If you were a Cold War kid, growing in the sunset of the Reagan years, what did you know about Ukraine? Maybe you knew about the reactor in Chernobyl that irradiated half of Europe, and that scene in where the fur-hat-wearing Ukrainian smashes Kramer and Newman’s game of on the subway (“ !”). Maybe you saw, in the 1994 Olympics, Nancy Kerrigan finish second to Oksana Baiul, a waifish orphan turned figure skater who came from that newly independent ex-Soviet country. If you were born an American millennial, did you hear about the Ukrainian revolutions? There was the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the Maidan Revolution in 2013.
Did you know what all those massive crowds of Ukrainian citizens were protesting for, or against? Now we all know more about Ukraine—but Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of 2022 has flattened it again, into a site of ongoing tragedy and/or wartime resilience. If you, like me, have been paying close attention to Ukraine for years, you have been sick with worry over the damage and loss of this unjust war, over the existential threat it poses to this place, but also over the ways it has again reduced Ukraine to a collection of stereotypes and catastrophe. All of which is why the new, lovingly curated collection titled arrives as both a sonic balm and a reminder that Ukraine is not merely some liminal backwater.
The ambition of this musical anthology is vast: to recuperate, rehabilitate, and celebrate experiments in Ukrainian popular music in th.