Music vs. Politics: the Image of Russia in the Songs by British Pop Singers of the 1960s and 2010s

DOI

10.2991/icassee-19.2019.170How to use a DOI?

Keywords

intercultural dialogue; popular music; song; Soviet Union; West; Cold War; The Beatles; Sting; Robbie Williams; “Back in the USSR”; “Russians”; “Party like a Russian”

Abstract

The article deals with three most famous songs by British performers about Russia: 1) “Back in the USSR” by the Beatles (1968); 2) “Russians” by Sting (1985) and “Party like a Russian” by Robbie Williams (2016). The author investigates how the image of Russia in Western popular music has been transformed in a historical perspective. Each song is analyzed in terms of social context of its appearance, musical means of its expression and visual images used. The work also traces the reaction to these songs in Russian media and popular culture. The author concludes that from the deliberately fictional image of another country (“Back in the USSR”) through the open voicing of the problem of the Cold War (“Russians”), the song discourse comes to a total irony over certain representatives of the nation (“Party like a Russian”).

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Daria Zhurkova
PY  - 2019/11
DA  - 2019/11
TI  - Music vs. Politics: the Image of Russia in the Songs by British Pop Singers of the 1960s and 2010s
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 820
EP  - 825
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icassee-19.2019.170
DO  - 10.2991/icassee-19.2019.170
ID  - Zhurkova2019/11
ER  -