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Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia, by Thomas Cushman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 403 pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-79142544-4.
In his interviews with members of the St. Petersburg rock music scene, Cushman finds in the music "an active code of resistance and a template which was used for the formation of individual and collective identity" (p. 91). This is a claim often made about rock (and also often contested), but almost always within the context of Western capitalism. In Notes from Underground it emerges from a quite different setting. The book is littered with the words of musicians who voice their dreams, pleasures, and frustrations. Together they create a kind of oral history of Russian rock music. This particular history is one in which the music was made within and its meaning defined through Soviet communism, its subsequent revision, and its final collapse. Throughout, rock takes on changing social and political significance.
Two approaches have dominated the sociological study of rock music in the West. The first, borrowing from Adorno, has focused upon the mode of production and has concluded that popular music is another form of commercialized culture that merely...