Today in the International Herald Tribune I read a report, by Michael Schwirtz, on the Russian rock musician Yuri Shevchuk. It describes Shevchuk’s frustration with the waning influence of Russian rock, and its incitements to freedom, on Russian politics.  (I have not yet been able to find an online link to it.)

Until he recently confronted Vladimir Putin on television, I did not know of Shevchuk’s music or role on the Russian scene in musically preparing the way for the end of the Soviet Union.

This story touches on some elements relevant to the rock and theology conversation, the question of rock’s decline as a social-political force (interpreted often here at R&T as also a force of ‘spiritual’ significance) chief among them. The regret in Shevchuk’s remarks is evident: “The battle for freedom was very important for many but, as it turns out, not for all.” It sounds like he really means “not for many.”

In a story that bears remarkable resemblance across cultures, Shevchuk recounts how rock became a way of dealing with what was small about the oppressive world in which he grew up: “The sound of the electric guitar with fuzz freed our generation from this darkness and slavery.” But he concludes regretfully, “there is not a rock movement here like there once was.”

It is hard to disentangle the many pieces present here, which any sympathetic reader, in or out of rock culture, can understand: the slipping away of dreams, the inability of models of musical engagement with society to change, and the ways that desires for freedom get so easily retracked into precipitous desires for a master, especially in the economic and social chaos of the new Russia.

What does this mean for theologians and rock artists committed to freedom? There are only so many ways to spell ‘no easy answers,’ but I would be interested to know of studies of the micropolitics of everyday Russian life, how margins of resistance are felt and worked, and how music might help to specify, substantiate, or stretch out these margins. I mostly know of contemporary Russia what I read in the papers, but without equating two different societies, we in the United States also face an expiration of believable hope for a freedom that once would have been called revolutionary — this is in some ways the very essence of the postmodern condition. (And for Catholics globally, this expiration is the very situation of the church today as well.)

We probably need musicians and theologians of all kinds: those like Shevchuk who come from a cohort when all seemed possible, and who still want it all, those from a cohort perhaps more like mine when all never seemed possible and who want what we can have, and those from the newest generation who are in process of defining how they will push us musically toward a new mystical-political consideration.

Tom Beaudoin
London, England

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