Pop Goes the Frontline

More notes on the musical showdown between Georgia and Russia, from my regular column in The Moscow Times:

Pop music became the latest political battleground between Georgia and Russia over the weekend, as the government in Tbilisi tried to take some of the glitterball shine off the Eurovision song contest in Moscow by financing a rival rock festival which celebrated “freedom” and “European culture”. The implication being, presumably, that Tbilisi’s enemies in the Kremlin cherish neither of them.

Georgia had withdrawn its entry to this year’s Eurovision after the lyrics to the song, We Don’t Wanna Put In – an impudent snipe at the Russian prime minister set to a kitschy disco beat – were judged to be unacceptably political by the organisers. If the song was intended to cause controversy, have some fun at Moscow’s expense and put Georgia back in the international headlines, it worked. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman described it as an act of musical “hooliganism”, although Georgian officials insisted that Eurovision’s ruling was politically-motivated censorship. They responded by backing a lavish three-day festival called Tbilisi Open Air - Alter/Vision, one of the biggest musical events ever held in this country.

This isn’t the first time that pop has been used for political purposes here in Georgia. During the ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003 which swept President Mikheil Saakashvili to power, the country’s best-known rockers fuelled insurrectionary fervour by playing live to protesters outside parliament as they struggled to oust Georgia’s former leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. In recent weeks, demonstrations against Saakashvili have been partly inspired by a controversial pop star who has ‘imprisoned’ himself in an imitation jail cell to create an unusual anti-government reality-television show. Opposition activists have followed his lead by blocking streets outside parliament and other state buildings with hundreds of similar ‘cells’.

Georgia may have received a propaganda boost from this year’s Eurovision, but in 2008, it wasn’t so fortunate. Last year’s entry was sung by Diana Gurtskaya, a blind refugee from Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed rebel region which split from Georgian government control during a vicious civil war in the early 1990s. “My land is still crying, torn in half,” she wailed. “Something’s gotta change, something’s gotta change!” But the title of her song, Peace Will Come, could hardly have been a more inaccurate prediction: just three months after the Eurovision finals, Georgia was at war again, and the “cold bitter tears” of Gurtskaya’s lyrics continued to flow.