Polly McMichael

My current project is the phenomenon of rock stardom in the last decades of the Soviet Union. I examine rock music's creation of meaning in the Soviet context from different perspectives, including the culture of magnitizdat and "officially" released recordings, the significance and mythologies of live performance, the place of the verbal text in rock music, and the modes of individual and collective authorship that rock groups create. I also look at the ways in which rock music, traditionally thought of as a non-official or even oppositional form of expression, co-existed with the cultural institutions of the Soviet state and how it related to officially supported popular forms within Soviet estrada. The groups whose careers and creativity are discussed include Mashina vremeni, Akvarium, DDT, Kino and Nautilus Pompilius. This project has been supported by an AHRC Fellowship (2010-2011), which enabled me to interview former participants in the rock scenes of Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk and Riga.

Related current projects bring my expertise in Russian popular music up to the present day. These include work on Pussy Riot as a phenomenon with a problematic relationship to popular music, and on the representation of Soviet and Russian popular music stars on film. I am working on the singer-songwriter Zemfira Ramazanova (front-woman of the group Zemfira, founded 1998) and her reshaping of the genres of Russian popular song. I have also begun research on Slovenian popular music culture.