ABSTRACT
This chapter considers t.A.T.u'.s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) performance as a productive flashpoint of East-West misreading and failed translation that might account for the duo's very different reception in Russia and the West. It also highlights some of the ways in which post-Soviet appropriations of international pop styles wittingly or unwittingly mock the moral pieties and hypocrisy of Western democratic societies while coyly asserting the uniqueness and innate superiority of "Russianness" and its foundational mythologies. Musically, t.A.T.u'.s dance tunes are composed of standard synthesized cadences and their lyrics weave narratives of fearless resistance, emotional suffering, and youthful rebellion in a manner entirely consistent with the global pop styles marketed to local youth cultures. The ESC notoriously mingles kitsch and geopolitics as it annually constructs the collective memory of European cooperation while dramatizing the impossibility of escaping the borders and boundaries of nation and culture, gender and sexuality, self and other.
