Taking a break from the state level politics that inspired his earlier work on "The Rebirth of Politics in Russia," at the beginning of the 21st century Michael Urban spent his nights in the smoky clubs of Moscow and St. Petersburg pursuing his passion, documenting how and why Russia got the blues. The result of this effort, in which Urban was assisted by Andrei Evdokimov, host of Moscow's weekly radio show, "All This Blues," is an elegant, accessible seven chapter volume that invites the reader to explore with him the key personae and paradoxes that comprise Russia's world of blues.
Early in the book, Urban directs his readers to two cultural paradoxes that are central to the Russian blues phenomenon. First is the contentious issue of authenticity. How is it, Urban asks, that Russian bluesmen (and I add here parenthetically that the volume is heavily male gendered; apparently not many Russian ladies sing the blues) state that their soulful yearnings are best expressed in musical genres that originated in the Mississippi delta and inner-city Chicago? Their answers suggest that discovery of the blues (which first arrived in Russia via 1960s British blues rock), born of impoverished, disenfranchised African Americans, sated an expressive void, long waiting to be filled. No other genre would do. Yet the blues is a problematic non-native medium. Its lyrics are in English, a language that most of the performers, to say nothing of the audience, do not understand. Urban explains, mainly through the words of the bluesmen he interviews, that the foreign language, foreign rhythm and unfamiliar tones of this emotionally laden medium actually function to heighten its authenticity. Few attempts to sing the blues in Russian have succeeded.
Which leads to the second paradox: Blues, a raunchy low cultural form, produced and consumed by the dispossessed black folk of rural and urban America, was converted into a high cultural form in Russia during the 1990s by self-appointed cultural enlighteners. Urban blends an analysis of the role of Soviet cultural elites with the hard times that these very elites have recently encountered as nouveaux riches capitalists have altered the supply and demand of art, literature and music to suit their hardly refined tastes. As they strive to remain true to the original, throughout the book blues performers reiterate their goal of educating the public about the universal appeal of a genre that, in its unrestrained expressions of pain and passion, eschews commercialism and celebrates freedom.
The volume's last two chapters, "Identity and Community" and "Politics" forge a direct link between the sites, people and events of Russian blues to the "unsettled times" of the volume's subtitle. These last 25 pages are also the place where Russia Gets the Blues goes down and dirty into social theory. If B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn were the frequently cited exogenous names in the first 100 pages, now Foucault, Bourdieu, Edelman and Hebdige have taken their place. Here Urban stresses that the blues, valorized as a Western import yet having nothing in common with the vulgar materialism and indiscriminate consumption that index the West, ties its performers into a subculturally defined subversive community that expresses and evokes the "West's bad conscience" (p. 141). Invoking shades of Paul Gilroy without calling his name, the book closes on the guardedly optimistic note that by "disturbing the black/white dichotomy" (p. 150), Russian blues and bluesmakers can, if only through song, join blacks--not only of the distant and out-of-reach USA, but also Gypsies, and the so-called people of the Caucasus and Central Asia--into the "us" of Russia.