureheads for what he calls a Western anti-Putin narrative without sufficient attention to the political agenda of the band and its associates.

“Some outlets have portrayed the case as a quest for freedom of expression and other ground rules of liberal democracy. Yet the very phrase “freedom of expression,” with its connotations of genteel protest as a civic way to blow off some steam while life goes on, is alien to Russian radical thought. The members of Pussy Riot are not liberals looking for self-expression. They are self-confessed descendants of the surrealists and the Russian futurists, determined to radically, even violently, change society… They are targeting not just Russian authoritarianism, but, in Tolokonnikova’s words, the entire “corporate state system.” And that applies to the West as much as to Russia itself… Pussy Riot’s fans in the West need to understand that their heroes’ dissent will not stop at Putin; neither will it stop if and when Russia becomes a “normal” liberal democracy”.”

Simon Jenkins looked at matters from another angle, and took issue with the British and American Governments’ criticism of the jail sentence handed out to by the Russian court. He made mention of jail terms imposed in the UK to ‘send a message’, such as for nominally trivial offences (like the theft of a bottle of water) during the London riots and to Charlie Gilmour during the student-fees protest.

“For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the “disproportionate” Pussy Riot terms. In America’s case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism “suspects” incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial “three strikes” offenders… British courts jail at the drop of a headline.”

There is some truth to both of these arguments. But at the same time, they gloss over a crucial point, which is that whatever the geo-political background and sub-text, this case does concern freedom of expression and censorship. Jenkins, whose piece is more concerned with governmental statements than Pussy Riot per se, also states that “artists can look after their own”. In some ways, as the public statements show, this has been the case. In a substantive way, the women are still in prison, it’s less obviously true. Artists of any stripe don’t operate in a vacuum, and such power as they have is primarily expressive and then, as Street et al note above, motivational.

Censorship takes many forms, not all of them as extreme as jail sentences, but economic and institutional censorship are rife even in liberal democracies – BBC bans, record labels withholding releases and obscenity trials, for instance. (See Martin Cloonan’s ‘Popular music and censorship in Britain: An overview’ and ‘Banned!’ for case studies and an account of the different pressures facing musicians in the UK). But extremity is at the core of this case – both the sentence and the framing as criminal of a clearly political act. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but it bodes ill for freedom of expression in Russia that they are this close together, as does the news that a Russian priest who spoke out in support of protestors is to be defrocked.

So whilst it’s possible to criticise the critics for hypocrisy, it’s also worth taking stock of the fact that freedom involves choices. Amongst these are the causes one stands behind and prioritises. It’s not very fashionable to say it, particularly to adherents of individual causes, but fashion plays a part in political and non-political campaigns, however worthy they are. Anyone remember the Campaign for Tibet’s moment in the spotlight? The Tamils never got much of look-in beyond the news pages (and precious little there). Kody 2012 flared, somewhat ignominiously, on the mainstream agenda before fading. This isn’t to say that such activities aren’t worthwhile, or productive. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa surely owed some of its success to becoming a cause celebre, for example. It does mean that complete consistency across all parties is near impossible. As Mark Levine notes, in an article on the website of censorship watch organisation Freemuse,

“[I]f calls for boycotts were to multiply — if, for example, there was a call to boycott Russia by activists in response to the verdict against Pussy Riot — artists would be in a very difficult situation. Today more than ever artists survive on touring rather than selling records. If a group tours globally the chances are high that they will perform in a fair number of countries with problematic records on issues like freedom of speech… And of course, for “anti-imperialist” artists there would be little choice but to boycott the US and most NATO countries — some fifty countries presently contribute troops to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, for example — as well as Russia and China, given their clearly imperialist foreign policies. Such a list would, of course, leave very few countries left to tour. Because of this, it is unlikely that most artists will begin agreeing to boycott systematic human rights violators; nor is it that clear that citizens in such countries would prefer artists to stay away until the situation improves.”

But Levine also remarks upon choice,

“Ultimately, individual artists will have to determine whether the situation in a particular country is serious enough for them to sacrifice the income and experience of performing there in order to support fellow artists or oppressed citizens or occupied peoples.”

Not being able to support everybody isn’t a case for supporting nobody and if the Pussy Riot case has been useful in any respect, it has been to bring the issue of censorship and the role of the musician back to centre-stage and allow for a conversation on the topic. It’s easier to sing ‘Feed the World’ than ‘Address matters of corporate and international governance that exacerbate third-world hunger’. By the same token, it’s relatively easy to hang one’s banner on the Pussy Riot case as opposed to the myriad others that occur daily. (The Freemuse site contains a long and depressing list of these).

That their politics differ radically from many of their celebrity supporters is in some ways moot. Politics is messy and complicated – but so is music. This is what makes them awkward but perhaps appropriate bedfellows. And you don’t have to sign up to a radical anarchist agenda or ignore the travails of others to be critical of the blunt incident at the root of the coverage, three women imprisoned for singing a song in a church.

Adam Behr

International Association for the Study of Popular Music, ‘Statement Relating to the Detention of Pussy Riot on the grounds of hooliganism’

 

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