ABSTRACT
Visiting Russia today one cannot help but be struck by the commonalities—perhaps banalities—of global popular culture. At the beginning of April 2002, Britney Spears’s hit “I Am Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” was simultaneously number 2 in the MTV Russia charts and the UK official Top Forty, Eminem wielded a chainsaw menacingly from the front cover of the Russian youth magazine Ptiuch, and the British (U.S.-networked) game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” had top audience ratings across Russia. 1 Indeed, from the mid-1990s, Russia has been firmly in the global loop. At the “alternative” end of the music scene, new urban dance music—techno, gabber, hard core, trance, jungle, drum and bass, speed garage, trip hop, ambient, house, and funk—are spun in the clubs of even the smaller provincial cities of Russia, and Western DJs frequently include Moscow and St. Petersburg on their guest appearance list. At the popular end of the market, meanwhile, the newly commercialized Russian pop industry has grown sufficiently confident to inflect global pop with a local accent; all archetypes of contemporary Western popular music—girl bands, boy bands, bad boy rappers, quirky female soloists—have domestic equivalents. The West, in short, is no longer “forbidden fruit” in Russia; it is right there—on the television screen, in your headphones, on the street, and in the shops.
