ABSTRACT
Sonic Statecrafting analyses the intersection between popular music and state politics in Uzbekistan. Based on extensive field- and archival work in Tashkent, this chapter looks at the remarkable era from 2001 onwards, when the Uzbek government promoted a rather unlikely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight. Under president Islom Karimov, various state institutions were entrusted with estrada’s development and control, and the creation of milliy estrada – national estrada – as a sonic incarnation of national independence ideology was put high on the agenda of government policies.
How did the Uzbek state in the Karimov era govern popular music – and govern through popular music? Why was it so concerned about popular music in the first place? And what is the legacy of 15 years of concerted estrada politics in post-Karimov Uzbekistan? In addressing these questions, Sonic Statecrafting shows the continuing significance of Soviet concepts for framing the nexus between music, artists and the state, and for explaining the extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it challenges classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models for researching culture in authoritarian states.
