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The Sound State of Uzbekistan Popular Music and Politics in The Karimov Era 2019001408 9781138486140 9781351046435
The Sound State of Uzbekistan Popular Music and Politics in The Karimov Era 2019001408 9781138486140 9781351046435
The Sound State of Uzbekistan Popular Music and Politics in The Karimov Era 2019001408 9781138486140 9781351046435
The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov
Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and
state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival
research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistan’s
politics (2001–2016), when the Uzbek government promoted a rather un-
likely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre
of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance
it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate
bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight.
The Sound State of Uzbekistan shows the continuing legacy of Soviet con-
cepts to frame the nexus between music, artists and the state, and e xplains the
extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it c hallenges
classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models
for researching culture in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Proposing to
approach lives in music under authoritarianism as a form of normality in-
stead, the author promotes a post-Cold War paradigm in music studies.
Arnold Bake
A Life with South Asian Music
Bob van der Linden
Kerstin Klenke
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 Kerstin Klenke
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Klenke, Kerstin, author.
Title: The sound state of Uzbekistan : popular music and politics in
the Karimov era / Kerstin Klenke.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: SOAS musicology series | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001408| ISBN 9781138486140 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781351046435 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—Political aspects—Uzbekistan. |
Music and state—Uzbekistan.
Classification: LCC ML3917.U93 K54 2019 | DDC 781.6309587—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001408
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Preliminaries xiii
Entering estrada 1
References 293
Index 311
Illustrations
Figures
I.1 Tamara Khanum and her musicians in the 1930s 15
I.2 A poster from the 1960s for a concert by the Estrada
Orchestra of Uzbekistan and its soloists 18
I.3 A vinyl single by Yalla on the GDR label Amiga, 1975 21
I.4 Botir Qodirov performs at a wedding, 2016 24
I.5 A jazz matinée at the Tashkent House of Photography, 2005 26
I.6 A tribute evening to Viktor Tsoi at the club Vertikal'nyy Mir
[Vertical World], 2008 27
I.7 A poster announcing a concert by Thomas Anders from
Modern Talking, 2006 28
1.1 The Turkiston Palace, 2005 31
1.2 The entrance to O’zbeknavo at the rear side of the Turkiston
Palace, 2008 32
1.3 The structure of O’zbeknavo and the organs linked to or
embedded in it according to PKM-272 2001 41
3.1 At the folk fair for Independence Day in Alisher Navoiy
National Park, 2008 82
3.2 The Palace of the Friendship of Peoples, 2006 100
3.3 A poster for a charity concert organised by O’zbeknavo
(second from right) between posters for a commercial
concert, for a circus show and for a printer on one of the
“Tashkent Announcements” boards in the city centre, 2005 101
4.1 Nihol laureates sing the Nihol hymn in the final minutes of
the awards gala show at Independence Palace, 2008 117
5.1 At the festival of Uzbekistan – Our Shared House, 2016 157
5.2 The State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, 2016 174
5.3 A singer and her playback DJ at the Bek restaurant, 2005 176
5.4 “In clothes there is a reflection of spiritual values”: girls in
milliy style and demeanour according to official standards
(Andijon, 2016) 184
x Illustrations
5.5 Shahzoda in un-milliy style and demeanour according to
official standards, 2005 191
6.1 The entrance to National TV and Radio [O’zbekiston Milliy
Teleradiokompaniyasi], 2005 208
6.2 A record store on Bobur Street, 2006 224
Tables
1.1 Licence categories and fees, 2001–2003 (PKM-285 2001) 44
1.2 Licence categories and fees from 2014 onwards (PKM-196 2014) 45
4.1 Prize scheme for O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim 122
4.2 Organisation committee for O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim
1997, according to PKM-403 1996 130
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the generous support of var-
ious institutions and individuals, and it is to them that I want to extend my
deepest gratitude here. My first exploratory trip to Uzbekistan in 2001 was
financed by my father, Werner Klenke, who saw both his daughters set off
for fieldwork in different parts of Asia at about the same time. The Volkswa-
gen Foundation awarded me an individual project grant as part of their
“Between Europe and the Orient – A Focus on Research and Higher Edu-
cation in/on Central Asia and the Caucasus” programme for 2003–2006. I
am grateful to Wolfgang Levermann, the programme coordinator, for al-
lowing me maximum flexibility in scheduling trips between Germany and
Uzbekistan. Fieldwork stays in 2008 and 2016 were funded by the Hanover
University of Music, Drama and Media and the Center for World Music at
the University of Hildesheim Foundation respectively.
This financial and logistic support would not have amounted to anything
without the willingness of institutions in Uzbekistan to support me and my
research. In Tashkent, my fieldsite, this included first and foremost the State
Conservatory of Uzbekistan, the Institute for Art Studies, the Ministry of
Culture, the Estrada Association O’zbeknavo, the Central State Archive,
the Institut Français d’Études sur l’Asie Centrale (IFEAC), National TV
and Radio, various independent radio and TV stations and recording stu-
dios. I am grateful to all of them for granting me access to their staff and
their resources.
My deepest gratitude, however, I owe to the numerous people, particu-
larly in Tashkent, but also in Samarqand and among the Uzbek diaspora,
who generously shared their time, their knowledge, their music, their con-
tacts, their thoughts and their life with me – some for shorter spans of time,
some for already more than 15 years. I would very much like to honour
them all by listing their names here. Many interlocutors, acquaintances and
friends, however, whose opinions and statements have found their way into
this book, have wished to remain anonymous. Some who did not express a
desire for anonymity earlier may have since changed their minds – or may
yet do so in the near future. Because of this, I have decided not to put their
names in print. I will instead find other ways to demonstrate my gratitude.
Until then – a heartfelt kattakon rahmat and spasibo ogromnoye!
xii Acknowledgements
I profited immensely during periods of research and writing from my
exchanges with colleagues from ethnomusicology and various other disci-
plines. Specifically, I would like to mention here Irene Hilgers, Ted Levin,
Nick Megoran, Laura Adams, Ingeborg Baldauf, Tommaso Trevisani, Eva
Maurer, Martin Stokes, Mirjam Leuze, Marlene Laruelle, Habiba Fathi,
Philipp Reichmuth, Rano Turaeva, Lucille Lisack, Thomas Hilder, Sanubar
Baghirova, Oliver Seibt, Maurice Mengel, Florian Carl and Michael Fuhr.
A special thanks I owe to my dissertation advisors Raimund Vogels and
Julio Mendívil for their support and encouragement, their advice and their
comments. I am also grateful to the remaining members of my dissertation
committee, Susanne Rode-Breymann and Stefan Weiss, for turning my viva
into an inspiring discussion.
In the initial stages of my project, Razia Sultanova and Hamid Ismailov
invited me to stay with them in London twice, and I am deeply indebted
to them for their hospitality, for sharing their personal histories of Uzbek
estrada and for providing me with valuable contacts in Tashkent. Anna For-
tunova and two Uzbek friends who wish to stay anonymous generously gave
their time to assist with the transcription of interviews, while Annika Frech
miraculously turned the drab day when I submitted this book in its earlier
form as a PhD thesis into a feast. My sister and colleague, Karin Klenke,
not only came to share my fieldsite in 2004 for some weeks, but also took
charge of the references and brightened up the last weeks of writing with a
regular supply of sweets.
In the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, two anony-
mous referees and series editor Rachel Harris provided helpful comments to
strengthen and clarify arguments. I am grateful for their scrupulous reading
and their valuable recommendations. In the final stages of revisions, Chris-
topher Geissler helped to make the text sound more English. Any r emaining
Germanisms are my own – as are any mistakes. Florian Mühlfried has lived
with this book project as long as he has lived with me, and I am full of grat-
itude to him for all kinds of support: from pushing me on and cheering me
up – at just the right time and in right measure – to discussing the anthropol-
ogy of postsocialism and reading the manuscript over and again in different
stages of revision.
Several people who were involved in this project at various times and in
various roles in Uzbekistan and Germany have not lived to see it completed –
some went at the end of a full life, others prematurely. From among the
latter, I wish to remember two people in particular, without whom I would
not have written the book the way I did: Rüdiger Schumacher, teacher, ini-
tial dissertation advisor and fantastic host, who helped my research project
come into being, and Irene Hilgers, colleague, friend and great comrade in
carnival, who shared the pleasures and pains of fieldwork in Uzbekistan
with me. It is to their memory that I dedicate this book.
Preliminaries
a a as in father x ch as in loch
e e as in elder q a guttural variant of k
i i as in pin j j as in joke
o o as in pot ch ch as in much
u oo as in cool sh sh as in rush
o’ as the German ö g’ a mixture of ch as in loch and r as in ferry
r tapped r
Transition
In a classic reading of the transitology paradigm, transition is a synonym
for processes of democratisation in the course of regime change.1 Conse-
quently, a country in transition is perceived as being in a limbo state, in
an intermediate, provisional zone, marked by degrees of “not any more”
and “not yet”. This imaginary protracted passage – in the case of Soviet
6 Entering estrada
successor states between actually existing socialism and capitalist liberal
democracy – is usually interpreted as an inherently positive development.
Transitological accounts of post-Soviet political change present a judge-
mental narrative of teleological evolution, the gradual shedding of a tainted
past for the sake of a bright future, with independence marking the first
milestone on this path. This narrative is sometimes explicit, but more often
it is implicit, as if drawing on a seemingly self-evident scheme of values. If
applied to the political economy of Uzbek estrada, which is characterised by
only a rudimentary deregulation of state administration, this model will au-
tomatically produce the following analysis: Continuities with Soviet modes
of governmental oversight in the sphere of music are outdated and odd – not
dissimilar to the problematic perezhitki proshlogo, the infamous “survivals
of the past”2 in the socialist era. At the same time, the emergence of market
relations in the estrada scene can be hailed as a harbinger of democracy,
evidence of liberal progress already achieved, while oppositional musical
activities can be taken as proof of a civil society developing. Similarly, re-
courses to pre-Soviet modes of musical practices and thought can be judged
as signs of de-Sovietisation and thus normalisation.
An interpretation of this kind, while not an anomaly in research on mu-
sic and musicians in the postsocialist world, tells us little about the experi-
ences, opinions and visions of people in situ. Analysing societies from an
imagined ideal future, which automatically renders their present as flawed,
and presupposing the existence of a universal scheme of economic and po-
litical values, this classic transition model is unhelpful as a framework for
understanding postsocialist lives. Given how well established and enduring
authoritarian governments in the post-Soviet realm have been, a model that
can only make sense of them as reversals, delays or detours on the road
to liberal democracy is of questionable heuristic value. Why assume peo-
ple or states to perennially be “in between” or “after” something, ignoring
the condition of the present on the assumption that it is provisional – and
deficient?
For this and related reasons, social anthropology has widely dismissed
the classic paradigm of transitology and partially even the concepts of
transition and postsocialism as such.3 While I am sympathetic to these dis-
contents, discarding transition when doing research in Uzbekistan itself is
practically impossible. Though the concept is fundamentally misleading as
a theoretical approach to the field, it is omnipresent in political discourse in
the field (Brandtstädter 2007). A teleological transition from a dark socialist
past to a bright capitalist, liberal and democratic future is exactly how Islom
Karimov’s government envisaged Uzbekistan’s path of social, political and
economic progress. Numerous writings on national independence ideology
explicate this particular narrative of transition with its essentially optimis-
tic outlook, and it was widely, even aggressively, promoted in society in the
Karimov era. However dominant it may be, the official line on transition is
still just one way to understand actually existing authoritarianism in Uz-
bekistan. It exists alongside and is imbricated with other stories, alternative
Entering estrada 7
perceptions, different experiences and deviating interpretations of Uzbeki-
stan’s present and its relation to a past and to a future.
Because of its close entanglement with state politics, the estrada scene is
a particularly rich field for narratives of transition – or non-transition, for
that matter. This is not necessarily because this proximity tends towards the
replication of government transitology, though it does, but because it forces
actors to stake out their own position with respect to this dominant frame-
work. My research questions were framed by these narratives of change and
non-change viewed through the prism of estrada. If my contacts perceived
Uzbekistan in general and the estrada scene in particular to be transitioning
at all, which most did, I wanted to know where from and where to: Where
do they locate the start of this process, and what would be its realistic or
desirable end? Does the inherently teleological thinking of socialism overlap
with current transitology? Are their visions for the future modelled on any
examples? And how do they evaluate the past, present and future in these
stories of passage?
As indicated earlier, the Uzbek government’s estradisation policies did
not meet with general approval, and complaints about the current state of
affairs – musical or otherwise – were regularly coupled with worries about
bleak prospects and references to how things had been dealt with well in the
past or should be dealt with ideally in the future. Often it was ideas about
normality where accounts about the trajectory that Uzbekistan and its mu-
sics had taken – and would or should take – converged at: What is a normal
state? How does a normal state deal with music in general and estrada in
particular? What role does a genre like estrada play in the social life of a
normal state? Finally, what often seemed to me to be a specifically socialist
or authoritarian approach to estrada was entirely unmarked for many of my
interlocutors. For them, it constituted the proper, ultimately and universally
normal way of governing music – or governing through music.4 The cate-
gory of normality links transition to authoritarianism, the second overarch-
ing context informing my research questions.
Authoritarianism
President Islom Karimov’s rule in Uzbekistan spanned more than a quar-
ter of a century (1990–2016), starting in the Uzbek SSR’s final year of ex-
istence and lasting until the 25th anniversary of the Uzbek nation state’s
independence. His regime took the form of what has been termed “neo-
patrimonial authoritarianism” (Ilkhamov 2007), a style of governing that
relies heavily on patronage networks which are forged from – and newly
forge – individual or familial loyalties, while also providing pathways for co-
ercion. Tight control over these networks was coupled with the presidential
family’s and the wider ruling elite’s monopoly over key, lucrative branches
of the economy, which provided them not only with the opportunity for the
personal accumulation of capital, but also with the means to financially sus-
tain allegiances. Extreme centralisation, an extensive security structure, the
8 Entering estrada
absence of legal certainty and human rights violations worked together to
prevent the rise of opponents or rivals, to stifle protest and to pre-emptively
deter potential dissenters through an atmosphere of fear. At the same time,
an elaborate ideology, which would serve as the conceptual foundation for
Islom Karimov’s rule (see Chapter 7), was to be propagated through close
administration in the sphere of culture, reforms in the educational sector
and – at least partial – oversight of the media and other information chan-
nels among other means.
In western European media, authoritarian states are often portrayed as
both menacing and bizarre in nearly equal measure. Rather than Uzbeki-
stan, it is more frequently North Korea that serves as the epitome of danger
and absurdity, followed closely by Turkmenistan. And quite unsurprisingly,
state spectacles, sweeping coercion, kitschy propaganda and eccentric po-
licing of the arts lend themselves to sensational journalism. Some scholarly
analyses of authoritarianism – and music in authoritarianism – have the
same tendency to engage in what I would call totalitarianisation, a narrow
focus on the regulated and prohibited, the odd and strange, the dark and
bleak.5 But just as classic transitology tells us little about life in actually
existing postsocialism, a totalitarianising approach tells us little about life
in actually existing authoritarianism. Ultimately, totalitarianisation in rep-
resenting people and music is, to quote Kofi Agawu, an “investment in dif-
ference” (2003: 216).
On closer scrutiny, totalitarianisation reveals itself as a heritage of the
Cold War era. It has survived the end of the Soviet Union and the eastern
bloc as a representational strategy and found new and easy targets in the
postsocialist world. Western European and Anglo-American musicology
may have begun to tackle its role in colonial and neo-colonial endeavours in
recent years, but, with rare exceptions, there seems to be little awareness so
far of the need to engage in a comparable project to “de-Cold-Warify” the
discipline. This despite the fact that the ideologies and practices of the Cold
War were similarly encompassing and just as violent as those of colonialism.
They shaped the world for decades and left us deeply ingrained structures
of binary thinking and hierarchical imaginaries, which continue to deter-
mine global geopolitics as well as scholarly and everyday perspectives on the
“(post)socialist East” and the “liberal West” (see Chapter 2).
I see a focus on normality as part of an epistemological politics to overcome
this problematic heritage in the discipline. An anti-totalitarianising stance
does not mean, however, neglecting the dark sides of authoritarianism. It just
accentuates the quotidian and the ordinary, the trivial and the unexceptional–
and it adds the pleasures and joys of music into the mix. What is a normal life
in music under authoritarian rule? If measured against standards of normal-
ity in western liberal thinking, much of what goes on in Uzbek estrada would
not seem normal. What passes for normal in the field is frequently wider,
sometimes narrower – but mostly just different. This difference, however, is
not what I am concerned with in this book. On the contrary, in exploring
the politics of music in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, I have been more interested
Entering estrada 9
in common ground. As strange, stifling and restrictive as Uzbekistan’s ad-
ministration of estrada might be, state engagement with music is not limited
to authoritarianism.
Liberal democracies are also concerned with governing sound – and gov-
erning through sound. They believe in the edifying social or psychic effects
of certain kinds of music (and not others), are financially or administratively
involved in promoting certain genres (and not others), and for many, the rep-
resentation of the nation in music matters, evident in, for example, the estab-
lishment of national youth orchestras, the founding of folk music archives
or participation in the Eurovision Song Contest. None of these policies are
less ideological than the Uzbek policies related to estrada – they have only
acquired the aura of being the normal, if not universal, way of dealing with
music, at least for those acting within the framework of the respective ideol-
ogies. In pointing to these commonalities instead of highlighting difference
or claiming deviance, I do not seek to trivialise authoritarianism. Rather I
work towards an “embrace of sameness” (Agawu 2003: 169) as a means of
contributing to what Nicholas Tochka has termed “a post-Cold War musi-
cology” (2016: 214). At the same time, I work towards claiming a space for
the arts in analyses of the state in Central Asia.
Notes
1 Originating in the political sciences and sociology, theories about transition
were first developed in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to regime change in
Latin America and southern Europe and came to be transferred to postsocialist
political and economic transformations in the early 1990s. An influential early
work of classical transitology was Samuel Huntington’s book, The Third Wave:
Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991). Under increasing critique
from the mid-1990s onwards, the approach gradually lost its appeal in the aca-
demic sphere. Implicitly, however, some of its tenets and values are still present
in scholarship. In policy-making and journalism, transitology is quite a common
conceptual framework today (Gans-Morse 2004).
2 In the Soviet era, “survivals of the past” or “vestiges of the past” were defined –
and fought – as residues of former social, political and economic regimes thought
to hinder progress towards socialism. Although “survivals” could be anything
from economic relations to festivities, from greetings to tastes (Markov n.d.),
the most prominent was religion. On practices of Islam as “survivals” in Soviet
Central Asia, see Anderson (1993) and DeWeese (2011).
3 Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the postsocialist world, social
anthropologists have probably been the most ardent and persistent critics of
transitology, countering its evolutionist teleology with evidence of the unpre-
dictability and uncertainty – in short, erraticism – of transformation processes
(see, for example, Burawoy & Verdery 1999a; Buyandelgeriyn 2008; Tökés 2000;
Verdery 1991). Important collections of case studies that question the validity of
the transition model have been Berdahl, Bunzl and Lampland (2000), Burawoy
and Verdery (1999b), Hann (2002b), Pine and Bridger (1998), and Sahadeo and
Zanca (2007). Influential critics from outside social anthropology have included
Bunce (1995), Carothers (2002) and Cohen (1999).
4 In her study of Swedish Estonians in the early 1990s, Sigrid Rausing also en-
countered the topic of normality. In contrast to her interlocutors, mine tended
not to perceive the Soviet past as “not normal”, nor were they sure that they were
heading towards a “normal” future (Rausing 2004: 2). See Laura Adams (2010:
28) for ideas about a “normal” state among members of the Uzbek cultural elite.
5 For representations of Uzbekistan with a totalitarianising thrust, see Everett-
Heath (2003) and McGlinchey (2011). Already the title of the latter’s book is
revealing: Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia.
6 These are, among others, Trevisani (2011), Reeves (2014), Beyer (2016), Ismail-
bekova (2017), Megoran (2017b) and the individual contributions in Reeves,
Rasanayagam and Beyer (2014).
7 Sociologist Laura Adams has done extensive research on state spectacles in
Uzbekistan (1998; 1999; 2005; 2008; 2010), political geographer Nick Megoran
has included estrada in analyses of discourses of danger in Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan (2005; 2008a) and social anthropologist Eva-Marie Dubuisson has
worked on poetic contests (aitys) in Kazakhstan (2014). Perhaps the most exten-
sive inclusion of poetry and music in social science research can be found in so-
cial anthropologist Jeanne Féaux de la Croix’s (2016) monograph, Iconic Places
in Central Asia, but here the wider framework is not the question of state politics.
Prelude
Introducing estrada
Estrada was something very different from what it is today, when, in the
early twentieth century, it first arrived in the region which is now Uzbeki-
stan. It would be rare for any musical genre not to change to some degree
over the course of a century, but the shifts that the concept of estrada un-
derwent were substantial enough to merit the label metamorphosis. In fact,
estrada was not even a musical genre at that time. It was an entertainment
format that had developed in the late nineteenth century, the Russian equiv-
alent of music hall, vaudeville or théâtre de variétés.1 It derived its name
from the French estrade, meaning “stage” or “platform”, and in contrast to
the “large stage” of opera and drama, estrada was often referred to as the
“small stage”. In tsarist Russia, estrada performances took place in front
of socially diverse audiences in restaurants and beer halls, in cinemas and
small theatres as well as outdoors in parks.2
In the first decades of the Soviet era, Russian estrada gradually became
more structured. Ideally, an estrada show was a succession of self-contained
numbers, chosen and arranged for contrast, while, at the same time, adher-
ing to an overarching theme. To accomplish this trick of “unity made from
diversity”, estrada drew on a wide range of art forms, including comedy and
satire, folk and popular songs, the recitation of poems, dance and circus
acts. It often fell to compères to draw links between the individual numbers
and interact with the audience. As such, an estrada performance in early
Soviet Russia might have resembled a show at a French théâtre de variétés or
an English music hall, but, given the increasingly prominent socialist frame-
work of cultural production and administration, its entertainment qualities
became solidly wedded to the goals of education, propaganda and enlight-
enment. From Russia, estrada spread throughout the Soviet Union and into
the socialist countries of eastern Europe.
By 1936, the year the Uzbek SSR’s borders were finally set, the term
estrada was definitely in use. Documents at the Central State Archive in
Tashkent testify to this: “The statute of the Uzbek musical-estrada trust
‘Uzbek Filarmoniya’” from 1935, various documents from 1939 referring to
“estrada-concert activity”, a 1941 decree on the founding of a “mixed na-
tional estrada brigade”, and a 1944 document mentioning “[t]he segregation
of a concert-estrada office from the Uzgosfilarmoniya”.4 The institutional-
isation of music was high on the agenda across the 1930s Soviet Union, not
only in estrada. In 1936, the Tashkent Conservatory was established, fol-
lowed by the Union of Composers and the Symphony Orchestra in 1938. In
line with the Marxist-Leninist logic of evolutionism, these initiatives aimed
to accelerate first and foremost musical, but also socio-political progress
among Uzbeks – and structural measures were closely linked to aesthetic
considerations. As Joseph Stalin had maintained in 1934, works of art were
to be “national in form, socialist in content” in order to help advance the
presumably backward peoples of the USSR towards socialism. And if they
16 Prelude: introducing estrada
were, they would also adhere to the more general aesthetic of socialist real-
ism, which had been proclaimed the new mandate for artistic production
the same year.
It is not clear from archival documents accessible to me what degree of
impact these policies had on Uzbek estrada in the 1930s and 1940s. They
certainly had an effect on other aspects of musical life in the Uzbek SSR,
and would later become evident in estrada too. This was preceded, however,
by many Uzbek artists travelling outside of the republic to perform. The
Uzbek SSR assembled 20 brigades to entertain soldiers at the frontline and
in hospitals and workers in the Urals and Siberia during the Second World
War. According to Leonid Yusupov, these brigades gave more than 4,000
concerts altogether (2004: 33). At the same time, the Leningrad Conserva-
tory was evacuated to Tashkent.5
While estrada had not fully metamorphosed from entertainment format
to musical genre by the 1950s, music had certainly become the dominant art
form in Uzbek estrada. Most people in Uzbekistan today date the origin of
a unique tradition of estrada in the Uzbek SSR to the end of this decade,
which was also the beginning of a golden age for estrada orchestras.
Orchestras were an intrinsic part of Soviet attempts to raise Uzbeks’ “level
of culture”. Music policies to this end took two forms. One measure was
to “improve” local music by approximating it to European aesthetics. This
included the harmonisation of the hitherto monophonic music, tempered
tuning, building instruments into consorts, enlarging the previously small
ensembles to orchestra size, and fixing and canonising the oral heritage
through notation. These measures were applied to the region’s folk music as
well as its classical traditions. The latter encompassed the grand suite forms
that had developed at the former courts in the region, the so-called maqoms,
but also some smaller genres. Due to their relationship to feudal rule and to
Islam, the status of the classical traditions oscillated between endorsement
as a form of refined “folk creativity” and rejection as “class enemy” culture
throughout the Soviet era.6
The second measure to advance “musical progress” was the introduction
of European forms of art music, such as opera, symphony, oratorio and
chamber music. These were to merge with local musical elements to create a
national school of academic music, as it is commonly called in Uzbekistan
today.7 Composers from the Russian SFSR were sent to Tashkent to acceler-
ate the process. The musical results of both approaches were not necessarily
“national in form, socialist in content”, but did usually represent a blend of
Uzbek and European traditions.
In 1958, the State Estrada Orchestra of Uzbekistan was officially institution-
alised under the umbrella of the Filarmoniya. By that time, small dance bands
and entertainment orchestras had risen in number considerably since the 1940s,
usually with a line-up of drums, piano or accordion, bass, brass instruments
and saxophone (Yusupov 2004: 40–42). This development was directly tied
Prelude: introducing estrada 17
to the Russian and Ukrainian evacuees in Tashkent at that time, many of whom
stayed on after the end of the war. In the 1950s, almost half of Tashkent’s pop-
ulation of about 900,000 was European in origin. Orchestras offered a short
programme in cinemas before the film, gave concerts in parks and performed
for open-air dance floors. Their performances, which were a blend of Soviet
and international standards, were catered first and foremost to the taste of a
European audience.
According to Leonid Yusupov, enthusiasm among ethnic Uzbeks was
limited:
Figure I.2 A poster from the 1960s for a concert by the Estrada Orchestra of Uzbek-
istan and its soloists
Source: Courtesy Yunus Turaev.
piano and drums, and occasionally instruments from older Uzbek musical
traditions. Singers who became famous as the orchestra’s soloists included
Rano Sharipova, Muhabbat Shamaeva, Alla Ioshpe, Yunus Turaev and
Eson Kandov (Video I.3).
Uzbek scholars call the style of estrada in the 1950s and the 1960s “sym-
phojazz” or “song symphojazz”. At that time, estrada symphony orchestras
sprang up all over the Soviet Union, and in the 1960s, Tashkent hosted or-
chestras from Moscow, Leningrad, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Lithu-
ania and the Ukraine (Yusupov 2004: 72). Despite receiving praise, Uzbek
artists and orchestras were also criticised for promoting a brand of estrada
with too few specifically Uzbek features.
In 1971, the State Estrada Orchestra of Uzbekistan was merged into the
newly founded Tashkent Music Hall, which presented what in Uzbekistan is
sometimes called “theatre of songs” or “sujet estrada spectacle” (ibid.: 97).
Its first programme in 1973 was called The Travels of Sindbad the Sailor – or
Oriental Fairy Tale, based on themes from the Arabian Nights fables. The
show followed the general estrada principle of contrasting numbers linked
by an overarching theme, but music by far predominated over the other in-
cluded art forms. The Tashkent Music Hall closed in 1978 and the orchestra
was dissolved, but from among its members three ensembles were formed.
Two of these would play an important role in the stylistically already
Prelude: introducing estrada 19
very different Uzbek estrada of the 1970s and 1980s: Sado [Sound] and Navo
[Tune, Melody].
According to Leonid Yusupov, the Estrada Symphony Orchestra at State
TV and Radio started to fall into decline by the late 1970s and the early
1980s too (ibid.: 111). It still exists today, but it has lost much of its former
glamour and grandeur. Its main function is to record the soundtracks for the
major state holidays in Uzbekistan (see Chapter 3). In addition, it still serves
as a musical status symbol in the country and a sign of professionalism in
estrada, substantiating claims that estrada is, indeed, an art form and not
just commercial entertainment.
Figure I.3 A vinyl single by Yalla on the GDR label Amiga (1975)
Source: Courtesy Herbert Schulze.10
recount a long and difficult trip through the desert, as an allegory for the
stagnation era at that time.
Yalla may have been the Uzbek SSR’s most famous estrada export in
the 1970s and the 1980s, but it was not the only VIA at that time. Bands
like Inter, Sintez and Samarkand, plus the above-mentioned Navo and
Sado were also active in the scene and met with success in competitions
outside the republic (Video I.5). On the whole, however, official Uzbek es-
trada was limited to a rather small number of people until the late years of
perestroika. Leaving aside instrumentalists, there were always only about
20–30 singers who had professional status. Amateurs were considerably
more numerous. Today, all estrada from the late 1950s through the late
1980s is commonly labelled retro in Uzbekistan, as it is in the Russian
Federation.
The era that brought the VIAs to the scene also granted estrada access
to the educational sector in an attempt to promote professionalisation
and – in the local parlance then and now – “to prepare cadres”. In 1978, the
22 Prelude: introducing estrada
so-called Studio for Estrada-Circus Art was founded, which offered two-
year courses for students. Renamed the College for Estrada-Circus Art after
independence, still today the name is reminiscent of estrada’s early history
as a kind of théâtre de variétés. In the same year, the Hamza Secondary
School established an estrada department, and estrada performers began to
enrol in the Institute of Culture (Yusupov 2004: 100).
Two developments in the late 1980s profoundly shaped estrada in the
1990s and until today: the first was the widespread use of synthesisers to
replace instruments, which significantly reduced the need for and number
of instrumentalists. The other was that estrada began to make inroads into
a socio-cultural sphere that had been the exclusive preserve of folk and clas-
sical music – weddings. In the late 1980s, concerts were still organised ac-
cording to the estrada principle of “unity made from diversity” and usually
included other art forms. The term estrada, however, had by this time be-
come solidly linked to music, thus completing its metamorphosis.
[T]he band turned on its amplifiers and cut loose with a program of
schmaltzy, Russian-Uzbek techno-ethnic folk-pop music. The dance
floor in the center was immediately filled with couples doing a mixture
of ersatz Uzbek dance, which emphasizes liquescent arm and hand
movements, and the hybridized contemporary dancing found all over
the former Soviet Union whose body language is based on hopping up
and down while shaking the hips. The music was earsplittingly loud …
(1996a: 45, emphasis original)
These critical comments do not capture the great enthusiasm which greeted
bands like Bolalar at the time. In particular, school pupils and students be-
came ardent fans, who, in the later 1990s would also embrace rap of the kind
performed, for example, by Al-Vakil (Video I.7).
The 1990s were also formative for the careers of Nasiba Abdullaeva, the
group Shahzod and Yulduz Usmanova, one of Uzbekistan’s estrada super-
stars, beloved across all generations and famous for her mix of local traditions
and pop. The 2000s saw female singers such as Ozoda Nursaidova, Rayhon,
Shahzoda, Lola, Feruza Djumaniyozova and Sevara Nazarkhan, male sing-
ers Samandar, Anvar Sanaev, Davron Ergashev and Sardor Rahimhon, as
well as the girl-trio Setora rise to fame, while Gulsanam Mamazoitova and
Ozodbek Nazarbekov have certainly been the most prominent stars of the
2010s so far (Video I.8, Video I.9). This list could be extended into a seemingly
endless directory, even if trying to present just a fraction of the groups and
soloists that have entered the scene from the 1990s onwards or were active
when I started to explore Uzbek estrada myself from 2001 onwards.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital of about 2.5 million inhabitants, is the
centre of estrada production in Uzbekistan, and during my first weeks of
fieldwork in the summer of 2003, I was completely overwhelmed by the pres-
ence of estrada in the city. Wherever I went, there seemed to be estrada.
24 Prelude: introducing estrada
In some places, I would have expected it. These were shops and stalls selling
tapes or CDs, on the radio and TV, in taxis and restaurants. In a similar
way, I expected to find estrada in concert halls, such as the Palace of the
Friendship of Peoples or the Turkiston Palace. I did not expect it in other
places, however, such as in the State Conservatory, which added an estrada
department in 1997 that was subsequently enlarged into an estrada faculty
in 2002. I had not assumed I would encounter estrada at weddings, at least
not live – and certainly not performed by the stars of the scene (Figure I.4).
Music competitions I had not thought about, and I had not imagined es-
trada to be furnished by its own government institution. On the other hand,
there were places where I had been sure I would find estrada but did not.
Discos and clubs in Tashkent, for example, hardly ever play Uzbek estrada
or indeed any music produced in Uzbekistan; they almost exclusively play
music from Russia, the USA and the UK.11
The internet only slowly became a place for estrada over the course of my
research. At the beginning of fieldwork in 2003/4, only a few people I met in
Tashkent had stable internet access at home. Many did not own a computer,
and it was mostly students frequenting the internet cafés that were sparsely
spread over the city and offered faster connections than plugging landline
telephone cables into modems. There were some shou biznes portals and a
handful of artists had their personal websites, but watching video clips and
Figure I.4 B
otir Qodirov performs at a wedding, 2016
Prelude: introducing estrada 25
downloading music was a cumbersome, time-consuming affair. Only in the
late 2000s and the 2010s did the internet and later social media become an
important platform for communication between artists and their fans and
for the distribution and reception of Uzbek estrada in general, a process
that was accelerated by the development of smartphones. For some time it
seemed that social media would be the means to circumvent government
regulations for estrada, and in certain regards they were and still are, for
example when video clips are uploaded anonymously on YouTube, but the
estrada administration soon caught up with developments and started to
monitor and regulate artists’ activities on Facebook and VKontakte (see
Chapters 5 and 6).
Figure I.5 A
jazz matinée at the Tashkent House of Photography, 2005
ritual music accompany several wedding events centred on the bride and
involve professional musicians and singers as well as the female members
of the bride’s family – parental or in-laws, depending on the stage of the
wedding procedures (Macrae 2004; Merchant 2005b). Finally, ensembles of
karnay (long trumpet) and surnay (double reed instrument) play an impor-
tant part in announcing wedding events.
Over the course of my research, jazz and bard song did not feature
prominently in public musical life in Tashkent – nor did alternative music
(Figure I.5). From among the latter, rap and electronic music were rarely
heard, and rock music’s prominence fluctuated with government policy,
oscillating between near complete absence and obvious presence in the
form of public rock festivals and live performances by local bands in bars
(Figure I.6) (see Chapter 6).
Foreign popular music enters Uzbekistan predominantly via the internet,
but also through radio and TV. So-called independent FM radio stations
are more important in this respect than National TV and Radio, with its
strong focus on Uzbek music. Russian-language FM stations play mostly
music from Russia, the USA and the UK. In addition to Uzbek estrada and
lirika, Uzbek-language FM stations also play tracks from other Asian coun-
tries, including Tajikistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, India and
the Arab world. Their share of airtime varies based on the station’s format,
Prelude: introducing estrada 27
Figure I.6 A
tribute evening to Viktor Tsoi at the club Vertikal'nyy Mir [Vertical
World], 2008
Figure I.7 A poster announcing a concert by Thomas Anders from Modern Talk-
ing, 2006
Notes
1 The most exhaustive treatment of Russian estrada in the Soviet era is the Russian-
language, three-volume publication Russian Soviet Estrada (Uvarova 1976; 1977;
1981). MacFadyen (2001; 2002a; 2002b) is an excellent source of information on
individual performers.
2 It is not entirely clear in the scholarly literature whether these performances
would have been called estrada at that time already as opposed to having ac-
quired the label retrospectively.
3 A special thanks to Maxim Penson for his contribution to my book in grant-
ing me permission to reproduce this photograph by his grandfather (www.
maxpenson.com)
4 The cited documents are the following: 1935: f. R 94, o. 5, d. 1651, l. 248; 1939:
f. R 2087, o. 1, d. 33 l. 254; 1941: f. R 2087, o.1, d. 68, l 42; 1944: f. R 2087, o. 1, d.
127, l. 2. In Soviet – and often also post-Soviet – usage, the term Filarmoniya
does not designate a symphony orchestra, but a government institution for the
administration of various forms of music. Similarly, the term Uzgosestrada,
which is an abbreviation for Uzbek State Estrada [Uzbekskaya gosudarstvennaya
estrada], is not the name of an ensemble, but an administrative unit.
5 For an overview of Uzbek song production in the war years, see Vakhidov (1976:
59–80).
Prelude: introducing estrada 29
6 For western studies on music policies in the Uzbek SSR, see Levin (1980; 1984;
1993; 1996a; 2002), Djumaev (1993; 2003), During (1993), Slobin (1971), Frolova-
Walker (1998), Kale-Lostuvalı (2007), Sultanova (1993) and Tomoff (2004). The
Soviet-era literature in Russian on the effects of these policies is vast. A good
introduction to music in the Uzbek SSR is the three-volume Russian-language
publication The History of Uzbek Soviet Music (Vyzgo, Karelova & Karomatov
1972; 1973, Vyzgo, Karomatov & Nasyrova 1991).
7 Throughout this book, I use local categories to describe and categorise the over-
all musical field. This means, I use the term academic music for what is com-
monly called art or classical music in Great Britain and the USA, and I use the
term classical music to denote the regional court traditions and their derivatives.
8 For more detailed information on the orchestra era in the Uzbek SSR, see Yu-
supov (2004: 38–75), Bekov (1994: 46–58) and Vakhidov (1976: 81–129).
9 For more detailed information on Yalla and analyses of concert programmes,
see Yusupov (2004: 78–96) and Bekov (1994: 62–65, 71–86).
10 This vinyl single was my chance discovery at a flea market in Germany in 2000,
which greatly contributed to my initial interest in Uzbek estrada. It includes two
songs in German: “Wie schade” [How sad] and “Das wird ein Tag sein” [This
will be a [grand] day].
11 These presences and absences of estrada shaped my fieldwork. Besides engaging
in participant and non-participant observations in various fields of the estrada
scene (conservatory, radio, state administration, concerts, competitions, wed-
dings, bars, discos and clubs) I conducted about 80 conversations altogether,
ranging from long informal talks to more formalised interviews, predominantly
with various representatives of the estrada scene, but also some people outside of
it (singers, instrumentalists, government officials, teachers, students, pupils, col-
leagues, sound engineers, radio hosts, journalists and others). In addition, I col-
lected audio, video, visual and written materials such as CDs, VHS tapes, VCDs
and DVDs, journals, newspapers, merchandising, legal documents, etc. To get
insights into the history of estrada, I spent a total of four weeks in the Central
State Archive in 2004 and 2005 and surveyed the Institute for Art Studies’ yearly
collections of newspaper clippings on music up until the year 2008. When out of
the field, I kept up to date with estrada news through various government, shou
biznes and news websites as well as through contact with colleagues, acquaint-
ances and friends from Uzbekistan.
12 There is another term for song in Uzbek, ashula, which is part of musical ter-
minology in the classical traditions. The term qo’shiq, on the other hand, is not
exclusive to the sphere of estrada, but also designates certain types of songs in
the folk traditions.
13 Whether jazz is currently part of estrada or not, is occasionally a subject of
debate in Uzbekistan. There certainly was stylistic and personal overlap in the
orchestra era and there still is some now. In line with the great majority of my in-
terlocutors, however, I will treat estrada and jazz as separate genres with regard
to the contemporary situation.
1 Administering estrada
Decrees, institutions and
policies
Figure 1.1 T
he Turkiston Palace, 2005
32 Administering estrada
Figure 1.2 The entrance to O’zbeknavo at the rear side of the Turkiston Palace, 2008
The overall rationale for the founding of O’zbeknavo was to lend “government
support to the development of music-dance art” and to answer “requests from
concert-creative collectives of Uzbekistan”. Accordingly, O’zbeknavo was to
be exempted from paying taxes on its revenues for the first three years of its
existence. The money saved was to be invested in “the further development
Administering estrada 35
of the music-dance art, the strengthening of its material-technical basis”.
Judging from this short foundational document, O’zbeknavo was intended
as a hybrid institution, founded and directed by the government but, at the
same time, acting as “an independent creative-productive complex” [samo
stoyatel’nym tvorchesko-proizvodstvennym kompleksom].
The structure and function of O’zbeknavo were further elaborated three
weeks later, when the Cabinet of Ministers adopted the resolution “On the
organisation of the activity of the tour-concert association ‘O’zbeknavo’”
(PKM-163 1996). In line with its name, it was now entrusted with devel-
oping and organising various kinds of live music events, such as “show-
programs, recreational evenings, festivals, review concerts, competitions,
holiday celebrations, etc.” including “new concert programmes” by gov-
ernment order.
This invigoration of musical life was driven by more than a desire to pro-
vide the public with more entertainment or artists with more work. Its main
aim was “an enhancement of the cultural level [povysheniya kul’turnogo
urovnya] of the population of the republic” based on the aforementioned
“perfection of cultural services” and the “continual renewal and perfection
of the repertoire [postoyannogo obnovleniya i sovershenstvovaniya repertu-
ara]” on the part of performers. More generally, O’zbeknavo was assigned to
create “an effective system of administration and management [upravleniya i
rukovodstva]” for musicians and dancers.
Two provisions left no room for doubt about the new institution’s status:
First, it would be headquartered in the Turkiston Palace, one of the city
centre’s most impressive buildings. It became obvious during my research
that this choice of location was indeed charged with great symbolic power.
Both supporters and opponents of estrada’s high status in music politics
referred to the prominence of O’zbeknavo’s premises when commenting on
the Uzbek government’s extraordinary attention to the genre. In general,
the spread of cultural institutions across the city and the condition of their
respective buildings and offices were often interpreted as a direct spatial
translation of current priorities in cultural policies and sometimes even
read as clues to the fate of certain genres (see Tochka 2016: 53). The second
provision that immediately underlined the importance of O’zbeknavo was
that its general director was simultaneously named as deputy minister of
culture.
The resolution also detailed the internal structure of O’zbeknavo and
set the number of staff in Tashkent at 20. The general director and his/
her two deputies were to oversee various departments, among them, the
repertoire department, the cadre department and the department for tour-
concert activity and international relations. Apart from 23 ensembles di-
rectly named, membership in the association was to be voluntary for other
ensembles and for soloists.4 The organisation’s advisory board, the so-
called Council, comprised the heads of the participating groups, the general
36 Administering estrada
director and deputies, plus the heads of O’zbeknavo’s regional branches.
Part of O’zbeknavo’s budget was provided by the government and part was
to be self-generated. In addition, the association was to set up a Develop-
ment Fund to aid of artists, especially with respect to “the training and
encouragement of young talent”, and, more vaguely, in aid of the “develop-
ment of music and dance art”.
This broad phrase reflects the extensive range of artistic practices and
genres which O’zbeknavo was initially meant to oversee. The list of ensem-
bles directly assigned to O’zbeknavo almost reads like an inventory of mu-
sic and dance life in 1990s Uzbekistan, albeit mostly in its state-engineered
form. It included, among others, the National Symphony Orchestra, the
Korean Ensemble of Classical Music and Dance, the Botyr Zakirov
Estrada-Symphony Orchestra, the Distinguished State Ensemble of Folk
Dance Bahor, the To’xtasin Jalilov State Orchestra of Folk Instruments, the
Concert-Lecture Office, the State Chamber-Instrumental Ensemble (KIA)
Yalla, the Ensemble of Classical Dance and Song, the Uyghur Ensemble
and the Theatre Abid-A. Estrada is represented by five ensembles on that
list, which is quite a substantial number, but certainly cannot be interpreted
as an early indication of the genre’s complete takeover of O’zbeknavo just
five years later.
One provision in the resolution, however, accorded estrada special atten-
tion from the start. It ordered O’zbeknavo, together with the Ministry of
Culture, the Ministry of Public Education and the Ministry of Higher and
Secondary Special Education, to submit a proposal to the Cabinet of Min-
isters regarding “the creation of a college on the basis of the Republican
Studio of Estrada-Circus Art, and also of a faculty for estrada art at the
Tashkent Mukhtar Ashrafi State Conservatory”.
A second provision, although not specifically tailored to estrada, can
also be seen to have been instrumental in determining O’zbeknavo’s di-
rection from 2001 onwards. It required the association to submit yet an-
other proposal to the Cabinet of Ministers, this time in conjunction with
the Ministry of Justice, with suggestions on how to include “forms of
activity in the sphere of culture and art in the list of forms of activity,
in which enterprises (organisations) have the right to engage only on the
basis of a special permit (licence)”. The original list of activities allowed
only with special government permission dated to January 1992 and had
been regularly amended since then (PVS-516-XII 1992). When O’zbeknavo
was founded in April 1996, this list already featured an erratic conglom-
erate of ventures ranging from film production and medical services via
“organising gambling houses, conducting lotteries, etc.” and “activity of
non-governmental educational institutions and religious educational insti-
tutions” to “the development, production, repair and sale of rocket-space
systems” and “the development, production and sale of devices and weap-
ons using radioactive material and isotopes”. In late 1996, several activities
Administering estrada 37
related to music were added after “the fabrication of perfume and cosmetic
products, household chemicals” and “activity in the sphere of tourism”.
These were:
It took another four and a half years before a licensing system for these
kinds of activities was fully worked out, but its implementation would
then be directly linked to the realignment of O’zbeknavo in 2001. In the
intervening time, the association saw a budget increase, the t ransfer of
its dance ensembles to O’zbekraqs, the newly formed National Dance
Association, and several internal restructuring measures. These
i ncluded tightening the head office’s relationships to O’zbeknavo’s re-
gional branches and the country’s creative unions, emphasising work
with young performers and strengthening the role of Uzbek classical
music in the departmental setup (UP-1695 1997; PKM-102 1997; PKM-
216 1999).
Over the past years distinct work has been carried out in our country
towards the development of modern estrada-song art [sovremennogo
estradno-pesennogo iskusstva]. The government pays great attention to
this sphere, among the broad[er] public, especially among young people,
interest in estrada art is growing, [and] increasing numbers of creative
groups and performers are appearing.
38 Administering estrada
At the same time, mistakes and errors [oshibki i proschety] are made
in the creation of conditions for the advancement [povysheniya] of the
culture of estrada art, for estrada performers’ professional proficiency
and for the comprehensive identification [vsestoronnogo vyyavleniya] of
talent among young singers. As a result of the irresponsible attitude
[bezotvetstvennogo otnosheniya] of relevant organisations and also of
some estrada groups and soloists, there can be heard, in addition to
highly artistic musical creations [naryadu s vysokokhudozhestvennymi
muzykal’nymi proizvedeniyami] that serve to nurture a feeling of love
towards the Homeland [sluzhashchimi vospitaniyu chuvstva lyubvi k Ro-
dine] [and] devotion to the ideas of independence [predannosti ideyam
nezavisimosti], meaningless and artistically weak songs [bessoderzha
tel’nyye i khudozhestvenno slabyye pesni] in concert, television and radio
programmes, which are then further distributed through audio-video
tapes, thereby exerting a negative influence on spiritual education [otri
tsatel’noye vliyaniye na dukhovnoye vospitaniye].
The work of the Ministry of culture, the Teleradio company [and] the
Tour-concert association ‘O’zbeknavo’ in regard to the coordination of
the activity and the repertoires of creative collectives and soloists can-
not be considered satisfactory [(n)el’zya priznat’ udovletvoritel’noy].
In the interests of the further development of Uzbek national music
art, the identification of young talents, the provision [to them] of support
as well as spiritual and material motivation [dukhovnogo i material’nogo
stimulirovaniya] and also the evaluation of the experience and accom-
plishments [opyta i dostizheniy] of the estrada-song art, the creation of
conditions for the development of this sphere, the propaganda of highly
artistic creations, the Cabinet of Ministers decides [the following].
(capitalisation and emphasis original)
The first of the total of 14 clauses that follow this preamble decreed the es-
tablishment of a Council for the Development and Coordination of National
Estrada Art (hereafter the Council). Compared to O’zbeknavo’s original
Council, a gathering of the heads of the association’s regional branches and
affiliated or participating ensembles, its successor was intended to be consid-
erably broader and more illustrious in composition, an assembly of “famous
luminaries of estrada art” as well as representatives from the “broad musical
public”, various institutions in the sphere of culture and “other interested
organisations”. An appended exhibit directly appointed the 60 members of
the Council, a long list of high-ranking politicians, heads of cultural and
educational institutions, senior scholars, eminent artists and media figures.
Among them were three presidential counsellors, the culture minister and
his deputy as well as the culture minister of Karakalpakstan, the deputy
interior minister, the heads of the Academy of Arts, the State Conservatory
and the State Institute for Arts, the chairmen of the Union of Composers
and the Union of Writers, the chief secretary of the Council for Spirituality
Administering estrada 39
and Enlightenment, the chairman of the Kamolot Youth Movement and
his deputy, the general director of Yoshlar [Youth] TV channel, the head of
National TV and Radio, as well as the director of the recording company
Tarona Rekords. The promised “famous luminaries of estrada art” were 11
in number and predominantly stars from the 1980s and the 1990s.
Had I seen this list at the beginning of fieldwork without knowing the
context (and had the estrada faction been slightly less sizeable), I would have
assumed it to be a government advisory board for a radical realignment of
the general politics of culture rather than one concerned with the future of
a genre of popular music. And my assumption would have been wrong – not
only in mistaking the purpose of this assembly, but also in imagining the
two projects were separate. This group’s determining the future of estrada
was precisely nothing less than a radical realignment of the general politics
of culture (see Chapter 7).
The 2001 resolution also delineated a number of organisational, concep-
tual and ideological tasks for the Council, broadly framed as “the coordina-
tion of the activity of estrada collectives, soloists and other representatives
of estrada art”. One line of action aimed to support artists by defending
their “creative, material and legal interests”, motivating them “spiritually
and materially” and helping “young performers of national estrada find pro-
fessional and spiritual perfection [(m)illiy estrada sohasidagi iste’dodli yosh
ijodkorlarining kasbiy va ma’naviy kamol topishga]”. Furthermore, the Coun-
cil was tasked with nominating for state awards those artists “that make a
worthy contribution [vnosyashchikh dostoyniyy vklad]” to the development
of estrada and, additionally, with establishing its “own prestigious awards”.
A second set of responsibilities were more consultative in nature. The
Council was expected to provide suggestions on how to organise “holiday
extravaganzas, festivals, review concerts and contests, show-presentations,
folk fairs and other cultural-enlightening events on a national scale”. Be-
yond its advisory capacity, it was also allowed to organise festivals, review
concerts and competitions itself.
A third set of activities required conceptual and analytical deliberations
in conjunction with supervisory responsibilities. On the one hand, this
encompassed
On the other hand, it requested that the Council engage in “monitoring of the
condition of national estrada art” and organise conferences and “academic-
creative symposiums” on the genre’s development. More concretely, the
Council was entrusted with “analysing and judging [tahlil etish va baholash]
40 Administering estrada
the repertoires, concert programmes and scenarios” of estrada soloists and
groups. While the resolution was not very explicit with regard to evaluation
criteria, it contained at least some tasks that could also be read as guide-
lines for analysis and judgement, reinforcing the thrust of the preamble. The
Council was to encourage the creation of songs that “teach young people
love for the Homeland, [educate them] in a loyal spirit to the ideas of national
independence [yoshlarni Vatanga muhabbat, milliy istiqlol g’oyalariga sado-
qat ruhida tarbiyalashga]”. Moreover, it was supposed to devise and imple-
ment programmes that “propagated national estrada art [targ’ib qilishga]”
and “responded to the era’s problems [davr talablarga javob beradigan]”. And
to help save estrada’s “national identity [milliy, o’ziga xoslikni saqlashga]”, it
should combat “imitation, artistic shallowness [taqlidchilik, badiiy sayozlik]”.
The resolution expected the Council to meet at least once every three
months; only its chief secretary would receive a salary. The Council was,
however, not without assistance in fulfilling its work. Three subordinate in-
stitutions were designated to support it: (1) O’zbeknavo; (2) the Group of
Representatives of Creative Support [Gruppa predstaviteley tvorcheskogo
sodeystviya]; and (3) the Fund for the Development of Estrada Art [Fond po
razvitiyu estradnogo iskusstva].
O’zbeknavo became the main executive organ of the Council and was re-
branded from “tour-concert association” to “estrada association” [estrad-
noye ob’’yedineniye].5 It was from this point on accountable to the Council
and charged with implementing the Council’s recommendations and deci-
sions. Its general director was appointed by the Cabinet of Ministers, but
his/her position changed – from deputy culture minister to just being equal
in rank to a deputy culture minister. O’zbeknavo’s overall structure – a head
office in Tashkent supported by regional branches – was preserved, as were
several of its original responsibilities such as the “perfection of cultural ser-
vices”, the organisation of various kinds of concerts on its own initiative
and “by government order” and the “continual renewal and perfection of
the repertoire” of artists. Its new overarching goals – “the development of
estrada” and “elevating [yuksaltirish] the estrada culture in the republic” –
highlighted its musically more focused responsibilities. In line with this,
the “academic and folk artistic collectives” that had been affiliated with
O’zbeknavo were transferred to the Ministry of Culture or, in the case of its
branches, to the respective regional bodies for culture administration. An
organisational chart (Figure 1.3) illustrated how O’zbeknavo’s structure was
adapted to the new situation.
With hindsight, the most significant new regulation for O’zbeknavo, and
even more so for the future of estrada in Uzbekistan, was most likely that to
do with the issue of licences, a topic that had been aired in 1996 when the as-
sociation was founded. Now, O’zbeknavo was made the licensing organ for
“tour-concert activity in Uzbekistan and beyond its borders” as well as “for
artistic services … at weddings, anniversaries and other festivities”.6 One of
its first tasks was “to register within two months all legal and natural per-
sons that engage in the given forms of activity and provide them with special
Administering estrada 41
Fund for the General Director of the Deputy General Group of Representatives of
Development of Estrada Association, Director – Chief Creative Support: Writers,
Estrada Art O’zbeknavo – 1 Secretary of the composers, music critics,
Council – 1 journalists, representatives
of the general public
Human Resources –1
In total: 20 people
Figure 1.3 T
he structure of O’zbeknavo and the organs linked to or embedded in it
according to PKM-272 2001
Alterations
As mentioned above, the resolution “On the further development of estrada-
song art” remained in force from 2001 until 2017. Some minor amendments
in 2003 and 2014 improved the phrasing of the text, but left its meaning unal-
tered (PKM-498 2003; PKM-196 2014). There were, however, also some more
substantial changes. In 2007, for example, the addition of several clauses ex-
panded O’zbeknavo’s authority and duties with regard to violations against
licensing directives. From that point it would monitor and ensure that only
artists with a valid licence were recorded and prevent radio and TV sta-
tions from broadcasting songs and video clips by unlicensed artists. In ad-
dition, O’zbeknavo was entrusted with issuing another form of licence, a
so-called one-off tour-concert certificate [razovoye gastrol’no-kontsertnoye
svidetel’stvo] on the basis of its own “artistic expertise” (PP-653 2007). As
this reflected existing practice or was at least the subject of discussion and
dispute by 2005, when I started to do research at O’zbeknavo, it is likely
that the 2007 additions were meant to provide the legal basis for an already
established administrative reality rather than introducing radically new re-
forms. By this resolution, the president also appointed a new Council. A
quarter of its foundational members continued their participation, but their
overall number was reduced from 60 to 40.
Several amendments in 2014 entailed fundamental changes for O’zbeknavo
in spite of their brevity (PKM-116 2014). It became part of the Ministry of
Culture and Sport [Madaniyat va sport ishlari vazirligi tizimidagi tashkilot
hisoblanadi], and accordingly became accountable to the Ministry instead
of the Council. The right to appoint and dismiss its general director was
transferred from the Cabinet of Ministers to the president, while the gen-
eral director was reinstated as deputy culture minister proper and granted
an even wider range of responsibilities than had been enumerated in the
1996 resolution. As head of the Ministry’s newly established Administra-
tion for the Development of Creative Associations and Folk Creativity, he
assumed the responsibility for O’zbeknavo, the National Dance Association
O’zbekraqs, various orchestras (Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra,
Orchestra of Folk Instruments), the Republican Academic-Methodical
Centre of Folk Creativity and Cultural-Enlightenment Work, and the Crea-
tive Association of Artistic Collectives of Uzbekistan. While the Academic-
Methodical Centre was mainly concerned with ideological questions in
the sphere of culture, the Creative Association represented a wide variety
Administering estrada 43
of government-financed ensembles from the four major spheres of Uzbek
music: folk, academic, classical and estrada. The amendments therefore
granted O’zbeknavo’s general director a considerably extended scope of ac-
tion and influence, which reached well beyond estrada. He was second only
to the minister himself with respect to all decisions at the Ministry of Cul-
ture and Sport related to music. It is therefore not entirely surprising that
the director of the association became minister of culture in late 2014. These
amendments furnished O’zbeknavo with more power and were intended to
take estrada’s “development and coordination” to another level.
None of this should give the impression that the government considered
the state of estrada in Uzbekistan to be satisfactory by 2014. We will see
below that the alleged problems referred to in the preamble to the 2001
resolution were – and are – real. The death of president Islom Karimov in
September 2016, however, heralded the end for O’zbeknavo. In February
2017, his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, decreed that the institution would
be closed (UP-4956 2017) but that the primary tool which Uzbek authorities,
formerly in the form of O’zbeknavo, used to influence and shape estrada
would be maintained: the issuance, suspension and withdrawal of licences.
In the next section I will discuss the intricacies of the licensing system, as it
existed from 2001 at least until early 2017.
Licences
On 29 June 2001, just three days after it had consigned estrada to the tight
administrative structure detailed above, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted
another resolution specifying the regulations that O’zbeknavo and the
Group were to follow in the licensing process. Save for some amendments,
which will be detailed below, this resolution retained its validity throughout
the Karimov era (PKM-285 2001).
Licences, whether for private performances (“cultural services”) or public
concerts in Uzbekistan or abroad (“tour-concert activity”), were issued for
a year and could be extended on a yearly basis. A licence not only granted
the right to engage in the designated activities. It also exempted artists from
paying tax on any income generated from their performances. A fee was
charged for licences, payable in advance either all at once or in quarterly
instalments. To obtain a licence, artists had to submit an application and
supporting documentation to O’zbeknavo, including information on their
musical education, their repertoire and any awards or prizes they had re-
ceived. Only in case of an “obvious existence of special giftedness, talent”
would the Group overlook the absence of proof of musical education.
The Group’s decision, which had to be made within 15 days, was not
limited to just rejection or approval. The resolution stipulated 12 types of
licences altogether, organised according to a complex rating system that
44 Administering estrada
differentiated three categories of activity and, within each of these, four lev-
els of professional qualification, the so-called rating groups. No concrete
evaluation criteria were provided for assigning artists to rating groups, but
would, according to the resolution’s text, be set by O’zbeknavo within a pe-
riod of 10 days. Fees for licences varied depending on the rating group and,
as they were calculated as multiples of the official minimum wage, their ac-
tual amount would rise and fall with the general economic development of
the country. For clarification, the resolution provided a table (Table 1.1).
Several clauses further elucidated how the rating system would function.
A licence for a higher category automatically afforded the right to engage in
activities of a lower category, e.g. a licence for public concerts (category 1)
Table 1.1 L
icence categories and fees, 2001–2003 (PKM-285 2001)
1 2 3 4
Note:
a The civil wedding ceremony is often merged with the nikoh, the evening part of the wed-
ding, which is, as mentioned above, also the main event for estrada performances. The
palov ritual, more commonly called osh, takes place in the early morning hours and is
usually a rather solemn, male-only affair, accompanied by classical music. It derives its
name from the Uzbek dish osh/palov, which is served on these occasions. Kelin salom is
a ceremony for welcoming the bride into her new family, whereas charlar is an umbrella
term for various forms of ritualised visits shortly after a wedding between the two families
which have been linked through the marriage. A sunnat to’yi is a festivity on the occasion
of a boy’s circumcision. Deviations from standard Uzbek orthography of these terms in the
table result from the fact that they are transliterated from Russian.
Administering estrada 45
allowed artists to additionally perform at festivities (category 2) and in
entertainment establishments (category 3), while a licence for festivities
(category 2) allowed artists to also perform in entertainment establishments
(category 3). One regulation was particularly tailored to help meet the aim
related to the “encouragement of young talents”: Newcomers who were as-
signed to rating group IV of category 1 would have their licence fees waived
for the first year. Although not explicitly mentioned in the resolution, the
broadcast of songs or video clips was considered a “tour-concert activity”
and thus required a licence of category 1.
By 2017, the rating system had been altered twice since its creation in 2001.
First, it was simplified in November 2003 by an amendment that collapsed
categories 2 and 3, while preserving the fees for category 2. This change oc-
curred during the first months of my fieldwork in Tashkent and considerably
confounded my initial attempts to understand the concept and rationale of
licensing. The second modification was adopted in July 2014 and, again, re-
sulted in reducing the number of available kinds of licences, this time from
eight to six (Table 1.2).
This second amendment not only reduced the number of licences in cat-
egory 2. Compared to the original fees, it also introduced a significant cut
Table 1.2 L
icence categories and fees from 2014 onwards (PKM-196 2014)
1 2 3 4 5 6
There was in addition one clause hidden among the list of duties that, in its
syntax and style, differed from the rest. More significantly, it referred to a
prohibition instead of a duty:
Beyond O’zbeknavo
A number of other institutions besides O’zbeknavo have contributed to the
state-led estradisation process in Uzbekistan in various forms and to var-
ying degrees. Some of these I passed – or remembered – on my way to
O’zbeknavo in this chapter’s introduction. Several will re-appear in later
chapters of this book. Among these are the Ministry of Culture, the Union
of Writers and the Union of Composers, National TV and Radio, the
Kamolot Youth Movement, the Council for Spirituality and Enlightenment
and the educational sector, which includes specialised music schools, ly-
ceums and colleges, in addition to the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan
with its estrada faculty. They are distinguished from O’zbeknavo and the
administrative structure surrounding it by the much broader scope of their
work. While they may be engaged with estrada, and this engagement may
have gained importance since 2001, none of these institutions was origi-
nally established or later tailored specifically to deal with this genre. Apart
from sending representatives to the Council, their engagement with estrada
revolves primarily around various music contests, which, as I will dis-
cuss later, play an important role in structuring and engaging the estrada
scene and the general public. In these events, the Ministry of Culture as
well as educational institutions such as the Conservatory have their share
of or even take on lead positions, but their responsibilities for estrada are
wider. While the educational sector’s main task with respect to estrada is
professionalisation – in various forms of cooperation with the Ministry –
the latter is also the administrative pivot for granting state awards in the
sphere of culture and sport.
Every year in late August, on the occasion of Independence Day and by
presidential decree, hundreds of representatives from a wide variety of pro-
fessions are celebrated with these awards, which, taken together, make up
a complex and graded system of honorary titles, orders, medals and other
decorations. During my first few weeks of fieldwork in Tashkent in 2003,
I came across a book that was exclusively devoted to these state awards
(Ro’zinazarov 2001). I have to admit that I bought it only because I con-
sidered it a bizarre niche publication, not believing it to be at all relevant to
my research. As the months went by, however, I gradually came to discover
the importance of this kind of official recognition for the estrada scene.
And about a year later, when Independence Day was approaching again
and state awards were a frequent topic of conversation, the book became
Administering estrada 51
a vital companion for finding my way through a truly astounding number of
different decorations.
Some of these decorations are specific to certain professions, such as
Distinguished Irrigator, while others, especially higher-ranking ones, are
broader in scope. In the field of estrada, the most common award is Distin-
guished Artist, which literally translates from Russian as “merited artist”
[zasluzhennyy artist], and from Uzbek as “an artist who has shown service/
who has served” [xizmat ko’rsatgan artist]. This is an honorary title for sing-
ers and musicians, who can also with luck later secure the higher-graded
title of People’s Artist [narodnyy artist / xalq artisti].9 Composers and con-
ductors may become a Luminary in the Arts [zasluzhennyy deyatel’ iskusstv /
san’at arbobi], and concert directors can be honoured as a Distinguished
Cultural Worker [zasluzhennyy rabotnik kul’tury / xizmat ko’rsatgan madani-
yat xodimi]. The following higher-ranking decorations have been granted
to individuals in the estrada sphere so far: Glory [shuhrat], Glory of La-
bour [mehnat shuhrati], Friendship [do’stlik], Respect of Homeland-Nation
[el-yurt hurmati] and For Great Services [buyuk xizmatlari uchun]. They do
not have an official Russian translation. Girls and young women can also be
awarded the Zulfiya Prize [Premiya imeni Zul’fii] for their achievements in a
number of fields, including estrada.
According to the relevant legal texts, all these awards recognise the ren-
dition of extraordinary services – or the existence of extraordinary talent.
Most acknowledge contributions to the development of culture or art in
Uzbekistan, while some honour a dedication to peace and friendship and
others credit commitment to the spread of patriotism and “ideas of national
independence and social progress”.10 Direct applications for state awards
are not possible. They are granted on recommendation by institutions only
and are predominantly awarded to individuals, more rarely to groups of
people. In addition to the decoration itself, honorary titles entail financial
benefits, in form of a monthly supplement or as a one-off payment, and may
be accompanied by various privileges, such as access to preferential med-
ical treatment. In the sphere of estrada, the prestige that state decorations
bestow on their bearers is at least as important as the direct material and
tangible benefits these awards bring. This prestige, after all, usually trans-
lates into additional financial and other advantages.
Mechanisms in the economy of prestige, however, move this examination
into areas beyond the legal framework on paper – and into the realm of
practice, which I will focus on from now. But before I explore estrada poli-
tics in action, I will pause to think about how to approach it. The tight legal
framework discussed above may suggest concepts like control and freedom
or repression and resistance as appropriate and convenient terms to think
with. My aim, however, is to come to an understanding of the relations
between authoritarian policies and popular music that transcends exactly
these common binary tropes.
52 Administering estrada
Notes
1 Nola is also a technical term in Uzbek music, denoting a characteristic vocal
ornamentation technique, a kind of slow, drawn-out, guttural trill. The Uzbek-
language Music Dictionary explains it in the following way: “NOLA (crying) – to
prolong and vibrate the voice on one syllable of a word when singing” (Akbarov
1987: 231; see Djumaev 2005: 178).
2 Most of the legal documents cited in this and following chapters can be found
online on the website lex.uz in Uzbek and/or Russian. Texts contained in this da-
tabase, however, usually do not include all the appended exhibits, which are part
of the original paper versions. Because I am better versed in Russian, I have
referred to the Russian version of legal and other documents whenever available.
3 I consider “creative” to be a rather clumsy translation for the Russian adjective
tvorcheskiy and would normally prefer “artistic”. Throughout this text, however,
I will use “creative” in order to distinguish tvorcheskiy from khudozhestvennyy,
which I will consistently translate as “artistic”.
4 O’zbeknavo was not only given responsibility for these 23 ensembles, but also
for the Turkiston Palace, the recording studio Navozonda and its own provincial
branches. This kind of affiliation to an institution is usually expressed using the
formulation pri [institution X] in Russian or [institution X] huzurida in Uzbek.
Being pri was mandatory in the Soviet era. Whether group or soloist, amateur
or professional – there had to be an affiliation with an institution ranging from
houses of culture or kolkhozes to the Filarmoniya, the Union of Composers or
the Ministry of Culture. Professionals would also be paid by the institutions to
which they were affiliated. It is no longer obligatory for singers and musicians
in Uzbekistan to be affiliated with an institution, but musical independence, not
being pri to anything, still makes some officials uneasy (see Chapter 6).
5 Interestingly, O’zbeknavo translated Estrada Association as Variety Arts Asso-
ciation into English despite only dealing with music. With this choice it resorted
to the earlier meaning of estrada as performance format resembling music hall
and théâtre de variétés.
6 These were only the first two of the six items linked to culture and art, which in
1996 had been added to the list of activities that demanded some kind of licens-
ing procedures, as mentioned above. Licensing of the remaining four items was
made the responsibility of the government administration [hokimiyat] in each
of the provinces and the city of Tashkent as well as the Council of Ministers in
Karakalpakstan.
7 I am grateful to O’zbeknavo for providing me with this and other documents and
allowing me to quote from them.
8 It may be difficult to differentiate between “state” and “government” in practice,
but the two words are often paired in Uzbek legal texts.
9 These two titles are also awarded to actors and to instrumentalists and singers
in other field of music. None of the currently active estrada instrumentalists has,
to my knowledge, been honoured with one. This is not surprising, considering
how little importance is attached today to estrada instrumentalists and purely
instrumental estrada, compared to estrada singers and estrada songs. Recall the
title of the resolution that initiated the Uzbek government’s estrada politics in
2001: “On the further development of estrada-song art”.
10 Most of the higher-ranking medals were established in 1994. The lower-ranking
titles Distinguished Artist and People’s Artist were approved by Uzbek legis-
lature on 16 April 1996. This was simply the legal ratification of a decades-old
practice, as these two honorary titles had been awarded since the early years of
the Soviet Union.
2 Approaching estrada
Opposition, affirmation and
beyond
When, however, scholars have done research on pervasive state music pol-
icies, they have tended to focus not on these measures’ desired or success-
ful results and their proponents, but on musical activities and people who
resist, oppose or flee them. It appears that ethnomusicologists – with some
notable, but still rare exceptions, which I will draw on later – prefer musical
resistance over musical affirmation, ultimately reinforcing a sense that stud-
ying the former is more normal, more canonical and valuable.
This stance, which I would term subversion bias, can be explained by the
long history and strong tradition of advocacy in ethnomusicology. Advo-
cacy has been part of its professional ethos for several decades now, a key
Approaching estrada 55
principle for many of its practitioners and often a source of pride. The com-
mitment to extol musics in their own right and to champion old traditions
forgotten, suppressed, endangered or defamed has been deeply ingrained
in the field’s paradigm (see Bohlman 2008: 107; Hamm 2004: 198; Merriam
1963; Nettl 1983: 10f.). Often scholars study the music they wish to promote.
There is nothing inherently problematic in fusing one’s research interest
with advocacy as a personal choice but the reverse inference – scholars wish
to promote the music they study – is considerably more problematic, par-
ticularly if used as an assumption when judging the research foci of col-
leagues. It is possible to study music without being an ardent advocate of it
or, more importantly, of the political setting in which this music is embed-
ded. Unfortunately, the two are often conflated or, as Philip V. Bohlman put
it in the quotation above, confused. No one would impute fascist tendencies
to historians just because they study Nazi Germany. The sometimes strong
reactions of dismay and disapproval from colleagues upon learning of my
research topic, however, seemed to implicitly suggest an intuitive assump-
tion that I promoted – or at least trivialised – authoritarianism and censor-
ship because I studied state-organised musical processes and their results as
well as engaged with government officials as their proponents.
Interestingly, the expectation that one would study musical opposition
appears to be reserved for modern nation states. Scholars focusing on court
music and praise singing in the service of historical and contemporary
kings, emirs or tribal chiefs will rarely be accused of a warped commitment
to monarchy, other forms of socio-political inequality or even despotic cru-
elty. This certainly is true with respect to the emirates and khanates in the
region that would become the Uzbek SSR and later the Republic of Uzbek-
istan. Their ensembles, traditions and music policies are at the centre of
contemporary ethnomusicological research – despite their obvious lack of
oppositionality and their indisputable relation to feudalism.
The expectation that one will study musical opposition is even stronger
in popular music studies than in ethnomusicology. A quick survey of pub-
lications on popular music in the Soviet Union, socialist eastern Europe
and their successor states, for example, reveals the predominance of this
interest in titles alone: Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern
Europe and Russia (Ramet 1994), How Can I Be a Human Being? Culture,
Youth, and Musical Opposition in Hungary (Kürti 1994), Notes from Under-
ground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (Cushman 1995), Up from the
Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (Szemere
2001), Throwing Stones at the System: Rock Music in Serbia during the 1990s
(Mijatovic 2008), Subversive Sounds: Music and Censorship in Communist
Poland (Szurek 2008).
Given the little information available on politically affirmative – or polit-
ically disinterested – musical life under socialism, one could conclude from
the scholarly output in western music studies that popular artistic expression
in the socialist world during the Soviet era was predominantly oppositional
and, furthermore, consisted almost exclusively of rock music.2 For among the
56 Approaching estrada
genres of socialist popular music, it is rock that has received by far the most
scholarly attention, and because the majority of publications highlight its role
in the demise of the eastern bloc, rock has even somehow acquired the status
of the musical incarnation of opposition.3 Several scholars have convincingly
interrogated this presumed oppositionality and rock’s allegedly decisive con-
tribution to late twentieth-century political history (Briggs 2014; Pekacz 1994;
Steinholt 2001), but the myth of socialist rock’s musical heroism has proven
tenacious and attractive – in public as well as in academic discourse – and
continues to influence perspectives on its postsocialist afterlife.
While popular music studies might generally incline towards researching
the oppositional, historical musicology certainly does not have similar pref-
erences. Still, as critical studies of the field’s approaches to music in Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union have shown, historical musicologists also
tend to expect their fellow scholars to study opposition in music, when it
comes to totalitarian or authoritarian settings (see, for example, Hakobian
1998; 2012; Potter 1998; 2006).
The discipline’s subversion bias and the resulting expectation among its
practitioners that one study musical opposition, are already problematic in
themselves, but they have an even more problematic side. The expectation
that someone will study musical opposition is necessarily preceded by the
expectation that someone else will engage in musical opposition in the first
place, that is, musicians and others involved in popular music.
Positing that “much musical practice tends toward the subversive”, Jayson
Beaster-Jones seems to have a similar stimulus-response-model in mind
Approaching estrada 57
(2014: 336). So too do Martin Cloonan and Reebee Garofalo, who claim,
without presenting any supporting data, that “every act of repression is ac-
companied by an act of resistance” (2003: 1).
This widely shared belief made a subtle appearance in the official an-
nouncement for the 43rd World Conference of the International Council for
Traditional Music in 2015. The conference theme, “Music and New Political
Geographies in the Turkic-speaking World and Beyond”, was summarised
as follows:
How have these new and emerging political and cultural alliances at
the junction of a decision to merge or to choose independence used mu-
sic to further their geopolitical goals and how have musicians and their
audiences resisted new forms of economic and political domination and
hegemony through music-making and dancing? 4
(emphasis added)
The reasoning on display here often goes hand in hand with more or less
direct evaluations along the following lines: If states put music to their use,
this is misuse or manipulation. We expect musicians to oppose this, or at
least we hope they do, and we are disappointed or even appalled if they
don’t. Writing about teachers and students at the State Conservatory of Uz-
bekistan in Tashkent, Tanya Merchant, for example, implicitly, but clearly
expresses a preference for a certain kind of behaviour on their part: “Are
the canon and the nationalist ideals that seem to go with it being questioned
and challenged? Are they being blindly accepted or subverted?” (2006: 142).
In a similar vein, in his discussion of popular music in Nazi Germany,
Peter Wicke states that “at no time has the lack of political responsibility
on the part of performing musicians and composers been so clear, and had
such disastrous eventual consequences” (1985: 49). Thomas Turino goes so
far to assign them “the guilt of acquiescence” (2008: 191). And with refer-
ence to music censorship in Slovenia, David Parvo writes: “It is unconscion-
able to sit back and let the repression progress; when the right to speak one’s
mind is questioned, speaking out becomes an obligation as well as a way of
fighting back” (2003: 148).
Scholarly disappointment with research subjects has probably been most
directly and frequently voiced by researchers working on postsocialist rock,
who tend to bemoan a lack of oppositionality in their field – or at least the
right kind of oppositionality (see, for example, Kürti 1994: 94; Ramet 1994:
10; Yoffe 2000: 110f.).5
When I started my field research in Uzbekistan, I considered myself
free of this expectation of opposition. I might not yet have known much
about estrada, but I certainly knew that if one was looking for musical
resistance and subversion, estrada was definitely the wrong genre. After
all, this was exactly what had drawn me to the topic in the first place. And
I had presumed, based more on intuition and inference than on any actual
insights into the workings of Uzbek cultural politics, that there was gov-
ernment involvement in the estrada scene. But I did not think about this
58 Approaching estrada
involvement in terms of misappropriation. My position was more in line
with Marcello Sorce Keller’s view on this relationship, published a few
years after I began research: “[C]harging music with ideological imports
is no misuse of it, but rather takes advantage of one of its main functions”
(2007: 107).
Over the first few months of my stay in Tashkent, however, as I became
gradually more aware of the immense and extensive scope of estrada ad-
ministration, I noticed the expectation of opposition slowly creeping into
my thoughts, albeit in a slightly different variant. I did not start to expect
estrada singers or composers to openly protest political regimentation
through their music or by other means, but I subconsciously assumed
they secretly and privately objected to the tight administrative frame-
work they were subjected to. This was a result of the responses I received
when I questioned people about their attitude to estrada administration.
Some were reluctant to answer and others were very critical, but most
were explicitly affirmative. They said they approved of it in general and
thought it necessary, even if they conceded that it had some flaws, par-
ticularly that it was not strict enough. In short, most people I had met
by that point supported and defended an administrative system for mu-
sic which I deemed extremely restrictive. And some even desired more
restrictions.
I found these responses strange and difficult to believe. I doubted that
my interlocutors confided in me their true thoughts on this topic, which I
interpreted as an understandable reservation, as healthy mistrust vis-à-vis
a foreign researcher in the context of an authoritarian political regime. For
several weeks, this led me to intuitively follow a kind of spy-like approach,
searching for clues of hidden resistance and subversion in people’s behav-
iour and speech. I started to distance and estrange myself from people I
had already grown fond of and to whom I was close, until I became too
entangled in my own mistrust and feared I was starting to twist my data. I
finally realised that by stylising my interlocutors as revolutionaries manqués
who publicly feign complicity but privately think opposition, I was simply
extending the expectation of opposition into the realm of the clandestine
and thus speculative.
This approach is quite common in literature on the Soviet era and con-
temporary authoritarian states and appears in work in ethnomusicology
too. In her study on musicians in socialist Bulgaria, for example, Carol Sil-
verman remarks:
[T]he idea [of a velvet prison] can be considered a rather violent, pater-
nalistic and overpoliticised narrative. It is violent, as it imprisons artists
in a position of compliance with the authorities. It is paternalistic, as the
subtext reads that true artists ought to resist any cooperation with state
institutions. And it is overpoliticised, as it reduces complex cultural re-
alities to a stereotypical dichotomy of artist vs. the state, a reduction I
consider to be emblematic of the Western gaze on China.
(de Kloet 2010: 182)
What happens when we just discard the presumed inevitability of this an-
tagonism? Shedding the expectation of opposition and the underlying pre-
sumption of a naturally inimical relationship between repressive states and
their artists allows us to discern and assess musicians’ positions and actions
without automatically judging them to be morally objectionable and aca-
demically irrelevant. We might discover responses such as a belief in state
ideology, support for political regimentation in the sphere of music, coop-
eration with government institutions or even just acceptance and adjusting
to the circumstances. One could go even further and posit an affinity to
state power and stability among artists similar to that which Jerome Kara-
bel identified among intellectuals:
Like the former Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan is well into its postsocialist phase,
but since it has preserved a remarkable degree of cultural regimentation
and, as will be explored later, much of the ideology and logic behind it, Ras-
mussen’s remarks are still apt. They were certainly relevant for me, when,
feeling stuck at the beginning of fieldwork in Tashkent, I was sifting through
excerpts of secondary literature read back home in search of an exit out of
what I considered a conceptual dead-end.
The unpolitical
The expectation of affirmation still seems useful, at least provisionally, for
thinking through relations between musicians or other musical actors and
government politics. At the very least, it serves as a kind of safety measure
against the potential reappearance of the expectation of opposition. If offi-
cial political discourse is no longer the primary or sole explanatory frame-
work, however, we no longer need to assign artists a position somewhere
along the axis between affirmation and opposition. We can acknowledge that
their actions and speech might be motivated not only by government poli-
cies, but also by friendship, love, envy, hate, money, fame, pleasure, family
ties, personal obligations or by ideas about musical aesthetics, making them
perhaps appear less political, but more personally complex – and therefore
fundamentally more normal and human. Despite extensive restrictions un-
der authoritarian rule in Uzbekistan, there is, of course, that which people
perceive and describe as life beyond politics. This life is animated by its own
motivations and goals, is generally exempt from the grip of the state, but not
necessarily directed against it: “ Most people, … even in the worst political
regimes, do not spend most of their time being political. The majority of
citizens spend even periods of revolution at work, at home, or in the pub”
(MacFadyen 2002b: 4). It is therefore not surprising that artists in authori-
tarian and totalitarian states often resent constantly being asked questions
that relate their work to politics (see de Kloet 2003: 184; Steinholt 2001: n.p.).
How independent the supposedly unpolitical part of life really is from
government policies is a different matter. After all, it is not unusual for po-
litical ideology to extend its reach to issues such as fame, family, friendship
Approaching estrada 63
and musical aesthetics. Thus, trying to separate the political from the unpo-
litical in the field proves to be a rather futile enterprise.8 Even if there were
an appropriate methodological tool, this approach would inevitably lead to
replacing one simplistic binary with another: opposition/affirmation with
political/unpolitical. It would be equally ill-suited to deal with the messiness
of life, musical and otherwise, which is certainly not structured by binaries
and is thus impossible to understand with any kind of “either-or” model.
The more adequate and promising approach seems to be an “and as well”
model, a theoretical framework that operates beyond binaries. In this re-
spect, Alexei Yurchak’s take on The Last Soviet Generation provides a use-
ful perspective – and it was the resource that got me out of the trap of the
common “either-or” models which blurred my thinking at the beginning of
fieldwork (2003; 2006).
Beyond binarisms
Studying late Soviet socialism, Yurchak criticises the academic habit of di-
viding Soviet reality into two apparently separable and dichotomous spheres:
one centred around government politics, the other somehow beyond it. He
lists conceptual pairs that further structure this mode of thinking, which is
equally common for conceptualising life in other repressive states:
oppression and resistance, repression and freedom, the state and the
people, official economy and second economy, official culture and
counterculture, totalitarian language and counterlanguage, public self
and private self, truth and lie, reality and dissimulation, morality and
corruption.
(Yurchak 2006: 5)
To him, these coupled categories are ultimately a relic of Cold War convic-
tions about the fundamental depravity and badness of Soviet socialism.9
To anyone familiar with publications on socialist music, they are immedi-
ately recognisable as standard structuring principles – and as handy tools
for what I have earlier termed totalitarianisation, that is, presenting life in
socialism or postsocialist authoritarian states as bleaker and darker than it
actually was or is.
Fully acknowledging that “tremendous suffering, repression, fear, and
lack of freedom” were an inherent part of Soviet life and can be captured
in these binary models, Yurchak maintains that they nevertheless fail to
account for another, no less important facet of socialist reality:
This view of how meanings are produced through the repetition of au-
thoritative speech acts and rituals refuses a binary division between
form and meaning or between real meaning and pretense of meaning.
In the late Soviet case, the performative repetition of the rituals and
Approaching estrada 65
texts of authoritative discourse, and the engagement in different new
meanings that were not described by the constative dimensions of
these rituals and texts, still did not preclude a person from feeling an
affinity for many of the meanings, possibilities, values, and promises
of socialism. It even allowed one to recapture these meanings, values,
and promises from the inflexible interpretations provided by the party
rhetoric.
(Yurchak 2006: 28)
Every artistic field … had its stylistic norms and internal boundaries
that distinguished the canonically official from the aggressively unoffi-
cial, but that also included a large gray area in which artists played out
a game of ‘chicken’ with the cultural censors. Perhaps it was the pas-
sionate anti-Sovietism of a handful of well-known unofficial artists that
led Western observers of Soviet culture to view the categories of official
and unofficial art as inviolably disjunctive – divided by a Berlin Wall
of artistic taste and cultural choice. But at least in the 1970s and 1980s,
it was common enough for artists to probe the cultural no-man’s-land
between official and unofficial art, and to move back and forth between
official and unofficial work, official and unofficial artistic life.
(Levin 1996b: 21; see MacFadyen 2002b: 63)
But how does all this relate to the situation in contemporary Uzbekistan and
my own research?
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the
fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it
traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge,
produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network
that runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative
instance whose function is repression.
(Foucault 1980: 119; see Foucault 1993 [1972]: 214;
Verdery 1991: 427)
Notes
1 Academic music in Uzbekistan has been studied from an ethnomusicological
perspective by Lucille Lisack (2009; 2015). It had previously received some at-
tention from scholars of historical musicology (Frolova-Walker 1998), Russian
and Soviet history (Tomoff 2004) and sociology (Kale-Lostuvalı 2004). In her
Approaching estrada 71
(2015) monograph on Women Musicians of Uzbekistan, ethnomusicologist Tanya
Merchant devoted one chapter to arranged folk music, one to estrada and one to
academic music.
2 For more rock-related research, see, for example, Barber-Kersovan (1993; 2006),
Lange (1996), Levy (1992), Maas and Reszel (1998), McMichael (2005; 2009),
Mitchell (1992), Pogačar (2008), Rauhut (1998), Ryback (1990), Steinholt (2003;
2004), Survilla (2002), Szemere (1985), Teodor (2009), Troitsky (1987), Wicke
(1992), Wickström and Steinholt (2009), and Yoffe (2000).
3 Perhaps the most enthusiastic portrayal of Soviet rock’s presumed oppositional
stance comes from Mark Yoffe who describes the perestroika years as “a period
of glorious struggle and absolute victory by the rock’n’roll community over the
Soviet philistines” (2000: 107). With regard to Albania, Nicholas Tochka has
pointed out that musical resistance is often misremembered with historical dis-
tance, as liberalisation in music might well have been initiated by the govern-
ment and not necessarily fought for from below (2016: 100, 142ff.).
4 See www.ictmusic.org/2015-ictm-world-conference-astana-kazakhstan (accessed
7 February 2018).
5 If one follows Pekacz (1994), Steinholt (2001) and Yurchak (2006) in doubting
socialist rock’s inherent political oppositionality, postsocialist rock’s lack of
opposition will be less surprising, as will be the rock scene’s involvement with
extreme nationalism, right-wing movements and the Orthodox Church in Russia
(Wickström & Steinholt 2009).
6 This was certainly true for the majority of musicologists, composers and classi-
cal musicians in Nazi Germany (Potter 1998), as it was for the majority of Soviet
composers (Hakobian 1998; Redepenning 2008) and the stars of Russian Soviet
estrada (MacFadyen 2001; 2002a; 2002b). That this impetus towards accommo-
dation with the state is not limited to the elite sections of the musical word, is
well demonstrated by Carol Silverman in her account of wedding musicians in
socialist Bulgaria (2007: 75ff.).
7 In the original text, Rasmussen’s critique in the last sentence is specifically re-
lated to Timothy Rice (1994). Instead of [If the], it reads “Because Rice’s”. As
an earlier reference to Rice could not be reproduced here at length, I chose the
more general phrasing to keep the quote intelligible, but logically in line with the
original.
8 Mark Slobin points to a similar problem with the Gramscian model of hegemony:
[H]ow do you know hegemony, when you see it? … An easy response to [this]
question might lead you to assume that almost anything is an example of
hegemony, since there is not picture of it on the post office wall to compare
with the suspect you’ve rounded up.
(Slobin 2000 [1993]: 27)
While it might be difficult to locate resistance in the face of overwhelming he-
gemonic power as described by Gramsci, it is almost impossible if we turn to
Michel Foucault. In viewing resistance as not being exterior to power, he grants
power even more of a totalising thrust (1978: 96). At the same time, power, in his
view, is more pervasive and thus less menacing than it appears in antagonistic
models (see below). See Abu-Lughod (1990: 41f.) and Taylor (1997: 78–82) for
discussions of Foucault’s ideas on resistance.
9 David MacFadyen likewise criticises this approach, which he sees as pervasive
in Slavic studies:
The rhetoric of the Cold War even today structures the teaching and study
of East European customs … [T]wentieth-century Russian culture is seen in
degrees of compliance with or deviance from Soviet ideology. Politics colours
72 Approaching estrada
everything. Such an enduring critical approach has led to the dismissal of
the most important and vital aspects of Soviet society as either underserving
of attention or, at best, sullied by dogma. Song, it is held, does nothing but
reflect policy.
(MacFadyen 2002b: 3)
Similarly, Yngvar B. Steinholt remarks on the “narrow and somehow awkward
picture of cultural life” in publications on Soviet popular music and attributes it
to “‘communist studies’, a highly politicised brand of cold war-sociology, paired
with Birmingham School subcultural theory” (2001: n.p.).
10 In May 2005, in the wake of the arrest, trial and imprisonment of 23 men being
charged with terrorism, the Uzbek military killed hundreds of people – p rotesters
and bystanders, men, women and children – who had gathered in a square in this
Ferghana Valley city (see Kendzior 2007; Megoran 2008b). On the government
side, the events were presented as a legitimate and necessary counter-measure
to an attempted coup by religious extremists and terrorists and the number of
victims was claimed to be much lower; more commonly, the Andijon events are
seen as a brutal crackdown on civic protest sparked by justified discontent with
local economic and political affairs (see Liu 2014).
11 There were poets and musicians outside estrada, however, who critically reacted
to the Andijon events, most famously hofiz Dadakhon Hasanov in the lirika
genre. He composed, sang and recorded a song which came to be known as
“There was a Massacre in Andijon” [Andijonda qatli om bo’ldi] and very directly
accused the Uzbek government of slaughtering civilians on a grand scale (Audio
2.1). For this, he found himself in court. On 8 September 2006, Hasanov was
convicted for “actions undermining the constitutional system” and “threaten-
ing public safety and order” (Kendzior 2007: 325). He was given a three-year
suspended sentence on the condition that he cease composing politically moti-
vated poems or songs. In addition, his house and car were seized and an already
existing ban on performing in public was extended. Five months earlier, two
men from Bukhara, Jamal Kutliev and Hazrat Ahmedov, had been sentenced to
seven and four years in jail respectively, simply for listening to Hasanov’s song.
For more information on the song, its lyrics, the trials and Hasanov in general,
see Andrew (2006), HRW (2006), Mahkamov (2006), Schachter (2006), Tyson
(1994), and XarxaAsia (2006). For a detailed study of various artistic reactions
to the Andijon events, see Kendzior (2007). Fifteen other songs by Hasanov are
included in the two-disk album Ozodlik ohanglari (Recital of Liberty): Poems by
Uzbek Dissident Authors (Sodiq 2007; see Kendzior 2009, for a review).
12 What I have termed scholarly totalitarianisation usually involves a narrow per-
spective on the political, an emphasis on the negative aspects and effects of au-
thoritarian life, a focus on the generally rare moments of harsh repression (cf.
Tochka 2016: 89) and an antagonistic portrayal of the situation with rather clear-
cut and clearly evaluated parties. All this is easily recognisable as a heritage of
the Cold War. In scholarly totalitarianisation, socialist cultural life is sometimes
further dramatised by evoking images of war. Mark Slobin, for example, claims
that “[m]usical activity became a battleground contested by local oppositional
forces and entrenched centralized bureaucracies” and goes on to write about “a
long fencing match on the battlefield of culture” (1996: 8, 9; see also Bright 1985:
126–127; Cloonan & Garofalo 2003: 4). For an excellent analysis of scholarly
totalitarianisation with regard to music in Nazi Germany, see Pamela Potter
(2006); for an equally excellent analysis of the phenomenon in revolutionary
China, see Barbara Mittler (2010).
13 See Kelly M. Askew’s (2002) excellent study on music and nationalism in
Tanzania for a similar performative approach.
3 Staging estrada I
Concerts, reyting and artisthood
Tashkent, 2004
The temperature is still freezing, but the atmosphere has heated up. It is mid
February, and the third day of Melodies of My Dear Motherland is about to
begin. Announced in December as a four-day-long “festival of national es-
trada”, I had expected this event to be a rather glitzy show organised around
a competition, which, as I have come to realise in the past months, is an
obligatory part of festivals in Uzbekistan, if not actually a synonym for it.
What I have been witnessing over the last two days, however, has proven
my initial assumptions wrong. But then, there had already been reasons to
doubt the reliability of my intuitions: The festival had been postponed for a
few days without public notice – in fact, I had not seen any kind of advertise-
ment for it apart from one rather inconspicuous announcement – and just
a week ago someone involved in the organisation had offered to arrange an
access permit for me. Not a backstage pass, just an authorisation to enter at
all. This all seemed to contradict the general idea of a festival, and, indeed,
the procedures so far have borne little resemblance to the kind of entertain-
ment expected – or any kind of entertainment actually – save for a multitude
of participants, endless musical activities and a dim spirit of competition.
Even the illustrious location seems to have been stripped of its usual gran-
deur, which could have furnished the occasion with at least the semblance
of celebration. Normally living up to its name through a combination of
neo-oriental interior design, plush fabrics, discreet lighting and slight over-
heating, now the Turkiston Palace feels like a lavishly decorated fridge. The
temperature in the concert hall must be around 14 degrees and the working
lights do little to attenuate the physical discomfort. On the contrary, pale
and cold, they add a touch of desolation, revealing shabby details behind
the veneer of splendour: worn-out patches in the carpet, stains on the velvet
chairs, cracks in the stage boards. By now I know all of them, at least the
ones visible from the seat assigned to me somewhere in the back rows. From
there, I have spent the last two days watching and partially filming the activ-
ities on and around the stage, but when settling down again with camera and
stand just a few minutes ago, one of the organisers gruffly motioned for me
to quickly store away my equipment. Even without being able to overhear
74 Staging estrada I
conversations, I can sense a heightened level of nervousness today, more
tension and more commotion.
Melodies of My Dear Motherland is not a festival, nor is it a competition –
it is an audition, organised by O’zbeknavo. Its aim is to find suitable sing-
ers and songs for the estrada block in the official spectacle on the occasion
of Navro’z, the spring equinox on 21 March with its roots in Zoroastrian
thought and practice. Over the past two days, more than a hundred estrada
singers have come on stage to perform one or two songs each in front of a
selection committee – either to a minus, an instrumental playback track, or
to a full playback track, a plyus. Criteria for the order of appearance seem
to have been origin and popularity: Students from various music institu-
tions as well as lesser-known singers from Tashkent have featured on the
first day, whereas the second day has been mainly devoted to estrada from
each of Uzbekistan’s provinces and Karakalpakstan. Now, as the third and
final day is about to begin, with artists gathering backstage and some of
them coming down into the auditorium to greet members of the selection
committee, I start to sense the reason for the change in atmosphere and the
restrictions on recording: today is reserved for the stars of the scene.
As will soon become evident, however, their celebrity status is not met
with an attitude of deference on the part of the committee members. Just
as their less famous predecessors in the audition have been, they too are
reprimanded – for being badly prepared, for presenting songs that are old or
inappropriate to Navro’z (or both), for turning up late or for having failed to
prolong their licences. Frequently, the tone is brusque and presentations are
broken off abruptly after just a few bars. There is little glamour regarding
the scene’s top acts and some even look like scolded school children, when
exiting the stage. On occasion, however, on this day as on the two preceding
ones, it is the selection committee itself that comes under scrutiny – and
criticism. Even though the committee already includes a high-ranking pol-
itician in the form of the minister of culture, the committee has its work
sporadically supervised by an even higher government level. Well into the
first day, the audition routine was suddenly disturbed by a certain unease
among the 10–15 people in the hall. Their attention shifted from the stage
to one of the side entrances and everybody rose from their seats. A man had
just entered the auditorium, and even though I could not directly see his
face, his characteristic figure and way of walking made him immediately
recognisable – it was one of the deputy prime ministers, Alisher Azizkhod-
jaev, who later that year, would become minister of culture and sport. He sat
down with the committee members and after a short conversation among
the group, performances resumed, but the atmosphere had noticeably stiff-
ened. Having watched and discussed a few singers, he rose to leave. Again,
everybody stood up and there was a certain amount of commotion, before
the audition returned to its earlier course and mood.
His visits on the second and third day followed a similar pattern, but were
considerably longer. During his stays he acted like an additional committee
Staging estrada I 75
member and, on the second day, even initiated a debate on the stylistic
orientation of the estrada block. I could not understand the details of this
conversation from a distance, but the general thrust of the argument was ob-
vious. Dissatisfied with at least some of the committee’s decisions, he urged
for more proximity to folk and classical music, whereas most of the mem-
bers favoured a musical idiom that was distinctively estrada. Even though
I could detect hardly any traces of a turn to older Uzbek traditions within
the estrada block at the actual festivity, at the auditions the deputy prime
minister’s intervention surely left its mark. At least in his presence, artists
were asked to preferably present songs that were based on folk and classical
music or used local lute instruments in the accompaniment.
However, the final yield of the three days of auditions would only be pre-
liminary anyway, with successful acts outnumbering the total that would
eventually be needed to staff the estrada block. This left ample room for mu-
sical manoeuvring in the weeks to come. Only a few songs would stay, as they
had been presented; more frequently, alterations to text and/or music were
already planned at the auditions, and there even were some slots for which a
singer was already selected, as was the style of her outfit in some cases, but
for which a fitting song still needed to be found or even composed. In fact,
when watching the Navro’z spectacle in its final form on television around
21 March that year, there was little in the estrada block that I could directly
relate to what I had heard and seen during the auditions. Many people had,
indeed, been very busy since the beginning of February – and there was at
least as much work lying ahead of them. Preparations for the Independence
Day show around 1 September were to start soon after Navro’z, and the be-
ginning of July saw my return to the Turkiston Palace for another three-day
audition. It would very much resemble the first one I had w itnessed – only
this time, the low temperature inside the concert hall would be a welcome
retreat from the scorching summer sun outside.
By the time the Navro’z auditions took place in February 2004, I already
knew about the close connection between the government and estrada in
Uzbekistan and had an idea about the significance of state celebrations.
Still, I found the extent to which high-ranking political figures, such as the
minister of culture and one of the deputy prime ministers, were involved in
this event surprising and irritating. I would have thought that politicians of
their status had more serious things to do than to listen to estrada singers
several days in a row for hours on end. But the friends I met for dinner on the
evening of the auditions’ third and final day did not share my astonishment.
For them, the commitment of these two senior politicians was perfectly con-
gruent with the importance that the Uzbek government attached to the cel-
ebration of Navro’z on 21 March, and even more so to the commemoration
of Independence Day on 1 September.1 If sheer grandiosity is taken as a
yardstick for political relevance, then it is indeed hard to imagine a matter
of higher priority in Uzbekistan. Annually, both holidays are honoured with
opulent state spectacles in Tashkent and less opulent, but still impressive
76 Staging estrada I
spectacles in the provincial centres, which overshadow all other kinds of
state concerts that take place in addition in and out of Tashkent over the
course of a year.
How are these state concerts of various grandeur and importance organ-
ised? What is their purpose? How do relations and issues of power between
artists and government officials play out in the production processes? What
do artists gain from performing at these state concerts? And how do they
relate to their participation? These are the central questions that I will ad-
dress in this chapter – and I will start my exploration with a closer look at
the premier state concerts, Navro’z and Independence Day.
Preparations
Even the rehearsals for the celebrations are well guarded from the public. In
the weeks running up to Navro’z and Independence Day, one can only get
an acoustic impression if one is passing the future concert site. Especially
in July and August, with daytime temperatures rising above 40 degrees Cel-
sius, most activities on the shadeless stage take place after sunset. When
I arrived in Tashkent for fieldwork in the summer of 2003, rehearsals for
Independence Day were already under way, and I always enjoyed walking
along Sharof Rashidov Avenue or sitting in one of the lawn restaurants on
Staging estrada I 77
Brodvey, where I could hear streaks of sound wafting through the warm
summer night from the brightly illuminated festivity grounds.
For the participants, however, the preparations for these two grand
state spectacles are extremely demanding and put a heavy strain on their
time, energy and nerves. This is as true for the innumerable students who
form background tableaus as it is for the hundreds of performers on stage
and the spectacles’ directors and other creative and technical staff. To
mount an event with such a mass of participants in several weeks is it-
self a challenge, but the task is complicated considerably by the politi-
cal significance – a nd thus political sensitivity – attached to these two
celebrations. The programme is subject to alteration upon request from
high-ranking government officials right up until the very last day. Usually,
these interventions are aimed at more closely tailoring content, personnel
and aesthetics to the preferences of the president, but changes can also
be prompted by the most subtle shifts in foreign policy priorities, which
are meticulously translated into the show.3 People I talked to differed in
their opinions on how officials and organisers ascertained the president’s
thoughts and feelings on these issues. A few were convinced that he actu-
ally took a great interest in these spectacles and would directly voice his
opinions to his advisers. Many even suspected that they were organised
solely for his own personal pleasure, including a sound engineer who told
me this shortly after Independence Day 2005:
Most people, however, would not concede that the president played such an
active role in decisions. They instead suspected his inner circle i nterpreted –
very freely and often wrongly – things he said that were vaguely related
to the subject, and many accused high-ranking officials of inventing presi-
dential likes and dislikes in order to promote their own goals, particularly
their positions in patronage relations. Until his death in 2016, the sheer in-
vocation of Islom Karimov’s wishes, regardless of whether they faithfully
reflected his actual opinions, always worked like magic to swiftly cut short
certain proposed alternative solutions and to mute potential dissent.4
Reception
To advance Uzbekistan’s national identity and to enhance the country’s in-
ternational reputation by showcasing grand eras of its history as well as
its political, economic, cultural and spiritual accomplishments since in-
dependence: these were the ultimate goals of the Navro’z and Independ-
ence Day spectacles most frequently mentioned by those involved in their
staging – government officials and creative staff alike. And these statements
often sounded like the legal acts which, each year anew and each year more
elaborately phrased, order the production of the festivities. According to the
2007 decree for Independence Day, for example, the celebration pursued the
following objective:
There are reasons to doubt, however, that the two lofty aims – bolstering
national identity at home and improving Uzbekistan’s image abroad – are
actually met by the lavish Navro’z and Independence Day shows.
A vital, but currently absent, prerequisite for strengthening Uzbekistan’s
international prestige via this format would be for it to be broadcast abroad,
to say nothing of its being received with interest. Despite the fact that the
productions are specifically tailored to impress a global audience (in addi-
tion to pleasing the president) and foreign spectators are regularly invoked
during rehearsals to spur participants’ ambitions and efforts, in reality, the
shows are in actual fact hardly ever noticed beyond Uzbekistan’s borders.
But even if they were, the question is whether these gigantic displays of na-
tionalism would elicit a more favourable response than the mixture of awe
and revulsion, marvel and ridicule which dominate the outside perception
of North Korean state spectacles.
As Richard Leppert maintains, conspicuous displays of musical “redun-
dancy and excess” were important in negotiations about power and peace
already among the courts of early modern Europe. Contemporary state
spectacles may hope to function in a similar way,
80 Staging estrada I
as a veiled threat of force, dramatizing the fact that one has both wealth
and the willingness to spend – on musical instruments and paintings,
for example, for the moment, but potentially on cannons and the like
as necessary.
(Leppert & Lincoln 1989: 12)
Figure 3.1 A
t the folk fair for Independence Day in Alisher Navoiy National Park,
2008
The folk fair itself, however, is very much enjoyed by Tashkentis. Its ac-
tivities are concentrated on Alisher Navoiy National Park, but it spreads
over the whole city centre with music performances on central squares
(Figure 3.1).
However effective or not they were in raising national pride under Islom
Karimov, state holidays were – and still are – an immense demonstration of
power on the part of the Uzbek government, forcing the population to some-
how engage with them, be it via extensive media coverage or inconveniences
in daily life due to security measures. But it is the show’s participants who
are confronted more pronouncedly and more directly by government power
in the context of these celebrations. My research has focused on artists in
the estrada block, but it seems safe to assume that other performers are sub-
ject to similar conditions.
Auditions
The social dynamics and the wider field of power relations as played out in
auditions seem to be captured quite well using a binary model – if we look at
them as an isolated event. On the one hand, there is the government, repre-
sented by the selection committee, which misappropriates artists’ creativity
for its own ends and forces them to participate in nationalist endeavours,
with some members of the committee perhaps even taking personal pleas-
ure in this enactment of power. On the other, are the artists, who resent the
government’s incursion into their freedom of expression and movement –
when to sing which songs for whom – and who, without openly opposing
this obligation, try to at least obstruct the state’s attempt at administration.
Failing to prepare new songs, presenting thematically inappropriate
songs, being late, leaving early, showing up with an invalid licence or not
showing up at all – any of these could be read as a more or less subtle form of
sabotage. In line with Timothy Rice and his concept of a “referential, ethical
aesthetic” (1996: 194), one could extend this and read the obvious musical
84 Staging estrada I
or textual inappropriateness of some of the presented songs as a way to de-
liberately express political opposition.10 While it might be tempting to view
the audition in terms of this binary model, and there are certainly aspects
of the situation that fit the artist vs. state dichotomy, it is ultimately impos-
sible to appreciate the complexity of this particular setting or even the wider
relationship between the estrada scene and government through the lens of
this neat and simple antagonism. A look at the two presumed factions will
reveal why.
Artists
If I found impatience and annoyance to be the defining sentiments on the
part of the selection committee during the auditions, as I mentioned ear-
lier, then the dominating mood among the singers on and behind the stage
seemed to be indifference and resentment. Later, in interviews and informal
conversations, this impression was both confirmed and contradicted. There
had been resentment and there had been indifference – but there had also
been some measure of competitive eagerness, occasionally fiercely so, which
had escaped my attention at the time.
Resentment was partially related to the brusque behaviour of the selec-
tion committee, which some singers considered disrespectful. One well-
known female artist described her experience the following way:
“Turn around”, they say, “we will look at what you have there.” Honestly,
such things were said. I walk on the stage, they know me, [but say] “In-
troduce yourself.” [Then] People’s Artist Nasiba Abdullaeva enters,
they tell her “Name, please!” This is offensive.
(10.2005)
Another reason for resentment related to time was hinted at but not directly
discernible at the auditions themselves. This is the demands on time that
will be made should one be selected for participation in the actual show. As
was described earlier, rehearsals for the spectacles go on for weeks. In ad-
dition, one might be asked to re-record a song from one’s repertoire or even
learn and record a completely new song for the show’s playback track. And
then there is always the danger that all this will amount to nothing, as one
might still be dropped from the programme at short notice.
Apart from a commitment in time, being chosen for the estrada block also
means a noticeable loss of regular income, particularly in the case of Inde-
pendence Day. Estrada singers earn the bulk of their salary from performing
at weddings, and late spring to early autumn is the favourite season for getting
married – fruit and vegetables are in abundance and the weather allows those
with enough space at home to celebrate outdoors in their courtyards. Stars of
the scene can earn several hundred – even several thousand – dollars a night
during that season by driving from one wedding to another to perform the
currently fashionable short gigs of three to four songs, called birrov in Uzbek
(literally: in a wink, in a jiffy, quickly). Other, lesser-known singers might
be hired with their ensembles as the dezhurka, which literally – and aptly –
means “on-call service” in Russian. They provide music for the whole dura-
tion of the party and those musicians accompany singers who have dropped
in for a birrov, unless they have their own ensembles with them or perform
to a digital minus or plyus anyway.13 Unless the preparations coincide with
Ramadan, during which the marriage season is suspended, Navro’z and In-
dependence Day rehearsals clash with potential wedding engagements.
Financial losses are most severe for those artists who are sent from Tash-
kent to perform – and thus also rehearse – for the provincial editions of the
holidays, musical missions that are consequently particularly unpopular.
One day before Independence Day in 2008, a sound engineer told me the
following story about the unlucky fate of a singer who had been selected to
perform in the spectacle:
[X] is annoyed about Independence Day. His brother, who is with him
in the group, too. They lose a lot of money. He currently gets 700 dollars
for a birrov, and he has three, sometimes even five weddings a day. …
[X] recorded a song for Independence Day in the studio. That was an
overnight thing, from four in the afternoon to three at night. That was
eleven hours. We gave him a special price of 350 dollars, but that was still
expensive and time-consuming. There were a lot of musicians, karnay
90 Staging estrada I
[long trumpet], surnay [double reed instrument]. The shtab [head festi-
val committee] liked the rough version, but the final version they didn’t.
They said: “Take something old.”
(08.2008)
Officially, estrada singers are not paid for their performances in Navro’z and
Independence Day spectacles. As already mentioned, their commitment is
one of the obligations they assume by signing their licence contract with
O’zbeknavo and, besides being considered a patriotic duty, part of the trade-
off for being exempted from having to pay taxes. In reality, however, money
flows in various directions. For acquaintances with close connections to the
estrada scene, it was a kind of sport to trade names and figures, when out to-
gether for tea or dinner around the time of Navro’z and I ndependence Day.
Despite assertions from officials to the contrary, some singers obviously and
unofficially do receive money for their performances – from O’zbeknavo
funds or the general holiday budget. The higher their star status and the
more untroubled their relationship to the government, the likelier it is that
they will be compensated for their efforts. A high star status alone, however,
is not enough.
At the same time, as noted above, money flows in the other direction, and
this happens much more frequently. Singers pay selection committee members
and other government officials to be included in the estrada block. This means
there must be something to be gained from performing at Navro’z and Inde-
pendence Day – and this something must outweigh the demands on time and
loss of income which participation entails. Pleasure is surely one aspect. Those
who had performed in one or more spectacles already, especially younger sing-
ers, talked about the excitement of participating in an event so grand, lavish
and generally regarded as important. Some also mentioned their pride related
to singing for so many people, including so many prominent people – even if
singing at this occasion only means lip-synching to a playback track.
With regard to the directors and other actors with major responsibili-
ties for the spectacles’ success, Laura Adams writes about their “pleasure
in complicity” with the authoritarian state and its nation-building project
(2010: 187–188). Based on my conversations with estrada singers, I would
argue that their pleasure centred more on the performance situation as such
and less on furthering loftier political and ideological goals. Many did point
to the political importance of the event, but my impression was that they
drew pride rather than pleasure from this fact. Considering the constant
danger of their being dropped from the programme and their generally sub-
ordinate position in the overall production processes, it is quite difficult to
imagine how a feeling of complicity could genuinely arise.
A female artist of great fame, but, to my surprise, with a scathingly criti-
cal perspective on estrada administration, talked about her view on singing
at these events in the following way:
I will tell you the good side [of it], that, which is a plus … [It is] an honour
to sing in front of the president. I like this, this is the most exceptional
Staging estrada I 91
[samoye yedinstvennoye], to sing for our president, sing for our author-
ities [dlya nashikh rukovodyashchikh organov], in order to be tête-à-tête
[tet-a-tet]. This is a kind of happiness [schast’e], a part of happiness. I
think this is normal. And if a person [contributes] his part there, for
example there is a republican holiday to which he contributes his small
part, for the sake of his state, for the sake of his nation. I consider this
part of happiness.
(09.2004)
Apart from pleasure and pride, a more crucial and lasting aspect of partic-
ipation in Navro’z and Independence Day spectacles is the positive effect
that it has on one’s reyting. Reyting – a word used in Uzbek and Russian
alike – is quite an elusive but omnipresent and vitally important concept in
the Uzbek estrada scene. It is for this reason that I will look at it in more
detail now.
Spectacle enthusiasts
It is not always the case, but often spectacle enthusiasts pay to participate,
or rather, pay in an attempt to participate – if their bids are unsuccessful,
their investment will not be returned. The majority of them are newcomers
who compete for one of the few slots for “promising young talents”. A radio
journalist explained how important it is for them to participate in Navro’z
and Independence:
Staging estrada I 95
This is for promo … This is mainly interesting for young singers [lit:
youth], because they need PR, and they want to be seen not only by the
public but also by the government – who they are, what they are doing.
Essentially, this [Independence Day] is like a PR company.
(11.2005)
Sometimes, more senior singers, who are hoping to regain their former pop-
ularity in shou biznes and the wedding market, try to buy their way into the
estrada block at Navro’z or Independence Day as a similarly convenient but
significant step towards making a comeback. And then there are those who
have fallen from grace with the government, usually over licence issues, for
whom the two major spectacles are an important occasion to restore them-
selves to good favour with the state and its organs.
At the auditions for Navro’z 2004, for example, Ozoda Nursaidova turned
up unexpectedly. This singer, who performed Asrasin, the first Uzbek patri-
otic video clip I ever saw back in in 2001, is one of the few stars whose great
popularity in the wedding scene is not matched by government recognition –
at least not any more – due to extended quarrels, officially couched in lan-
guage about licence issues (see Chapter 6). As one of the selection committee
members told me later, her surprise appearance was judged to be an attempt
at improving relations, but it was unsuccessful. Her standing with govern-
ment officials at various levels of authority was too damaged and she was
deemed too unrepentant at heart for the committee to even consider dis-
cussing her inclusion – despite the fact that her great talent was undisputed
and she had even been honoured as a Distinguished Artist earlier. If an
artist in a similar situation does manage to get into the estrada block at one
of the major spectacles, this is a sure sign of her or his official rehabilitation.
This does not necessarily mean that they paid for their inclusion; a song that
fits the spectacle well is often investment enough.
Regardless of the motivation behind one’s attempt to get on the Navro’z
or Independence Day programme, however, the sum paid for a good song
usually exceeds the sum paid for inclusion, if the latter financial transac-
tion is involved at all. Most of the spectacle enthusiasts commission one
or several new songs for the occasion from a composer and/or arranger, to
lyrics either bought from a poet or issued by O’zbeknavo or the Ministry of
Culture. They then record these songs before the audition in minus and plyus
versions. Depending on the prestige and professionalism of those involved
in the process, these additional expenses can add up to several thousand
dollars. For the top stars of estrada, who earn just as much with just one
birrov at a wedding, this is a negligible sum. For newcomers, however, who
might get 50 dollars for a birrov and are invited to weddings only once or
twice a week, this is a considerable amount of money. Given this substantial
prior investment and the prospect of immensely enhancing one’s reyting,
should one be successful, it is little surprising that struggles for a slot in the
estrada block can be fiercely competitive.
96 Staging estrada I
A student from the Conservatory, for example, became notorious for her
relentless and ruthless campaign for a place on the programmes during the
audition phases in 2004. She not only directly approached everyone she con-
sidered influential in the decision-making process, including me, surpris-
ingly, because she suspected that a foreigner with a video camera must have
good relations with people “at the top”. She and her family also resorted to
more, one might say hands-on measures, such as her hitting another can-
didate at the auditions backstage with her handbag and her mother getting
into a verbal and physical dispute with another young singer’s mother in the
middle of the city’s central department store ZUM. Finally, this singer ac-
tually did make it into the Independence Day show, but was nearly expelled
from the Conservatory.
While most people I spoke to noted that this was an extreme case, rivalry
and envy were described as common sentiments among spectacle enthusi-
asts around Navro’z and Independence Day. Many others experienced dis-
appointment when all their efforts – financial and otherwise – did not meet
with success. A sound engineer remembered how one of the young custom-
ers at his studio was really devastated by news about his failure:
The immense zeal and strong desire on part of these singers hoping to be se-
lected for performance at the two major state spectacles should not lead one
to forget that a great number of their colleagues tries hard not to be selected.
I will analogously call this group of singers spectacle evaders.
Spectacle evaders
Almost all spectacle evaders I talked to had already performed at Navro’z
and Independence Day, and almost all were generally willing or even ea-
ger to do it again. Their main reason for hoping not to be selected was a
perceived lack of current need for participation. They were satisfied with
their reyting at that time and preferred exploiting it with lucrative wedding
engagements instead of spending long hours at rehearsals.
The young singer who dreamt of participating in the Novaya Volna
competition, for example, had quite a clear idea about how frequently she
and others should appear at the two major state spectacles:
Minor concerts
Navro’z and Independence Day are, without a doubt, the most important
government-organised festivities in which the estrada scene is involved, but
they are certainly not the only ones. There are myriad other state concerts
and official events that O’zbeknavo staffs with its licensed singers. On most
of these occasions, the selection process is far less laborious and lengthy than
the auditions and their aftermath for Navro’z and Independence Day; often
it is managed with just a few phone calls and no prior rehearsals. Neverthe-
less, the amount of “events determined by state and government” in which
estrada artists have to perform in order to fulfil their contractual licence
duties is astonishing. To provide a fuller picture of their official obligations
and to explore the mechanisms of reyting beyond the two most important
state spectacles, I will now turn my attention to these minor concerts.
A calendar of concerts
Some minor concerts are, like the major events, invitation-only. Others are
so-called charity concerts [xayriya kontsertlari], meaning that admission is
98 Staging estrada I
free either for the entire audience or at least for parts of it, if priced tickets
are donated to certain socially disadvantaged groups. Charity concerts are
frequent. In its activity report for 2001–2003, for example, O’zbeknavo lists 33
charity concerts out of a total number of 112 concerts in Tashkent for the first
six months of 2002, and 190 out of a total of 410 concerts in the rest of the coun-
try for the same period (O’zbeknavo 2001–2003: 7). Smaller state holidays, in-
augurations and anniversaries dominate this calendar of concerts in honour
of events, cities, institutions and professions. Age groups are also celebrated
with estrada, with events often taking place in connection with Uzbekistan’s
motto of the year, such as 2002’s “Respecting the Elderly”, 2008’s “Youth” or
2014’s “Healthy Child”.15 The following passage from O’zbeknavo’s activity
report for the first nine months of 2006 gives a rather good impression of the
various festive occasions for which estrada singers are recruited:
Occasions for charity concerts can also be gruesome, though, lending the
label an outright cynical quality. About two weeks after the Andijon events in
2005, for example, estrada artists were summoned at short notice by the min-
ister of culture and sport and sent from Tashkent to Andijon to give a concert
with the aim, as the manager of one artist related, marking quotation marks
in the air with his hands, “to sing out against the terrorism and help pacify
the city” (10.2005). There had also been other, earlier political incidents in
which estrada artists had been deployed as a kind of musical rapid response
team in order to ease tense situations or shape public opinion. In 2000, a
Military Patriotism Song Festival [Harbiy Vatanparvarlik Qo’shiqlari Festivali]
entitled We Will Give You to No One, Uzbekistan! [Hech Kimga Bermaymiz
Seni, O’zbekiston!] assembled the superstars of the estrada scene and, ac-
cording to official sources, more than 15,000 enthusiastic spectators. An at-
tempt to dissuade young people from involvement with radical Islam and
encourage them to rally behind patriotism instead, the festival was organised
in the wake of various attacks earlier that year which the Uzbek government
had attributed to Islamic fundamentalists (see Chapter 7).
Musical missions to rural Uzbekistan, which are high on the concert
agenda from about mid-September until mid-November, also have little to do
with happy events. During this time, estrada artists provide entertainment to
“cotton pickers and voluntary helpers [paxtakorlar va hasharchilarga]” dur-
ing the cotton harvest (O’zbeknavo 2001–2003: 6). In this context, the term
“voluntary helpers” is a blunt euphemism for the countless pupils, students,
Staging estrada I 99
teachers, low-ranking government clerks and other adults, altogether around
one million people, who were annually forced to help out as harvest hands
and support professional farmers in this hard manual work in the Karimov
era. Former students I spoke to about these annual spells of involuntary
labour all recalled the immense hardship of harvesting and their anger at
just being pulled from their university courses. But they also recounted, how
much they had enjoyed the concerts – “cultural rest” or “cultural relaxation”
in official parlance – and being able to mix quite freely with young people of
the same age and of the other sex without parental supervision.
There are two more types of O’zbeknavo’s activities that fall under the
category of charity in its broadest sense, that is, providing estrada perfor-
mances free of charge: sending artists to perform at poor families’ wed-
dings16 and holding events for young people with the goal of enlightenment
and education, such as this initiative:
In recent years, these educational engagements have become much more ex-
tensive in scope, as artists are also sent to the provinces and Karakalpakstan
for what is described by O’zbeknavo as “lessons in spirituality propaganda”.
My last fieldtrip in March 2016 coincided with the beginning of such a mis-
sion in culturalisation – or rather spiritualisation. The end of the month saw
the start of a “Youth Festival” organised by the Kamolot Youth Movement
with three-day-long activities in each of Uzbekistan’s provinces as well as
Karakalpakstan and spanning across more than 10 weeks altogether from
the end of March until the end of May. Under the title We Are Children of
a Great Country, the festival centred on a total of 18 topics, among them
“This is My Homeland”, “The Parliamentarian and Youth”, “The Heroes
You Love”, “Mass Culture and Youth Spirituality”, “‘The Victory Is Ours!’
Independence Marathon”, “The Conscientious Salesman”, “From Short
Film to Big Cinema”, “The Kamolot Library” and “I Serve Uzbekistan”.
Estrada artists were part of the programme as performers, but also as guests
for talks with children and young people, and the list of participants reads
like a who’s who of the 2016 estrada scene. Some of them had just finished
the weeks of rehearsals for and the actual performance of Navro’z and were
now about to embark on trips to various provinces and Karakalpakstan –
as were poets, writers, classical and academic musicians, actors, athletes,
scholars and other public figures. By chance, I met several of them at the
Tashkent domestic airport. When I was waiting to take a flight to Ferghana,
they were about to board a plane to Qarshi, the capital of Qashqadaryo
100 Staging estrada I
province, where the festival was to begin. With Ramadan running from 6
June to 4 July that year and preparations for Independence Day starting
directly afterwards and stretching until 1 September, it was clear that those
singers, who had been appointed for two or three such trips, would miss a
good part of the wedding season in 2016 thanks to their participation “in
events determined by state and government”.
In addition to providing entertainment or education free of charge,
O’zbeknavo organises concerts with admission fees, albeit very modest ones.
These mostly take the form of gala shows with a great variety of estrada
singers. In Tashkent, at least, they are mainly autumn and winter amuse-
ments, staged either in the Palace of the Friendship of Peoples (Figure 3.2)
or the Turkiston Palace.
Throughout the year, Tashkent-based artists are also sent on tour by
O’zbeknavo to participate in similar concerts around the country in order to,
as one O’zbeknavo official phrased it, “level out inequalities in cultural supply”:
In one oblast there are very many, in another very few events. For this
reason, we have to take care that performers have the opportunity to
travel there. The people who live in Surxandaryo, for example, it’s not
their fault that they live there. For this reason, we have to take care that
it is affordable/accessible and cheap for them to visit [concert] halls.
(11.2005)
Figure 3.2 T
he Palace of the Friendship of Peoples, 2006
Staging estrada I 101
Occasionally, however, estrada artists are summoned in the other direction,
when it is requested that a provincial O’zbeknavo organise a so-called r eport
concert [otchëtnyy kontsert] in Tashkent, presenting the respective region’s
estrada talent for critical inspection in the capital.
Figure 3.3 A
poster for a charity concert organised by O’zbeknavo (second from
right) between posters for a commercial concert, for a circus show and
for a printer on one of the “Tashkent Announcements” boards in the city
centre, 2005
102 Staging estrada I
glamour on most of these events, significantly limiting the pool of artists. As
one O’zbeknavo official claimed: “We are only sending the best performers.”
What he means is artists above a certain level of reyting, perhaps interspersed
with some still rather unknown newcomers, depending on the importance of
the event. Definite numbers are not available, but estimates by officials and
people in the media converged on a figure of around 50–70 singers altogether,
of whom some 15–20 would be the most sought after. The composition of this
narrow circle – and its core – would change with the usual fluctuations and
gradations of reyting within the estrada scene.
This means there is a significant number of minor concerts and related
events for which O’zbeknavo could enlist an estrada singer – in addition to
Navro’z and Independence Day – and the likelihood that one would actually
be chosen increased with one’s reyting, at least to a certain extent. But as
mentioned above, many of these events required less time and effort than
did Navro’z and Independence Day – on the part of officials in selecting art-
ists and on the part of artists in preparing and rehearsing. Furthermore, es-
trada singers sometimes received some financial remuneration and, at least
for the smaller events, there was more room to negotiate a refusal should one
receive a request to perform. On the topic of remuneration, I received diver-
gent information, but there was more reason for me to believe artists claim-
ing to have received money than officials claiming not to have paid any.
In contrast to the commitments and risks that Navro’z and Independ-
ence Day entail, the conditions surrounding these comparably minor events
might seem more favourable. They come with one crucial downside, how-
ever: Their effect on one’s reyting is also minor. Demonstrating availa-
bility and a willingness to perform would be positively acknowledged by
O’zbeknavo, and maybe even by other government officials. But being in-
cluded, for example, in the “Best Teacher of the Year” ceremony for the
Tashkent City Medical Institute at the Turkiston Palace obviously does not
secure the attention of the highest-ranked state representatives, nor does it
bring with it the immense publicity and prestige or audibility and visibility
that participation in Navro’z and Independence Day promises.
Consequently, estrada singers are rarely enthusiastic when summoned
to perform in minor concerts, and apart from real beginners who are only
starting to accumulate governmental recognition, I never heard anyone ex-
press particular eagerness to participate – and most certainly not the kind
of eagerness that would translate into an unofficial payment. On the con-
trary, the most frequent response to requests of this kind by O’zbeknavo was
annoyance – slight, if one had no other plans, but profound, if this clashed
with prior engagements. Not showing up when one has been appointed is
a strategy some artists try to employ as a way out, but usually with harsh
consequences (see Chapter 6).
In conversations with me or among themselves, singers and other actors
in the estrada scene cited time commitment as the most important reason
behind their resentment. Another source of irritation in the context of these
Staging estrada I 103
concert assignments was the fact that they were felt to resemble musical
conscriptions. One male singer said about being sent on musical missions
to the provinces on the occasion of state holidays: “We are supposed to go
there just like soldiers” (11.2005). A female singer of top reyting was simi-
larly resentful:
It is not like paying your licence and that’s it. They say “Go, work!”
Then they call, say: “We have an event here [and you have to go]!” For
some reason they sometimes relate to artists like to service staff [k ob-
sluzhivayushchemu personalu]: “Come on, forward!”, and we don’t have
a say in there, we cannot say anything.
(11.2005)
In 2016, a young female singer went so far as to compare her engagement for
an Independence Day spectacle in one of the provinces the year before to
the services of a sex worker to the militsiya, commonly called subbotnik, the
same term used for the obligatory community clean-up day: “They call you,
do with you what they want to, and don’t pay” (03.2016).
It would be wrong to attribute these reactions to the disproportionate sen-
sitivity of capricious pop stars spoilt by their fans’ devotion. The language
used in O’zbeknavo’s activity reports to describe the allocation of singers
to events, particularly the verbs used, aligns with their perception. In the
four reports available to me, only once were artists “invited” [taklif qilindi]
to perform in an event. In all other cases “their participation was provided”
[ishtirokini ta’minlandi] and most often they were “enlisted/summoned”
[ jalb qilindi] (O’zbeknavo 2007: 4). This terminology resonates with Laura
Adams’ and Assel Rustemova’s observation in the context of state holidays
that performers “are requisitioned in a manner similar to other supplies that
the spectacle producers must acquire” (2009: 1264). It also resonates with
my own experiences witnessing interactions between O’zbeknavo officials
and estrada singers and among officials themselves on the topic of these
enlistments.
It was especially the fact that participation was often expected at ex-
tremely short notice that would provoke the anger even of those singers who
did not generally oppose performing for free in minor concerts. Several
times over the course of research, I heard stories from estrada artists who
had already been on the way to wedding engagements or concerts outside
Tashkent when they were called by O’zbeknavo and summoned to sing at
an event the same day. When they refused due to prior commitments, they
found their licences suspended on their return to Tashkent and these were
restored only after they gave in to exhortations from O’zbeknavo officials,
offered their apologies and, sometimes, paid unofficial fines.
Thus, artists resent minor concerts for essentially the same the reasons
they resent the two major events, Navro’z and Independence Day. But in
contrast to the latter, giving (time) and taking (rough treatment) here are
104 Staging estrada I
perceived not to be satisfactorily balanced by gaining (reyting) – or at least
the promise of gaining. At the beginning of my fieldwork, most artists spoke
about minor concerts as an unavoidable nuisance, not very profitable, but,
save for short-term commitments, at least quite predictable and, taken indi-
vidually, not very time-intensive. Others found them somehow embarrass-
ing as not really fitting the glamorous image they liked to present in public.
Over the course of my research, however, anger and annoyance decidedly
grew, and it was very much present in March 2016 in light of the imminent
engagements in the We Are Children of a Great Country youth festival.
On the whole, however, the degree of resentment that I encountered
among estrada artists when conversations and interviews turned to the var-
ious and often numerous duties to perform on state demand was consider-
ably lower than I had expected. I had also anticipated that this resentment
would have a different focus. To conclude this chapter, I will examine this
discrepancy now in more detail.
Profit margins are not nearly as high for most artists, and for many a licence
fee is a substantial investment, especially, as several singers remarked, since
O’zbeknavo predominantly – or even exclusively – gave out the most expen-
sive rating group. Still, broad criticism was rare, even among artists with
less lucrative profits. Since their financial gain was limited, their acceptance
of this arrangement could not be based on commercial advantages. It was
linked instead to the fact that quite a number of them related their activi-
ties to concepts of duty and service – as did some of the above-mentioned
superstars. Both terms, duty and service, are already familiar from the legal
documents explored in Chapter 1, where they are a rhetoric staple. A pri-
mary objective for establishing O’zbeknavo in 1996, for example, was the
“perfection of cultural services to the population”, and it remained one of
its central tasks until 2016.
O’zbeknavo does not subcontract artists to fulfil this task, however. It
instead acts as a kind of broker for it, turning it into an artist’s individual
obligation by means of the licence system. The numerous and extensive du-
ties to which estrada singers must consent in order to receive the permission
to perform are described in a way that essentially and fundamentally casts
them as their very own. Consequently, the fulfilment of these, and service
in general, are considered to be a kind of personal responsibility that tran-
scends the usually narrower understanding of a contractual framework.
Some singers talked about duty and service in a way that seemed to just
mechanically echo official language, which can often, of course, be related
to a strategic reticence vis-à-vis a foreign researcher. For others, however,
duty and service seemed to be more than just a tried and tested veneer of
political expediency. They appeared to be integral, sometimes even central,
components of their self-concept as artists, albeit in differing degrees and
varying interpretations. Considering the fact that all professional estrada
singers in Uzbekistan earn their living by performing at weddings, this is
106 Staging estrada I
hardly surprising. After all, this means providing entertainment services at
people’s request – and this is how they spend most of their time. Even a male
singer of high reyting described his position in these terms:
Some singers do not like this image of musical servants, but most simply
take for granted that this is an aspect of being an estrada artist and for
many, the understanding of service transcends the normal boundaries of
a financially remunerated job anyway. It includes ideas of social duty, for
some also religious duty, and has an educative component – as it does for
this male singer of high reyting in his early thirties: “I want to somehow help
people with something, educate them to the good side, influence [them] to
the good side. The goal in this is the service to god” (11.2005).
Not everyone would subscribe to the religious aspects reflected in this
estrada singer’s comment, but even many of the more secular-minded artists
attribute a higher purpose to their art than the mere provision of entertain-
ment for others – and the provision of a living for themselves. Some singers,
especially those who had already been active in the Soviet era, talked about
raising the cultural level and aesthetic tastes of the population through their
art. Others mentioned addressing domestic or social problems and, through
this, giving people moral support – or a moral example – as important for
their work. Interviewing Yulduz Usmanova in the early 1990s, Theodore
Levin found her expressing exactly these ideas:
Yet, even with all her talk of music as commerce and her bitterness as
not earning the fees to which she felt entitled, Yulduz seemed in many
ways like a traditional musician. Despite her fame and her broad expo-
sure through mass mediation, her primary musical activity was still the
relatively intimate wedding performance. She still understood music as
a form of social service whose obligation was to convey moral values.
(1996a: 83)
Our task, you know – creative people like us, we should not work only
for politics or only for the people. Here, it was always like this: Creative
people should build a bridge from the state to the people. [So that] via
us, they walked to each other, you know. Here, if politics do not harm
the people, we should [bring] politics to them like a bridge, you know.
The nation cries, but they [in the government] do not hear its problems.
We should [bring] them its problems in creative form. I think, we should
stand in the middle, you know, not there and not there.
(09.2005)
While some singers did indeed confirm the opinion of a radio journalist that
“in their head there is only this – how to earn more” (09.2008), and others
dismissed the government’s expectation of duty and service as an intrusion
into their freedom and an interference with commercial aims, many singers
I talked to – many more than I had expected – had deeply ingrained ideas
about duty and service. Thus, being called on by the government to perform
at concerts for them was just a logical and normal extension of their own
thoughts about their role in society and the purpose of their activities, even
though they might resent the manner and the frequency in which they were
made to perform.17
Artisthood
When I automatically suspected estrada artists would be reluctant to fulfil
their various obligatory concert commitments, I did so from what I ear-
lier called a totalitarianising perspective. This perspective can only imagine
them to have been coerced, co-opted or duped by the Uzbek government
into integrating duty and service into their self-conception. Putting coer-
cion on the agenda is definitely not, however, what makes this gloomy in-
terpretation problematic. Not endorsing service and duty or displaying an
understanding of these concepts that diverges from the state version, can –
and usually does – result in trouble for estrada singers (see Chapter 6).
What does make this perspective problematic is that it presupposes a very
particular, essentially romanticist concept of artisthood as an unmarked
or even universal matrix, automatically relegating deviating concepts to
108 Staging estrada I
the position of inferior anomalies. Accusations of co-optation only make
sense if artists are imagined to be free, aloof and detached from political
affairs or, if they are politically involved, being so exclusively in a critical
way. But why presume a concept of musician to be universal – and relevant
in Uzbekistan – when, as various scholars (e.g. Botstein 2007) have con-
vincingly demonstrated, this concept is often little more than a fantasy even
in those places where it is generally accepted as the reigning ideology of
artisthood? This move seems particularly strange when we consider the fact
that Uzbek estrada singers are neither the first nor the only musicians in the
world who embrace ideas of duty and service. On the contrary, these con-
cepts have a long history of being prevalent, for example, among court mu-
sicians and praise singers, in religious movements and political campaigns,
which could serve as a more fitting basis for comparison.
When it comes to estrada in Uzbekistan, however, there is not even any
need to look elsewhere for similar models of artisthood. They can be traced
over centuries through the region’s own history, which has an ample tradi-
tion of musicians including service and duty in their self-concept – whether
to a Muslim god, as with various kinds of musicians in the Sufi context, to
the people, as with musicians providing entertainment at life cycle rituals
and those engaged in healing, or to worldly power, as with the court musi-
cians of the emirs and khans. And even today, concepts of duty and service
are very common – and highly valued – among classical and folk musicians
(see Levin 1996a). Older ideals of duty and service overlap or even merge
with later ones. In the Soviet Union, they were harnessed to the cause of so-
cialism in the form of culture workers. Then as now, musicians were meant to
support the government in educating people and advancing socio-political
progress, albeit with different goals.18 If the Karimov government needed
to co-opt artists after independence, it was to direct an already existing
self-conception towards new goals. The fact that current national independ-
ence ideology in Uzbekistan is, in fundamental respects, a continuation of
Marxism-Leninism, as will be explored in Chapter 7, is a crucial reason, I
would claim, why this change in goals went relatively smoothly.
There are, of course, singers in Uzbek estrada, particularly younger ones,
and even more so their producers or other people in shou biznes, for whom
the whole idea of serving people, country or government seems an absurd
and somehow shameful anachronism. They consider the duty towards the
state fulfilled with payment of the licence fee – just as other people’s duty is
satisfied through payment of their taxes. But in light of the longer history
of musicianship in what is now Uzbekistan, it seems hardly surprising that
many estrada artists today perceive duty and service as a normal part of
their profession. In principle, the situation in Uzbekistan is similar to the
one described by Judith Frigyesi for Hungary:
Also in Uzbekistan, many estrada singers I talked to, particularly but not
exclusively those whose careers had begun in the Uzbek SSR, subscribe to
an ideal of the committed or engaged artist and consider it the normal con-
cept of musicianship. For them, it is rather a model that posits artists as
being ideally free, aloof and detached from political affairs that appears
an anomaly – and often an inferior one. For most of them, this model is
unattractive since it would, in their view, greatly diminish their societal
relevance. Because their pride, self-esteem and sense of importance come
from being involved in and needed for the nation’s “culturalisation” and
the proper course of grander socio-political processes, it does not appeal
to artists to imagine themselves distanced from all this. One female singer
in her early thirties summed up her long monologue about the role she saw
for herself and her colleagues in society with the following sentences: “You
know, if it weren’t for us, everything would fall apart. Look at the state the
country is in. We help to hold it together” (06.2004).
Reciprocity
A concept of artisthood which includes ideas about duty and service as well
as endorsing the deal of “no tax in exchange for concert commitments” does
not mean, however, that the relationship between estrada and the govern-
ment was or is necessarily considered ideal – aside from resentments about
disrespect or demands on time and other particulars related to its execu-
tion. I sometimes encountered discontent with the current arrangement on
a more fundamental level: Several singers found it lacking in reciprocity. In
their view, their dedication to duty and service for grander socio-political
causes deserved more consideration on the part of the government than al-
ready existed.
Many artists appreciated the tax exemption as well as the increase in
reyting and the prospect of state awards that their various concert com-
mitments promised. But for them, this was not enough. They would have
found a proper contractual relation appropriate, one in which financial re-
wards for their services were not indirectly gained via the prestige economy
and a – more or less external – shou biznes or wedding engagements, but
through direct remuneration by the government itself – in cash, but also in
kind, such as in the form of complementary flats and privileged access to
high-quality health care. Particularly older singers who had experienced the
110 Staging estrada I
Soviet system, where professional musicians had been directly employed by
the state and received set salaries, often accused the Uzbek government of
having breached its contractual obligations after independence, while de-
manding estrada artists continue to fulfil theirs. In their opinion, by pur-
suing partial deregulation and marketisation in the sphere of estrada and
officially outsourcing monetary transactions to weddings and shou biznes,
the Uzbek government had just furtively abdicated its own allocative duties
towards them – and, more generally, towards the proper development of
estrada. They experienced liberalisation as loss – in respect, prestige and
financial security – and as an absurd deviation from normality in music
politics (Brandtstädter 2007: 136).
Indignation and incomprehension were even more pronounced among the
composers I spoke to. In November 2003, for example, a composer told me
about a recent meeting with state officials where singers and composers had
been ordered to prepare songs for Navro’z – and was obviously annoyed:
We have to provide music, and then there will be a selection, but not a
real competition. You cannot ask for a salary. They expect you to do
this as a duty to the homeland. There are two great holidays, Independ-
ence Day and Navro’z, and it is not asking too much, the responsible
people say, to compose two pieces a year.
(11.2003)
Notes
1 As mentioned earlier, Laura Adams has done extensive research on these two
state holidays (Adams 1998; 1999; 2005; 2008; 2010; Adams & Rustemova 2009).
I am grateful to her for discussing Uzbek culture politics with me in Tashkent in
the summer of 2004.
2 A propiska is an official document of residential registration. Uzbek citizens
cannot just move to Tashkent if they wish, and it is difficult for many to get a
propiska there. For this reason, the number of people living in Tashkent without
a Tashkent propiska is always high, which makes it hard to reliably assess the
capital’s number of inhabitants.
3 Changes to the estrada block, which is really just a sequence of single acts with-
out an overarching theme, appear minor in comparison to the substantial alter-
ations or even complete deletions, which are often suffered by broader stretches
of the programme that revolve around a single topic, should “foreign policy con-
cerns and ideological dictates” come into play (Adams 2010: 71).
4 From Hitler’s interventions in music policy (Potter 2006) via Stalin’s commen-
taries on opera productions (Redepenning 2008: 365) to Kim Jong-il’s infamous
“on the spot guidance” for films (Howard 2005: 117f.), leaders of authoritarian
Staging estrada I 113
and totalitarian states are routinely, even if sometimes wrongly, credited with
extraordinary personal engagement and direct involvement in artistic matters
(see also Botstein 2007: 492). A pleasant corollary of these leaders’ artistic en-
deavours are the anecdotes about those same leaders’ artistic incompetence (see,
for example, Graham 2003: 40).
5 Just as in English, the Uzbek word for star as a celestial body is the same as the
word for a popular artist: yulduz, pl. yulduzlar. This is also true for Russian:
zvezda, pl. zvëzdy. In more poetic Uzbek, the Persian-derived word setora (more
rarely sitora) is sometimes used.
6 There probably are people in Uzbekistan who endorse these shows as a welcome
distraction from the hardships in life, as Donna Buchanan has described with
regard to 1950s socialist Bulgaria (1995: 396). I did not meet any of these people
in Uzbekistan, however, or if I did, they did not admit to having this type of
response.
7 For other forms of Independence Day celebrations, see Adams and Rustemova
on contemporary Kazakhstan (2009) and Baily on 1970s Afghanistan (1988:
140). For the pleasures of participating in Soviet parades, see Yurchak (1997:
163–166).
8 The selection committee does not wish to see certain artists, such as restaurant
singers with licences from the lower categories, and it does not need to see stars
whose participation is already clear. The latter may even be part of the selection
committee.
9 Many people who are active in the Tashkent estrada scene have actually never
heard of this centre. It might well be that it was established more on paper than
in reality in order to fulfil tasks laid down in O’zbeknavo’s yearly plan or as
a reaction to complaints about the low quality of patriotic songs in previous
spectacles.
10 Timothy Rice proposes this approach of a referential aesthetic in the context of
Muslim Rom wedding musicians in 1980s Bulgaria: “So they played Bulgarian
tunes, but with a kind of aggressive ferocity that expressed wordlessly in music
their hostility to a planned economy and nationalist politics that offered them
very little” (1996: 186). While somehow appealing, I find this essentially herme-
neutic analysis too speculative in the absence of supporting data and generally
problematic for its narrow focus on the political. In his research on music in
Albania, Nicholas Tochka has similarly warned of reading politics into musi-
cal sounds or situations, which might be governed by totally different concerns
(2016: 125; see Rasmussen 2002: 16–17).
11 Alisher Azizkhodjaev (1953–2012) certainly had a penchant for martial arts. He
is commonly said to have boxed as a young man and, later in life, he served as
president of the Uzbek federation of kurash (national wrestling). However, he
also held a PhD in law and the title of professor.
12 See Tochka for comparable strategies of non- or rather half-preparation in the
context of socialist Albania’s Festival of Song (2016: 78f.).
13 It might seem remarkable that the terminology to differentiate the two types of
performances or hiring is a mixture of Uzbek [birrov] and Russian [dezhurka].
The Uzbek equivalent to dezhurka would be navbatchi. In daily usage, most Uz-
beks I know also resort to the Russian word, when referring to the on-call ser-
vice of pharmacies, for example. So this mixture of languages reflects normal
speech habits, at least in Tashkent.
14 Novaya Volna [New Wave] is an International Contest of Young Pop Singers that
draws the majority of its participants from the successor states of the Soviet
Union and the former socialist countries of eastern Europe. From 2002 to 2014,
it took place in Jurmala, Latvia, which had already hosted the late-Soviet-era
All-Union Contest of Young Performers of the Soviet Estrada Song from 1986 to
114 Staging estrada I
1989. Estrada singers in Uzbekistan consider Novaya Volna to be the most pres-
tigious international competition – after the Eurovision Song Contest, which,
due to European Broadcasting Union regulations, is not accessible to them. As
a consequence of political quarrels between Latvia and the Russian Federation
in the wake of the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014, the competition
has taken place in Sochi since 2015. For more information on the contest, see
newwavestars.eu/en/ (accessed 7 February 2018).
15 Since 1997, every year has been dedicated to a certain social or economic unit in
Uzbekistan, which has then been awarded special attention in turn, for example,
with concerts, newspaper articles, etc. For an overview of all mottos assigned so
far, see http://kun.uz/uz/news/2016/12/07/savkat-mirzieev-2017-jil-nomini-elon-
kildi (accessed 7 February 2018).
16 I only encountered this initiative in O’zbeknavo’s activity report for 2007 (p. 5).
While singers were actually sent quite frequently to weddings and other festivi-
ties on O’zbeknavo’s orders during my fieldwork, these were commonly private
assignments on the part of officials and linked to personal obligations or status
games in the context of patronage relations. This means the families in question
were usually very affluent (see Chapter 6).
17 See Morgan Liu (2017) for a fascinating analysis of “logics of obligation” and
ideas about the beneficial “paternalistic state” in Uzbekistan.
18 On how ideas of duty and service in the Soviet Union and in other socialist states
translated into musicians’ practical commitments – across genres (see, for exam-
ple, Bright 1985: 124, 127; Leitner 1994: 22f.; Naby 1974: 117; Redepenning 2008:
192f.; Yusupov 2004: 58). The most striking instances, were, without a doubt,
the brigades and troupes providing frontline entertainment in the civil war and
the Second World War in the Soviet Union (see Frolov 1976: 39–63; MacFadyen
2002b: 126, 152ff.; Stites 1995; Kuznetsova 1977: 371–398; Yusupov 2004: 20ff.).
4 Staging estrada II
Competitions and other
activities “at the state level”
ihol laureates sing the Nihol hymn in the final minutes of the awards
Figure 4.1 N
gala show at Independence Palace, 2008
of Peoples with its awards ceremony Tarona Shou, or the State Conserva-
tory might be hosting the recently established newcomer contest New Names
[Yangi Nomlar]; estrada students and other youngsters might be battling
against one another in the DIY atmosphere of the self-organised (and self-
judged) Hit Review International at the Zerafshon Concert Hall, or a pri-
vate businessman with producer ambitions might be hoping to find the most
promising protégé by staging a contest in a rather shabby back office. In
view of this, it is hardly surprising that my concert-going debut at the begin-
ning of fieldwork in 2003 happened to be a gala show presenting the finalists
and winners of an awards competition. I was surprised, however, to find out
later that with Nihol, I had, incidentally, managed to start my research with
the most prestigious government competition for the estrada scene in the
early 2000s, a competition that was still running in 2017.
What is the rationale behind the immense number – and the often im-
mense scope – of government-organised music competitions involving es-
trada? How do issues of state control via musical engagement figure in these
initiatives? And how do artists and other people involved in estrada judge
these and similar activities “at the state level”, to use a common phrase?
These questions form the focus of my explorations in this chapter – and I
will start with a closer look at the two most important music competitions
118 Staging estrada II
at the time of my fieldwork: the already mentioned Nihol and O’zbekiston –
Vatanim Manim [Uzbekistan – My Homeland].
Nihol
Nihol (lit.: sprout, shoot, sapling) was established in 2000 as a presidential
award for singers, instrumentalists, music ensembles and dancers up to 30
years of age “with the purpose of continuously motivating powerful youth”
in the fields of classical music, folk music, academic music, estrada, classi-
cal dance and ballet (PKM-334 2000). Until 2005, candidates were recom-
mended by institutions and individuals, with nominees selected by a jury to
compete as finalists in a contest that took the form of a gala show. As such,
every year in August, shortly before Independence Day, 10 winners were
chosen and presented with one of the unranked awards. Receiving a Nihol
award was accompanied by a substantial monetary prize, 70 times the min-
imum wage, which was equivalent to about $615 in 2000 and $489 in 2005.
Just for comparison: a scholar or instructor at the Conservatory would re-
ceive a monthly wage of $50–60 at that time. A Nihol award also provided
free admission to an institution of higher education in the fields of culture
and art – free meaning without an entrance exam and without tuition fees.
In 2006, Nihol was considerably enlarged through its transformation
into a contest of three rounds, progressing from district via provincial to
the national level, with the final selection taking place in Tashkent. At the
same time, the overall number of awards was extended to 15, while the age
range was limited to candidates between 17 and 25. In 2008, the head of the
Department for Work with Talented Youth at the Ministry of Culture and
Sport, responsible for the organisation of Nihol, explained this change in
structure with reference to the decision to pay more attention to what is usu-
ally called – at least in Tashkent and in official documents – the regions or
provinces (regiony and oblasti in Russian, hududlar3 and viloyatlar in Uzbek).
Clearly reflecting the perspective from the capital of a very centralised coun-
try, all these terms denote anything that lies outside the city of Tashkent.
“We changed the structure of the contest so the regions would feel that we
care about them, too, and not only about the capital” (09.2008) was how the
head of department explained the recent development. Looking at the list of
winners for the first six editions of Nihol prior to this modification, a neglect
of those from “the regions” is apparent: out of 56 laureates altogether, 47
came from the city of Tashkent. The regulations for the contest from 2006
onwards put a stop to this extreme bias in favour of contestants from the
capital, stipulating that Uzbekistan’s 12 provinces and the Autonomous Re-
public Karakalpakstan should ideally be represented by one laureate each,
leaving only two awards for the city of Tashkent.
Reality does not entirely conform to these regulations, as there continue
to be three to four winners from the capital and some of “the regions” have
walked away empty-handed. But the tendency towards a more equally
Staging estrada II 119
distributed recognition of young talents across the country is undeniable.
Similarly undeniable, however, is the very unequally distributed recognition
of young talents across genres, at least until 2007. According to internal Min-
istry documents, of the 85 awards altogether given between 2000 and 2007,
48 alone went to estrada solo singers or groups, leaving only 37 to be shared
among all the other music and dance genres covered by Nihol – figures that
strongly support critics’ complaints about the prominent p osition of estrada
in cultural politics and musical life.4 Since 2008, the overwhelming dom-
inance of estrada has waned somewhat, with classical music in particular
gaining more ground, but estrada is still the genre with the most laureates
across the entire history of Nihol.
As befits a competition for young talents, all contestants, regardless of
genre, have to prove their extraordinary artistic giftedness. But Nihol is not
only about honouring outstanding and promising capabilities in music and
dance. It solidly weds talent to patriotism – as this excerpt from the 2006
decree that modified and enlarged Nihol reveals:
One could assume that the preference shown towards estrada in the awards
is related to the fact that these requirements are much more easily met by
this genre than, for example, by academic piano and ballet. While this is cer-
tainly true, and could well play a role in jury decisions, other factors seem to
be more important in contributing to the imbalance.
There are many more estrada singers than academic piano players or
ballet dancers in Uzbekistan, particularly outside Tashkent, which draws
talented people from other parts of the country at an early age, who seek
the high quality tuition available there in specialised educational institu-
tions. For this reason, applications for Nihol already demonstrate a great
bias towards estrada and, as the head of the Department for Work with
Talented Youth at the Ministry of Culture and Sport, remarked, the aim
is to preserve a certain ratio between the number of applications and the
number of laureates in one genre. Moreover, it is no secret that estrada is
high on the Uzbek government’s music policy agenda, and at least some
Tashkent-based students from the field of academic music have refrained
from entering the competition, as they consider their chances too low in
light of current government music priorities. For them, Nihol lost much of
its appeal particularly after 2006, when the number of awards for Tashkent
residents was reduced to two.
120 Staging estrada II
The 2006 modification not only expanded and adjusted the regional
reach of the event, but also its temporal spread. Whereas recommenda-
tions and applications previously had to be submitted by 1 July for the
awards of the same year, after 2006, the first round took place in April, the
second in June and the third in July and August. In 2011, when Nihol was
again modified and turned into a biannual contest, the three rounds be-
came even further dispersed with round one scheduled for April and May,
round two for October and November and round three for June through
August of the following year (PKM-295 2011). Even more remarkable than
the gradual extension in time, however, is the increase in the numbers of
participants. While from 2000 until 2005, a total of around 100–120 can-
didates were considered for the award each year, in the inaugural edition
of the restructured version in 2006, the first round attracted already about
3,000 contestants. By 2008, entries for the initial stage had risen to more
than 8,000, leaving 881 competitors for the second round and 89 finalists
on the national level.
These figures might seem impressive, but they pale in comparison to the
immense scope of another contest that was organised annually during the
period I conducted fieldwork: O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim [Uzbekistan –
My Homeland]. The 2003 edition of Vatanim Manim’s award concert could
well have been the event that inaugurated my field research in Tashkent; it
took place just five days before Nihol’s gala show.
Vatanim Manim
Originally, Vatanim Manim was meant to be a one-off event in 1996 (PKM-
451 1995). Afterwards, a presidential decree declared this first edition “an
unforgettable event in the spiritual life of our nation …, met with great sat-
isfaction by the citizens of the state, supported with enormous enthusiasm”
(UP-1550 1996). For this reason, it was subsequently made a recurring phe-
nomenon in 1997 and repeated on a yearly basis until the mid-2000s. Open
to soloists and ensembles, amateur and professional musicians, the young
and older people without any age restrictions, Vatanim Manim was estab-
lished as a song contest – or, more precisely, as a contest for songs as well as
their performance. One could participate with any song – whether classical
or academic, folk or estrada – as long as it was new and patriotic. The decree
that turned Vatanim Manim into an annual event, summarised the competi-
tion’s goal in the following way:
Vatanim Manim was a two-rounds event organised under the joint respon-
sibility of the Ministry of Culture, O’zbeknavo, the Union of Writers, the
Union of Composers, the Council for Spirituality and Enlightenment and
the National TV and Radio. Talking about the competition with staff in the
Ministry of Culture for the first time in 2004, I found it almost impossible
to grasp its structure – or rather, I could not imagine that what I seemed to
understand was indeed correct. But it was correct in broad terms after all,
as I found out later, when reading the documents that Ministry staff had
copied for me.
Even with the documents in front of me, the whole system still appeared
extremely complicated. This was particularly the case with the first round,
which always took place in spring and early summer. Part of it was or-
ganised on the provincial level, that is, by the administrative branches of
the government in Uzbekistan’s 12 provinces, the Autonomous Republic
Karakalpakstan and the city of Tashkent – on the same level as the second
round of Nihol. In addition, various ministries and other state institutions
were assigned to organise their own contests among the soloists and ensem-
bles that fell under their purview. Thus the Ministry of Defence, for exam-
ple, had to arrange a competitive selection among its military ensembles,
while the Ministry of Public Education organised one among its Houses
of Culture, and the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education
among pupils and students. The same applied to the Ministry of Labour and
Social Security, the Ministry of Culture and O’zbeknavo. Even though this
was not specified in the official decrees, numerous other government organ-
isations, such as the Kamolot Youth Movement, often joined the explicitly
named institutions in conducting their own contests.
Both tracks of the first round, the provincial and what one could term
the institutional, converged when sending their winners – three for every
province and every institution – to the second and final round. Each year,
Vatanim Manim ended with a grand gala concert and the presentation of
the laureates in Tashkent’s Palace of the Friendship of Peoples on the third
Sunday in August, the official Song Holiday [Qo’shiq Bayrami] that had
been established along with the contest. In contrast to Nihol, the altogether
ten awards for Vatanim Manim were ranked (Table 4.1). In addition, vari-
ous governmental social foundations were called upon to honour contest
participants with their own prizes in cash or kind.
According to official records, each year Vatanim Manim processed more
than 50,000 participants and more than 10,000 songs. With contestants
ranging from groups of toddlers who could barely walk, let alone remember
choreographies or lyrics, to thousands of rather well-rehearsed and well-
behaved pupils and students, to frail elderly people with quavering or already
122 Staging estrada II
Table 4.1 Prize scheme for O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim
In fact, such competitions we have had in the past, we have now and
we will have in the future – and with time, there will be even more of
them … And the content is always the same: to propagate national ide-
ology and effectively implement spiritual-enlightening measures.
(05.2015)7
I find it hard to imagine how Uzbek musical life would cope should this pre-
dicted increase in contests really take place. Already during fieldwork my
impression was that at least the estrada scene was more than saturated with
competitive music events – not only, but especially a result of state initiative.
The next section will convey why.
Competitions galore
It can be quite a cumbersome task to keep track of music competitions in
Uzbekistan. The most important and biggest government events of this kind
for the estrada scene, Nihol and Vatanim Manim plus its successors, may be
quite prominently featured in the media and thus easily traceable. Others
are not – and, as already mentioned above, there are many. Various state
organisations regularly come up with individual or joint initiatives, most
rather short-lived or even just one-off affairs, restricted in regional reach
and targeted audience. To add to the confusion, titles of former contests
are sometimes recycled several years later to garnish new and often very
different ventures into musical competition. At the beginning of fieldwork I
tried to keep an exact and exhaustive list of estrada-related competitions in
Tashkent, but soon realised the futility of this endeavour – too many were
the institutions involved, too numerous the occasions, too small the scope of
most of them to be announced publicly. As I found out later, competitions
are, in fact, an extremely popular item on the agenda of annual plans in
almost any state institution in the field of culture or education and tend to
spring up wherever one looks.
Even when considering just the larger events, however, one already gets
more than a vague idea of the demands competitions make on all involved.
These, for example, were the major – and some minor – government initia-
tives of this kind that included or exclusively concerned estrada in Tashkent
in 2003, the year I started my fieldwork:
Even when taking into account that the same estrada singers will not take
part in all these events, it is worth remembering that these competitions take
place in addition to and often in parallel with other obligations based on
government demand, such as preparations for Navro’z and Independence
Day or minor concerts (see Chapter 3). To provide a more detailed picture
of involvement, I will now look at patterns of participation.
Contestants
Patterns of ambition to participate in contests resemble those to partici-
pate in state spectacles explored above. For young estrada singers, these
events are similarly attractive, especially the larger ones, because of the var-
ious benefits they promise: the highly valued privilege of free admission to
university in Nihol and substantial prizes in cash. That at least some con-
testants invest part or most of these amounts in advance on songs and/or
unofficial payments certainly reduces the absolute financial benefit in case
of their success, but this unmistakably points to the fact that there is more
to be gained from participation in contests than the officially proclaimed
prizes. Just as with performing in state holidays, winning one of the major
contests entails government recognition as well as heightened audibility and
visibility in the media, both positively affecting one’s reyting.
Many people I spoke to, artists and officials alike, even judge success in
the larger contests, especially Nihol, as a kind of inaugural step into a pro-
fessional career in estrada. It is also widely seen as a precursor for being
considered for a state decoration. This is not only supported by figures – of
altogether 85 Nihol laureates, for example, by 2008, 12 had already been
awarded the honorary title Distinguished Artist – but also by the simi-
larity in treatment between achievement in contests and promotion in the
state award system. Whenever artists are announced in state-related public
events – and often even when they are introduced in more formal private
126 Staging estrada II
settings – their names are preceded by their successes and titles. These are
also printed on posters and mentioned by compères on stage. Even the two
compères at the 2003 Nihol award show, who are on close terms in real life,
as I found out later, constantly included honorary titles when referring to
each other on stage. In sum, all these potential benefits mean that very zeal-
ous newcomers have a variety of good reasons to compete in as many gov-
ernment contests as possible. And this is exactly what some attempt to do.
Artists with a sufficiently high reyting and a sufficiently good relation-
ship with the government (according to their own estimate), however, are
usually not eager to participate in contests, just as they are not very keen
on participating in state holiday spectacles. For singers who can easily earn
the equivalent of the promised prize money on one evening of wedding en-
gagements or even with just one birrov, these contests understandably hold
little financial allure. Similarly, Distinguished Artists and People’s Artists
in good standing with the government and the audience do not necessar-
ily seek more government recognition or more publicity – at least not by
engaging in an activity that is as time-consuming and unpredictable in
outcome as entering contests. And in general, as several people remarked,
there seems to be a reluctance among professional estrada singers to com-
pete with amateurs in the same event – as a matter of principle, but also for
fear of losing to them, as this would inevitably have a detrimental effect on
their reyting.
In an interview, one of the most popular estrada singers in the wedding
circuit quite vehemently complained about the mix of amateurs and profes-
sionals on stage. The thematic context was the estrada block of the Navro’z
and Independence Day spectacles, but the line of criticism is exactly the
same with respect to contests:
I like it, when they invite deserving artists [dostoynykh artistov], this is
normal and not insulting. But if it continues like this, I, for my part,
will not go to Independence Day any more. I will say, “There are such
artists, I don’t want to perform among them”, and if they force me to
sing there, I will say, “Sorry, but together with these artists, who are not
capable of singing on stage, [whom] the public does not know, [of whom]
it is unknown where they have come from, I will not sing. For me this
is a minus.”
(09.2005)
For these reasons, most students I spoke to said that they felt they were not in
a position to decline if asked to enter a contest, even if their chances of win-
ning were very low. Thus the majority of non-enthusiasts simply took this
obligation for granted and did not really spend any time thinking of ways
128 Staging estrada II
to opt out. A young composer vividly recalled being practically conscripted
into composing a song for Vatanim Manim as a student at the Conservatory:
I did not have a choice. The rector sent for me, and there was a piece of
paper in front of him, with the name of a poet written on it – and mine.
It was just not possible to refuse. This was an immense impudence.
(09.2005)
Others involved
Conservatory teachers I spoke to, for example, took pride in having lau-
reates among their students, and they enjoyed the prestige this conferred
on them. In fact, even though the concept of reyting had no valence among
them, the number of their students who had won contests, or more precisely,
which places they had won in which contests, with international successes
being the most highly valued, certainly played a role in negotiating their
status and were a frequent topic in faculty or department meetings as well
Staging estrada II 129
as in more private conversations. Still, they often resented the extra work of
preparing students for a promising entry and feared damage to their image
should their academic offspring not compete successfully.10
Similarly ambivalent in their attitude towards contests were the jury mem-
bers I talked to. They felt honoured to be invited as judges and most con-
sidered their input important for the success of the contest or even for the
development of estrada in general. But they dreaded the demand on their
time and the often difficult diplomacy involved in determining w inners –
similarly to the members of the auditions’ selection committees, with which,
in fact, there was often some overlap. Juries for competitions have a set-up
similar to that of selection committees for Navro’z and Independence Day,
but, at least for the final round of countrywide contests, they are usually
larger. Composed of government officials, members of educational institu-
tions, state foundations and artists, they are one very obvious case in which
the boundaries between the country’s creative and administrative personnel
become blurred.
Another case in which composers, poets or singers are cast into more or-
ganisational roles is when they are appointed as supervisors for the exe-
cution of provincial rounds. At the first edition of Vatan Yagonadir, Vatan
Bittadir in 2007, for example, composer and head of the Department for
Estrada Singing at the Conservatory, Dilorom Amanullaeva, was enlisted
as one of seven “members of the Organisational group allocated to the re-
gions” and assigned the task of ensuring that the contest’s first round in the
provinces of Bukhara and Navoiy be carried out “on a high level” (Vatan
Yagonadir 2007). Two other composers and a poet were among the remain-
ing six people who were put in charge of the first rounds in the other ten
provinces and Karakalpakstan.
Finally, of course, the government’s actual bureaucratic staff spends a
considerable amount of time organising competitions. Members of govern-
ment institutions responsible for conducting contests obviously have a stren-
uous job implementing them, and most of the officials I spoke to experienced
stress related to their immense workload. None of them, however, openly
complained to me. Considering their position and the formal nature of our
interaction, this is not surprising. On the other hand, government officials
might also be more willing to accept these obligations. After all, in contrast
to participants and the jury, their involvement is at least part of their regu-
lar job and not a set of additional tasks. Furthermore, their position at the
upper levels of the chain of command enables a closer – much more personal
and often much more positive – relationship with the contests they super-
vise. The way most of them talked about the competitions within their scope
of duties made it clear that they did somehow consider them their own. Por-
traying the task of organising a contest as demanding, while depicting its
execution as well structured and coordinated, seemed to be a common rhe-
torical strategy for proving bureaucratic professionalism as well as personal
dedication to something large, complex and important.
130 Staging estrada II
This strategy is probably prevalent among organisers of state contests and
festivals in most other parts of the world, too, and I certainly encountered it in
Germany. I would argue that the decisive difference compared to the majority
of similar initiatives elsewhere (and a defining feature of the Uzbek setting) is
the high government positions of those using this strategy. I have never ceased
to be intrigued by what astonished me most while watching the audition for
Navro’z 2004: Competitions, just like Navro’z and Independence Day, have
an enormous reach upwards in the state hierarchy. They engage government
members of the highest rank – and in large numbers. The 1996 decree, for ex-
ample, that turned Vatanim Manim into an annual contest appointed people in
the following positions to its 25-member Organisation Committee (Table 4.2).
So many songs they have written, so many deplorable [people] spent time
on auditions, [in a] jury, [at] competitions … They made so many songs,
134 Staging estrada II
but I do not remember any, save for Sevara’s Ulug’imsan Vatanim … In
12 years only one song.
(04.2004, see Exiting estrada)
Engaging people
Due to their varying size and differing participation patterns, it is difficult
to estimate how much time competitions take up from people involved in
them. Some government officials are essentially occupied with implement-
ing contests all year long, whereas for others this is only one of a number of
tasks to be dealt with over the course of several weeks, as is the case for jury
members and creative personnel furnished with organisational responsibili-
ties or recruited to contribute compositions or lyrics. The time commitment
by estrada singers ranges from complete abstention (those with very high
reyting) to part-time engagement over several months (those eager to gain
government attention and increase their reyting).
Various authors have rightfully pointed to the importance of state-
organised competitions in monitoring or even domesticating musical scenes
(see, for example, Nooshin 2005: 251; Silverman 2007: 79). Based on the ev-
idence, this applies to Uzbekistan, too, but the implicit assumption of a bi-
nary split between the monitors and the monitored needs to be challenged.
In the context of Uzbek music competitions, supervision surely is a crucial
factor, but, as was demonstrated earlier, the line between those who do the
monitoring and those who are being monitored is extremely blurred. Due
to the extensive involvement of state officials up to the highest ranks, while
monitoring musical scenes, the Uzbek government essentially monitors it-
self. In line with the hierarchical system of responsibility, sketched above, to
some degree monitoring affects everyone involved, reaching up to the very
top. And just as in the context of Navro’z and Independence Day, the ulti-
mate supervisor of events – real or alleged – is the president, and invoking
him is a safe strategy for making even ministers move.
How effective this supervision is on every level is a different matter. Judg-
ing from my experience with Melodies of My Dear Motherland in 2004,
which was announced as a competitive festival but turned out to be merely
an audition, I would not be surprised if at least some of the first rounds on
the level of districts and cities existed more on paper in the annual activity
reports than in reality. Even if the selection procedures were quite altered in
this way, however, there would still be a need for people to choose contest-
ants for the competition’s higher levels. This might be less demanding than
running a proper round, but it would nonetheless require attention and cost
time.
136 Staging estrada II
Regardless of any deviations from the official structures and how pre-
cise individual estimates of participation are, it is safe to say that all events
staged by government command – competitions, state spectacles and minor
concerts – result in tens of thousands of people spending from several weeks
up to three or four months engaged in state-organised musical activities
in Uzbekistan every year. And most of these events are linked to patriot-
ism. This, in turn, means that it is known what tens of thousands of people
are doing over various spans of time and with varying degrees of intensity
and authority – whether toddlers, school children or students, teachers or
professors, amateur or professional artists, composers or poets, mayors,
ministry staff, ministers or deputy prime ministers. Binding people’s energy
and time to activities that are as structurally and thematically regulated as
these concerts and competitions might look like a music policy approach
that is intent on more than simply monitoring and supervising – and merits
a different label, something like control. And while this was the term that I
intuitively attached to initiatives of this kind, the majority of people I talked
to perceived and framed them very differently.
[Contests such as Vatanim Manim] are very important, not only for
proving oneself a patriot [pokazat’ sebya patriotom] – and I really very
much love my homeland. It is thanks to our homeland that we have
succeeded in [even] having fans. In 2003 I was nominated for the Nihol
award. The president himself bestows it. This is a reward for good work
[za khoroshiy trud], they give it to young people. This was very pleasant.
Even the president himself trusts in us. This was pleasant and I wanted
to work more.
(11.2005)
Complaints
It was often the same people who both fantasised about fixing problematic
estrada-related issues “at the state level” and those who lamented about the
reality of estrada dealings “at the state level”. At first sight, this seems remi-
niscent of what Alexei Yurchak calls rhetorical circularity in his analysis of
official discourse in late Soviet society:
The ultimate circular injunctions of this discourse were that Soviet cit-
izens should develop new approaches and methods of work by using
old approaches and methods, and should continue doing the things that
proved futile in the past.
(Yurchak 2006: 71)
Incompetence
Much more frequently, however, accusations of incompetence were levelled
at government representatives below the president, with staff at the Minis-
try of Culture and O’zbeknavo the main targets. Just as the deputy prime
minister was dismissed as an uncultured boxer by some (see Chapter 3),
O’zbeknavo’s then director was blamed for being just a builder, which was
at least an allegation linked to his primary qualification as a construction
engineer. But not everyone who talked about his perceived lack of qualifi-
cations did so as politely as this senior member of staff at the Conservatory
when musing about who it would be most promising for me to address at
O’zbeknavo in my research:
At this moment I do not see any professionals there … You can ap-
proach [X], he might be able to tell you something. But everyone else,
they are far from that … For example, [the director] … can tell you very
much – very much – with regard to organisational-structural matters …
But why this genre develops or does not develop, why [someone] intro-
duced these folk motives into the music or those – and [why] this is good
or bad, he can answer you that like a normal listener, … on a subjec-
tive basis. But there is no professionalism, of course. However, he is a
very great organiser, a very good organiser, he can do everything out of
nothing.
(12.2003)
A very refined and distinguished composer was more concise – and more
scathing – in his judgement: “[There] sit very ignorant people, very stupid,
very unintelligent people – and they direct us!” (11.2005).
Personal grievances and feuds certainly play a role in accusations of in-
competence, not least the fact that intellectuals in Uzbekistan, as in other
parts of the postsocialist world, have suffered a considerable fall in status
since independence and are quick to question the competencies of govern-
ment bureaucrats of a more managerial type (see Tochka 2016: 109; Verdery
1991: 434). But this attitude was not limited to those who had personally
experienced a loss of prestige after socialism. And then, automatically re-
sorting to allegations of official incompetence to explain perceived deficits
in the sphere of culture is not specific to Uzbeks.
One line of reasoning held that the government is not a very attractive
employer financially and competent people would rather prefer to work in
Staging estrada II 143
shou biznes, as this representative of a media company claims: “[T]o say that
there should work [lit.: sit] competent people in the state organs is ridicu-
lous. They receive little money, they cannot be competent” (05.2004).
Others claimed that there was a general lack of competent people in Uz-
bekistan for the management and development of estrada and they blamed
this on the government’s failure to prepare and provide the “necessary cad-
res” by establishing relevant university courses – at all or sufficiently quickly.
Most people I talked to, however, doubted that competence was – or
would be – any significant criterion for being hired into the state’s estrada
administration anyway. Aware of the fact that important government posi-
tions in Uzbekistan were regularly assigned in return for a substantial pay-
ment and on the assumption that the respective candidate would be able to
channel funds upwards in the government hierarchy, they did not see how
any other skills, such as a proper professional qualification in the sphere
of estrada and its management – compared to a primarily economic and
patronage-related one – could become more relevant.
Consequently, processes in the governmental estrada administration
were seen to be dealt with primarily on the level of personal relations, and
this was the most obvious sign of a lack of professionalism for many. Thus,
various people I talked to asserted that individual interests and personal
benefits, financial and otherwise, were the real motor behind most of the
activities of O’zbeknavo and the Ministry of Culture, as opposed to the
claimed motivation to advance and support estrada (see Chapter 6).
Inertia
At a meeting in September 2008, an O’zbeknavo official informed me about
their latest initiative. It was supposed to help sustain – or newly establish –
and develop regional schools of estrada with a strong base in local folk and
classical traditions. I clarified the actions to be taken:
At this stage of fieldwork, this had been a rather expected answer, and meet-
ing a sound engineer later that day for dinner, I related my fresh news to him
and the following conversation ensued:
Remarks along these lines were not extremely common, as talking about
the use of government posts for personal gain normally presupposed a more
solid relation of trust than talking about incompetence. But I still heard
them throughout my fieldwork. And sometimes, to my astonishment, I even
encountered interjections of straightforward or trenchant criticism into oth-
erwise rather calm and impersonal conversations on the part of interviewees
I had only just met. In 2005, for example, a senior singer responded to a
question about the work of O’zbeknavo in the following way – again differ-
entiating between the state and its organs:
O’zbeknavo does not work at all. There sits a builder, who does not un-
derstand a thing in art, who builds everything on personal relations …
This is [all] in the sphere of personal interests, the state does not have
any significance. They use their status, their post, on which they sit.
(10.2005)
No, I will not. They only do this conference in order to show that they
are doing anything at all. This will not be a proper academic confer-
ence, but rather for ‘party applauses’ [partiynyye aplodismenty]. They
will celebrate and praise themselves. There will be academically active,
well-informed people participating, but this will still not be a proper,
normal conference.
(05.2004)
And, in fact, the first paper after the words of welcome already made clear
that this was going to turn into something very different. The speaker was
interrupted after about three minutes and more or less politely reminded of
the time of five minutes for each presentation. Then, people were constantly
shuffling in and out, even the convenors, and the whole conference was over
after two and a half hours. When, two weeks later, I joined a radio journalist
to visit one of the senior female top stars of the scene, she greeted me with
the words, “You were at the conference recently, right? It seems we always
meet at these utterly useless events” (06.2004). Still, she and others who had
laughingly or angrily dismissed the event considered organising conferences
to be important in principle and something the government should defi-
nitely do for the development of estrada.
There was a basic recognition of the essential appropriateness of the
government’s endeavours and intentions, and musicologists in particular
frequently suggested conferences as a necessary first step in remedying the
maladies that seemed to plague the scene. Once again, the proposed cure
for what was perceived to be going wrong “at the state level” was exactly
the same set of measures that were deemed deficient or inefficient in their
execution or implementation in the first place. But, and this was supposedly
the decisive difference, as soon as they were dealt with at the imaginary ideal
“state level”, they would be conducted properly.
Staging estrada II 147
Empty activism
To me, the dominant overall approach of locating expertise and responsi-
bility for the cause of estrada with the government, and the concrete and
often cumbersome means of dealing with it – holding meetings, organising
conferences, drafting plans, installing numerous state organs and trying
to solve problems predominantly by talking – looked like a direct contin-
uation of Soviet cultural politics. And in many respects it certainly is (see
Chapter 7). I often had the impression that a demand for involvement “at
the state level” was an attempt to calm or domesticate a confusing and
complex cultural situation by reassuringly invoking a tried-and-tested
counter-spell. However, for many people I met from within the estrada
scene, this was not an unbroken, unreflective continuation of Soviet prac-
tices. Just like some of Nicholas Tochka’s contacts in Albania in the late
1990s and early 2000s, my interlocutors had experienced the outcome of
partial deregulation and marketisation in the sphere of estrada and per-
ceived these transformations and their results to be disregulation instead
of positive harbingers of long-awaited liberalisation, normalisation and
democratisation (Tochka 2016: 176, see also Chapter 6). For some, this had
simply been a failed experiment.
Furthermore, what seemed inherently and specifically Soviet to me was,
for many of my interlocutors, just an unmarked practice – the normal way
of organising and implementing music policies. Thus, only rarely did I en-
counter comments that explicitly related problems in the field of music to
the survival of unwieldy administrative structures from the Soviet era, such
as this from a former member of staff at the Ministry of Culture:
This idea of the unlike twins was corroborated just a few days later, when a
journalist told me that FFUz engagements for estrada artists were now over-
ruling O’zbeknavo’s concert commitments. If FFUz wanted to have an art-
ist for an event, he/she could just decline O’zbeknavo orders – and FFUz was
very active in organising events, in Uzbekistan as well as abroad, co-opting
or suffocating all potential rival initiatives.
As I did not return to Tashkent for fieldwork between 2008 and 2016, I
did not see FFUz reach its zenith in influence and activity myself.11 But
I followed estrada news and gossip via the internet and stayed in touch
with acquaintances from the estrada scene, some of whom had already
worked or started to work closely with or in connection to one of Gulnora
Karimova’s enterprises, whether in the commercial or the NGO branch.
Most of them had a decidedly reserved relationship with her and were
keen on keeping a certain distance. Wikileaks might have outed her as
the allegedly “most hated woman” in Uzbekistan, but the people I associ-
ated with considered her the most dangerous woman in Uzbekistan. They
loathed her for her notorious and omnivorous kleptocracy, while fearing
her power and her habit to ruthlessly co-opt or dispose of anybody she
wanted. I noticed over time, however, how my acquaintances increasingly
enjoyed working in the structures she had set up around FFUz and how
they praised the results of her work, often comparing it to the activities of
state organs, which never managed to look good in direct juxtaposition.
At some point I realised that her approach to planning, organising and
150 Staging estrada II
implementing cultural initiatives was in very fundamental ways probably
close to what many people had fantasised about when imagining estrada
being ideally treated “at the state level”.
As stated in the quote above, many of the FFUz activities actually corre-
sponded to government activities – competitions, for example, were high on
the agenda and became a staple in the FFUz portfolio. But they were fur-
nished with a much grander and much more glamorous setting – and could
be sure of fittingly grand and glamorous coverage in Gulnora Karimova’s
various commercial media outlets. In 2008 in situ, and then on from afar, I
heard friends and acquaintances lauding her skills:
She does everything very well. She promotes an elite, urban and youth-
ful kind of culture, she has taste. She has style and taste. This is a to-
tally different level of culture … It would be better, if Gulnora were
president. Everything would be more youthful, and she would use less
money.
(05.2013)
Lyrics
Language
Milliy estrada is sung in Uzbek. Only two people I talked to considered lan-
guage choice irrelevant and maintained that a song with Russian, Tajik or
English lyrics could also qualify as milliy estrada. The almost undisputed
position accorded to the Uzbek language in definitions of milliy estrada
became strikingly obvious during the auditions for Navro’z and Independ-
ence Day 2004. Among the hundreds of songs presented there, fewer than
a handful were in Russian, the rest were in Uzbek. In one case, the selec-
tion committee decided after hearing only a few bars that the song in ques-
tion would make a good contribution to Uzbekistan – Our Shared House
[O’zbekiston – Umumiy Uyimiz / Uzbekistan – Nash Obshchiy Dom], a “friend-
ship and culture festival” for minorities living in Uzbekistan (Figure 5.1).
Nationalising estrada 157
Thus, in terms of language preferences, milliy estrada clearly tends to define
“national” in the narrow terms of Uzbek nationality and not in the more
encompassing terms of Uzbek citizenship, which would more accurately
reflect the country’s multinational population.2 The priority given to the
Uzbek language in milliy estrada, however, follows general policies of lin-
guistic Uzbekisation since independence, which have decidedly decreased
and delegitimated the formerly important role of Russian in politics and
everyday life (see Djumaev 2001: 324–326; Fierman 2009; Mesamed 2004).
The lyrics of milliy estrada can take up regional dialects of Uzbek, such
as, for example, Khorezmian, but there was broad consensus among my
contacts that they should not fall back on lower class speech, youth slang
or swear words. Adequate lyrics are provided either by new poems com-
posed by contemporary professional Uzbek authors, older – even centuries
old – verses by writers such as the fifteenth-century poet Alisher Navoiy,
adaptations of Uzbek folksong texts or parts of epics that are prevalent in
Uzbekistan. Only a small number of people, all linked to the sphere of me-
dia, considered youth slang appropriate as a welcome sign that milliy estrada
was in fact close to the nation – or rather to the nation’s largest age group:
young people.
Opinions are divided on whether texts originating outside the territorial
confines of Uzbekistan in its contemporary form and written in languages
Figure 5.1 A
t the festival Uzbekistan – Our Shared House, 2016
158 Nationalising estrada
other than Uzbek (or the now extinct pan-Central Asian Turkic language
Chagatai) could, in Uzbek translation, serve as the textual basis for milliy
estrada. Many people I spoke to found this contradictory to the idea of
milliy on principle, but most conceded to have never really thought about
this as being an option so far. Some said their judgement would depend on
the texts’ content. If it expressed or fit “Uzbek mentality”, as one musicol-
ogist put it, poems by non-Uzbeks in languages other than Uzbek could, in
translation, serve as lyrics for milliy estrada.
Content
Besides the question of language, content is certainly the second big issue
when it comes to lyrics. Asked about suitable subjects for milliy estrada, an
O’zbeknavo official came up with the following assortment of desired and
impermissible topics:
One can sing about love, about the homeland, about anything, but it is
forbidden [zapreshayetsya] [to sing about] religion, … or to propagate
terrorism, rape … Shoot, rape people, that is not allowed. He should
sing about the homeland, about love, about what he wants, about flow-
ers, [there are] so many topics. [But] there are several topics which one
must not touch: prostitution, pornography, drugs, terrorists, religion.
(11.2005)
Songs “about the homeland” [vatan haqida / o rodine] are certainly the jewel
in the crown of milliy estrada. It is the content of the lyrics that determines
whether a song will be labelled as a vatan song, whereas musical properties
are more or less irrelevant – at least in practice, if not necessarily in theory.
There are two understandings of what constitutes a vatan song in Uzbek es-
trada, one narrower and one broader. Songs that directly praise the country,
the nation, the president or any combination of these three form the core of
this category. A well-known vatan song of this kind is Yulduz Usmanova’s
“We Will Give You to No One, Uzbekistan” [Hech Kimga Bermaymiz, Seni,
O’zbekiston], first sung on Independence Day 1999, again at Independence
Day 2000 and, as mentioned earlier, used as the title for a Military Patri-
otism Song Festival in Tashkent the summer in between – a musical call to
unity, patriotism and vigilance (Video 5.1).
In the broader understanding, the category of vatan songs accommodates
a wider spectrum of topics, such as important historical events and figures,
contemporary politics and the very general and elusive notion of o’zbekchi-
lik, meaning something like “Uzbek traditions, morals and objects” as well
as “doing things the Uzbek way”. In keeping with this, lyrics extolling the
beauty and bounty of Uzbekistan, celebrating the gentleness and generosity
of its people or depicting colourful traditions and customs can qualify for
the label of a vatan song. Here, however, vatan songs tend to blur into the
Nationalising estrada 159
more general category of milliy estrada and their designation depends on
personal perspective or political position.
Asrasin by Ozoda Nursaidova, which sealed my choice of research topic,
belongs to the category of vatan songs as more broadly defined as do, for ex-
ample, two songs plus elaborate and costly video clips by female trio Setora
[Star], “You Are There” [Sen Borsan] (2000) and “The Spirit of the Ances-
tors” [Ajdodlar Ruhi] (2001) (Video 5.2).3 They also take up the topic of
threats – the contemporary one posed by Islamists as well as the historical
one posed by Mongols – and show the bravery of Uzbek soldiers and their
ancestors in fighting these enemies. Both were extremely popular among
young people at the time of their release and were still around when I started
fieldwork in 2003. Even years later, people fondly remembered these hits and
officials continued to name them as exemplary.
It might seem surprising that religion, and particularly Islam, is not con-
sidered a suitable topic for milliy estrada and is mentioned in the same breath
as prostitution, pornography, drugs and terrorists by the O’zbeknavo official
quoted above.4 After all, the revival of Islam has ostensibly been a crucial is-
sue for the Uzbek government since independence, and according to official
statements, Uzbekistan is a Muslim country, just as being Uzbek means
being Muslim. In line with this reasoning, any ethnic Uzbek choosing con-
version from Islam is subject to harsh consequences from the government.
On the other hand, the Muslimness, which is propagated as good, acceptable
and essentially Uzbek, is extremely narrowly defined. It is more an under-
standing of religion as cultural asset than as belief system – and in place of
Islam, the more diffuse concept of spirituality gradually gained prominence
in official writings during the Karimov era (see Chapter 7). Consequently,
anyone opting for stricter adherence to Islam than officially prescribed faces
equally harsh or even harsher consequences from the government than do
converts from Islam.5 The alleged threat of Islamic fundamentalism looms
large in Uzbek politics, and the exclusion of religion from the suitable topics
for milliy estrada has to be seen in this context. Following this logic, propa-
gating religion equals propagating terrorism. Terrorism, however, can and
does appear in milliy estrada, if depicted in a decidedly deterring way, as in
the video clips mentioned above. The same is true for prostitution and drugs.
Contrary to what one might expect, the exclusion of Islam from estrada
has nothing to do – and was never linked in conversations – with the prob-
lematic relationship between Islam and music, which, for example, is a
major topic in music policies in Iran (see Youssefzadeh 2000: 41; see also
Nooshin 2005). Uzbekistan’s Sufi heritage seems to play a decisive role here.
A number of people I talked to explicitly referred to the importance of mu-
sic in Sufism – and the Sufi basis for Uzbek classical music – to explain the
lack of discussions about the fundamental compatibility of music with the
teachings of Islam.
Love is an appropriate topic of milliy estrada, if the lyrics very poetically
depict states of intoxication or rapture (in itself a central characteristic of
160 Nationalising estrada
Sufi poetry), focus on forms of family love, such as children’s love for their
parents and vice versa, or if portraying chaste forms of affection in a het-
erosexual setting. Pre-marital or marital intimacy is acceptable only if it is
hinted at and wrapped up in morally impeccable allusions. This also con-
cerns descriptions of female beauty, which should stay, as an O’zbeknavo
official remarked, “above the neck”. He negatively compared the physical
traits praised today with those that received attention “in the past”: “Ear-
lier, singers described beautiful eyes, beautiful eyebrows, beautiful hair
and beautiful lips … Now they sing about the waist and the bellybutton.
Everything has moved downwards [hammasi pastga tushdi]” (11.2005).
A famous estrada composer similarly compared the old way of portraying
desire, suitable for milliy estrada, with new ways that should be impermis-
sible for milliy estrada, but was more explicit and more agitated about the
topic:
While the physical references criticised here even stayed “above the neck”
(save for “your whatever”, of course), they were scolded for another flaw
that equally made them inappropriate for milliy estrada: banality. And this
composer is certainly not an exception in voicing this kind of judgement.
Common terms used to describe the textual quality one is looking for in
milliy estrada include rich in content [soderzhatel’nyy] and relevant [zna-
chimyy]. Particularly for female listeners I talked to, songs that take up – and
take seriously – domestic problems or, more generally, the world of women’s
emotions not only fall under the label of milliy estrada, but are a crucial part
of it. Several singers argued in a similar vein when speaking about the social
responsibility of artists and framing their activities in terms of duty and
service to society, as was explored in Chapter 3.
The type and degree of realism and social relevance considered prefer-
able, suitable and permissible for milliy estrada are far from an uncontro-
versial debate, however. Singing about flowers, as the O’zbeknavo official
suggested, when specifying topics considered appropriate for milliy estrada,
Nationalising estrada 161
might seem a blatant banality to others, but for him, it would be milliy, at
least if done in a poetic way. On the other hand, tackling pressing real-life
problems, such as the habitual mistreatment of young brides by their
mothers- and sisters-in-law, would not qualify for milliy estrada in his, and
undoubtedly in many others’, view, whereas praising Uzbek soldiers battling
fierce Islamic fundamentalists would. And while for some, the depiction of
teenage life worlds using Tashkent youth slang is a sure sign of estrada’s
downfall, for others, this is a part of a vital realism that is necessary to keep
the genre alive and meaningful across generations. I will return to these
divergences and, more generally, the topic of realism in milliy estrada in
Chapter 7, where I will discuss the workings of milliy estrada in the context
of national independence ideology.
Music
[T]he question, does estrada music live in the system of folk music or
not, has not been removed from the agenda. Naturally, of course [it
does]. Folk music [Xalq musiqasi], as an intact phenomenon, puts only
the real life [haqiqiy hayot] in song. [If] estrada is not from the start
shaped and then developed in a form resembling [folk music], [it] con-
sequently cannot, as a distinct musical art form, show itself as a folk-
appropriate [xalqchil] phenomenon.
(Abdurakhimov, Rasultoev & Norbo’taev 2006: 51)6
You can change the fundament as you like, it can be as you like, but the
melody decides everything. You can do it purely doira [frame drum],
tanbur [plucked long-necked lute] and play everything in an Uzbek way,
but if you play Beethoven, it will not become Uzbek music. But you
can do the whole fundament rock, invite Metallica, and they play [their
way], but the melody, the pitch inventory, will be Uzbek, this is already
Uzbek. Important is the pitch inventory and the melody, and how it is
constructed. This determines to which nation this or that melody, ele-
ment belongs to. In my opinion, this is what it depends on.
(07.2004)
Ornamentation
Besides some melodic connection to Uzbek folk and classical music, another
feature that is frequently mentioned as either necessary for or at least desira-
ble in milliy estrada is the application of vocal techniques drawn from these
older traditions, first and foremost a characteristic kind of vibrato [nola],
as well as constrained forms of voice production, which are, for example,
common in the province of Surxandaryo in southern Uzbekistan. In a con-
versation on the properties of milliy estrada, an Uzbek colleague emphati-
cally and elaborately argued that these, as he called them, “national timbre
associations” should be transferred onto instruments, such as the electric
guitar in order to enhance the sound’s milliylik, its “nationalness” (01.2004).
At the same time, he vehemently dismissed the (already long accomplished)
adoption of foreign vocal styles: “We do not need people here who sing like
Ella Fitzgerald” (11.2003). This, however, is an opinion not widely shared,
and equally vehemently objected to by others – as with this member of staff
at the Conservatory’s estrada faculty, who became very agitated over the
subject: “This is just some kind of very subjective opinion. We need [singers]
of the type of Fitzgerald, Patricia Kaas, Tina Turner, Gaynor. We need such
singers … Of course we need them!” (02.2004).
164 Nationalising estrada
Musical instruments
Instruments are a less controversial topic, generally considered to be an es-
sential ingredient for forging milliy estrada. Almost everybody I talked to
agreed that the standard estrada line-up of guitar, bass, piano and drums –
or now rather their synthetised equivalents, often conveniently packaged into
just one keyboard – should be augmented by various kinds of instruments
regarded as Uzbek. The same applies to orchestral variants of estrada, which,
in the form of the Estrada Symphony Orchestra (ESO) at National TV and
Radio, has already followed this practice for decades. Instruments consid-
ered primarily suitable are the doira (frame drum), nay (flute), tanbur or dutar
(long-necked plucked lutes), g’ijjak (short-necked spike fiddle) or sato (long-
necked fiddle) and, as a specificity of Khorezmian folk music, the accordion.7
The doira’s full potential for milliylik in estrada is often described as real-
ised only, when, instead of being exploited merely as a sonic marker, it con-
tributes metro-rhythmic patterns from classical music [usul], even though
most of these patterns are considered too intricate to be compatible with the
typically regular 4/4 or 6/8 metres of estrada songs. Using synthesised sound
libraries for these instruments – rarely available anyway – or close sonic
approximates is generally considered to be less milliy than playing the in-
struments themselves. For many people I talked to, however, this was more
a matter of principle than an aesthetic conclusion based on aural experi-
ence, as they often conceded having difficulty in differentiating real from
synthesised sounds when listening to songs. Even if certain instruments
are not used in the soundtrack of songs – whether real instruments or their
synthesised sounds – they are often at least visible. It is very common to
include them in video clips or as part of the line-up on stage at concerts,
thus referencing milliylik at least visually. In contrast to debates about style,
however, I rarely encountered expressions of doubt that instruments used
beyond the borders of Uzbekistan for centuries – which basically includes
all of those mentioned above – could not sonically and visually signify the
unique character of Uzbekistan’s music and thus contribute to estrada’s be-
ing truly milliy.
Foreign influences
A last and frequently discussed criterion for milliy estrada related to its mu-
sical properties concerns the world of music beyond Uzbekistan’s borders,
or rather, how this world of music is dealt with. Some people I talked to
in government positions pursued an essentialist approach, seeing no place
for foreign elements in something dubbed milliy. This might seem strange
considering the fact that estrada itself is originally a foreign import and
continues to feature a whole myriad of components that are comparably
new to Uzbekistan, such as keyboards or harmony. From an external per-
spective, it may be tempting to explain this puzzle with reference to theories
Nationalising estrada 165
of indigenisation or domestication – with time, imports just shed their for-
eignness, are appropriated and turned into something of one’s own. But this
does not in any way reflect local understanding of the situation. I will elab-
orate on this in more detail in Chapter 7, but this hard-line stance, which
indiscriminately views all foreign music as a threat to estrada’s national
identity, is only taken by a small number of people anyway. Most regard
the world of music beyond Uzbekistan as a welcome source of necessary
enrichment that can be digested into something milliy. This official from
O’zbeknavo believes so, but he highlights certain gradations and conditions:
Professionalism
Professionalism is considered a vital prerequisite for elevating estrada to the
“high artistic level” on which it is supposed to be located, whether milliy or
168 Nationalising estrada
not. A phrase as ominous as it is omnipresent, and a regular occurrence in le-
gal documents, “high artistic level” is also a staple formulation in O’zbekna-
vo’s activity reports and, as noted in Chapter 1, one of the duties that artists
vow to fulfil by signing their licence agreements: “to conduct anniversaries,
festivities on a high musical and artistic level”. Professionalism is not an
invention of independent Uzbekistan, however. It was already an important
concept in Soviet-era musical life, as Terry Bright observed in 1986:
Here, Terry Bright already mentions one facet of the demand for profession-
alism, which is itself posited as one of the two guarantors of a high artistic
level in current Uzbekistan: the educational background of those involved
in the production of estrada. The other facet concerns the division of labour
during this process. Both are referred to in the following statement by Uz-
bek musicologist Davlat Mullajonov:
Collaboration
The creation of estrada is professional if it is accomplished as a joint en-
deavour, as a collaboration between composers, poets, singers, instrumen-
talists, sound engineers and, if necessary, arrangers. The insistence on a
collective approach has less to do, however, with the survival of a socialist
work ethic than with an attempt to differentiate estrada as a professional art
form from an amateur version of the genre. This distinction, in turn, draws
on an important Soviet conceptual binary in the field of culture already
Nationalising estrada 169
mentioned earlier: the opposition between professionalism and amateurism,
literally something like “self-doer-hood” in Russian and “enthusiast-hood”
in Uzbek [samodeyatel’nost’ / havaskorlik]. Although – or perhaps because –
the formerly decisive marker for professionalism in the Soviet era, artists’
employment and payment by the state, is no longer a valid criterion for dif-
ferentiation since the Uzbek government almost completely abandoned this
role in the field of estrada after independence, the collective mode of crea-
tion has remained a crucial feature of distinction between the two spheres –
at least for those who regard this separation as being important in the first
place.
Thus, a singer-songwriter type of musical production, which is celebrated
for expressing an artist’s authenticity, credibility and versatility of talent in
other scenes in other parts of the world and in bard song in Uzbekistan, is
not deemed appropriate for Uzbek estrada.12 In conversations and inter-
views, government officials and musicologists in particular, but also a num-
ber of singers, poets, composers, journalists, Conservatory staff and sound
engineers, expressed their dismay at the rising number of estrada singers
who deviate from the pattern of labour division by producing their songs
single-handedly, sometimes just faking collaboration, or with the support of
just one or two other people, predominantly non-professionals themselves.
For critics of this approach, it is not so much its alleged amateurishness as
such that is problematic, but the fact that the number of proponents of this
approach is growing steadily, as is their presence in places that should be
reserved for professionals.
If songs produced in this manner, that is in an amateur style, were just
played at Houses of Culture in fringe districts of Tashkent or at provincial
weddings, they would face less criticism, if not necessarily receive critics’
endorsement, because they would be seen to be restricted at least to their
proper, that is subordinate and less public, place. Their dissemination via
radio, TV and concerts, however, resulting in the mixing of the two spheres,
is not only considered an assault on the prerogatives of estrada profession-
als, who fear – and concede to already suffer – a loss of privileges, status
and income, but an assault on the essence of estrada as art. A well-known
composer described the situation as such:
Our tragedy lies in the fact that now, in the final years of the 1990s,
starting in 1996, 1998, now in the 2000s, amateurism has grown like
mushrooms [vyrosla kak griby], professional art and amateurism are on
one level. This has to be separated [Nado otdelit’]!
(12.2003; see Mullajonov 2004: 22)
The concept of art is important in this context. While the joint effort that
is promoted in the production of estrada might resemble the common divi-
sion of labour in mainstream western pop, where most stars sing songs with
music and lyrics written by others and might, for this reason, sometimes be
170 Nationalising estrada
belittled for not having their own creative input, the Uzbek ideal of collec-
tivity is modelled more on the common distribution of skills in the realm of
academic music. There, most stars sing songs written by others, too, but are
never belittled for not having their own creative input, at least not for this
reason. In addition, composers and lyricists have a prominent position in
the presentation and perception of the final product in academic music, par-
ticularly the composer, who is often even more prominent than the singer
(the German term Interpret for a performer of academic music captures this
role quite well). In mainstream western pop, in contrast, composers and lyr-
icists are frequently not even named or their importance pales in compari-
son to the performer’s prestige.
Despite some deviations in opinion about the hierarchy among the people
involved in creating a professional estrada song (representatives of the var-
ious professions tend to attach the most weight to their own), singers, com-
posers and lyricists are generally considered the core personnel. The singer
eventually becomes most closely identified with the song as its public face,
but the names of composers and poets are usually still announced at con-
certs, printed in the programmes for Independence Day and Navro’z and
sometimes inserted in video clips. Arrangers, instrumentalists and sound
engineers may be of secondary importance in comparison, but their involve-
ment is still thought to enhance the professionalism of a song.
As can be expected, the many singers who are blamed for following an
amateurish approach to estrada and undermining the genre’s status as art
do not necessarily share the negative assessment of their own activities or
agree with the definition of professionalism underlying this accusation – or
the positing of estrada as art in the first place. Most have a different idea of
professionalism, as this financially successful but frequently scolded young
singer remarked in an interview: “Of course, I am a professional estrada
artist. I live on singing” (09.2005). He went on to explain that his aim was to
make money by making people dance at weddings, adding a short excursus
on ideas of social duty and service. For him, singing estrada was first and
foremost a job in music, which he tried to accomplish most profitably by
involving as few other people as possible. Making art in extensive creative
joint ventures was clearly not part of his career goals.
This essentially commercially based perspective on professionalism in es-
trada obviously clashes with the notion of professionalism promoted by the
Uzbek government and other actors in the scene. When I visited O’zbeknavo
in November 2005, one of its members of staff told me about a singer who
had already hung up posters announcing a solo concert around the city:
But when he presented the programme to us, there was written every-
where: lyrics, music, arrangement himself. We said that this is impos-
sible. Who works that way? This is without perspective. Only very few
people in the world are able to work as poets, musicians and arrangers
at the same time. That someone wrote magnificent poems, magnificent
Nationalising estrada 171
music and sang magnificently – this has never happened in history
[takikh v istorii ne bylo]. They think they can do everything themselves.
(11.2005)
Education
Attaining the “high artistic level” necessary for estrada to deserve the label
milliy presupposes, as mentioned above, the existence of a second facet of
professionalism, which is directly related to the first: education. Ideally, the
creation of an estrada song is a collaboration among highly qualified spe-
cialists. In fact, it is this specialisation which makes the division of labour
necessary in the first place.
For composers, arrangers and sound engineers, professionalism in this
sense is usually defined by a Conservatory degree in composition, or, for en-
gineers, in audio engineering. Depending on the quality of the creative out-
put, however, the completion of upper secondary education at colleges and
lyceums or even just having attended a school with a special focus on music
may also be deemed sufficient.13 Working as a composer, arranger or sound
engineer without any kind of formal training in academic music is usually la-
belled amateurism, with one notable exception: so-called bastakorlar (plural
of bastakor), composers (and almost always also performers) in the monodic
tradition of Uzbek classical music and predominantly without institutional-
ised music education, are known and appreciated for contributing fine and
appealing milliy melodies to estrada songs, which will then ideally be harmo-
nised by professional arrangers or composers (see Bekov 1994: 13).
While demands for more professionalism are omnipresent and prominent
in discourses about estrada in Uzbekistan, there are also some voices ques-
tioning the need for it – or, more precisely, the need to make all estrada a
professional affair. As a senior musicologist remarked in a conversation:
Ninety per cent of all estrada groups are without music education. Es-
trada is not only art, it is also just culture … And the question is: Do you
need a professional education for estrada? What do they do with their
diplomas? Where will they go? Can’t they work without them?
(08.2004)14
Similarly, in his PhD thesis on Uzbek estrada, musicologist Olim Bekov ex-
hibited some doubt on the necessity of education, pointing to the fact that
neither French chansonniers, nor “gypsies” or the first ragtime musicians
had any institutionalised education – in addition to strongly voiced demands
and praises for professionalism in other parts of the text (1994: 13). Nev-
ertheless, only very few people I spoke to, and they exclusively numbered
among those who pursued solely commercial interests in estrada, advocated
Nationalising estrada 173
completely forsaking the idea of estrada being an art form that is created by
professionals in the sense outlined here.
In the case of poets, a university degree in literature or a related subject is
considered the optimum qualification for producing “highly artistic” lyrics,
and a number of well-known poets whose works are widely appreciated and
used for creating milliy estrada do or did, in fact, have such backgrounds.15
The demand for formal education in this sphere is much less pronounced than
in the realm of music, however, for several reasons. First, there is no university
course in Uzbekistan that would offer specific training to become a poet or
lyricist, such as creative writing. Furthermore, milliy estrada can be based on
poems from the pre-tsarist era, a period in which no formal education existed,
at least not outside the sphere of religious teaching. Finally, and similar to the
situation with respect to bastakorlar, contemporary talent for poetry qualify-
ing as milliy is also recognised to exist in the classical and folk traditions – or
even just as an individual gift that might be found anywhere in society.
In any case, criticism of unprofessionalism in music or lyrics will be
directed at the singers of the songs in question, mostly in the form of re-
proaches for not having chosen their “creative collective” wisely. At the
same time, singers are themselves affected by the demand for professional-
ism through education. Again, a degree in estrada from the State Conserva-
tory of Uzbekistan constitutes the optimum proof of a relevant education. It
conveniently also counts as one of the factors that positively influences one’s
reyting as a vocalist. To have graduated from Uzbekistan’s highest educa-
tional institution in music – and the only one of its kind in the country – is
considered prestigious and a seal of quality. It is also positively acknowl-
edged by government institutions involved in estrada administration and
may, as several singers remarked, result in more respectful treatment by of-
ficials. These positive effects have led already accomplished singers to enrol
in the vocal department of the estrada faculty just to earn this official seal
of professionalism (Figure 5.2).
Even though the possession of a conservatory or university degree as ev-
idence of musical training already carries with it some weight in the scene,
the relationship in estrada between professionalism and education is, of
course, about more than just printed diplomas. At least in theory it is about
musical knowledge, as this former member of the government’s estrada ad-
ministration remarked:
And while students and graduates from the Conservatory are credited with
commanding or acquiring an extraordinarily thorough and thus superior
174 Nationalising estrada
form of musical knowledge, simply having passed subordinate levels of the
music education system can be – but is not always – judged to be a sufficiently
professional background for singing “highly artistic” estrada.
Importantly, however, it is not only a training specifically in estrada – a
comparably new addition to the curricula of most educational institutions
in Uzbekistan anyway – that is usually considered to provide relevant
knowledge. Vocal and instrumental expertise in other parts of the over-
all musical field – academic music, folk music and classical music – can
achieve equal recognition.16 Again, having successfully completed a for-
mal education is a particularly strong proof of the desired professionalism.
In the sphere of folk and classical music, however, these institutional-
ised types of transmission intersect with other – and older – models of
professionalisation, such as master-pupil relationships (ustoz-shogird)17
or the a cquisition of singing and playing skills through socialisation.
Consequently, alongside degrees and diplomas, sheer ability can also
count as evidence of adequate knowledge in music – for singers as well as
for instrumentalists.
Expanding the understanding of musical education and professionalism
in this way is certainly is a very reasonable move. There are accomplished
estrada singers who have never received any formal music education. In
addition, quite a few singers and some instrumentalists from classical and
Figure 5.2 T
he State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, 2016
Nationalising estrada 175
folk music – with and without a conservatory background – regularly cross
over into estrada for financial reasons and play the wedding circuit, many of
them highly esteemed for being well versed in these traditions that are sup-
posed to be the foundation of milliy estrada (Merchant 2006: 205–225). The
application procedures for licences at O’zbeknavo reflected the more expan-
sive perspective on this facet of professionalism – as well as the high value
accorded to formal education and accolades of any kind. As mentioned in
Chapter 1, among other documents, applicants had to hand in:
Figure 5.3 A
singer and her playback DJ at the Bek restaurant, 2005
Nationalising estrada 177
Restaurant singers and standby singers at weddings might be professionals
in the sense that they earn their living by performing estrada. But they are
not professional estrada artists in the way that is promoted by the Uzbek
government. This would require them to possess their own repertoire or, in
the case of cover versions, creatively remodel the original. Even if reworked
with exemplary professionalism and artfulness, however, prisoner songs –
and many others in the restaurant repertoire – would never q ualify as milliy
estrada due to the values promoted in them. But standby and restaurant
singers follow – and are particularly acclaimed for – a reverse approach
anyway: They try to stay as close to the original as possible, preferably
using, if available, the original minus for the songs performed as well as
imitating the vocal style and expression of the artists covered.
Established estrada artists might speak about standby and restaurant
singers with some disdain, if they mention them at all, but I found these
spheres to intersect more than most conversations seemed to imply – and
definitely more than the governmental estrada administration would wish
for. In fact, many students in the vocal department of the Conservatory’s
estrada faculty, who, by completing degrees in music, easily fulfil the educa-
tion requirement in terms of professionalism, actually work as cover singers
in standby combos at weddings or restaurants – after and, to the annoyance
of their teachers, frequently instead of attending their classes.
There is a certain division along ethnic lines in these activities: It is mostly
ethnic Uzbeks who provide music at weddings, while those identifying as
ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Koreans or Tatars tend to perform at restau-
rants. As ethnicity/nationality is also a point of discussion in the definition
of milliy estrada, it is to this that I will now turn.
Ethnicity/nationality
Despite the officially proclaimed vision of an ethnically inclusive state in
which minorities are in all respects considered equal to the titular nation and
together constitute the unranked Uzbekistani citizenry, in socio-political re-
ality, there has been a strong thrust towards an ethnically and thus more nar-
rowly defined Uzbekisation since independence. Minority cultures may be
celebrated once a year with the festival Uzbekistan – Our Shared House, dis-
cussed above, and generally valued for the diversity with which they embellish
the country. But participation in society has become increasingly dependent
on the willingness and ability to adapt to the diffuse, but powerful notion of
o’zbekchilik, Uzbekness, in which proficiency in the Uzbek language is only
the most conspicuous – and probably least elusive – aspect. At the same time,
the Uzbek government takes a strong stance against racism in the media, and
there is little tolerance towards – at least open – discrimination on ethnic/
national grounds in public institutions such as schools or universities.18
In the context of estrada, this means that if, for example, ethnic Ukrain-
ians with Uzbek citizenship create a variant of estrada based on what they
178 Nationalising estrada
consider their specifically Ukrainian milliy traditions, the result would
not be counted as a representative of Uzbekistan’s overall milliy estrada.
It would be a kind of Ukrainian milliy estrada produced on Uzbekistan’s
territory. As had already become obvious with regard to language choice
in milliy estrada, milliy references nationality/ethnicity, and not citizenship,
which would include everyone living within the borders of the nation state.
However, as Matteo Fumagalli remarks in his analysis of ethnicity politics
in the country, “Uzbekness is a notion open to all those who embrace Uzbek
customs and traditions, regardless of ethnic belonging. It is construed as a
territorial, or civic type, of national consciousness” (Fumagalli 2007: 113).
In the microcosm of estrada, this means that singers who are not ethnically
Uzbek are thought of as being in principle able to master and become repre-
sentatives of Uzbek milliy estrada – as long as they fulfil the criteria outlined
above.
Ethnicity does not immediately impede successfully meeting the require-
ments related to the two facets of professionalism, collaboration and educa-
tion, or those related to desirable and undesirable content or the inclusion
of elements and instruments from older Uzbek traditions. A major hurdle in
the production of Uzbek milliy estrada by Uzbek citizens of non-Uzbek eth-
nicity, however, is often language. Tajiks tend to be the exception since most
of them have a good-to-excellent command of Uzbek. But as Uzbekistan’s
most numerous minority, they also boast their own separate and sizable
music circuit, musically oriented towards Iran and using Tajik lyrics, which
limits both interest in and a need to pursue a career in Uzbek milliy estrada.
The country’s Tatar, Ukrainian, Russian and Korean communities, on
the other hand, are not large enough to make catering to a specific audience
of one’s own ethnicity/nationality a financially viable, let alone lucrative,
option for prospective professional estrada musicians. This is all the more
true, given the fact that these communities’ penchant for furnishing their
festivities with original and locally produced live music is much less pro-
nounced than among Uzbeks, while the workings of shou biznes in Uzbeki-
stan rule out the option of living on income from concerts, royalties and the
sale of records instead (see Chapter 6). Consequently, aspiring singers with
Tatar, Russian, Korean or Ukrainian backgrounds who hope for a profes-
sional career in Uzbekistan’s estrada scene have no choice but to play by
the rules – among them the language rules – of milliy estrada, at least with
respect to a portion of their repertoire.
Most of them, however, not only grow up in Russian-speaking households,
but, due to the existence of separate Russian and Uzbek-language branches
at all levels of the education system in Uzbekistan, also complete their
schooling and, possibly, even their higher education in Russian. As a result,
their Uzbek language skills are often rather poor or almost non-existent.
Not surprisingly then, during estrada singing lessons at the Conservatory,
the pronunciation of Uzbek lyrics by non-native Uzbek speakers is always
a prominent topic, and practising the accurate articulation of particularly
Nationalising estrada 179
those Uzbek consonants that are not part of the Russian phonetic system
can take up a considerable amount of time. At estrada recording sessions,
non-native Uzbek speakers usually have someone accompanying them who
supervises and, if necessary, corrects their pronunciation. At concerts, this
lack of fluency in Uzbek forces them to resort to playback, even if they pos-
sess the necessary vocal skills to sing live.
A young estrada singer of Slavic descent described her difficulties and her
way of dealing with the Uzbek language in the following way:
KK: Your mother tongue is Russian. Is it not difficult for you to sing in
Uzbek?
X: … Over the course of seven years I have got used to it so much, such an
interesting language, that it is pleasant to sing in it. At the beginning [it
was] difficult, of course, I almost broke my tongue … But I am keen on
this (lit.: my soul lies to this [u menya dusha lezhit k etomu]), probably
every person is born in the place destined for him/her. Because I was
born here and have lived my whole life here, because this has all soaked
into me [v menya vsë vpitalos’], because of this, this is even not a foreign
language, but a native one.
KK: Did you study the language?
X: Not thoroughly [Ne tshchatel’no]. Basically, I just picked [it] up from here
and there. I understand the meaning, but basically [I learned it] from
songs. In a song I understand every word, and because of that I can
already say something, a little bit [nemnozhechko], but I feel embarrased
[stesnyayus’], I am afraid that I will say something not in the right way.
KK: Do you also work together with someone in the studio?
X: Yes, yes, definitely! There is a person sitting in the studio who corrects
[me]. The only time that I recorded a song without people, everything
ended in having to sing the whole song again. I sang something up there,
one letter [different] and already a different word. I have already got
used to it so much that, in principle, I do not make crude mistakes.
Even if a person sings with a small accent, this can lend some flavour to
a performance.
(11.2005)
X: What did Larisa Moskalyova do? Regrettably, now she does not work
here in Uzbekistan. She sang folk stuff in the original. She made an
effort [stremilas’], she studied and she did it not badly, and even better
180 Nationalising estrada
than some Uzbeks, and because of that she was in people’s hearts.
Many started to venerate [her], “she sings wells and also dances [well],
see, a Russian girl has learned [this]”. And when she started to sing in
Russian, the people accepted this, too. The trick is, to give the people
[narodu] what they want at the beginning, and then, when you become
what they want, you can do your own stuff.
KK: Many say that it is difficult for Russians [in estrada] here.
X: On the contrary. It is easier for them. There are many Uzbeks, [it passes]
unnoticed, [if another one enters estrada]. But if a Russian enters, and
does it well, they accept him immediately.
(09.2005)
The ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars I talked to, however, did not
really subscribe to the positive assessment of their career prospects in Uz-
bekistan’s estrada provided by this ethnic Uzbek. It also did not align with
my own observations. In fact, I met some people with estrada ambitions
who contemplated hiding their non-Uzbek ethnicity by choosing an Uz-
bek stage name to improve their career chances. And there were some who
clearly resented that their success depended on an obligatory adherence to
the ideal of milliy estrada. In 2005, after about a year of absence, I ran into a
young Tatar singer in Tashkent shortly before she was supposed to perform
at a gala concert. I had interviewed her in 2004 and knew about her long-
time dream to become a professional jazz singer. To my surprise, she was
wearing an atlas silk dress with a matching skullcap, a very classic form of
Uzbek women’s attire, and about to sing a song in Uzbek, in which I knew
she was not very proficient. She countered my remark, “Wow, that looks
milliy!” with “Oh, Kristina, you are back. Help me, please! I want to leave
[the country]. This is just a horror here [Eto prosto uzhas zdes’]”, pointing at
her outfit (09.2005).
Another Tatar showed even more disdain for the mandatory Uzbekisa-
tion as a prerequisite for a professional career in estrada. She found it quite
unimaginable that she would have to learn Uzbek properly and earn her liv-
ing by performing at weddings. In her case, this abhorrence of milliy estrada
was based more on her feeling of civilizational superiority as a Crimean
Tatar than on her passion for a different genre. Once, when meeting mem-
bers of her family, I found myself embroiled in outpourings of embittered
rage against “the Uzbeks” who, as one of her relatives maintained, “are,
at heart, nothing more than bazar sellers, culturally primitive, regardless
of how finely they dress. They drive around in big cars, but have only just
descended from their donkeys.” I had experienced forms of desperate de-
fiance among non-Uzbeks before. Relegated to a subordinate position in
the course of the country’s nationalisation policies, also others I had met
had tried, at least verbally, to reclaim their former cultural supremacy and
privileges lost since independence. But I had never encountered – and would
never again encounter – such blatant displays of racism.
Nationalising estrada 181
Although success in Uzbek estrada is regularly declared to be open to
everyone independent of ethnicity, and non-Uzbek singers may receive
some – often rather paternalistic applause – when mastering milliy estrada,
it is nevertheless difficult even for those willing to fulfil all the prerequisites
of milliy estrada to embark on – and sustain – a professional estrada career.
Among the then-active 50 top stars of the scene in the early 2000s, there was
no one identifying as Tatar, Russian, Ukrainian or Korean. Larisa Mos
kalyova, who was often presented as an example of Uzbek estrada’s ethnic
egalitarianism in a similar way, as she was in the interview cited above, was
no longer performing, and rumours oscillated between her having stopped
singing altogether and her pursuing a lucrative career in Kazakhstan in-
stead, where, in addition to a taste for Uzbek estrada, musical versatility was
said to be more appreciated. The young singer of Slavic descent I mentioned
earlier cautiously hinted at the problems she had in earning a living, while
her father, with whom I also had the chance to talk to, was more outspoken:
Outside the scene’s centre, however, there is some space especially reserved
for estrada artists from among the minorities: at the above-mentioned fes-
tival Uzbekistan – Our Shared House. There, alongside other performers,
non-Uzbek estrada singers regularly appear and win prizes for being wor-
thy musical representatives of their respective ethnicities – not only young,
aspiring vocalists, but also acclaimed estrada veterans. Having been cele-
brated as Soviet artists before independence, without much attention paid
to their ethnicity, these singers often resent being allotted to ethnic slots
now even more than their younger colleagues. In contrast to winning at this
festival, however, being granted a presidential Nihol award, is of course a
recognition straight from the very centre of things, and some estrada new-
comers of non-Uzbek descent have been presented with one. As one member
of Nihol’s jury confided to me, however, he and his co-jurors decided for
these singers against the express wish of one of the deputy prime minis-
ters, who, two years in a row, had claimed Uzbekistan had no need for such
artists – and thus no need to acknowledge them with awards.
The opinion that singing in Uzbek with a Russian accent can add an in-
teresting touch to a performance of milliy estrada, as claimed by the young
Slavic singer quoted above, is not widely shared. Faulty pronunciation of
lyrics is a recurring topic in the press and an aspect commonly cited in
complaints about the deplorable state of estrada. It was also frequently dis-
cussed at O’zbeknavo and in the Conservatory, as it was among members
of my host family. It is important, however, to note that this criticism is not
182 Nationalising estrada
only directed at singers of Ukrainian, Russian, Korean or Tatar descent.
Ethnic Uzbeks who come from so-called yevrolashgan, Europeanised, fami-
lies and who have grown up in a Russian-speaking environment, completed
Russian-language education and whose knowledge of Uzbek is just as poor
or non-existent as that of their non-Uzbek colleagues, are just as frequently
the target of this criticism – if not more so. Nevertheless, their chances of a
successful professional estrada career are considerably greater. Two of the
most highly reyted singers at the time of my fieldwork did not speak Uzbek –
and many people thought that there was not much point in them improving
their language skills since both, allegedly, did not have the vocal ability to
sing live, anyway.19 Surprisingly, the accent one of them had when singing
and speaking a few words in Uzbek on stage or at weddings, became very
fashionable among teenage girls, and many, at least in Tashkent, began to
imitate it.
Apart from a lack of language proficiency, another critique which eth-
nic non-Uzbeks frequently face is the inability to adorn their singing with
ornamentation techniques derived from folk and classical traditions – the
so-called nola, mentioned above – thus rendering their performance less
milliy. Opinions vary on whether this shortcoming is due to a different mu-
sical socialisation, a lack of training or a certain degree of unwillingness,
or whether there are some more fundamental reasons, such as innate dispo-
sition. As I will explore in Chapter 7, resorting to ethnic essentialism, even
crossing straight into genetics, is also a common strategy in claims for the
socio-political necessity of developing and promoting milliy estrada.
Tellingly, those advancing arguments about innate vocal inabilities are
often the very same people who praise, for example, immaculate renditions
of classical Uzbek repertoire by singers of Korean descent at Uzbekistan –
Our Shared House, which obviously subverts the first assumption. In any
case, criticism along these lines can be withering – as is this remark by an
O’zbeknavo official about Oksana Nechitaylo, a young female singer of
Ukrainian descent: “Her song begins, there are real instruments, Uzbek
flavour [kolorit]. But then she starts to sing, purely European [chisto po-
yevropeyski]. And then it is clear: She is lying [aldaydi]” (11.2005). Oksana
Nechitaylo was a student at the Conservatory during my first period of field-
work, and I frequently heard rumours from teachers and other students of
the estrada singing department that she was preparing to leave the country
and pursue a career somewhere else. Due to the fact that her overall style
was really quite far from milliy estrada and because she had recently re-
leased a song in an Uzbek and a Russian version, I also had doubts that she
really saw a future for herself in Uzbek estrada.
And, indeed, when I returned to Tashkent in 2008, I found that she had
left Uzbekistan and started to work quite successfully in Russian estrada
under the pseudonym Sogdiana and with the kind of pan-oriental style for
which, as was explored in the introduction and will be further explored in
Chapter 6, Uzbek estrada had been celebrated during the Soviet era, but
Nationalising estrada 183
which would have had difficulties being considered milliy estrada by Uzbek
standards (Video 5.5). By 2016, all former estrada students of non-Uzbek
ethnicity whom I had met at the Conservatory between 2003 and 2005 had
left Uzbekistan to pursue careers in Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, Russia
or Korea.
It is not only artists of non-Uzbek ethnicity who choose to work abroad,
however. Ethnic Uzbeks also take this step, whether in search of more money
and fame or because it is their only chance at actually continuing a career
in estrada if they have fallen out with the government over their art – or if
their domestic life has become too tumultuous for a true representative of
milliy estrada in Uzbekistan. The concept of milliy estrada makes demands
not only on music, lyrics and professionalism, but also on singers’ appear-
ances and demeanour – on the concert stage, in video clips, at weddings and
in private life.
Concerts
Concert performances should have a measure of glamour, elegance and
grandeur – after all, they are about estrada – but to deserve the label milliy,
they should also maintain a certain level of modesty, restraint and dignity.
The stage outfit is an important factor in this. For women, dresses made of
atlas silk or material that draws upon, but modifies the characteristic look of
the ikat weaving technique are preferred. They can be fitted, figure-hugging
and extravagant, but they should not be too sexy. Too sexy would be any of
the following styles, individually or in combination: shorter than just above
the knee; with a low neckline or spaghetti straps; long, but high-slit; chaste
in every other respect, but very low-backed or with revealing cutaways in
other parts. In short, anything apart from the head, arms, lower legs and
knees plus a moderate décolleté should ideally be covered. In 2016, there
were rumours that O’zbeknavo had recently issued a directive demanding
female singers not reveal legs and shoulders on stage, but the 2016 edition
of the gala show You Are Dear and Sacred, Woman honouring Women’s
and Girls’ Day on 8 March did not show any evidence of this. Appropriate
clothing in general, however, had certainly become a more prominent issue
in Uzbekistan by 2016. A dress worn by singer Lola at a concert the previous
year – very low-backed and mega-mini on one side – had sparked heated dis-
cussions and temporarily cost Lola her licence. In addition, there were now
posters in various public places urging young people in particular to wear
modest, clean and neat clothes, showcasing appropriate styles (Figure 5.4,
compare the outfit in Figure 5.5 on p. 191).
It is not a sign of immodesty, but rather a fulfilment of the audience’s
rightful expectation of glamour, however, when female singers change their
outfit several times during a concert – backstage, of course. There tend to
184 Nationalising estrada
Figure 5.4 “ In clothes there is a reflection of spiritual values”: girls in milliy style
and demeanour according to official standards (Andijon, 2016)
be two or more dresses among these without references to atlas silk or other
allusions to standard Uzbek female clothing, such as the classic combina-
tion of trousers and tunic. A dress can incline towards western fashion in
the form of a gala gown or it can take up forms of oriental or wider Asian
couture, but it should still adhere to the mandate of modesty and dignity
outlined above. Thus, anything resembling belly dancing attire – which is
actually quite popular among younger female stars – is neither accepted as
milliy nor seen as being appropriate to estrada as such. It does not qual-
ify as milliy because it consists of a scant amount of material that reveals
more than it conceals while also being, as an Uzbek colleague said, “an un-
necessary cultural borrowing” and too indeterminately oriental. Nor does
it befit estrada, which requires sufficiently cultured, elegant and sophisti-
cated attire – in short, it is just too vulgar to present art. An O’zbeknavo
official complained about this fashion by criticising one popular female
singer: “[X] dances very suggestively, Arab style, in a high-slit dress. This
is not appropriate for milliy estrada. There is modern milliy clothing, [made
from] atlas. There should be a difference between art and pornography”
(11.2005).
Nationalising estrada 185
Similarly inappropriate, however, (but not popular anyway) are stage cos-
tumes that are more or less the opposite of belly dancing attire and resemble
the plain, cloak-like garments worn by many Muslim women in the Arab
world. An exception are playful adoptions of the paranji, the burqah-like
robe of settled, predominantly urban women in pre-Soviet Central Asia, or
allusions to contemporary practices of bride veiling in the context of wed-
dings when this corresponds with the song’s content. Headscarves, either
tied at the back as a reference to an almost indispensable female accessory
in Uzbek domestic life, or loosely draped, in Grace Kelly-like cabriole fash-
ion and worn with a stylistically fitting dress, for example, are acceptable.
If headscarves are tightly bound, however, hiding hair plus neck, they be-
come problematic due to their religious connotations. Both, veiling robes
and closely fitted headscarves, could be interpreted as propaganda for Is-
lam, which, as discussed above, is not part of the concept of milliy estrada.
Among audiences, however, opinions vary widely, on what should be con-
sidered appropriate female dress for milliy estrada, and, as almost anywhere
in the world, age usually plays a decisive role in the assessment. In a friend’s
parental house, for example, there were often heated discussions among
the female family members about women’s stage outfits or their clothing in
video clips, with this friend’s mother advocating a much more conservative
style than she had sported herself in the Soviet 1970s, when she was the sing-
ers’ age. Her photo albums, which showed her in dresses made of atlas silk,
but with a hemline ending well above her naked knees and worn with high
heels, gave her away.
Discussions about women’s hair – length and style – in estrada are rare,
not because this aspect is irrelevant to milliylik, but because preference for
long natural hair for women is extremely widespread in society in general,
and most Uzbek women actually do have such hair. There are female artists
with cropped hair, but this is more frequently found among singers above
the age of 30 or 40. Once during fieldwork, however, I did witness female
hair become the topic of heated debate. This happened after Independence
Day 2004, at which superstar Yulduz Usmanova had sported something
that looked like a bleached straggly mop on her head. Almost everybody
I talked to about the show mentioned her hair – its inappropriateness for
estrada in general and at an event of such national and international impor-
tance in particular. “Undignified” [nedostoynyy] was the politest way that
people phrased their criticism, “like a prostitute”, the bluntest.
For men, it is considerably easier to choose an appropriate stage outfit
and hairdo, as they are under no pressure to look particularly glamorous.
It suffices if they look elegant, and this is a demand easily met by donning
a suit or even just dark trousers plus formal shirt or T-shirt. Nor do they
need to get changed during the performance. Younger artists can get away
with a more casual look, such as slacks and T-shirt, but they might also be
criticised for sloppiness in dress – and this attire is certainly not considered
milliy. In contrast to women, however, there is less need for men to include
186 Nationalising estrada
references to milliy clothing anyway. A common connection is made by put-
ting a chopon, a quilted coat made of cloth or velvet, on one’s shoulders over
a suit. But I would argue that suits have actually become male milliy dress in
Uzbekistan. Worn on stage, they can be single-coloured or patterned, plain
or of bright colour, velvety or shiny and even glittery, but preferably not
made of atlas or other material in ikat style, as this is associated too much
with female fashion.
Likewise, men should wear their hair cut short and not resort to colour-
ing or fancy styling so as to avoid an overly effeminate appearance. As with
clothing, younger singers are granted more leeway here than their older col-
leagues, but at least among the girls and women I met in Uzbekistan, hardly
any of them found long hair on men at all attractive. Longish male hair,
however, had become quite fashionable during my first period of fieldwork,
at least among the many female viewers addicted to the South Korean serial
Winter Sonata, whose main male character wears a layered haircut with a
long fringe falling into the eyes, the hair on the sides covering the ears and
reaching almost down to his shoulders at the neck. This haircut also became
popular among male students (as did the film hero’s style of draping his
scarf). Whether due to this influence or something else, this style also found
its way into estrada around that time (where it had already existed, particu-
larly in the 1980s), but, as will be seen in Chapter 6, it was not approved of
by O’zbeknavo or other state institutions and even seen to violate the ideal
of milliy estrada.
In addition to dress and hairstyle, another important aspect in assess-
ing a concert performance’s milliylik is the artist’s behaviour on stage, es-
pecially his or her way of dancing. As was very clear in the statement by
an O’zbeknavo official cited above, anything resembling belly dancing,
commonly labelled “Arab dance”, is considered too sexy for a female rep-
resentative of milliy estrada – even of estrada in general. In fact, any kind
of suggestive dancing by female singers, whether Arab or not, was regularly
branded by O’zbeknavo officials as un-milliy. But for male artists too, mak-
ing any sexually suggestive movements is problematic. Hopping around the
stage is also frowned on, for men and women alike, unless they are still kids
or very young adults. In contrast, and not very surprisingly, including move-
ments from the more restrained Uzbek classical and folk dance styles is wel-
come as part of the show. This applies to both female and male artists, but
the latter more often refrain from moving much anyway and leave dancing
altogether to the chorus line or its soloists, which are a feature of concerts
anyway regardless of the singer’s sex. Ballet, breakdance, standard, jazz,
modern, Latin and other forms of dance definitely do not qualify as milliy.
As with musical borrowings, opinions vary widely, on whether these
dance styles should be part of an estrada concert at all. At least some of
them are based on movements that are not compatible with the dignified
and elegant behaviour expected of a performance of art, and there is debate
over whether a concert that incorporates them can be said to still conform to
the ideal of milliy estrada overall. Some musicologists and officials involved
Nationalising estrada 187
in estrada administration take a strict stance against these borrowings:
“[A]ny kind of dance that is not related to milliy movements does not en-
rich a performed song’s content [qo’shiq mazmunini boyitmasdan], it stays
separate with oddness [alohidaligi bilan ajralib turaveradi]” Abdurakhimov,
Rasultoev & Norbo’taev 2006: 58).
The majority of people I spoke to, however, mostly artists and audience
members, see diversity in dance style to be an absolutely essential show in-
gredient. They like to present – or see – variety, which is part of a concert’s
appeal, and they do not really care, whether this is considered milliy or not.
And suggestive dancing, whether performed by women or men, is usually
greeted with a lot of applause at concerts – and across generations: recall the
matronly Uzbek ladies in their fifties who went wild over a young male singer
making sexy dance moves at my first Nihol gala concert in 2003 (Chapter 4).
Private lives
Ideally, artists are not only representatives of the notion of milliy estrada
when they are at work, but also in their private lives. This is a difficult de-
mand to fulfil for both male and female estrada singers alike. They might be
celebrated and venerated as stars, and their services might be highly sought
after – by private individuals planning weddings and by the government
organising concerts – but their profession as such is not a very respectable
one essentially. A quite reliable indicator of this can be found in parents’
opinions on this career choice, in singers’ chances on the wedding market
and in the hopes and plans they themselves have for the future of their own
children. In interviews and conversations, artists almost unanimously re-
counted that their parents and other elder relatives had disapproved of their
wish to become an estrada singer. Many related that their spouses were – or
could only be – from the world of art or from yevrolashgan families, who
did not mind their job. A young part-time estrada musician I met said that
he would stop playing the wedding circuit as soon as he approached the age
of marriage himself, as this activity would be a strike against him for the
188 Nationalising estrada
family of any prospective wife and thus narrow the circle of eligible brides.
Another one announced he would quit singing a few years before his own
children reached the age of marriage and would look for a more decorous
job in order to enhance his children’s chances of finding good partners
(which he did not do in the end). And two female students from the estrada
singing department contemplated transferring into music pedagogy and
musicology respectively so they would appear to be more respectable brides
in the eyes of matchmakers. Only very few estrada artists I spoke with could
imagine allowing their – already existing or future – children to embark
on the same career. For some fathers of daughters, it was an absolutely un-
thinkable choice.
For male estrada artists, the lack of respect accorded to their profession is
linked to the fact that singing at weddings basically means serving someone
and thus puts them in an inferior position. It also has to do with the fact that
the evening wedding parties where estradniki perform are events associated
with alcohol, the more or less free mixing of the sexes and a certain lower-
ing of normal moral standards. The world of shou biznes beyond weddings
has an even worse reputation and is widely suspected to be a realm of utter
moral laxity if not depravity – an assumption I will explore in more detail
in Chapter 6. A well-known and respected singer, who would become the
epitome of milliy estrada a few years later, commented on the situation:
X: Earlier, twenty years ago, no one here gave his daughters [into marriage]
to a singer. They did not give [them] to him. He is a singer, you should
not give him a daughter. Slowly, this already passed. They thought that
a singer has many wives. … Today, they admire us. But when I want to
give my daughter into marriage, this interferes …
KK: Would you give your daughter into marriage with a singer?
X: I would give her to someone who is a good person (lit. to a human being
[cheloveku]; meaning: yes, I would give her to a singer, if he is a good
person).
KK: And if your daughter wants to become a singer, will you allow [her]?
X: Never!
(08.2004)
While it might not be very respectable for men to work as a service provider
and in a morally dubious environment, in contrast to women, they are at
least expected to work at all and their honour is not harmed if they are ac-
cused of pre- or extra-marital sexual relations.
Female estrada artists, on the other hand, already partially damage their
reputation just by working. In the eyes of many Uzbeks I met – men and
women, young and old, in and beyond Tashkent –, the most respectable and
thus proper position for a woman is that of a housewife and mother, regard-
less of her qualifications. Even in the eyes of those who, in general, think
it normal or even important for women to have a paid job – mostly peo-
ple who have been socialised in the Soviet era, with its attempts to achieve
Nationalising estrada 189
gender equality by promoting women’s right and duty to work, among other
c ampaigns – the profession of estrada singer is a problematic career choice.
For them, its glamour, a certain degree of sexual objectification and the usu-
ally open display of riches are incompatible with the inherited socialist and
partially still prevalent ideals of social sameness as well as female plainness
and, related to this, a measure of desexualisation.
Quite a few women with senior positions in estrada administration or
education, themselves examples of strong, independent women directly in-
volved in teaching or managing female estrada singers and decided propo-
nents of female employment and emancipation, found it noticeably difficult
to acknowledge this profession as a decent one for women. They praised it
for the incomparable – and in their view often admirable – societal free-
dom it allowed singers above a certain reyting, but they had clear reserva-
tions about it because of its disrespectable reputation. I was witness to and
sometimes a participant in various conversations between them and female
estrada students at the Conservatory, in which they regularly warned their
aspiring and often enthusiastic protégés that they would not have a “nor-
mal future life”, that they would maybe have to forsake “female happiness”
(commonly meaning to have a husband and children),20 and thus advised
them to seriously think twice about their choice of a professional career in
estrada. In an interview, an unmarried female singer in her early thirties
described the dilemma female estrada singers face in the following way:
It is difficult to be a good wife and a good singer, you can be a wife and
a good singer or a good wife and a singer, you know. Of course, you can
be a bad [wife], but you have to make an effort to be at least a normal
[wife], but you cannot be an excellent wife and an excellent singer … For
this reason, it is very difficult. In our customs, [this] mentality [is] some-
how difficult. I do not say that it is very [difficult], but you have to take
everybody into account, you have to take into account your mahalla
[neighbourhood district], your parents, your husband, your relatives. In
our oriental/eastern21 customs this is very difficult. You have to take
everybody into account.
(06.2004)
For example, if it is about marrying. Who is a singer, [they will say about
her] “This is a disgrace for our family. How can this be, in a family like
ours? A singer – no way!” As if I were working as a prostitute, yes? Or
as, the hell, whatever.
(04.2004)
During my first period of fieldwork in 2003–2004, there was only one female
singer among the higher reyted stars of the scene whom everyone, without ex-
ception, conceded was of impeccable moral reputation: Nasiba Abdullaeva.
190 Nationalising estrada
At the audition for Navro’z in 2004, I talked to a young artist who was trying
hard to also earn – and keep – such an image. She thought a career in estrada
to be exciting, but exhausting – and said: “You can lead the life of a saint, but
still everybody thinks you are a singing prostitute” (02.2004).
Regardless of whether female estrada singers really “lead the life of a
saint” or not, they all have to contend with the stigma of moral laxity and
licentiousness, much more so than do their male colleagues, whose – alleged
or real – promiscuity can be easily reinterpreted as a sign of manliness. Thus,
for women, there is already an inherent contradiction between the milliy and
moral values they are expected to – and often do – represent in their art, on
the one hand, and the values they are assumed to live by in their private lives
on the other. This is a fragile construct, and it is quickly and easily destroyed
if there are public signs of indecency. These might be un-milliy photos posted
by themselves in social media where they pose suggestively and are wearing
little; they can also be rumours or more concrete incriminating evidence that
they are not conforming to the expectations of either a chaste unmarried
girl or a dedicated wife and mother. And this situation can be easily – and
regularly is – exploited: by rivals in reyting, by furious ex-partners, by people
who just love scandal and by government officials.
In 2006, for example, Shahzoda, a famous estrada artist (Figure 5.5), had
allegedly been filmed having sex outside of marriage. There was a video
circulating on the internet and despite the fact that it was so blurry and
coarsely grained that it could have depicted almost any woman with dark
hair – and almost any physical action in addition to sex – it was enough to
grind her career in Uzbekistan to a halt for some time. She had her licence
revoked and lost a lucrative advertising contract – practically overnight, the
posters vanished from the city. There were various hypotheses about who
had launched this campaign against her. One stipulated that it had been a
female colleague of similar reyting who was hoping for a career boost by
side-lining her. Another, which surfaced much later, maintained that the
sex film had only been a pretext to silence her for political reasons in a game
of proxy. Her father, Bahodir Musaev, branded a dissident, was to be pres-
surised by this move endangering his daughter’s career into abandoning his
critical activities, while, at the same time, the politically problematic family
background rendered her quite unsuitable to represent estrada anyway.22
Whatever the true background to this story, by 2008, when I returned to
Tashkent after two years of absence, Shahzoda had shifted almost all of
her performance activities to Kazakhstan. By 2016, however, she had been
rehabilitated. Her inclusion in the youth festival We Are Children of a Great
Country, organised by the Kamolot Youth Movement, was an unmistakable
sign of that (see Chapter 3).
This incident – and there have been myriad others, mostly, however,
without a political background of this sort – already clearly indicates how
far the concept of milliy estrada can haunt singers in their private lives, up
to and including the point of questioning the notion of privacy as such.
Nationalising estrada 191
Figure 5.5 Shahzoda in un-milliy style and demeanour according to official stand-
ards, 2005
Ideally, estrada artists are not only to be epitomes of the moral values they
are supposed to advocate in songs, but they are to narrowly embody the
government’s line on politics and religion as well – wherever they are (see
Chapter 7). Odiljon Abdukaxxarov, then head of O’zbeknavo’s licence de-
partment, was very clear about that in February 2017, when he summed up
concisely what had already been the official position for years:
Notes
1 With the conceptual combination of milliy and estrada, ideas about music
in Uzbekistan differ markedly from Tajikistan, where these two terms are
not paired but considered mutually exclusive (Spinetti 2005: 187). In ascrib-
ing e strada the potential to be national, the discourse about milliy estrada in
Uzbekistan bears more resemblance to the situation in Israel, where various
forms of popular music are marked and discussed as national music (Regev &
Seroussi 2004). Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi even found the belief “that
popular music is the cultural form that most strongly signifies Israeliness”
(2004: 2) to be widely shared. Similarly, but not identically, many of my in-
terlocutors believed milliy estrada to best signify the independent and modern
Uzbekistani nation state, whereas they thought classical or folk music to most
strongly signify o’zbekchilik, Uzbekness.
2 Uzbekistan has a population of about 31 million. Its ethnic composition is
roughly as follows: 75 per cent Uzbeks, 10 per cent Tajiks, 5 per cent Russians,
2.5 per cent Karakalpak, 7.5 per cent others (Kazakh, Tatar, etc.). In Uzbek offi-
cial statistics, the number of Tajiks is usually estimated to be lower than what is
estimated in the scholarly literature.
3 For an analysis of the clip, see Martin (2001) and Megoran (2005: 564ff.; 2008a).
4 Consequently, I would not subscribe to Alexander Djumaev’s conclusion that
“[a]n appeal to Islam is taking place in all layers and spheres of Uzbek musical
culture” (2005: 179). Nor do my observations of developments in jazz, bard song
and alternative music support this assertion.
5 For Uzbekistani citizens of non-Uzbek and non-Tajik ethnicity, adherence to
Orthodox, Lutheran or Catholic Christianity is generally accepted, while there
is much less tolerance for religious groups such as Charismatic Christianity, the
Bahá’í faith, the Hare Krishna movement or Jehovah’s Witnesses. For detailed
research on the mandate to be Muslim, the government’s stance against con-
version and the activities of various religious groups in Uzbekistan, see Hilgers
(2006; 2007; 2009).
6 To translate the Uzbek term xalq musiqasi as folk music is slightly misleading
in this context. Xalq musiqasi is often used not to narrowly connote folk music,
which is its literal translation, but it has a wider meaning, encompassing folk
as well as classical music. Transcriptions of the Bukharan shashmaqom, for ex-
ample, appeared under the title O’zbek Xalq Musiqasi in a nine-volume edition
of folk and classical traditions within the borders of the Uzbek SSR, published
between 1955 and 1962. The wide application of this designation is, on the one
hand, related to the Soviet idea that true creativity lies with “the people”, so
the shashmaqom was declared to have its sources in folk music. On the other
Nationalising estrada 193
hand, to label the shashmaqom folk music in the Soviet era saved it from being
forever banned as an outdated feudal remnant – a fate it actually met for sev-
eral years.
7 The karnay (long trumpet) and surnay (double reed instrument) are rarely men-
tioned among the instruments suitable to milliy estrada. The main reason for this
is that they are associated less with music in the strict sense than with signalling,
as mentioned earlier.
8 At the 2004 Independence Day audition, a young singer sitting next to me in the
auditorium started furtively to laugh, when the selection committee was discuss-
ing the inclusion of a song, which they obviously all considered suitable – and
thus sufficiently milliy – for the show programme. This was despite the fact that
the song in question was what they, in theory, all abhorred most: a straight cover
of a Turkish hit with Uzbek lyrics. Shaking her head and still quietly chuckling,
she leaned over to me and whispered: “That’s our experts for you – what an as-
sembly of ignorance!”
9 In addition to the factor nomadic vs. settled culture, which was frequently men-
tioned in the conversations I had, it seems plausible to assume that the impetus
to borrow from Asian music cultures beyond the former borders of the Soviet
Union rather than from those previously within its confines, is also linked to the
heritage of ideas about socialist cultural development:
Just as one could not fly from Tashkent to Tbilisi without going through
Moscow, cultural borrowing had to go the same route, since Moscow set the
standards for what constituted ‘international’ culture. Given that national
cultures were to be ‘developed’ through internationalization …, it was not
acceptable for the cultures of the less-developed periphery to borrow from
one another … Artists found no profit in adopting the culture of another
Soviet republic …
(Adams 2008: 629)
As I will explore in Chapter 6, however, Uzbek artists did find profit in ingesting
musical influences from what in the Soviet era was – and in Uzbekistan often still
is – commonly called “the foreign east/orient” [zarubezhnyy vostok]. Besides, the
adoption – and preferably faithful rendition – of songs originating from other
national or ethnic groups within the Soviet Union played an important role in
demonstrations of respect and reverence as part of cultural diplomacy.
10 See Harris (2005) for a fascinating account of musical borrowings in Uyghur
popular music and the discourses around them.
11 The term “world estrada” is also used in the sense of “estrada of international
significance” (see Chapter 7).
12 Why bard song in Uzbek today adheres to this system of prestige – as it formerly
did in the Soviet Union – can be explained by the fact that it is defined more as
poetry than as music (see Bright 1986: 365).
13 Musical literacy is often considered an important marker of professionalism
across the world (see, for example, Buchanan 1995: 389; Harewood 2008: 214). In
Uzbekistan, I never found this specifically mentioned – not because it is irrele-
vant, I would claim, but because it is generally taken for granted (see Merchant
2015: 110).
14 These questions are particularly relevant for the instrumentalists who graduate
from the Conservatory’s estrada faculty. The majority of singers do not have
their own bands but just perform with a minus or plyus, and those singers that do
perform with a band often have a reputation for paying their musicians badly.
Furthermore, the Estrada Symphony Orchestra at National TV and Radio is
not an attractive career option, as salaries are low, and the heyday of orchestral
estrada has definitely passed. All Conservatory students in the instrumental es-
trada department I talked to saw this as a big problem, and quite a few consid-
ered emigrating.
194 Nationalising estrada
15 The late Muhammad Yusuf (1954–2001), a venerated poet, studied Russian lan-
guage and literature, for example. Usmon Azim (b. 1950), another highly valued
writer, studied journalism.
16 A vocal training in academic music is considered a good base for estrada with
regard to fundamental singing and intonation skills, but, as teachers in the
Conservatory’s estrada faculty, some of them trained academic singers them-
selves, frequently remarked, it is also difficult to convert or to re-build an opera
voice into an estrada voice. On the one hand they explained this with divergent
sound aesthetics, on the other, with the fact that opera is more about vocal fach,
whereas estrada is more about individualism.
17 The principle of ustoz-shogird teaching exists outside the institutions of music
education, but is also integrated into them. Particularly in the sphere of classical
music, students at the Conservatory commonly regard their teachers there as
their ustozlar (see Merchant 2015: 65–67). In the sphere of estrada, I rarely en-
countered such relations. There are cases of senior estrada artists having younger
protégés, but these connections have less to do with transmitting s pecific musical
knowledge and skills and thus building or continuing aesthetic lineages. They
are more about extra-musical support and maybe repertoire a dvice, but most im-
portantly, for the younger singer, the mere association with a senior figure from
the scene enhances his or her reyting. For a detailed account of ustoz-shogird
transmission in Uzbekistan’s Ferghana valley, see Sultanova (2009).
18 I am grateful to Nick Megoran for sharing his insights on Islom Karimov’s eth-
nicity/nationality politics and “authoritarian conflict management” with me in
Tashkent and Andijon in March 2016 (see Megoran 2017b: 212–216).
19 Just as Tanya Merchant did among Conservatory students of classical music
(2006: 223), I also frequently encountered people mocking these singers’ lack of
language proficiency, among them other estrada artists. Unlike Merchant, how-
ever, I never found any hints in these remarks that I could have interpreted as
a kind of post-colonial Uzbek defiance vis-à-vis Russian as the language of the
former oppressor. Most people I met, while welcoming the more important posi-
tion granted to Uzbek, actually deeply regretted the decline of Russian as a for-
mer lingua franca. By many, this was interpreted as a sign of de-modernisation
and re-provincialisation (see Chapter 6).
20 In addition to this interpretation of “female happiness”, I found another that
circulated exclusively in female-only gatherings. Here “female happiness” was
discussed in terms of true love: loving someone and being loved, having an at-
tractive, interesting and caring partner at one’s side and experiencing sexual ful-
filment. This, however, was rarely seen to be achievable in arranged marriages,
but rather as an unofficial second wife to a married man or as an unmarried, di-
vorced or widowed woman with an unmarried, divorced or widowed man as the
partner of one’s own choice. For most women, this kind of “female happiness”
was something that came after an unsuccessful arranged marriage.
21 The Russian term vostok and the Uzbek term sharq denote both: east and orient.
22 This kind of punishment by proxy was a common tactic by the Uzbek govern-
ment under president Islom Karimov in its attempt to silence dissident voices.
I met several people who feared – probably rightfully so – children, grand-
children or other family members being beaten up or abducted as a measure to
pressure them into giving up activities critical of the government or to keep them
from religious conversion.
23 Cited in: “Pornography in Uzbek: What Tashkent Chases Its Stars for”:
https://365info.kz/2017/02/pornografiya-po-uzbekski-za-chto-presleduyut-
uzbekskih-pevits/ (accessed 7 February 2018).
6 Authorising estrada
Licences, certificates and the
status of milliy estrada
Issuance
Licences
As detailed in Chapter 1, estrada singers need a licence to perform. Licences
were issued based on the decisions of the so-called Group of Representa-
tives of Creative Support, an organ under the Council for the Development
and Coordination of National Estrada Art. Its 19 members, among them
writers, composers, scholars and journalists, met once or twice per month
and reviewed documents from first-time applicants as well as from artists
wishing to prolong their licence or change their licence category. Before
these meetings, documents had already passed through O’zbeknavo’s Office
for Repertoire and Control:
For most of the period of my research, artists were not required to perform
their repertoire live in the licensing process; they handed in audio and video
material as well as sheets with lyrics. Current and former members of the
Group I spoke to consider this method a major flaw, as recordings can eas-
ily conceal even a total lack of vocal ability. This critique was also widely
shared among singers (with vocal ability), musicologists and journalists. The
temporary change to an audition format in 2014, promoted by then director
Bahodir Axmedov, considerably reduced the number of artists reviewed per
session – and the number of those licensed in general.
Not requiring live performances in the course of licensing decisions was a
crucial difference from earlier administrative practices in the Soviet Union
and socialist eastern Europe. Auditions used to be standard procedure in
the Uzbek SSR, for example, in the approval – or rejection – of new rep-
ertoires and the evaluation of professional ranking (and thus, artists’ pay-
ment, concert and touring duties, etc.). But, as discussed in Chapter 3, these
have survived as a routine procedure only in the context of selecting singers
for participation in major government concerts. And even there, artists of-
ten perform to a plyus, a full playback track.
Judged an even greater flaw than taking decisions based on recorded ma-
terial, though this was more often cited by non-members, for obvious rea-
sons, was the Group’s alleged propensity to grant favours and take unofficial
Authorising estrada 201
payments. What was considered even worse was O’zbeknavo officials cir-
cumventing the Group altogether, either for their own benefit, financial and
otherwise, or, more frequently, because they were acting as an accessory to
plots concocted “higher up”. Almost everybody outside O’zbeknavo and its
related structures blamed these institutions, or at least certain officials in
them, of basing licence decisions on prospective personal advantages in-
stead of ideas about the state and improvement of estrada. A former mem-
ber of the Group even claimed that half of licences were granted without
consulting the Group, and in 2016, a producer gave me the following advice,
laughing bitterly: “You should establish Nemisnavo [terminological equiv-
alent to O’zbeknavo for Germany]. You will become rich, you will become
more important than Merkel. You can take someone from O’bezknavo with
you as a consultant [sovetnikom]” (03.2016).
In addition to accusations of incompetence among presumed experts in
responsible government organs, corruption was the most often cited expla-
nation for the glaring ineffectiveness of an instrument as powerful as the
licensing procedure. Despite the fact that the government had devised a
smart strategy to improve the quality of estrada, as critical interlocutors
usually did acknowledge, there were hundreds of artists with licences who
would never have been granted one, had the Group and O’zbeknavo staff
done their job properly according to official provisions and the standards
of milliy estrada. I myself was often astonished about the blatant discrep-
ancy between claims about the presumably rigorous selection system and its
questionable outcome from the standpoint of milliy estrada or even simply
vocal ability. A senior Conservatory teacher even became quite agitated on
the topic when asked for her opinion:
For all this dirty rubbish [gryaznyy musor], O’zbeknavo and television
are to blame. Why are they granting so many licences – and what for?
Let them all audition live. And why does television show such video
clips? Where women walk around in underwear?
(03.2016)
Although I was not permitted access to the meetings of the Group or other
official internal O’zbeknavo discussions and could not in any other way per-
sonally verify the allegations of corruption, I have little reason to doubt
widespread claims about its existence and the various stories about its work-
ings. This factor undoubtedly played a role in turning the licensing proce-
dure into a shady and unpredictable endeavour, which could, as I will look at
in more detail below, include outright harassment. At the same time, wide-
spread knowledge that performers could compensate for their deficiencies
in talent or repertoire with financial or other favours, in addition to the fact
that auditions were – and are – usually conducted with pre-recorded mate-
rial anyway, meant that the hurdle performers had to clear was significantly
202 Authorising estrada
lower than officially claimed. This knowledge could be used by singers to
their advantage – and it frequently was.
Most singers I talked to regarded the initial issue or regular prolongation
of their licences as a formality rather than a serious examination. And, as
detailed in Chapter 3, many, particularly those of high reyting, were happy
about the deal they struck – to be completely exempt from paying tax for
a yearly fee that they could earn in one day by performing at weddings. In
return for this, they did not mind highlighting the most milliy part of their
repertoire in the licensing documents – if they had to distract from the re-
maining parts at all. Others, such as a young group who performed in a type
of humorous rap style with a lot of slang and thus somehow still counted as
estrada, if not exactly milliy, described the procedure more as an unpleasant
but almost ritualistic nuisance similar to school boys getting a routine lec-
ture from the headmaster and having to vow better behaviour. And a few,
while appreciating the financial advantages it entailed for them, considered
the licensing procedure a kind of uniquely Uzbek abnormality and absurd-
ity, inappropriate for a modern nation state.
Many estrada singers try to avoid licensing procedures altogether. This
predominantly concerns those who would apply only for a category 2
licence – artists who perform in restaurants and bars or as dezhurka, the
standby combo at weddings, mostly with a cover repertoire (see Chapter 5).
They do not fear being refused on the basis of not being milliy enough. Most
frequently, their motivation is purely financial; they hope to avoid having to
pay a licence fee in order to save money. People who were well versed in the
intricacies of the wedding circuit all agreed that, financially, the licence sys-
tem was a blessing for singers above a certain reyting, but a burden for those
below this level or even outside of this system entirely. For those people, the
licence fee was not money that could easily and quickly be recouped, but
actually a substantial investment.10
The same applies to rock musicians or rappers and others who are active
in popular music styles that are considered neither strictly estrada nor at
all milliy. For them, a licence would just mean a major expense without any
advantages. Their music is not in demand at weddings, and their sporadic
live gigs in clubs or underground venues generate hardly any income, if at
all. Their status in the overall system has always been a bit vague. Often left
more or less to themselves, their scenes occasionally rather suddenly came
into the focus of government attention during the period of my fieldwork,
followed by – sometimes subtle, sometimes v iolent – measures intended
to curb their activities. This is linked to the fact that the official posi-
tion on rap and rock oscillated widely in the K arimov era. P olicies were
sometimes based on the conviction that rock and rap could be brought
safely into the fold of milliy estrada – and made administrable – with the
help of the licence system, a view that was promoted by a presidential ad-
viser on cultural matters in a conversation with me in 2008, for example.
Authorising estrada 203
The rationale behind his ideas was similar to socialist Albania’s treatment
of dance music in the 1960s:
Rap and rock policies in Uzbekistan might have taken a similar course,
and had a similar effect in the long run, had the government’s estimation
of their potential for incorporation not radically changed. At other times,
rap and rock were assumed to generically defy “nationalisation”, and once,
in 2011, they were branded “satanic music”, “created by evil forces to bring
youth in Western countries to total moral degradation” and “approaching
as dark clouds over the heads of Uzbek youth” (cited in Pannier 2011).11
Government attitudes were rarely unanimous, however, and even with
the allegation of satanism still being floated, acts that clearly sported rap
aesthetics – musically and otherwise – were included in the great govern-
ment spectacles celebrating Independence Day or Navro’z. While the output
of Uzbek rap tended to be very tame anyway, some of the most prominent
rappers of the scene have produced some of the most patriotic songs, such
as, for example Shoxrux’s “My Homeland” [Vatanim] (Video 6.2).
On the whole, there was much less resentment about the licence system
as such than I had initially expected, and there was not even much talk
about it – until conversations touched upon flaws in its functioning, when
resentment could turn into rage. Financial benefits aside, my contacts over-
whelmingly approved of the idea that the government should somehow have
a grip on who was singing – and who was singing what – in the country.
This was linked to the widespread conviction that culture should ideally be
dealt with “at the state level”, as explored in Chapter 4. Some regarded this
as to be an ongoing task of any state and were quite surprised to hear that
Germany did not have a licence system. Others instead explained it more
as a necessary interim measure, to be used until Uzbekistan became more
consolidated – and thus more in line with ideas about transition. A friend of
mine, a recent graduate of German philology, even became quite agitated
when I suggested that Uzbek estrada might do better without a licence sys-
tem and without O’zbeknavo: “No! Of course you need something like this.
I mean, how could it be otherwise? Then anybody who wants to be a singer
could just become one. But this is impossible! Just imagine!” (08.2004).
204 Authorising estrada
For older estrada singers, the licence system is in many respects just a con-
tinuation of the Soviet model, and while some resent no longer being paid by
the government (see Chapter 3), others freely and openly appreciate the im-
mense riches the new system makes possible. For many younger singers, it is
something they just take for granted, do not waste too much thought on and
grudgingly or impassively accept it. The number of people who disapproved
of the licence system altogether grew considerably more over the years of
my research, however. Some completely reversed their opinion, such as this
former member of the licensing Group at O’zbeknavo, who had still been an
ardent advocate for licensing in 2008:
But while the demands of milliy estrada are impossible for Tashkent’s rock
musicians and rappers to meet, most of the repertoire of most estrada artists
is already quite milliy anyway. This is not in response to O’zbeknavo orders,
but to popular demand and their own musical preferences. I will come back
to this point below.
Of course, nobody expected that, when the doors [to the foyer] opened
and the lights went on. Everybody thought: “[What a] shame, what
[kind of] concert is this – the lights go on, the doors open.” … They
go to a concert, but when there is some “Oops”, when something like
this happens, everybody goes “Oooh”, and they have something to talk
about. And when they suddenly saw that these were soldiers, I think,
there were even happier.
(10.2005)
Other singers said that they preferred to display patriotism in a softer form,
such as praising Uzbekistan’s beauty or the generosity and hospitality of
its people. Some claimed their audience was fed up with songs telling them
how great the state was and how even greater its future would be, but still
all the more in need of positive images and self-affirmation as a nation in
these hard times.
When studying the concert programme of the group ‘[X]’ and other
young singers also performing at the ‘Zarafshon’ concert hall, it was
206 Authorising estrada
noted that there were included performances of singers without permis-
sion [meaning: without a licence], the concert programme was artisti-
cally of low level [badiiy jihatdan past saviyada] …
It was noted that the solo concert programme of Uzbekistan people’s
artist [X] in the palace of the ‘Friendship of peoples’ from [x] April un-
til [y] May was conducted on a high artistic level, the programme was
well prepared, the participants of the programme were dressed in a way
befitting our national traditions [milliy an’analarimizga mos ravishda ki-
yinganligi], special attention was paid to the decoration and the stage
culture, but there were instances when the singer went beyond the scope
of the scenario …
It was noted that the concert programme of [X] in the palace of the
‘Friendship of peoples’ from [x] May until [y] June was of lower artistic
quality compared to previous years, also the singer used words during
the concert programme that were not shown in the scenario and that do
not befit stage culture and our national values [saxna [sic] madaniyatiga
va milliy kadriyatlarimizga [sic] mos kelmaydigan].
(O’zbeknavo 2006: 6–8)
Figure 6.1 T
he entrance to National TV and Radio [O’zbekiston Milliy Teleradi-
okompaniyasi], 2005
banning artists from being broadcast was to discipline and restrict them by
curbing their means for publicity. And if the reason for the withdrawal of a
licence was a specific song or video clip (as opposed to “on account of con-
duct”), it was just as important, according to O’zbeknavo, to withdraw this
from circulation in order to stymie its influence on the population.
Radio and TV stations may not have been eager to show pre-emptive obe-
dience in licence matters, but they risked harsh sanctions if they did not ex-
hibit reactive compliance, even if this made running a programme difficult.
In September 2008, a radio host told me that she was having severe problems
finding suitable music, as so many singers that fit her radio station’s format
were currently suspended, and even some of those with valid licences had
been put on a blacklist around Independence Day. What made matters even
worse was that a prohibition against playing Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turk-
men and Iranian music had just been issued, too. This left her with little in
her playlist to choose from and she – half-jokingly, half-desperately – said:
What shall I do? Maybe I should just say something like “For the next 3
minutes there should have been a song by Sevara Nazarkhan, who, un-
fortunately, is currently banned” and then just keep 3 minutes of silence.
(09.2008)
Authorising estrada 209
Some stations dare to circumvent these bans by including tracks from sing-
ers they know to be suspended or to have had licences withdrawn in their
late night rotation. But all radio and TV people I talked to agreed that this
was a dangerous game, as a radio host from another station said in 2005:
“They can just close down the station at any moment” (09.2005). And this is
something to which the Uzbek government has resorted on occasion. Curi-
ously, the radio and TV outlets belonging to Gulnora Karimova were, while
they existed, a kind of haven for banned estrada singers and riskier acts. She
could take liberties that nobody else could – as long as her father did not
intervene personally, no one dared to touch her. So there was music on her
stations that could not be heard anywhere else. Still, her staff was always
alert not to push the boundaries too far, primarily in order to avoid personal
repercussions.
To its own great dismay, O’zbeknavo could only react to the release of, in
its view, unsuitable songs and videos ex post facto. Neither it nor any other
state organ was equipped with the tools to directly control the production
of estrada songs and video clips.13 Pre-emptive measures such as O’zbekna-
vo’s monthly “spirituality hours” for artists, mentioned in Chapter 5, or
other lecture-style meetings to convince singers in general and newcomers
in particular to conform to milliylik, were a rather futile endeavour in this
respect. This means once artists had a licence, they were free to record the
songs and shoot the clips they liked and have them broadcast – at least, until
someone found them problematic when noticing them on TV or radio. An
O’zbeknavo official himself pointed to this gap in administration:
[H]e today receives a licence for a certain period, for example, for a year,
and in the course of the year, he continuously works, learns new songs.
We authorised this repertoire [points to a pile of documents], he received
[the licence], tomorrow he learns new songs, but he cannot completely
guarantee that tomorrow the lyrics, the music will be the same.
(11.2005)
In all of O’zbeknavo’s activity reports that were available to me, a short “rec-
ommendations and suggestions” section at the end repeatedly mentioned
the need to find a solution to monitor production and broadcasting. It is not
only O’zbeknavo, however, that regretted the absence of a single govern-
ment recording centre. While show business representatives, who made a
good living from music and clip production, found this a rather absurd pros-
pect, quite a number of journalists, musicologists and composers considered
the establishment of a centralised state music production basically the only
countermeasure to what they considered to be estrada’s plummeting decline
in quality. Most were very sceptical about the chances that such a huge pro-
ject would be realised, but some maintained with surprising confidence and
transition optimism that, with further consolidation, the Uzbek state would
surely tackle and accomplish this important task. And those familiar with
210 Authorising estrada
Soviet practices all pointed to the former success of the Melodiya state re-
cord company, with some dreaming of a revival of its Tashkent branch as a
national Uzbek enterprise.
Currently, estrada songs and clips are produced in a wide variety of ap-
proaches, ranging from complete home-manufacture with just a computer
and a cheap camera in people’s living rooms to very elaborate and expensive
recording and film projects in professional studios with excellent equipment
and a large crew of specialists. Once songs and clips are finished, singers
themselves or their producers offer them to radio and TV stations, which, if
they fit their format, will agree to include them in their programmes. Save
for singers of top reyting whose releases radio and TV stations are interested
in playing anyway, artists have to pay for radio and TV promo, and written
or oral contracts regulate the frequency of rotation, occasionally the pro-
gramme slot, the term of contract and the price.
Unable to prevent un-milliy songs and clips from coming into existence,
O’zbeknavo would have at least liked to have been able to prevent their
broadcasting, but its power to directly intervene at this point of the process
was rather restricted, so it aimed for a kind of remote form of monitoring,
similar to the one recently established with to’yxona managers. Over the
course of my fieldwork it convened various meetings in order to oblige ra-
dio and TV stations to adhere more strictly to the tenets of milliy estrada in
their choice of musical material for programming. There were frequent calls
for the establishment – or rather re-establishment – of so-called khudsovety,
“artistic councils”, which had been organs for selection in broadcasting and
other spheres of culture in the Soviet era. In interviews and conversations,
some people would talk about khudsovety as if they held the key to solving
almost all problems perceived to be afflicting estrada, endowing the term
with a kind of magic ring. This composer fondly remembered them:
But here in Uzbekistan [Uzbek SSR], there was no place for amateur
artists in TV and radio, little space was granted. We always had big
khudsovety, a commission worked for the selection of music and singers.
Their lyrics, the music were studied meticulously. Is there no plagia-
rism, [does it have] originality, is it new? All this was deliberated and
discussed … Before, when I was young, in the 1970s, 1980s, there was
not a single song, not a single singer, neither on radio nor on TV, that
had not passed through a khudsovet. They listened to our songs many
times. They looked at all categories, what kind of music, performance,
what recording quality, even to the clothes, they paid attention …
(10.2003)
The final selection did, in fact, include quite a number of songs that
O’zbeknavo would have approved of as milliy estrada, but those present had
made their decision on the basis of very different criteria: aesthetic novelty
and suitability to their format. Leaving the office, I wondered whether the
station had simply re-christened its weekly editorial meetings khudsovet in
order to placate O’zbeknavo. A radio host I talked to shortly afterwards
confirmed my impression:
The term had definitely lost its former magic ring for me and it never again
managed to conjure up fantasies of fierce censorship.14 This was also due
to the fact that various people corrected my initial impression about the
nature of khudsovety in the Soviet era. Composers in particular tended to
describe them more as working meetings with intense discussions among
professional colleagues than strict and arbitrary gatekeeping commissions
(see Tochka 2016: 109).
In autumn 2008, an O’zbeknavo official told me about plans to staff the
radio and TV stations’ khudsovety with at least one of its members of staff,
thus testifying to their, in his view, ineffectiveness despite their imposing
name. As far as I know, however, this did not happen. O’zbeknavo was still
only able to intervene after new songs and clips had already been released
and broadcast. It did this, however, with reliable regularity and great zeal –
and often harsh consequences for singers. There were various paths through
which O’zbeknavo received information regarding the airing of songs
and clips that were not compatible with the ideal of milliy estrada. Some
212 Authorising estrada
journalists spoke about a special department in the government whose staff
engaged in constant monitoring of all the Uzbek radio and TV stations and
informed O’zbeknavo, when they discovered a problematic song or clip. Oth-
ers doubted the existence of such a permanent media watchdog unit and dis-
missed it as a government-invented chimera meant to scare and thus secure
obedience from the media. Whether on the basis of concerted supervision
or chance spotting, however, it is certain that O’zbeknavo was often notified
“from above” about songs and clips these higher-ups deemed questionable.
As mentioned earlier, a few of my interlocutors claimed Islom Karimov
himself to have regularly watched estrada clips at the weekend and that his
advisors passed his views down the government hierarchy to O’zbeknavo
early the following week. Like some of my other contacts, though, I consider
it more likely that high-ranking politicians pretend to speak in the presi-
dent’s name in order to lend more substance to their often personally moti-
vated, rather than politically oriented, slander of singers – an assumption I
will come back to later. While in previous years, “above” in political terms
had usually meant the Cabinet of Ministers, by 2016, the term was almost
invariably used to denote the National Security Service [Milliy Xavfsizlik
Xizmati (MXX) / Sluzhba Natsional’noy Bezopasnosti (SNB)] – if the word
was even uttered at all and not replaced with a gesture in which one tapped
the index and middle finger of the right hand on one’s left shoulder, as if to
mark an epaulette. The conviction that the SNB had actually taken control
of most aspects of politics was widespread; increased numbers of people felt
they were being spied on or bugged, and there were rumours that every es-
trada artist above a certain reyting had been allocated a personal SNB mem-
ber charged with monitoring her or him. When passing the building of the
Ministry of the Interior, home of the SNB, an elderly acquaintance summed
up the heightened feeling of fear and being watched by saying: “Look, Kris-
tina, our Gestapo!” (03.2016).
Whatever or wherever the ominous-sounding “above” actually was, when
it came to estrada, O’zbeknavo staff sometimes reacted with anger to notes
sent from the upper strata of the government. Complaints from there often
included accusations that O’zbeknavo officials had insufficient control over
“their” estradniki – accusations that these officials found unfair, as the gov-
ernment, in their opinion, provided them with too little power and too few
legal means to actually control them. In any case, in addition to acting on
hints handed down to them, O’zbeknavo officials also checked radio and TV
programmes and they followed up on critical comments in newspapers and
on social media on certain songs and clips.
If a singer’s repertoire was found to be at fault, she or he might have just
been summoned to O’zbeknavo for “recommendations” [rekomendatsii] and
“direction” [napravleniye]. Depending on the particular aspects of the song
or clip that were considered incompatible with the ideal of milliy estrada, she
or he might then have been exhorted not to compose music oneself but to
collaborate with professional composers, not to cover Turkish songs, not to
Authorising estrada 213
write lyrics oneself but to draw on the work of professional poets, to use
more Uzbek instruments, not to use slang words, to show beautiful Uzbeki-
stan in clips and not some foreign country, to dress more decently (women),
to get a haircut (men), not to sing about Islam in any kind or to show life
more positively – in short, straightening out anything that was deemed to
deviate from milliy estrada. She or he might have got off with this warning,
particularly, if she or he was a newcomer and was being admonished for
the first time. Unless the song or clip in question could easily be altered,
however, it would have remain blocked from being broadcast. As several
singers told me, this is a fate that has befallen almost everybody in the scene
at some point of their careers. This is not necessarily because artists were in-
tentionally out to provoke or rebel, but because they misjudged what would
be acceptable, not least due to the often highly erratic nature of O’zbekna-
vo’s decisions. And it is exactly because of the often highly erratic nature of
these decisions that artists also tested boundaries, not with regard to grand
political themes – as mentioned above, if artists were interested in political
subversion, they would not work in estrada – but certainly with regard to
the degree of sexual overtones, slang and dress, in the hope of broadening
their fan base.15
Interestingly, radio stations could be just as strict or even stricter than
O’zbeknavo was. When, in 2005, Davron Ergashev released the song Mario
with matching clip, O’zbeknavo was, for various reasons, not delighted: the
whole storyline was too focused on physical attraction, the women were clad
too sexily and not at all milliy, the male hero was a notorious womaniser
and there was too much slang. Still, song and clip went into heavy rotation
and became a super hit. However, it was played on one radio station, Oriat
Dono, only in an extra version that had had the section with the heaviest
slang cut in order to make the song fit the station’s format (Video 6.3).
Often, however and particularly in the case of singers with a high reyt-
ing and/or a record of previous official admonitions, artists would not get
away with just being summoned or called on to alter something; O’zbeknavo
would suspend their licences. As was detailed in Chapter 1, singers’ duties
were rather vaguely phrased in the licence agreement and thus a claim that
they had been breached was easy to make. Particularly the following clause
could be, and often was, invoked in the context of suspensions based on
repertoire: “The performance of works that are opposed to our national and
pan-human spiritual values is forbidden.”
Suspension
Occasionally singers were officially informed about a suspension, but often,
as this producer remarked, they were not: “No one tells you directly that you
have lost your licence. You just happen to find out. Through the media, on
the phone: ‘You have a problem!’” (09.2008). Suspended artists certainly did
have a problem, but they did not suffer a complete ban from working. Those
214 Authorising estrada
affected tended to have a category 1 licence, which allowed them to give
public concerts and have their songs played on radio and TV. This was in
addition to the activities permitted by a category 2 licence, such as singing
at weddings and other private festivities, as well as in restaurants and bars.
Although there was no legal basis for this regulation in theory, a suspension
of a category 1 licence continued to allow singers to exercise the rights of a
category 2 licence in practice. This means they could still perform at wed-
dings, and thus continue the work that secured them their living, just as they
would when in possession of a category 1 licence.16 But the suspension was
intended to somehow affect them negatively, of course – and it did.
Due to the licence inspections by to’yxona managers, at least in recent
years, suspended singers would most likely receive wedding invitations only
for parties held at private homes, thus decreasing the number of engage-
ments and lowering their income. In addition, artists were not allowed to
give concerts and they were banned from being broadcast. This ban affected
not just the one song that caused the suspension, but their whole repertoire.
This might have initially saved them money since they earned nothing from
concerts or from radio or TV play; on the contrary, they, or their producers,
usually invested in this. But it also meant that they were cut off from all the
usual channels of promotion and, unless given airtime by some station, left
without a chance to advertise new songs, the main currency for entering
or securing one’s position on the wedding circuit. In short, a suspension
could have a devastating effect on one’s reyting and income, not because
one’s audience turned away after one’s fall from governmental grace, but
because one might have simply sunk into oblivion after suddenly losing
public visibility and audibility. By 2016, however, a form of music TV had
appeared which quite obviously operated independently of licence issues.
Several video clip channels, such as ZIZI TV provide entertainment solely
for restaurants, where they are broadcast on screens scattered throughout
the premises. To my surprise, various suspended estrada singers were part
of the rotation – with their contact phone numbers inserted. Though these
media outlets have not yet boosted suspended artists’ careers again to a sig-
nificant degree, I suspect it will only be a matter of time before these chan-
nels are made to adhere to licence regulations, too, regardless of the form
these regulations will take after the dissolution of O’zbeknavo.
There are singers who were already so established on the wedding circuit
by the time they lost their licences that they managed to stay among the
most highly reyted artists despite being barred from promotion for months
or even years. They are the rare cases, mentioned in Chapter 3, where a
high reyting is not congruent with state recognition; but most singers could
not count on a similar streak of luck. There were no official regulations
on how to effect an early repeal of one’s suspension, and artists as well as
O’zbeknavo officials were very reserved when talking about this topic. Peo-
ple with affiliations to either government or shou biznes agreed, however,
that money or favours could help lift a suspension ahead of schedule or even
Authorising estrada 215
instantaneously, while the subsequent release of an ostentatiously milliy
song would restore a good relationship with O’zbeknavo, other government
organs or just individual officials again.
Knowing how these mechanisms can be used does not mean that all es-
trada singers are willing to use them. Although they might risk a setback
or even the end of their careers, some artists I met were quite defiant and
refused to engage in such acts of subservience. They were predominantly
those whose licences had been suspended not due to presumable flaws in
repertoire, which are generally quite easily straightened out, but, as it was
usually termed within and even beyond O’zbeknavo, “on account of con-
duct” [iz-za povedeniya].
The form of behaviour that was most often sanctioned by suspension was
artists’ refusal to perform at government concerts – either by just not show-
ing up or, more rarely, by verbally rejecting the order when they were told
they would perform. As described in Chapter 3, while most estrada artists
were even rather eager to participate in the grand government spectacles on
Independence Day and Navro’z for reasons of reyting and government rec-
ognition, they were not keen on being enlisted for minor concerts, particu-
larly if they were to take place outside of Tashkent. Being sent to sing at one
of the provincial Independence Day or Navro’z celebrations, to entertain
cotton pickers or to advance the “culturalisation or spiritualisation of the
regions” was rather unpopular with anyone in the Tashkent scene who was
not an absolute newcomer.
Many Tashkent artists tried to avoid these obligatory musical missions,
but they were often caught out, most frequently when they were seen per-
forming at lucrative weddings instead. Apart from the hassle of travelling,
financial considerations were the main incentive for circumventing these
mandatory appointments. But some artists’ reluctance was at least as much
caused by a dislike of their conscriptive nature, as discussed earlier. As par-
ticipation “in events determined by state and government” was one of the
duties to which artists formally consented to assume, when signing their
licence agreements, absence from these events, unless convincingly justified,
constituted a breach of this obligation and usually entailed a suspension for
several months. In O’zbeknavo’s activity reports, these instances appeared
in the following form:
Due to the fact that Uzbekistan’s distinguished artist [X] did not par-
ticipate in the 2,750th anniversary concert programme for the city of
Samarqand …, the Group of creative assistance under the Council for
the development and coordination of estrada art revoked the validity
of his licence according to Decision number 17 of the meeting on 21
August 2007.
Due to the fact that singer [Y] did not participate in the concert pro-
gramme conducted on the 16th anniversary of ‘Independence’ holiday
without any reason, the Group of creative assistance under the Council
216 Authorising estrada
for the development and coordination of estrada art revoked the valid-
ity of his licence according to Decision number 19 of the meeting on 18
September 2007 for three months.
(O’zbeknavo 2007: 7)
Twice, singers called off interviews with me, having been informed earlier
the same day that their licences had been withdrawn “on account of con-
duct”. Both had performed at weddings instead of singing at assigned con-
certs. They cancelled our meetings because of time constraints, as they were
busy trying to repeal the suspensions as quickly as possible, but also, as one
of them revealed at a later date, to play it safe by avoiding any additional
trouble. Giving interviews can be a sensitive issue, particularly if foreigners
are involved, and several estrada singers who had toured abroad faced prob-
lems on their return due to allegedly having said things to foreign reporters
that placed Uzbekistan in a negative light or could, at least, be interpreted
that way. “Did they give interviews?” was also the first guess a journalist ven-
tured when informed about the latest list of suspensions by an O’zbeknavo
official in a conversation I happened to overhear before a meeting in 2008.
And sometimes, the “bad press abroad” mechanism even worked by proxy.
In 2016, acquaintances from the estrada scene linked senior star Farrukh
Zakirov’s alleged licence suspension to public comments made by his niece,
singer Nargiz Zakirova, who had emigrated to the US about 20 years before
and who now lives and works in the Russian Federation. On social media
she had written about the “true hell of Uzbekistan” and renounced it as her
homeland: “I am not yours and have never been [yours]! Neither by religion,
nor by character, nor by soul, nor by heart. My homeland – this is the US,
Russia, Dagestan, India, China!”17
Compared to other forms of behaviour, however, statements in the for-
eign press were a less frequent cause for suspensions – not only because
the majority of artists are well aware of the possible repercussions and
are very careful about what they tell journalists abroad, but also because
Uzbek estrada singers do not frequently go on concert tours. Engagements
abroad are predominantly wedding invitations in neighbouring countries
and therefore not typical occasions for interviews. Domestic interviews, on
the other hand, are rather tame, because interviewers also risk problems for
themselves if they ask potentially critical questions.
Suspensions “on account of conduct” could also be imposed, if artists
were deemed lacking in respect towards their audience or propagating
amorality. Keeping one’s audience waiting for too long at solo concerts
was sanctioned in this way, as were scanty dress and sexy dancing at con-
certs, indecent photos or videos on the internet, a scandalous private life, or
“immoral behaviour” at weddings.18 Often, O’zbeknavo claimed its licence
suspensions were a reaction to outrage among concerned citizens about art-
ists’ alleged misbehaviour, which presumably threatened to subvert public
morality. These claims are difficult to substantiate, but the commentary
Authorising estrada 217
sections on YouTube and Uzbek shou biznes news sites clearly show that
there are people in Uzbekistan who do feel offended by artists’ perceived
indecencies, whether public or private. But the same sites also reveal a sig-
nificant amount of incomprehension over these allegations and support for
the respective singers.
In 2005, Ozoda Nursaidova, who had not only given me my first ever ex-
perience of a vatan video clip in 2001, but was one of the most popular wed-
ding singers in the mid-2000s, was accused of inappropriate behaviour when
a video recording of a recent performance at a sunnat to’yi, the celebration
of a boy’s circumcision, became public. It showed her verbally interacting
with a male guest, who was obviously mentally handicapped, probably
drunk and dancing extremely eccentrically. When he pretended to be in sex-
ual pain and faked an erection, first with a cigarette or some strip of paper
and then later with an empty plastic bottle, she jokingly commented on the
size of his penis – to the great delight of the other guests, judging from the
background laughter.
Almost everybody I met in Uzbekistan admired Ozoda Nursaidova for
her expressive singing, her great qualities as an entertainer and for her talent
to cope with difficult, that is drunk and sexually importunate male guests
without offending them. Many people from the estrada scene who actually
watched the recording might have found her style of dancing towards the
end of the wedding too sexually allusive – it was certainly not milliy – but
they did not understand the allegation of shocking immorality and thought
that she had handled the situation rather well. In fact, they were more inter-
ested in discussing who could be responsible for leaking a private recording
of a wedding to the public and assumed this to be part of a rival singer’s plot
intended to harm Ozoda Nursaidova’s career. After I had just arrived in
Tashkent in 2005, a journalist told me about her suspension:
The longer rumours spread, the more fantastic and outrageous Ozoda
ursaidova’s indecencies grew, for most people who talked about the in-
N
cident had not actually watched the recording. In fact, by the time I finally
managed to get hold of the video, my own expectation had been built up
so much that I was rather unimpressed when I actually saw myself what
had happened. But judging from comments on YouTube, many Uzbeks did
218 Authorising estrada
find her behaviour completely unacceptable. O’zbeknavo too considered
it incompatible with her obligation “to conduct anniversaries, festivities
on a high musical and artistic level”, as explicitly mandated in her licence
agreement.
Ozoda Nursaidova’s suspension was lifted some time after this incident,
but in 2006 she again lost her licence and has, to my current knowledge
(March 2017), not recovered it since. Her last official concert in Uzbekistan
was in 2006; O’zbeknavo’s activity report for 2007 already notes that “[o]n
28 December, an illegal concert programme with participation of singer
Ozoda Nursaidova in Navoiy city was stopped” (O’zbeknavo 2007: 8). This
makes hers one of the longest suspensions in Uzbek estrada. In fact, it has
been so long that it might more correctly be termed a withdrawal.19 Her
reyting at the time her licence was revoked, however, was so high that for
several years she managed to keep her status on the wedding circuit even
without the promotional effect of concerts, radio and TV broadcasting. In
recent years, however, it seems to have declined considerably, and in 2016
several people described her as a broken and sad figure. Even though she
has somehow managed to continue working as a singer and, increasingly, as
composer, it is clear that her domestic career and her life in general suffered
in response to the loss of her licence.
The fact that she has not recovered her licence is attributed by those who
know her well to her having a defiant character and to the high political
status of her opponents. Like other artists under longer-term suspensions,
Ozoda Nursaidova started to work abroad, collaborating with musicians in
Turkey, India and Egypt. Unlike other artists, however, she has been quite
outspoken about the negative effects of her suspension. On her homepage
she states that difficult times started for her in 2006 and she mentions bans,
threats and the cancellation of concerts.20 In 2014, she even publicly, on
Twitter, blamed Shavkat Mirziyoyev, then Uzbekistan’s prime minister,
for her situation and threatened to take him to court: “MISTER MIRZI-
YOYEV! Is it not ENOUGH for YOU that you have made my life hell for so
many years? Now you have started [to go for] my HOME?? Is there no law
for you?” (NN 2014, capitalisation original).
While some artists have profited from changes in the personnel in power
in the aftermath of Islom Karimov’s death in 2016, and even seen their long-
term licence suspensions reversed, it is questionable whether Ozoda Nur-
saidova will do: For her nemesis, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, is now president of
Uzbekistan. Besides its devastating personal repercussions, this particular
long-term licence suspension is also unfortunate from the perspective of es-
trada politics. It has obstructed an artist who, at least until the mid-2000s,
was a strong promoter, rather by default, of milliy estrada. The lyrics of some
of Ozoda Nursaidova’s songs might not be compatible with the ideal image
of women in milliy estrada – such as, for example, the title “If You Are Gone,
There Will Be Another One” [Sen Bo’lmasang, Boshqasi] – but she is loved for
Authorising estrada 219
her candid depictions of women’s life-worlds by female fans, and other songs
and clips, such as Asrasin, my first patriotic video clip experience, are even
straightforwardly patriotic. Even more importantly, with a Conservatory
education in classical singing as background, she essentially embodies the
ideal of a milliy estrada artist – save for a penchant for Turkish pop – and is
praised as one of the few singers among the top reyted estrada stars who can
actually perform live for hours.
In accusing an individual of playing a role in the suspension of her
licence (in addition to more general malice) in the tweet just cited,
Ozoda Nursaidova addressed a situation that many singers, particularly
women, but also others involved in the estrada scene consider to be one
of the biggest problems related to licences: the personal factor in deci-
sions and the immense power of those involved. While suspensions could
always somehow be explained as resulting from breaches of the licence
agreement – and its clauses were just ambiguous enough for this –, more
often than not, individual motives of influential people seemed to play a
greater role.
Most artists were rather steady licence holders. They may have occasion-
ally been threatened with suspension or their licence may even have been
suspended for some time, but they never got into long-term or really serious
trouble. A few, however, have had a very volatile career in this respect – and,
consequently, in many other respects too. Yulduz Usmanova has probably
trod the most widely oscillating course in terms of government standing:
several times from official prima donna to persona non grata and back. Save
for a fierce tirade against Kyrgyz people in the aftermath of interethnic
clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in and around the southern Kyrgyzstan
city of Osh in 2010 – “To the Kyrgyz” [Qirg’izlarga] – which was immediately
banned from airplay, her repertoire has, throughout all this time, been of al-
most spotless reputation from the perspective of the Uzbek government. She
has, however, variously run into serious trouble “on account of conduct”,
with her formerly high status in official circles and, in particular, proximity
to Islom Karimov making matters considerably worse. I will return to this
in Chapter 7.
Several journalists, scholars and Conservatory staff I spoke to all agreed
that licensing decisions with personal involvement from someone “above”
were the worst. There were situations where even the person in question
had forgotten about whatever problem she or he had had with the singer
that led to a suspension in the first case. No one, however, would dare to
lift a suspension, unless this person directly gave the order, which would
naturally never come, as she or he did not remember the incident; and no
one would dare to approach her or him about it. An even worse situation
was when someone imposed a suspension as an act of pre-emptive obedi-
ence, interpreting perhaps unrelated comments from someone “on top” or
just guessing how the higher-up felt about the matter. A former presidential
220 Authorising estrada
adviser described this situation as happening even at the highest levels of
the state:
They gather in a small circle. The president remarks that someone has
not sung well and everyone around him says “Remove him [uberite
yego]!”. If someone is prohibited already for a long time, no one risks
asking him, whether they can lift the ban. It is the people around him
that make the weather [i.e.: take decisions].
(09.2008)
A: Singer [X] left her own birthday party to sing at a wedding of a friend of
mine who married someone from the Ministry of Culture.
KK: Did she do that because she hoped for some advantages from the gov-
ernment’s side?
A: No, you just can’t refuse. You are obliged. Someone called her.
KK: Could she not just have turned off her phone on that evening or ignored
the call?
B: This is of no use. If they want to find you, they will find you anyway.
(08.2008)
The people who sit on the posts of control of art, for example, [at]
O’zbeknavo, they follow personal interests … If I do not greet [him],
he will put me under a ban [pod zapret otdayët]. Things do not work
that way, in art, they do not work that way. It is better not to work at all
then … He summons the girls who sing to the sauna. This is abuse [oskor
bleniye]. It would be better not sing at all any more … It would be better
to work somewhere else [lit.: on the side]. I will not, I do not like to hear
scorn [izdatel’stvo]. I openly say that they scorn artists, everywhere, be-
cause I have self-respect … You understand, for me this is abuse. How
is this possible? … Before I lose my honour [chest’], I would sooner not
work in this system any more. My honour is important to me. I cannot
discard my honour and endure [this]. I cannot … [go] to him to his birth-
day party, [go] to him to the sauna.
(06.2004)
They say, “You should dance, spin around.” But I say, “Sorry, I am a
singer and not a dancer” [who are of worse moral reputation, at least in
the context of weddings]. And when I started to dance, they say, “Oh,
what has become of her?” And then [I say], “Sorry, this [was] your ad-
vice. You told me yourselves, and now you do not like it?”
(11.2005)
Shou biznes
Unless singers, or their parents or other relatives, have sufficient means
themselves, they are dependent on financial support to start or advance
their careers in estrada. They need songs, they need to record songs, they
need to shoot clips, they need to pay for their songs and clips to be broad-
cast, for coverage in newspapers and magazines, for stage costumes, etc.
Until 2013, when Gulnora Karimova’s businesses were liquidated, one op-
tion for securing this support was to get signed either by her corporation,
Authorising estrada 223
Terra, or by Tarona Rekords, the other big Tashkent media enterprise, both
of which, apart from being recording companies, also had their own media
outlets – Tarona in radio, Terra in radio, TV and print. Tarona was still in
business in 2018, but the second, and much more common option, is to find
a sponsor, either a private individual who is interested in producing one or
several estrada singers or a company that is unrelated to estrada but invests
in artists. At the time of my fieldwork there was, for example, a window
manufacturer, Akfa, which sponsored a number of newcomers, and a stu-
dent from the Conservatory was funded by the Mining and Smelting Plant
in the city of Navoiy. Sometimes the roles of sponsor and producer overlap,
but often they are separate and singers may have both.
Ultimately, none of these forms of support has altruistic or necessarily
artistic motives; they are oriented towards producing revenue and maybe
bestowing some show business glamour on the sponsoring party. And un-
less it promises profit, milliy estrada is not a priority. While all or most of the
expenses mentioned above are covered by the record company or private or
corporate sponsor, contracts vary mainly in the rights and the income they
grant to singers. In the case of recording companies, singers may or may not
have a share in record sales, they may keep all their earnings from weddings
or just a certain percentage, or they will only get a fixed salary, while all in-
come generated by them at these events flows to the company (Figure 6.2).23
Corporate and private sponsors who do not directly profit from record sales
always take a portion of the earnings from weddings, again either a percent-
age or by paying singers a salary. In 2008, I knew of an estrada duo who had
a 20 per cent share of the money earned by them; in 2014, a friend told me of
a male singer with very high reyting who was bound for several more years
by a contract leaving him only 10 per cent of his wedding income.
All singers I spoke to agree that finding financial support is a difficult
task, as contracts, which are often concluded only orally, always operate on
a power imbalance and dependency which can be, and often is, exploited –
financially, but also sexually. A journalist described some of these sponsor-
ship deals in estrada as a disguise for forced sex work; various people likened
them to slavery and an O’zbeknavo official recounted the following story:
I know a girl from Surxandaryo. She found a producer and I was pres-
ent at the negotiations. He said, “I’ll get you a flat in Tashkent and pay
you 40,000 so’m per month [ca. $35 at that time]. All income from wed-
dings will be mine.” I advised her against this. Some time later, he came
back with a new suggestion: “I’ll take you as my second wife.”
(11.2005)
Women who were already established in the estrada scene and financially in-
dependent were often outraged when they saw female newcomers with noto-
rious producers, worrying about their reputation and their future chances of
becoming a respected wife and mother. But, as a government representative
224 Authorising estrada
told me, there are quite a number of women too who take the role of dubious
sponsors. She said: “Of course, she can’t take the girl as her second or third
or fourth wife herself, but she will tell her ‘You will be the second or third or
fourth wife of this man’” (03.2004).
Private producer-artist relationships are certainly more prone to sexual
abuse, but contracts with record companies, which do not commonly de-
generate into physical forms of exploitation, can also turn out to be disas-
trous for artists. In 2004/2005, the popular three-girl-group Setora wanted
to change the terms of their contract after having been with Tarona for
several years. According to some people I spoke to, it stipulated a com-
parably meagre salary, while according to others, they were given only a
small percentage from wedding revenue. Tarona refused and terminated
the collaboration, but they kept the group’s name, all their songs and the
rights to them. Shortly afterwards, it cast three new girls for a group of the
same name, who, from then on, performed the songs of the former Setora
to plyus versions recorded by their eponymous predecessors. The original
group renamed themselves Setanho. However, they had not only lost their
repertoire, which had made them famous, and needed a new one, but they
had difficulties in placing recordings and clips for promo. Tarona would not
broadcast them, neither would Terra, the result of a contractual agreement
between the two companies, nor would any other station linked to Terra.
Authorising estrada 225
For the same reason, Terra would not sign them, and they could not even
draw on composers and poets who were somehow bound to Tarona. This
basically was the end of their career in Uzbekistan, and they turned to the
Kazakh market instead.24
Ethnomusicologists who have done research in Uzbekistan have been
rather positive about what is often described as the renaissance of private
patronage in music. Their focus has been on the classical traditions, and al-
though I have heard some stories about sexual harassment in that sphere, too,
the situation may be different from the world of estrada in many respects.
Theodore Levin writes of “neo-feudalism with a human face” in this c ontext,
and although there are artist-producer/sponsor relationships in estrada that
could be labelled as such or even described as very respectful, correct and
fruitful collaborations, many estrada artists I know would rather scrap the
“human face” part of this phrase (Levin 1996a: 30; see Levin 1993: 57). They
certainly do not hail the reincarnation of patronage relations in shou biznes
as a fortunate return to older local forms of music economy that had un-
fortunately been suppressed during the Soviet era, or as welcome steps in
a transition towards a capitalist normality. For them, these relations, and
the withdrawal of the state, which enabled and necessitated them, are in-
stead part of a transformation which they experience as de-normalisation or
de-modernisation, of moving backwards towards feudal conditions, which
socialism once set out to combat (see Brandtstädter 2007: 142; Tochka 2016:
184f.). Women in the sphere of estrada in particular often commented on the
patriarchal and exploitative structures, which many of these patronage re-
lations entailed, and linked them to a general – and, from their perspective,
problematic – re-traditionalisation of society since independence.
Based on their own experiences with the commercial side of estrada or
stories told by their colleagues, many artists do not much trust that Uzbek
shou biznes will develop in a way that would offer them better conditions, at
least not until the government re-establishes a functioning system of copy
right protection and royalty payments. As noted above, even though gov-
ernmental estrada administration shows no promising signs of providing a
more pleasant working environment any time soon, an astonishing number
of people fantasised about the advantages of a centralised state-led record-
ing and production company. Whereas I do not see that this would neces-
sarily decrease levels of coercion, dependencies or harassment, many of my
interlocutors again drew from an ideal understanding of work “at the state
level” rather than an assessment of actual conditions and structures. Their
fantasy was thus free from all the current ills of estrada administration (see
Chapter 4). While their motivation is mostly very different, their call for
stronger government presence curiously echoed O’zbeknavo’s demand for
more influence in shou biznes in order to better forge milliy estrada. Pro-
ducers and sponsors as well as representatives of media companies, while
certainly profiting from partial deregulation in estrada, were not neces-
sarily happy with the current situation either – but for different reasons.
226 Authorising estrada
As already mentioned in Chapter 4, they found the remaining state involve-
ment inappropriate for the postsocialist situation and frequently lamented
the obligatory and – for them – financially unprofitable engagement of their
protégés in government concerts as well as the demand that performers ad-
here to the mandate of milliy estrada.
On the whole, I met no one who was really content with the present sys-
tem of music economy or who saw Uzbekistan’s “own path of renewal and
progress” in this sphere as having transited to a successful endpoint, a state
of normality. Some looked backwards for a normality they considered to
be universal, as opposed to a specifically Soviet socialist one; others looked
abroad for a normality they considered universal, as opposed to a specifi-
cally (neo-)liberal capitalist one. Among the latter were those who were con-
fident that the current model was only provisional and would eventually
lead them to this end point. “But we are not ready for it yet”, a member of
staff at the Ministry of Culture told me in 2004. And then there were others
who experienced the contemporary situation in estrada as a stagnation, as a
transition that had got stuck. Most, however, did not particularly care about
glances backwards, abroad or much further ahead. They were busy enough
coping with the circumstances that they somehow took for granted as con-
stituting the currently normal life in music.
Where does all this actually leave milliy estrada in musical life – a system
of licensing which, in theory, seems tailored to advance its development,
but turns out to be considerably less efficient in practice, and a shou biznes
which pursues commercial aims? I will conclude this chapter with exploring
milliy estrada’s status in the wider field of estrada in contemporary Uzbeki-
stan and also look at its Soviet pre-history.
KK: You were awarded the title Distinguished Artist this year … How did
this come about? With what did you serve Uzbekistan?
X: Oh, what did we do? We sang patriotic songs, we called [prizyvali] the
people to patriotism, young people. Because musicians have a measure
of influence on young people. Well, it is everywhere the same, when little
boys and girls see an ideal, yes, they think. I am of the opinion that our
state gave me the opportunity to take up my favourite profession. And I,
as any other patriot, am just obliged to repay my dues [prosto obyazana
vozdat’ dolzhnoye]. So, for example, I have written patriotic songs, where
I have called for and tried to evoke [prizyvala i pytalas’ vyzvat’] patriotic
feelings in our young people.
(09.2005)
Of course, I cannot know for sure that with this statement she was not
just reeling off expected phrases of political engagement. But as she was
otherwise openly critical of procedures in estrada administration, I have
228 Authorising estrada
little reason to doubt her sincerity – or that of others who pronounced sim-
ilar views on duty and commitment. It would thus be misleading to dis-
miss milliy estrada as nothing more than a brainchild of culture politics, an
official ploy to bother artists, co-opt them for an unpopular state project
and annoy audiences with sonified patriotism in the form of vatan songs. It
would be equally misleading, however, to disregard the existence of various
forms of discontent related to the concept of milliy estrada and dissatisfac-
tion with its implementation.
Most people outside O’zbeknavo and the Ministry of Culture consider
the official expectation that an artist’s entire repertoire, or even all of Uzbek
estrada, be milliy to be wrong – and constricting. Even if they are convinced
that milliy estrada should exist in Uzbekistan, that the country needs milliy
estrada and maybe even in great quantities, the majority of my interlocutors
wished for more variety in estrada, not necessarily in the form of an increase
in foreign music imports, which are widely available and broadcast anyway,
but also and even particularly in terms of local production. Some singers I
spoke to want to pursue experiments for artistic reasons and find themselves
restricted by the milliy estrada mandate, but also by their economic depend-
ence on weddings, which tends to tip the scope of musical options more
strongly towards danceable songs. Several singers, but also other people I
spoke to, complained about the necessity for estrada artists having to per-
form at weddings, in order to earn an income. In their view, it was unfair for
the government to criticise them for hastily produced songs and a low “artis-
tic level”, when the current system did not offer them the opportunity to fi-
nancially support themselves in any other way. If, for example, they received
royalties from radio play instead of having to pay for it and if concerts were
a vehicle for earning as opposed to investing money, they said, they would
be happy to spend more time thinking about and producing music. Ulti-
mately, they blamed the government for not establishing a better system.
They were supported in this by some composers I spoke to, who lamented
the absolute absence of any protection of authors’ rights. When asked about
the frequency of his wedding engagements, a famous singer, who was known
to almost always sing live, answered as follows:
Twice for four hours daily. During the day and in the evening. If you are
a well-known person and you mingle with the people, you get tired of
the people. Well, it is like that: They make a palov [Uzbek national dish],
they drag you there. From this you get tired, unnecessary things. If you
do not go, they are offended, [thinking] that he does not acknowledge
us. Such things. If we had other revenues from other sources … then we
would say “I do not go here, I do not want to, I go there.”
(10.2005)
Not everybody has artistic goals in mind, however, when complaining about
the narrow frame of milliy estrada. Other singers want to widen the stylistic
Authorising estrada 229
range of their repertoire on purely commercial grounds and, for example,
respond to the audience’s penchant for Turkish and Iranian estrada, which
count as lighter, faster and more energetic than their Uzbek counterpart.
For them, furnishing Turkish hits with Uzbek lyrics is a way to earn good
money with little effort, while also being attractive for wedding parties.
Most, however, endorse variety for both artistic and commercial reasons,
and quite a few hope to enter markets abroad with a specifically Uzbek ver-
sion of pop, rock, rap, electronic music or jazz.
Apart from incomprehension or even rejection of the idea that all Uzbek
estrada should be milliy according to the meaning promoted by the govern-
ment, and aside from the fact that the concept itself is so ambiguous, there is
also dissatisfaction with the narrowness in the understanding of the concept
milliy in the first place. Several people I spoke to wondered why milliy could
not accommodate more styles, more types of – or more realistic – content
and more diverse performances and costumes on stage. Those who had ex-
perienced Soviet estrada themselves, or just knew about its socialist life,
tended to refer to the shape and status of the genre in the Uzbek SSR as a
role model.
They pointed to singers like Botyr Zakirov or the VIA Yalla, who had
been successful not only in the Soviet Union but also in the rest of the east-
ern European socialist world – and even beyond. Yalla’s performances in
the East Berlin Friedrichstadtpalast, and especially Botyr Zakirov’s con-
cert in Paris’s Olympia in 1966, were often cited in this context as proof of
the extraordinary attractiveness of Uzbek estrada in the period from the
late 1950s to the 1980s and as evidence of its international reach. People
welcomed the fact that Yulduz Usmanova and Sevara Nazarkhan had en-
tered the world music scene in the 1990s and 2000s respectively, but many
of those I talked to did not consider this to be an equally successful foray
into, as they called it, “world estrada”. They argued that world music was
only a kind of e thno-niche of the global music market and not its centre,
where Uzbek artists would be in the same league as real stars like Madonna,
Céline Dion and Mariah Carey, just as Botyr Zakirov had allegedly been
with Edith Piaf and Yalla with Alla Pugachova.26
In the context of discussions about milliy estrada, however, it is the music
that allowed Uzbek estrada’s earlier success that is really important. What
was promoted as the specifically Uzbek brand of Soviet estrada was, in fact,
not at all strictly Uzbek. As I explained earlier, singers, composers, arrang-
ers, poets, stage and costume designers all drew rather freely on elements
from other Asian countries, commonly called the “foreign east/orient” or
“foreign Asia” [zarubezhnyy vostok / zarubezhnaya Aziya], to create a kind
of diffuse internal orient within the Soviet Union – aurally and visually.
Sometimes this was a timeless orient, sometimes an orient in the process of
modernisation, but it was very successful in both versions.
In addition to arrangements of Uzbek folk songs or newly composed
pieces in Uzbek and Russian in the repertoire of Botyr Zakirov and his
230 Authorising estrada
sister Luiza Zakirova in the 1960s, for example, there were songs from
Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, India, Indonesia, Korea, Afghanistan and the
Soviet republics Tajikistan and Azerbaijan (Bekov 1994: 48; Yusupov 1990:
14; 2004: 45).27 They sang these songs in a new arrangement for estrada-
symphony orchestra, but in the original language, mostly dressed in a dark
suit and short cocktail dress, but occasionally also alluding to their songs’
places of origins in their stage outfits (Video 6.4). Apart from gaining popu-
larity with his rendition of these “eastern” songs, Uzbek ones among them,
Botyr Zakirov also won fame for a cover version of Enrico Macias’ 1964
French hit Les Filles de Mon Pays.
Shows in the Tashkent Music Hall like The Travels of Sindbad the Sailor –
or Oriental Fairy Tale (1973), based on motifs from the Arabian Nights
fables, or Yalla’s concert programme The Teahouse Forever (1988), all
referenced a general orient into which everything specifically Uzbek was
subsumed.28 In the 1980s, when Yalla rose to fame as a VIA and swapped
the big orchestral sound for a classical band line-up of drums, percussion,
keyboard, guitar and bass, enhanced with some Uzbek or other Asian in-
struments, they increased the number of newly composed songs. But also
these tended to d epict a diffuse orient rather than something recognisa-
bly and unmistakably Uzbek, such as Yalla’s undoubtedly most popular
song “The Musical Teahouse” [Muzykal’naya Chaykhana] (Video 6.5). Even
when they took their titles from Uzbek cities, songs continued to draw on
rather unspecific oriental connotations. Knowing this, it is less surprising
that the video clip for Yalla’s early 1980s song “The Blue Domes of Samar-
kand” [Golubyye Kupola Samarkanda] was actually shot in Almaty, then
Alma-ata, in the Kazakh SSR. And as they were mostly geared towards a
Russian-speaking audience, many of the original estrada songs at that time
were written in Russian.
Anything genuinely Uzbek might have been absorbed into the general
“orientalness” of much of estrada in the Uzbek SSR with its covers of songs
from across the Arab world and much of Asia and its new compositions
that textually, often musically and, in clips or performances, also visually
referenced an imagined orient. Still, this whole mixture was widely labelled
and received as Uzbek – simply by equating the oriental with the national.
In his PhD thesis, written in 1990, Leonid Yusupov almost consistently uses
the terms “national” and “oriental” interchangeably, and when he describes
how the two concepts collapsed into one, it becomes clear that this is essen-
tially an effect of the Russian perspective on Uzbek estrada. Ultimately, he
attributes it to a lack of ability to differentiate:
For the listener, who has been socialised on the musical tradition of Eu-
ropean polyphony, the performance of Uzbek, Tajik, Lebanese, Afghan
or Arab melodies is associated with the understanding of ‘music of the
East/Orient’, but if performed by the estrada orchestra of Uzbekistan
and its soloists, it becomes Uzbek estrada music … Turning to the music
Authorising estrada 231
of the peoples of the East/Orient furthered the reconsideration of the
canons of making estrada music, it enriched the intonatsiya sphere of
Uzbek estrada music, determined its specificity and national traits.
(Yusupov 2004: 51, 74)29
[I]t is far from our mind to imply that professional composers have only
just begun to master [o’zlashtirilishi] the art of musical estrada or that
the creation of works based on milliylik has only just started. The rea-
son is that even before the independence era the works of a number of
composers (arrangers) …, even if [these works were] only small in num-
ber, included numerous pieces relying on milliylik. So, in those days, even
if only to a small degree, searches [izlanishlar] into milliylik began to be
visible in the works of various composers.
(Abdurakhimov, Rasultoev & Norbo’toev 2006: 9, emphasis added)
For many singers I talked to, the provincialism implicated in the mandate
for milliy estrada – or in the narrow understanding of the term milliy – was
part of a more encompassing sense of parochialism. Most explicitly artic-
ulated by those who had begun their careers in the Soviet era, but also by
Authorising estrada 233
some younger artists, the impression that the world has become smaller
since independence was quite widespread. Usually hailed as having brought
increased mobility, greater freedom and more exchange, independence has,
in the experiences of many Uzbeks, within and beyond the world of estrada,
restricted them in many respects and even deepened their isolation.
What Madeleine Reeves has termed – and criticised – as “celebratory
narratives of post-Soviet emancipation” (2011: 310) are very common in
the world music coverage of Central Asian music. World Music: The Rough
Guide claims that “[s]ince the last century the region has been largely iso-
lated, due to its incorporation into the Russian and then Soviet empire, but
things are changing in the post-Soviet era” (Sultanova & Broughton 2000:
24). In a similar vein, Sevara Nazarkhan’s 2004 Real World album Yol Bolsin
[sic] was hailed as “the first fusion of Uzbek and Western musical culture”
from a region which is “opening up to the world again” by Garth Cartwright
for the BBC.33 Considering the fact that for about seven decades the Uzbek
SSR was basically a laboratory for fusing Uzbek and western music, these
claims are hard to sustain.
The hardening of boundaries within the former Soviet space from intra-
state borders between constituent republics to international state borders
hinders movement considerably (see Megoran 2017a; 2017b; Reeves 2014).
It is made even more difficult by strict visa regulations for many destina-
tions that were previously part of the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the
only recently abolished requirement that one secure an exit visa from the
government in the first place. Countries outside the former socialist bloc
are, of course, technically easier to reach now, but, again, border regimes
render many of them almost as inaccessible as before. Touring outside Uz-
bekistan is thus cumbersome and for many artists basically impossible, all
the more so now that the government has withdrawn from promoting Uz-
bek estrada beyond its borders by organising trips abroad, to say nothing
of the fact that musical administrative networks within the former socialist
realm broke down with the end of the Soviet Union. Finally, time and again
and obviously with increasing success, O’zbeknavo tried to prevent estrada
artists from travelling to countries with whom Uzbekistan had problematic
diplomatic relations (see Chapter 7), thus further curbing their mobility.
On top of that, concerts by foreign artists are rarer now than they were in
the Uzbek SSR, when Tashkent was one of the main stops on their so-called
gastroli. Older artists, in particular, but also scholars and composers, tend
to complain about a lack of international exchange and a feeling of insular-
ity. One of the stars of 1960s and 1970s estrada summed up a long mono-
logue on what he found to be the dissatisfactory current situation with the
comment: “We are left to stew in our own sauce” – a metaphor I often heard
in interviews and conversations (07.2004). Of all the Central Asian capitals,
Tashkent might have been hit the hardest by these changes. It was not only
the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union, which was a source of pride for
its inhabitants, but, as Laura Adams rightfully remarks,
234 Authorising estrada
In the post-war era of prosperity and Soviet expansionism, Tashkent be-
came the model city of third-world cultural and economic development,
serving as an example for Marxist regimes and political parties around
the world. It also served as a model of internationalism in culture, host-
ing the Soviet Union’s main film festivals, art exhibitions, and writers’
conferences attended by artists from all over Asia, the Middle East, and
South America. Thus, cultural modernization in Soviet Uzbekistan,
perhaps more than in other places, was accompanied by a strong em-
phasis on internationalism in art.
(Adams 2005: 341)
Tashkent was one of the cultural capitals of the Soviet Union. There
were things that a capital could have, [those] for a city and for villages.
Tashkent was in the first category … Foreign performers, of whom there
were not many, travelled only to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Tash-
kent. Benny Goodman was in Tashkent, Paul Robeson was in Tashkent.
This [was] a major city in the Soviet Union, so it should also have ac-
cess to foreign performers, including Japanese estrada, “days of music”.
When I grew up, I heard Emil Gilels from among the famous [perform-
ers]. I was at a concert where Rodion Shchedrin conducted … Now,
Uzbekistan … is a little Soviet Union for poor people.
(09.2004)34
The Soviet Union, I mean, what a country this was! Big and powerful,
everyone was in awe. If you said, “I am an artist from the Soviet Un-
ion”, that was something. You were something. But now? “I am from
Authorising estrada 235
Uzbekistan.” What kind of impression does this make? Most people do
not even know where it is.
(07.2004)
Notes
1 From 2005 until 2013, Gulnora Karimova was sporadically active as an estrada
singer under the pseudonym Googoosha, not to be mistaken for the Iranian
singer Googoosh. She produced two albums, and her songs and video clips were
first and foremost aired by the TV and radio stations belonging to her own me-
dia company. The song she recorded with Depardieu is called “Heaven Keeps
Silent” [Nebo Molchit] (Video 6.1).
2 Accusations of meaninglessness were common in the Soviet era, too. A 1961
document produced by the Uzbek SSR’s Ministry of Culture, for example, or-
ders about 50 songs to be withdrawn from the repertoires of various soloists
and ensembles as “the texts of many vocal pieces are of low ideological-artistic
quality [ideyno-khudozhestvennogo kachestva], meaningless [bezsoderzhatel’nyye]
[sic], which without doubt has a negative effect on the education of the aesthetic
tastes of the people” (Central State Archive; f. R 2366, o. 2, d. 236, l. 2).
3 For everyone involved in Uzbek estrada, it was clear from the beginning that
Gulnora Karimova’s singing ventures were only the pastime of a “first daugh-
ter” and she certainly had no ambition to enter the regular estrada circuit and
Authorising estrada 237
its reyting machinery. In fact, Gulnora Karimova’s ambitions were very different
and much loftier – for some time she was tipped as her father’s successor and she
herself did much to fuel these rumours (see Chapter 4). Considering these very
credible dynastic aims, her outings into estrada were judged to be rather unfor-
tunate by absolutely everyone I talked with in Tashkent – not so much due to a
lack of talent, but rather because of the morally dubious image of female estrada
singers in Uzbek society, which she, as a prime player in Uzbek shou biznes at
that time, was certainly aware of. Whoever took notice of her estrada caprice
commented on the serious damage it inflicted on her popularity which she had
enjoyed at least among parts of the population due to her charity work – mostly
among the poor and elderly female. If she really had had any serious musical
aims, which she at least pretended to have, they would have been internationally
oriented, and to reach those, she would not even have had to bother about con-
tenders in the domestic scene at all.
4 This anonymously published article has been moved to the following website in
the meantime: http://sptnkne.ws/Hhz (accessed 7 February 2018).
5 See www.fergananews.com/news/20829 (accessed 7 February 2018).
6 The original press release has been removed from O’zbeknavo’s homepage, but
can still be found via an internet archive search engine: http://web.archive.org/
web/20130923064143/http://uzbeknavo.uz:80/uz/news/793/ (accessed 7 February
2018).
7 See http://mcs.uz/2662-zbeknavo-bir-nechta-honandalarni-1179shi1179-aytish-
1203u1179u1179idan-ma1203rum-1179ildi.html (accessed 25 March 2017).
8 A totalitarianising strategy was also used in various press reports in October
2013 when singer Jasur Umirov had his licence suspended on the grounds of –
allegedly – having feigned an illness in order to avoid having to perform for cot-
ton pickers. Several headlines, in some cases even complete articles, were phrased
in such a way as to suggest that the singer had actually been requested to pick
cotton (see, for example http://enews.fergananews.com/news.php?id=2740 (ac-
cessed 7 February 2018). While the provision of entertainment during the cotton
harvest actually is included in the licence agreements, wrapped up in the duty
“to participate in events determined by state and government” (see Chapters 1
and 3), picking cotton is not and I personally never heard of singers being sent to
help as harvest hands by O’zbeknavo.
9 Under president Shavkat Mirziyoyev licensing will persist, but details about
continuities and changes are not clear yet at the time of writing (March 2017).
Here I present the system as it was in use at least until February 2017.
10 On the part of O’zbeknavo, the percentage of artists who actually were licensed
was commonly deemed to be far too low. In 2005, a senior official said that from
an estimated number of 5,000 active estrada artists in the country only 10–15 per
cent were licensed. This was not because the applications of the remaining 90 per
cent had been declined, but because most of them had never filed one. O’zbekna-
vo’s provincial branches in particular were often criticised for their laxity in li-
censing, and, if O’zbeknavo’s activity reports are to be believed, this criticism
seems justified at least with respect to the first two years of the licensing system’s
existence: In Karakalpakstan only one person had been licensed by June 2003,
and together with those issued in the country’s 12 provinces, the number rose to
a meagre 243, which equalled about 7 per cent of all artists estimated to be active
outside Tashkent city (O’zbeknavo 2001–2003: 11).
Using activity reports from 2001–2003, 2006 and 2007 as a basis for analysis,
between 2001 and 2007, the total number of licensed artists varied between 654
(2006) and 971 (2003). Women made up only around 20 per cent of licensed art-
ists, and the average age ranged between 24.6 (2006) and 28 (2003). In 2006 and
238 Authorising estrada
2007, there were almost twice as many licences of category 1 than of category
2, whereas in 2003 numbers were roughly equal (if we add the then still-existing
category 3 to category 2). Rejections were 34 (2006) and 87 (2007). Licences given
free of charge to newcomers were 34 (2006) and 67 (2007).
11 This sounds like the standard voice of “concerned parents” or conservative
members of the cultural elite, which at various times and in various places have
condemned certain styles of popular music, pointed to their questionable origin
and warned about their devastating effects on teenagers (see Vuletic 2008: 868).
Also in the Soviet Union, the spectre of the morally and ideologically degrading
influence, particularly of rock music – whether imported or locally produced –
was always present. In 1987, rock was even labelled “the moral equivalent of
AIDS” (Ramet, Zamascikov & Bird 1994: 189). For a more detailed insight into
official criticism of rap in Uzbekistan, see Abdurakhimov, Rasultoev and Nor-
bo’taev (2006: 39–42).
12 In early 1990s Afghanistan, in contrast, authorities did break up wedding par-
ties. While licences also played a role here, the issue was rather playing certain
prohibited types of music (Baily 2009: 153f.).
13 In this, Uzbekistan markedly differs from some other countries with a heav-
ily administered music sector. In Iran, all recordings need a release permission
of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Nooshin 2009: 266), and in
China, all music “appears on the market through a publishing house, and all
the publishers are state-owned”, while piracy is endemic (de Kloet 2003: 170f.).
From 1978 until the mid-1980s Yugoslavia followed a rather bizarre practice –
not to control, but to qualitatively stratify the record market: Music that was
considered of low quality was singled out by so-called “šund [trash] taxation
committees” and released at a considerably higher price than music considered
non-šund (Rasmussen 1995: 255).
14 I cannot say whether khudsovet sessions at National TV and Radio are simi-
larly lax, as I have never witnessed one. I would suspect, however, that they are
conducted in a more formal manner; and I know that criteria for selection are
stricter.
15 I found most Uzbek estrada singers to be taking a stance similar to that de-
scribed by Edward Larkey for several GDR bands: They were
[not] willing to engage in political confrontation with the Party and jeop-
ardize their professional careers for the sake of making a political point.
Their primary interest was to maintain or expand their stature within the
field of popular music while upholding their political integrity as subaltern
participants.
(2005: 202)
16 In this, the situation of estrada artists in Uzbekistan under Karimov differed
from that of Arabesk singers in 1980s Turkey, where a performance ban was
total and forced many of the latter into exile (Stokes 1992a: 215).
17 For more background and detail on Nargiz Zakirova’s statements, see the web
article “Nargiz Zakirova has Suffered Insults and Hostility in [Her] Homeland
[Nargiz Zakirova podverglas’ oskorbleniyam i goneniyam na rodine]”, available at:
https://life.ru/t/шоу/343912 (accessed 7 February 2018).
18 Sanctions on the grounds of alleged misbehaviour were common already in the
Uzbek SSR. At a meeting of the Uzgosfilarmoniya directorate in January 1957,
for example, several artists were criticised for a lack of discipline, such as enter-
ing the stage with a dirty and torn suit and without shoes (Central State Archive
f. R 2366, o. 2, d. 150, l. 1). In 1959, an Uzbek musician was jailed in Moscow for
ten days for “drunkenness and hooliganism” (Central State Archive R. 2366, o.
2, d. 198, l. 15), in 1965, a singer was scolded for “unnecessary screams in the
Authorising estrada 239
form of ‘Jamaica’” on stage (Central State Archive f. R 2366, o. 2, d. 303, l. 28),
and in 1977, a female singer had her salary cut for misbehaviour at a wedding
(Central State Archive f. R 2366, o. 2, d. 529, l. 5).
19 Outside estrada, however, in the field of lirika, suspensions have been even
longer. Sherali Jo’raev, for example, suffered a decades-long ban on public per-
formance under Islom Karimov and his songs became officially barred from
radio. He remained, however, an extremely popular, respected and highly paid
artist over all those years and his licence was recently reinstated. Dadakhon
Hasanov’s – at least partially – similar fate has already been described above (see
Chapter 2 and Kendzior 2007).
20 See http://ozoda.com/ru/biography (accessed 7 February 2018). Ozoda Nursai-
dova changed her name to Ozoda Saidzoda in the 2000s.
21 Hiromi Lorraine Sakata writes of similar treatment of musicians in late 1960s/
early 1970s Afghanistan (1983: 93), as does John Baily with regard to the 1990s
(2009: 154). In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was known to invite estrada sing-
ers to sing for him privately (MacFadyen 2002b: 25ff., 67). I never heard of Is-
lom Karimov indulging in exclusive command performances of this kind at his
residency.
22 With reference to Afghanistan, John Baily describes a similar indulgence of the
powerful in otherwise prohibited practice (Baily 2009: 163), as does Carol Silver-
man with reference to 1980s Bulgaria (2007: 76).
23 In interviews and conversations, several singers whose contract guaranteed
them a share in record sales, suspected recording companies of cheating them by
falsifying sales numbers. See Silverman for similar complaints among Bulgarian
musicians (1996: 241; 2007: 85).
24 Kazakhstan is not only a good market for artists who suffer long-terms suspen-
sions, but popular with almost any Uzbek estrada artist who manages to enter
it due to the much higher level of payment. Everybody spoke about the fantastic
profits Kazakhstan promises, even for restaurant singers, and although I could
not verify this, a journalist claimed that Uzbek artists of very high reyting were
able to earn up to $15,000 for one birrov.
25 One scholar was already quite fed up with the constant criticism: “What they
lament about now, [that] the music is bad, the lyrics are bad – these lamenta-
tions were around already 20 years ago and even earlier” (11.2005). And in-
deed, when sifting through the documents in the Central State Archive, I was
surprised to come across so many familiar complaints. One frequent criticism
in the Uzbek SSR, however, is certainly no longer around: That singers do not
renew their repertoire often enough. There was no advantage in that when one
received a regular state income, as in the Soviet era. But now, with dependence
on the market, save for some all-time greats, novelty is important on the wed-
ding circuit.
26 However, not everyone was familiar with the rather narrow reach of world mu-
sic, and I often encountered exaggerated ideas about the degree of fame that
Uzbek estrada artists had achieved abroad. The nephew of a radio journalist
said that he was proud that in the USA, posters for Yulduz Usmanova’s concerts
were put up next to those of Michael Jackson. Also Sevara Nazarkhan’s popu-
larity with western audiences was frequently imagined to have reached fantastic
heights – “just like Madonna”, someone I met at a dinner remarked. In a similar
vein, a musicologist claimed that Ravshan Namozov was “loved” in Germany
and in the USA “negroes went to the shops to listen to him. They understand
him” (01. 2004). But even long before world music had become a convenient mar-
keting category for Uzbek music, Uzbek estrada was widely thought to have
conquered western markets: “Everybody in the west knows Botyr Zakirov”, one
senior member of Conservatory staff said.
240 Authorising estrada
27 Similar, albeit smaller concerts with a similar topic had already taken place
much earlier. Olim Bekov mentions a concert with the title Oriental Evening in
1924 in Samarkand (Bekov 1994: 38), and in many respects, the estrada singers
in the second half of the twentieth century continued what Tamara Khanum had
become famous for in the first half: programmes devoted to Songs of the Peoples
of the World.
28 For detailed descriptions and analyses of these concert programmes, see Yu-
supov (2004) and Bekov (1994).
29 Interestingly, Leonid Yusupov differentiates between the national and the orien-
tal only when he accuses the Tashkent Music Hall of having been too generally
oriental and too little specifically Uzbek (2004: 111). It remains unclear, how-
ever, what the criteria are on the basis of which he criticises the Music Hall, but
praises the repertoire and concert programme of Yalla.
30 For orientalism in Russian composers’ approaches to “internationalising” Cen-
tral Asian academic music, see Tomoff (2004) and Frolova-Walker (1998).
31 The orient had also a great presence in spheres beyond estrada in the Uzbek SSR.
In 1972, for example, at the Conservatory, a Department for Eastern/Oriental
Music was established, where – as another instance of self-orientalisation –
older Uzbek traditions were and still are studied alongside foreign musics.
32 In fact, at the Conservatory, the curricula expect estrada singing students to
cover a wide range of the genre and do not restrict them to learning milliy es-
trada, although vatan songs are a fixed part of tuition. The BA state exam for
estrada singing students, for example, requires them to master – and present –
the following repertoire:
Aria from a modern musical with elements of jazz improvisation.
Vatan song by an Uzbek composer.
Estrada romance or ballad.
New original song by an Uzbek composer [original, meaning: no arrange-
ment of a folk song].
Two dissimilar works in different languages with support of a vocal ensemble.
33 See www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/world/awards2004/profile_sevaranazarkhanasia.
shtml (accessed February 2018). See Merchant (2005b) for an analysis of Sevara
Nazarkhan’s productions for the world music market compared to her local
output.
34 On feelings and perceptions of provincialism and isolation after independence,
see Weil and Djumaev (1998: 158), Adams (1998: 2; 2010: 80), Djumaev (2003: 30),
Levin (1996a: 29) and Akbarov (1995: 28).
35 Alexander Djumaev is an explicit critic of what he sees as cultural devolution in
Uzbekistan:
[T]here is a general process of degradation, of cultural ‘banalisation’, a de-
cline of the cultural level of the population … There is the possibility of either
passing to a higher level of cultural changes or, renouncing what has already
been achieved, to turn back.
(2003: 29f.)
I will take a closer look at evolutionist approaches to cultural and socio-political
development in Chapter 7.
7 Mobilising estrada
Independence ideology,
nationalist realism and the
workings of milliy estrada
Tashkent, 2005
It is a late August afternoon, and I am sitting in the veranda of my flat, the
standard sun porch in Soviet-era concrete architecture in Tashkent. Veran-
das usually turn into giant ovens if exposed to the sun in summer, and into
oversize fridges, or even freezers, in winter. Mine did exactly this during my
first winter in Tashkent one and a half years ago, when temperatures fell
to minus 15 degrees, the frost covering the window panes with ice flowers
and turning the water that I stored there into huge solid cubes. As soon as
summer approached and hit the city, however, the veranda’s transformation
veered off the habitual track. Being shielded by lush trees, whose longest
branches brush the window grids when fanned by a faint breeze from the
Ankhor canal in the near distance, the veranda stayed cool and shady even
during summer chilla, the yearly 40-day heatwave in June and July. It felt
like an oasis – or rather like a huge aquarium, having been painted a bright,
shining turquoise, with wafting shadows on the irregularly plastered walls
resembling the reflections of moving water in sunlight. I left Tashkent at the
onset of autumn last year, finishing my first long period of fieldwork, and
have returned yesterday for three months to the city – and to my old flat. I
am happy to be here and I am excited. But as soon as I arrived, there was a
familiar anxiousness creeping in, a feeling that had been a steady compan-
ion during my first stay and is related to the political situation in Uzbeki-
stan, which has once more worsened since the year before.
Most of today I have spent taking a long exploratory walk through Tash-
kent. As usual, with Independence Day approaching, the city centre has been
full of activity, ranging from numerous brigades of town cleaners, rather lei-
surely clearing gutters or refreshing the paint on tree trunks, to myriads of
workers on various building sites hurrying to gloss old buildings – or finish
new buildings meant to be inaugurated in a few days as monuments to the
country’s progress. Apart from just wanting to get a feel for the city again,
my stroll also had a musical mission. Along the way, I have visited various
record stores and bought the latest estrada output to catch up on what has
happened in the scene during my absence.
242 Mobilising estrada
Now, tired and with sore feet, in the pleasantly cool underwater-like world
of the veranda, I am sitting, or rather sprawling, on my ko’rpachas – soft and
colourful plushy cotton mattresses, probably the most important and most
versatile items of furniture in Uzbek households. Amid streaks of light from
the already sinking sun, with dozens of CDs spread around and a small CD
player in front of me, I start to listen to what I have managed to capture
in my first musical haul. More absent-minded than attentive, I am flipping
from one song to the next. Some titles I have already heard on the radio,
others at a restaurant where I had dinner yesterday, most are new to me, but
nothing seems really extraordinary – nothing, until after three fast dance
tracks a slow, whining and agonised-sounding accordion sets in. An orna-
mented melody, strangely meandering between being in and out of metre,
punctuated by a patchy bassline and soon doubled by strings makes me lis-
ten more closely. I know, this is a song by Feruza Djumaniyozova, a young
female singer from the province of Khorezm in the far west of the country,
where the accordion has been a staple instrument in folk music ever since
it reached the region via tsarist soldiers stationed in Orenburg in the nine-
teenth century. After a few bars, in a slightly restrained and hushed voice,
Feruza Djumaniyozova starts to sing the following lyrics in Uzbek:
From what I can catch from the Khorezmian dialect, she then goes on to
praise abundance in food, hospitality, respectful behaviour, socialising and
music, before repeating the first and second line of the song several times
until finally ending on:
I am a child of Khorezm.
I have heard dozens of these vatan songs before, songs that are spilled out in
a thousand variations by competitions such as Vatanim Manim and stand-
ard fare at Independence Day and Navro’z. Up to now I have been inter-
ested in them, or rather in their existence, as a topic for research, but beyond
professional attraction, on a more personal level, I have dismissed them as
annoying, pathetic or kitschy – or all of those in one. And probably it has
been my own disdain of nationalism that has led me to conclude that these
vatan songs, with their blunt and clumsy patriotism, their blatant adulations
of the president, their eulogies to the greatness of the country, its past and
its future cannot possibly positively resonate with anyone or even have any
patriotising effect. Those who have claimed the opposite were, I was sure,
not to be believed.
Mobilising estrada 243
But now, lying in the darkening green of my veranda and listening to the
last bars of Feruza Djumaniyozova’s O’zbegim, I am deeply moved – and I
am embarrassed about it. I am thinking how beautiful Uzbekistan is, how
friendly and hospitable its people, and just how much I love this country. I
cannot believe my reaction; I am ashamed, and I want this emotion to dis-
appear. Envisioning comparable song lines such as “I am a German girl and
a child of Lower Saxony”, which I would simply find ridiculous and which
would only make me laugh, does not help. In disbelief, I want to test myself,
but playing the song again, twice, a third time, does not help either. On the
contrary, it just affects me even more, until I am feeling really low. For this
unexpected emotional outburst is not about joyous or light jubilance, it is a
painful and bitter sadness, heavy and haunting.
I finish my auto-experiments with estrada and patriotism for that day
and, quite irritated, leave the flat to meet friends for dinner. The next morn-
ing, with some nervousness, I have another try, but already after the first
bars I feel my throat tightening, my eyes filling with tears and immediately
stop the music. In the weeks to come, from time to time, I attempt to find
a logical reason for my reaction. One guess are the Andijon events in May
that year. As already mentioned earlier, in the wake of the arrest, trial and
imprisonment of 23 men charged with terrorism, the Uzbek military killed
hundreds of people – protesters and bystanders, men, women and children –
who had gathered on a square in this Ferghana Valley city. The incident put
me in a state of shock, and I can imagine the song to have functioned as a
kind of catalyst for emotional relief. This hypothesis at least explains why
it was sadness and not joy that the song evoked in me – and it helps me, as I
begin my second spell of fieldwork in Tashkent, to somehow accept what I
still consider a shameful penchant for patriotism.
While there might be some truth in this connection, with more distance
I ceased to muse about a possible reason for my reaction and started to
cherish it as a valuable experience in itself. I still cannot claim to know how
vatan songs affect Uzbek listeners, but at least I know now that one can be
affected by them – completely off guard and without much logic. However,
up to now, O’zbegim by Feruza Djumaniyozova has been the only one of
the many vatan songs I have heard in Uzbekistan that has managed to move
me this way – but I have been on the alert since then, and in the meantime,
I would actually welcome another experience like this, just out of curiosity
(Video 7.1).
I am certainly not among the original addressees of vatan songs, the
effect, however, that Feruza Djumaniyozova’s O’zbegim had and will prob-
ably continue to have on me, is what the Uzbek government under Islom
Karimov hoped for in promoting milliy estrada, national estrada. In this
chapter I will look at how milliy estrada is supposed to function – and why
it was considered so important that an elaborate administrative system
for its monitoring and disciplining was deemed necessary and justified by
the Uzbek government. First, however, I will outline the main tenets of
244 Mobilising estrada
Uzbekistan’s national independence ideology – not only to elucidate the
wider ideational and political setting of milliy estrada’s remarkably promi-
nent role in Islom Karimov’s music politics, but to get to the bottom of milliy
estrada’s imagined workings, which are intricately linked with this ideology.
to unite the people in the name of a great future [vo imya velikogo budu
shchego], to motivate every citizen of this country, independent of his
nationality, linguistic or religious affiliation, to feel permanent respon-
sibility for the fate of his Homeland, to foster pride in the very rich
heritage of the ancestors, the cumulated spiritual values/treasures [na-
koplennyye dukhovnyye tsennosti] and precious traditions [blagorodnyye
traditsii], to form highly moral [vysokonravstvennykh] and harmoniously
developed state citizens.
(Xanazarov 2007: 114, capitalisation original;
see Karimov 2001: 203)
Described on the one hand as already existing among the people in the
form of a fluid and fragmentary ideational framework, its folk version is
presented, on the other hand, as a still too amorphous structure that needs
the collating and ordering hand of experts to become a properly function-
ing, unified ideology (ibid.: 488). Presented as the latest in a line of famous
thinkers and great leaders who had come before him on what is now Uzbek
soil, it was Islom Karimov who, among this circle of experts, was seen to
serve as “the outstanding theoretician of the transition period from totali-
tarianism to free market relations, to a democratic society”, a phrase, that
echoes the terminology of classical transitology, save for the appearance of
the “outstanding theoretician” (Xanazarov 2007: 114).
Notably, the task of forming a proper national independence ideology out
of its folk prototype, which was presented around 2000 as still being under
way, had, by the mid-2000s, obviously been accomplished, making national
independence ideology seem something considerably more solidified then.
And indeed, there was to be little variation in the ideology’s main content
over the subsequent years. While some definitions might have been more
elaborate and broadly encompassing than others, the core elements always
remained the same.
Content
National independence ideology’s ingredients are commonly differenti-
ated between specifically Uzbek components and universal human values.
The first comprise the following: a life in friendship, good neighbourliness,
peace and harmony; close cooperation with all peoples; the sacralisation of
the concepts of homeland, family and mahalla; respect for parents, elderly
Mobilising estrada 247
people, and women (“the embodiment of love, beauty, tenderness, symbol
of eternal life” Xanazarov 2007: 115); care for the younger generation; love
for the native tongue as the source of the nation’s spirituality; tolerance,
mercifulness and industriousness; honesty and integrity. As Andrew March
has rightfully pointed out, these presumably particularly Uzbek elements
“are just the opposite: virtually generic values that almost all cultures would
claim to value” (2003: 217). The alleged world-wide validity of a number of
the ideology’s presumably universal elements, on the other hand, is rather
contestable: religious tolerance; the rule of law; the guarantee of fundamen-
tal rights and the freedom of man; respect for representatives of other na-
tionalities, their culture and national treasures; the adaptation of the best
achievements of other countries and peoples (Xanazarov 2007: 15).
Besides religious tolerance, maybe quite surprisingly given Islom Kari-
mov’s ostentatiously worn Muslimness, religion plays a rather minor role in
national independence ideology. In its stead, another concept became quite
central: spirituality [ma’naviyat / dukhovnost’], which evolved from a kind
of synonym for the people’s proto-ideology in the early 1990s to a term that
by the end of the decade denoted an internal state of mind, a primordial,
intrinsic property of every Uzbek. Across the centuries and against all odds,
spirituality has supposedly held the nation together; it is something like its
aerial life sustenance.7 Spirituality’s rise to prominence – and its shift in
meaning – have to be seen in connection with Islom Karimov’s attempt to
severely curb the role, power and influence of Islam and the Islamic author-
ities in Uzbekistan since the late 1990s, while, at the same time, claiming
to promote the religion and presenting himself as a devout Muslim – as in
his often cited statement, “I was born a Muslim and I will die a Muslim.”8
The importance given to spirituality can be read as a kind of concession to
deep-seated feelings of religiosity among much of the population, but by
encompassing and enfolding Islam, the concept robs the faith of its spec-
ificity, ultimately suffocating and delegitimising it. By 2011, in an exegesis
of national independence ideology, Islam was already discussed almost ex-
clusively with reference to the topic of extremism (Saifnazarov, Kasymov &
Toktaev 2011: 48–59).
The past
Just as Islom Karimov was presented as the successor to famous figures
from history, the contemporary ideologies that currently besiege the nation
also have a famous, or rather infamous, precursor – communism. In offi-
cial writings under Karimov, the Soviet era was invariably depicted as a
bleak period, one in which the Uzbek nation was subjected to the rule of an
illegitimate colonial power, forced to live by a foreign, false and artificial
ideology while continually fighting for its independence (see, for example,
Karimov 1998: 11). Consequently, apart from serving as a gloomy backdrop
and save for a few figures who were rehabilitated as defenders of the na-
tional cause during difficult times, the country’s past life as the Uzbek SSR
has been almost completely eradicated from official historiography. Uzbek-
istan’s libraries were widely cleansed of publications with obvious Soviet
references and, for several years, even the word Soviet was banned from
public discourse.
250 Mobilising estrada
Thus, with regard to the past, national independence ideology thrives
on processes of rigorous selection. The Soviet Union, often quite indis-
criminately thrown together with the preceding tsarist rule of Turkistan,
is the only era, however, that has been more or less completely erased from
the nation’s history. When it comes to earlier history, the principle of se-
lection has been coupled with the principle of incorporation in order to
procure the afore-mentioned line of famous thinkers and great statesmen,
some of whom merely happened to live on the territory of what is today
Uzbekistan, but who were claimed to have had advanced, over the course of
millennia, the Uzbek nation’s quest. These are figures like Amir Temur
(Tamerlane), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Jalal ad-Din Manguberdi, Ulugh Beg
and, as the only one Soviet era politician, Sharof Rashidov (see Djumaev
2001: 330f., 339; March 2002: 374–381).
Similarly, the sub-task that in 1992 had been phrased as “activating and
charging with concrete content the cultural-enlightenment work among all
strata of society“ (UP-360 1992) had, by 2004, become: “based on the idea
of national independence, on the cultural and spiritual-moral traditions of
the people of Uzbekistan, the implementation of cultural-enlightenment
work among the population” (PKM-272 2004). While the mandate to ad-
just cultural activities to the tenets of national independence ideology thus
came to pertain to all the arts, it was estrada that was affected most by
these mainstreaming measures. The reorganisation of O’zbeknavo in 2001,
from a “tour-concert association” into an “estrada association”, has to be
seen as part of the newly prioritised patriotisation policies. And from the
moment that O’zbeknavo started its second life as an agency solely devoted
to estrada, its work was solidly wed to national independence ideology. As
detailed in Chapter 1, the association and its various organs were ordered
by law to further “the development of ideological-artistic styles in relation
with national and pan-human spiritual values” and “teach young people
love for the Motherland, [educate them] in loyal spirit to the ideas of na-
tional independence”.
Ten years later, this link was affirmed very ostentatiously once again, this
time in the form of a self-commitment. The preface to a copious collection
of all the legal acts that provided the basis of O’zbeknavo’s activities, most
of which, save for the very prominent Karimov quotes, reads like a very
general version of the association’s yearly activity reports, is surprisingly
entitled “A Sacred Feeling” and closes with the following statement:
Modified in this way, the doctrine certainly does not deserve the label so-
cialist any more. It remains a form of realism, however, a variant that could
be termed nationalist realism, one that still shares a number of central traits
with its predecessor beyond a general proclivity for optimism. But what
exactly links milliy estrada as a representative of the nationalist realist ap-
proach to music to socialist realism?
Nationalist realism
The most obvious parallel, by now probably so self-evident that it hardly
needs mentioning, is that, at least in government discourse, milliy estrada is
conceived as serving a higher purpose beyond providing pleasure or income.
More than merely an aesthetic reflection of reality, it is thought of as an in-
tegral part or even motor of socio-political development itself, closely inter-
twined with the country’s progress as such through its subjectivity-forming
qualities. Olim Bekov and Davlat Mullajonov, two of the three Uzbek mu-
sicologists who have focused on estrada in their PhD theses, are very ex-
plicit about estrada’s capacities and role in their entry on “National Estrada
Music” in a large, popular scholarly book devoted to Uzbek arts and edited
by the Institute for Art Studies:
Today, … we are building on our soil a free and flourishing society. In-
disputably, we will only be able to reach these our great goals, to make
our life still richer, lighter and more complete, if we turn art, music into
our spiritual companion.
(Karimov 2002: 294)
Mobilising estrada 255
When Uzbek musicologist Sadyr Vakhidov wrote his book Uzbek Soviet
Song14 in 1976, the close connection between music and socio-political life
he described was not actually very different. Interestingly, it also acknowl-
edged music was able to inspire “devotion to the Homeland”, although the
term homeland, at that time, did not refer to the Uzbek SSR, but to the
Soviet Union as a whole, a decisive difference in denotation that I will come
back to in the conclusion, Exiting estrada:
Not explicitly mentioned, but certainly informing this quote – and the one
from Bekov and Mullajonov cited above – is the assumption that just as
society develops, so too does estrada. It does so, not in a wayward manner,
but it advances in an orderly way, in line with the general momentum of
socio-political progress.
This idea of musical evolution and, ultimately, improvement, is also the
rationale behind the peculiar forward thrust that is so characteristic in of-
ficial documents, in independent Uzbekistan as it was in the Uzbek SSR.
Whether the development or further development, the enhancement, ele-
vation or perfection of estrada as an art form, of individual singers’ reper-
toires, of cultural-enlightening work or the provision of cultural services, of
the population’s cultural level or the artistic level of concerts: these demands
and goals are staple tropes in laws, protocols and reports, from the 1940s
through to today. A senior member of the Conservatory staff found an apt
image for this powerful movement forward: “Uzbek estrada is like a train.
Maybe it is not at the world level yet …, but the train goes at full speed and
will continue to do so” (11.2003).
It is not only these ideas about the evolution of music, the inseparability of
music and socio-political development or even music’s indispensability for
progress that independent Uzbekistan adopted as a basic conviction about
the workings of art from political thought in the Uzbek SSR and the wider
Soviet Union. Also inherited was the belief in the extraordinary suitability
of the genre song for this almost symbiotic proximity, a belief which is, of
course, not an exclusively or originally Soviet phenomenon, but which has
determined musical action among earlier and other political or religious en-
tities wishing to further their goals through music.
Like Sadyr Vakhidov, who saw the basis for song’s socio-political power
in its simplicity, catchiness, and “alert responsivity to whatever phenomena
256 Mobilising estrada
in life” (1976: 4), many people I talked to during fieldwork described estrada
as easy to grasp, quick to react and close to real life.15 And almost every-
body pointed to the mass character these qualities lent the genre – including
this composer:
But how exactly is estrada to achieve all this – strengthen peace, perfect
morality, deepen spirituality, raise aesthetic tastes, inspire patriotism, fur-
ther the glory of the homeland and its progress towards the bright future of
independence? One crucial part of its powers can be found in its content.
Just as national independence ideology, with its strong thrust towards the
future, is always a bit ahead of life and thus more an ideal than a reflection
of reality, the genre, at least in the form of milliy estrada, is meant to be in a
similar relation of asynchronous homology to current affairs. It is meant to
Mobilising estrada 257
depict reality, but a slightly better, brighter and thus somehow heightened
version of it, a kind of refined reality, anticipating life as it would be further
ahead on Uzbekistan’s path of progress. This take on the present is solidly
shared by what I have termed nationalist realism and its predecessor, social-
ist realism, providing perhaps the strongest argument for the terminological
parallel. In 1966, the Soviet Encyclopaedic Musical Dictionary [Entsiklope-
dicheskiy Muzykal’niy Slovar’] quite elegantly described socialist realism’s
specific approach to time as a combination of “a feeling for contemporary
reality with a leap of the imagination into the future” (quoted in Brown
1974: 557; see Fox 1977: 210).
Milliy estrada does actually leave quite ample space for “contemporary
reality”, but there are also definite boundaries that require either some ad-
justments in the depiction of this reality, “leaps of the imagination into the
future”, or outright silence. As was detailed in Chapter 6, topics such as prob-
lems in romantic but chaste teenage love, petty family quarrels, even the nu-
merous threats that engulf Uzbekistan according to national independence
ideology can all find their place in milliy estrada as “contemporary reality”.16
But love that becomes physical, family quarrels that degenerate into domestic
violence or Uzbekistan’s bright future seeming questionable are not subjects
for milliy estrada despite their very obvious place in “contemporary reality”.
In 2007, for example, the song and clip “Moth” [Tungi Kapalak] by rap
formation Radius 21 disappeared from TV and radio just one day after its
release. Its storyline shows a girl in her late teens having a rich married lover
in his late fifties or early sixties, both unaware of family relations and thus
ignorant of the fact that she is to be married to his grown-up son.17 At the
wedding ceremony, lifting her veil, the man recognises his lover in his son’s
bride and commits suicide the next morning (Video 7.2). In 2008, I was talk-
ing about the incident with a radio journalist:
Shortly afterwards, another song by Radius 21, entitled Dubai and inspired
by a recent band trip there, met a similar fate. What was judged problematic
was not so much the fact that one of the all-male band members was wearing
thawb and ghutra in the clip or that there was a woman in a fitted evening
dress with a low neck- and backline who occasionally danced sexily (the
rest of the track mostly showed the band sitting on sofas in front of a stage,
playing, singing and drinking tea and was thus inoffensive anyway). Nor
was the overall content of the lyrics considered too indecent, despite a ref-
erence, tinged with a sense of retrospective melancholy, to an extra-marital
affair of 12 days in a hotel on a beach, at the end of which the man returned
258 Mobilising estrada
to his wife, children, parents – and homeland. As another journalist later
told me, the main point of criticism was the song’s title and, even more so, its
refrain, which in a mix of English, Uzbek and Russian goes: “Dubai, Dubai,
Dubai, Dubai. If we should not see each other any more – well, my darling,
goodbye. Just look, don’t forget my love!” In this, government organs saw
too obvious a reference to the – officially unacknowledged – reality that
many Uzbek women temporarily migrate to the United Arab Emirates and
work there as housekeepers, but also – many by force, others voluntarily – as
sex workers.
But even something seemingly rather virtuous such as travelling to Mecca
to perform the hajj, which certainly is part of “contemporary reality” in
Uzbekistan, is incompatible with the nationalist realism required for milliy
estrada. In 2005, a newly released – and immediately sanctioned – clip by
Davron Ergashev with precisely these images was a hot topic in O’zbeknavo
offices. Quite agitated, one of the senior officials said that Davron Ergashev
had produced “an Arab film, completely Arab! [arabcha kino, v polnost’yu
arabcha!]”, and another one, equally enraged, quoted from his talk with the
singer: “I told him ‘What kind of ideology is this? Explain that! Who is the
producer?’ Estrada and religion must not be mixed” (11.2005).
According to show business rumours circulating in the days following
the incident, Davron Ergashev’s own ambitions with this release were, far
from being related to religious proselytisation, in fact commercially ori-
ented. Having been scolded for one of his recent songs, which young people
had loved but more grown-up listeners had found too indecent, he had just
hoped to appease his critics and please his fan-base with a swing towards
religion. Some commentators claimed this move very clearly revealed his ig-
norance, if not idiocy. Islam is an even more sensitive issue than immorality
in estrada. It is even more sensitive in estrada than in national independence
ideology, given the anxieties attached to the genre’s presumably huge prop-
aganda potential, which, admittedly, is probably decidedly greater than that
of Islom Karimov’s writings.
Video clips that reference homosexuality or transsexuality are considered
equally problematic for the related reason of the fear of instilling in people
un-milliy ideas. While both certainly do exist in Uzbekistan, they are not
part of nationalist realist ideas about society, gender identity and relations.
But like most withdrawn clips, they continue to be available on the internet,
if they were not put up there anonymously in the first place. In 2013, for ex-
ample, a clip named “Honey Tea” [Asal Choy], which shows a cross-dressed
male singer infatuated with his male office head, appeared on YouTube,
shocking not only the members of the Council for the Development and Co-
ordination of National Estrada Art, who branded it as “immoral” [axloqsiz],
but also, as the comment section on YouTube reveals, many ordinary Uzbek
viewers (Video 7.3).
But why are such songs and clips considered so dangerous? How exactly
is milliy estrada thought to function? In what way and by which mechanisms
Mobilising estrada 259
is its nationalist realist depiction of life supposed to have an impact on peo-
ple? And what do officials fear will happen, if someone listens to songs or
watches video clips like the ones just mentioned?
You listen to [a popular song] at home, you walk on the street, it will be
played [on radio and TV] the whole day, it subconsciously takes effect,
it is always there, it does not go away. This means, it is a strong weapon.
I consider a song an atomic bomb. It can explode. It has no weight, no
colour, no smell. It injures the heart and is just gone. Like the radiation
disease after Hiroshima, it will destroy the roots.
(10.2004)
Singers
Estrada’s alleged extraordinary power also awards its singers an extremely
influential position. One well-known male singer in his thirties was particu-
larly aware of and outspoken about this:
Milliy estrada – it has great power. For example, myself … [M]y fans …
sit at [my] concerts. I see they are crying from [their] soul. I see that, I
don’t hypnotise them, nothing of that sort. I only sing [about] sorrow,
you understand? … [If] I have made a person cry with my sorrows, this
means I can influence people. This means, I own this power. You only
have to put the right words. Where do I want to direct young people,
for example, help the politics of the state? I direct my words, my sor-
row there. If [my fans] take it, this means, [I have] great power. Very
great power, even a stadium will cry. If a mayor goes there, regardless of
how much he will shout there, they will not cry. This means, our power
is greater than theirs, you understand? This means, we can be used in
politics or wherever. Uzbek estrada, I openly say that, for example, a
maqomist, someone who sings classical [music], a whole stadium they
will not assemble. Who can assemble [that]? Only estradniki. Estradniki,
apart from them no one. This means we have great power.
(10.2005)
Singers are idols. They influence the people and we try to influence
the singers. For example, some singers went to Andijon and performed
there with the governors. This had a great effect. People will now vote
for them … If O’zbeknavo didn’t exist, this would be problematic.
Now there are many extremists who come to Uzbekistan from foreign
countries. If such an extremist tells an estrada star “sing this” and he
does it, then people will listen more to [the extremist]. Alone he would
not reach 500 people. Estrada stars are idols. What they do, is law for
many. If a star wears a red T-shirt, everybody immediately wears a
red T-shirt. Money plays a big role for estrada stars. Extremists could
exploit that, in that they offer stars money for singing about certain
topics.
(11.2005)
In the late 1990s, a certain number of male singers – people have told me
of three – apparently experienced the fatal consequences of having such an
immense power over their audience attributed to them. When they decided
to quit estrada for religious reasons, two of them were jailed – following a
very particular interpretation of “on account of conduct”. It was not be-
cause they propagated Islam in their songs, nor were either of them what
in Uzbekistan is called a wahhabi, a proponent of political Islam. They had
just become more devout Muslims and it was feared that some of their fans
might follow their example. When they were released, the government al-
legedly forced them to take up singing again. One continued performing for
about a year and then emigrated; the other never again returned to estrada
and completely withdrew from public life.
A similar, but still slightly different case is presented by Ozodbek Na
zarbekov. He was a devout Muslim, but his songs did not have any mis-
sionising tendencies and he had never had any problems on this count. Nor
did he intend to leave estrada. Still, in the 1990s, he was jailed, suspected
Mobilising estrada 263
of wahhabism. He remained in prison for about a year and continued his
career afterwards. When I started fieldwork, in 2003 and 2004, he was a
well-known singer in the wedding circuit with a repertoire that was very
milliy. In 2005, he seemed a friendly, modest and slightly shy person who
had just provided the wedding season with a major hit, but he seemed far
from stardom – and his past problems were a subject not to be touched. By
2008, his reyting had increased immensely and he counted among the coun-
try’s top artists; in 2016, people even spoke about him as the “official state
superstar” [gosudarstvennaya syuperzvezda] and “master singer of the White
Palace” [the presidential inner-city residence] [Oqsaroy hofizi].
Many people attributed his ascent to the fact that the audience had
started to endorse milliy estrada more enthusiastically. Some, however,
claimed that his career boost was linked to the Andijon events in 2005.
They were convinced that his rise in fame was the result of targeted gov-
ernment intervention. With a nod to the power ascribed to singers, they
conjectured that the government had built up Ozodbek Nazarbekov, who is
from Andijon province himself, in order to placate the city and the region.
In their view, officials had wanted to show Andijon national acknowledge-
ment and highlight someone whom the province and its capital could be
proud of by providing the people there with an estrada star from among
their midst. More importantly, they saw it as a strategy by the state au-
thorities for deflecting the more critical local voices in music and installing
a reliable mouthpiece – not someone for hard political propaganda, but
someone who would more subtly represent the official line or divert lis-
teners completely from politics.20 In 2017, Ozodbek Nazarbekov became
deputy minister of culture.
Sound as a vehicle
Interestingly, many people who spoke about estrada’s propagandistic effect
relegated the level of sound to a subordinate position, viewing it more as a
vehicle, a medium for transporting textual and visual content rather than
an additional and separate track of meaning. This composer did this too,
attributing the damaging influence of estrada on its lyrics: “Very many dirty
songs are resounding. Horrible songs. The lyrics are terrible there. Because
of this estrada, here, the Uzbek mentality has changed. It has changed the
mentality of Uzbekistan” (08.2004).
From the perspective of sound as a vehicle, the demand that artists
integrate elements and instruments from older Uzbek musical traditions into
estrada to make it milliy appears to be not much more than a call to draw
on the standard inventory of accessorised Uzbekness, which in addition to
musical instruments such as the dutar, tanbur, ney and g’ijjak also includes
such things as atlas silk, wrestling, palov and various kinds of flatbread.
And indeed, at concerts or in video clips, instruments often fulfil precisely
this – and only this – decorative role. They are not part of the actual song,
264 Mobilising estrada
but there is a line-up of musicians inaudibly playing these instruments on
stage or on the visual track. It is presumed that the audience would like to
hear, or at least see them, and, similarly, that it would also like to have me-
lodic and rhythmic references to folk or classical music in estrada.
For many estrada singers, heightening the appeal of their music by draw-
ing on a local musical heritage may be part of a commercial strategy, but,
as explored in Chapter 6, for most, it is primarily a very normal and natural
consequence of being an artist from Uzbekistan. At the same time, due to
their presumably greater appeal they hold for listeners, songs with a de-
cidedly Uzbek sound are thought to get their messages across more effec-
tively. Herein lies the importance and value of the sonic level with respect to
propaganda – it assists and aids the transmission of content, like a kind of
carrier that facilitates the flux of meaning.
The logical inverse of this line of reasoning is that foreign estrada should
have difficulty in conveying the meaning of its lyrics. This might explain
why the Uzbek government pays so much attention to its domestic estrada
production but so little to pop music imports (which, for the most part, are
actually very far from the ideals of milliy estrada), but it cannot sufficiently
account for the constant expression of official concerns about the adoption
of too much foreign musical material into Uzbek estrada. There is, how-
ever, an alternative approach to the role and effect of estrada’s sound – an
approach, which actually attributes immense importance to a song’s sonic
dimension.21
I never put any goal before me, everything always happens sponta-
neously. Probably, it somehow comes from inside, because, from my
roots, I am an oriental person, but my education I received in European
classes. I think, this also left its mark.
(09.2005)
Mobilising estrada 265
A month later, a senior member of staff at O’zbeknavo elaborated on this
theory of musical genetics and tried to make it clearer for me by drawing on
an example from European music:
The Beatles have used Indian music. This was probably linked to the
fact that in John Lennon’s gene pool there was something Indian. This
depends on the blood … Of course, we have all descended from Adam
and there is assimilation. In a few generations, Arabs living here will be
Uzbeks, but in their blood there will always be something Arab.
(11.2005)
There are, of course, various problems with this view, apart from the very
fundamental problem of trying to define nations genetically and the concom-
itant neglect of socialisation. When, for example, is ethnogenesis supposed
to be so advanced that one will shed previous genetic – and m usical –
predispositions? And why should a musical mix be bad, if this blend might
represent exactly some people’s genetic mélange? As detailed in Chapter 6,
government politics does not oppose in principle the creation of transna-
tional musical syntheses in milliy estrada and the official I quoted above
later expressed exactly this view in our conversation – in line with independ-
ence ideology’s tenet to adapt the “best achievements of other countries and
people”. Imitation is rejected, but interpretation accepted – wherever the
boundary between the two. Even in the case of a successful interpretation,
however, the result should still be recognisably Uzbek if it is to qualify as
milliy estrada. This means that in contemporary Uzbekistan, regardless of
the population’s ethnic make-up or individual citizens’ heritages, milliy es-
trada should, according to this logic, first and foremost cater to those with a
dominantly Uzbek genetic imprint – or, put another way, address the Uzbek
portion of any particular individual’s genetic background, if any exists.
These discussions about the quality of a musical mix are directly linked
to the question of how estrada is supposed to interact with one’s national
266 Mobilising estrada
genetic predisposition. Essentially, the mechanism is one of consonance: If
estrada is properly milliy, its sound will somehow resonate with this inner
national essence and strengthen it. If there are too many foreign musical ele-
ments in Uzbek estrada, however, not only is there no reinforcing resonance,
the result is even worse: The national essence itself might be affected and
modified, losing its specificity. The likelihood of this happening is smaller
if foreign music is directly recognisable as such – if it is, as quoted above,
for example, “purely Turkish”. The chances are greater, however, if foreign
musical elements are mixed with Uzbek ones and can thus somehow hide or
disguise themselves.
Quite obviously, there are contradictions in this theory of the sonic work-
ings of estrada similar to those in national independence ideology. In both,
something is extremely stable and extremely fragile at the same time. In the
case of the latter, the country’s scientifically predetermined and thus un-
stoppable progress towards a bright future is endangered by myriad pow-
erful inimical forces that constantly threaten to throw it off its path. In the
former, a genetic code might undergo spontaneous and hazardous muta-
tions just by being sonicated with the wrong music. And in both scenarios
the stakes are high, for the fate of the nation is at risk. Whenever anyone
talked about the dangerous influence of foreign sounds in estrada with me,
they did so with the utmost seriousness. The academic version of this theory
still presupposes a national genetic essence, but it avoids some of the pitfalls
of the popular variant by locating this essence in music and not in people.
The presumed novelty of all these imports is, however, clearly contradicted
by the sheer musical evidence of Uzbek SSR estrada, which, as was explained
in Chapter 6, was actually quite voracious, particularly with regards to mu-
sic from the Near and Middle East. Furthermore, archival documents about
musical life in the republic as well as the numerous stories I heard from
Uzbekistanis about their public and secret musical activities in the Soviet
era do not support the evoked image of extreme isolation, which, however,
perfectly fits national independence ideology – and world music discourse.
A crisis of intonatsiya, as identified by Davlat Mullajonov for contempo-
rary Uzbek estrada, is a normal corollary of the enormous socio-political
changes taking place in the country. At the same time, this situation en-
tails a serious danger, particularly since the re-working and establishing of
268 Mobilising estrada
intonatsiyas to fit the new socio-political situation are proceeding slowly:
“The stream of new intonatsiyas could make worthless [qadrsizlanishiga olib
kelishi mumkin]” the national intonatsiyas which “have appeared during the
many-centuries-old traditional life of our people” (Mullajonov 2004: 88,
56) and which are something like the genetic code of Uzbek music (pers.
comm.). Just as national independence ideology has evolved over the centu-
ries, so have intonatsiyas.
In an ideal scenario, this code is thought to be continuously instilled into
people through socialisation, already starting in the pre-natal phase:
The first genetic codes [of music] a child [acquires] in the womb of its
mother, it already knows the voice of the father. Science has shown that.
Or when the mother gives birth, she sings a lullaby. Through them [lull-
abies] the genetic codes settle in, and then further [through] children’s
songs … [T]he national [intonatsiya] dictionary is written. Then, this
dictionary becomes larger. And [when] he has come of age, he knows,
what is this, maqoms, katta ashula. Although he is no musician, [but] an
engineer or a tractor driver. This accompanies [him] through life. When
he hears something national in an estrada song, he already looks at it as
something familiar.
(01.2004; 06.2004)
However, the wide spread of foreign intonatsiyas in estrada not only affects
individuals, but ultimately targets the national intonatsiya dictionary as
such: “If we do not stop this course now, then the skeleton, the intonatsiya,
dictionary will completely vanish … Here, Uzbeks may lose their genetic
code“ (06.2004; 01.2004). This, in turn, endangers the nation as such, for
only when hearing national intonatsiyas
the people feels itself as one body, one soul [bir tanu bir jon] … [A] per-
son, in whose heart have settled national intonatsiyas, more quickly un-
derstands the value of the nation, begins to sense a feeling of national
pride [milliy iftixor tuyg’usini] … Nowadays intonatsiyas have come to
be “transported” mostly by the field of estrada. As this is so, for the sake
of strengthening the priorities noted in our national ideology we have
to intensify the national spirit [milliy ruhni] in estrada music … In other
words, what is needed exactly is an Uzbek estrada that is rich in bril-
liant, beautiful, unique melodies [ jilvador, tarovatli, betakror navolarga
boy], in an oriental/eastern style [sharqona].
(2003: 24f.)
Thus, in the scholarly approach to the sonic workings of estrada, music’s im-
pact rests ultimately in its semantic charge – beyond, or rather maybe below,
the level of lyrics. Like an orator who uses rhetorical formulas, in its ideal
form as milliy estrada, estrada speaks to people through phonic tropes, na-
tional intonatsiyas which, via the meanings encoded in them, tell them about
their national idea, reproducing, asserting and uniting them as Uzbeks.26
What remains unclear, however, is why a decisive event such as independ-
ence and the radical socio-political change it entailed are, on the one hand,
270 Mobilising estrada
said to certainly need new intonatsiyas, but then are considered to be best and
necessarily represented by already existing ones.27 Even within the frame-
work of the intonatsiya theory, enthusiasm for Turkish and Iranian estrada
could be explained perfectly well by the often proclaimed new openness of
the country, such that the integration of their intonatsiyas into the current
dictionary would just be a particularly adequate expression of, for example,
of feelings of cosmopolitanism or pan-Turkism among the population.
In most conversations and interviews, this enthusiasm was explained by
a lack of “culturedness”, a deficiency in musical knowledge and aesthetic
refinement among the population – either because people were said not to
have reached this level yet or because it was claimed they had regressed from
the previously higher level of the Soviet era. This situation, in turn, was
often cited as demanding attention – from the government, intellectuals,
composers and singers. A composer phrased it in the following way:
Art should lead the people. Art should heighten the level of the people.
You know, the level of thinking, of culture, of psychology, the under-
standing of the world … But here, things are this way: Music follows
the people. What do the people demand? They have a low level. You
see, music follows the people. It fulfils the demands of the people, but it
should be the other way round … One has to write such music so that
the people grow. That among the people, aesthetics grow, [that] in a
listener, culture grows.
(12.2003; 08.2004)28
This is a period of intensive search for those right paths, that will,
maybe, subsequently give such already standard results of quality. At
this moment, we are searching, we are still searching … We are very
young. These years can, of course, help us orientate ourselves in search-
ing for the right path. And we will not blindly test ourselves in this or
that direction. No, in comparative analysis [we will] find out what gives
more results. If there is to be such selective choosing, I think, we will not
be worse than others.
(12.2003; 02.2004)
This final phrase, not be “worse than others”, already hints at the fact that
the presumed workings of milliy estrada are not confined by Uzbekistan’s
borders, but also reach beyond the country’s limits. And indeed, arguments
regarding the necessity of forging milliy estrada often included the favoura-
ble impression that would be made abroad by the genre in this – and only in
this – form. In the field of estrada, as in many others, Uzbekistan is certainly
what John Heathershaw has termed a “global performance state” (2014). I
will conclude this chapter by looking at what Uzbek milliy estrada is sup-
posed to effect abroad.
The country that was most often cited as having successfully forged an em-
blematic estrada and that could serve as a role model was Turkey. But there
were also others, according to this musicologist:
Well, Turkish estrada – that is immediately clear, when you hear İbra-
him Tatlıses, he exudes Turkishness. So, Turkish estrada has a face. The
same you can say of Indian estrada. Iran – the same. And this tendency
they want here, too, so that Uzbek estrada would have a face, a national
identity, as they say … Arabs, they have a recognisable estrada … India,
Turkey, Egypt. You hear them at any place in the world, and you will
recognise their origin.
(11.2005; 08.2004)
a purely Soviet question. There are tens of thousands of works from the
Soviet era on questions of the national and the international. When I
was studying at the Conservatory, once a lecturer asked whether Chopin
was a national composer. Everybody said yes. Then he asked whether
he was also an international composer. The answer was also yes. Then
he concluded, that now everything was clear about Chopin. Everybody
was so fed up with these questions.
(05.2004)
Musical ambassadors
Besides continuities with regard to the overall task, there are also continu-
ities with regard to the role singers are supposed to fulfil when touring out-
side Uzbekistan. In line with the importance assigned to milliy estrada for
negotiating Uzbekistan’s standing on the international level, government of-
ficials and staff of other state institutions in particular, but also some jour-
nalists and singers themselves, perceive performances abroad not as private
excursions and exhibits of individual talent, but more as official missions in
cultural diplomacy, regardless of who is organising these trips and where the
concerts take place.
Whether an estrada artist was considered worthy of representing Uzbek-
istan beyond its borders, whether her or his repertoire was suitable for such
purpose, whether she or he had behaved in a dignified – or at least somehow
proper – manner at these occasions: these were frequent topics of discus-
sion during my fieldwork, particularly in state institutions. Success abroad,
such as, when Sevara Nazarkhan was awarded a BBC Radio 3 Award for
World Music in 2004, was usually claimed as a recognition for Uzbekistan
that would raise the country’s prestige as a whole, as if there were a reyting
system among the global community of nation states. Bad behaviour, on the
276 Mobilising estrada
other hand, such as when a singer was accused of stealing cosmetics during
a trip to Germany, was condemned as reflecting badly on Uzbekistan’s in-
ternational image.
Estrada singers react differently to being stylised as musical ambassa-
dors. Some voluntarily accept the responsibility of acting as cultural repre-
sentatives of their country, seeing it as part of their duty towards the nation
and state in line with their self-perception as engaged artists – or even as a
prestigious privilege. Others accept this role grudgingly, but would actually
endorse it if the government treated them as it treats real ambassadors – that
is, paid them for their services – or at least organised their concert trips
abroad. And a few dismiss the expectation to perform the state abroad as an
absurd infringement on their artistic individuality and freedom.
For the majority of the period of my fieldwork, the Uzbek government
had, in fact, little control over estrada singers’ foreign activities and this
situation was a constant source of discontent for O’zbeknavo. While a 2011
document by the Council for the Development and Coordination of Na-
tional Estrada Art demands artists present their invitation and “have a
conversation” [suhbatdan o’tkaziladi] at O’zbeknavo before trips abroad, as
long as artists possessed an exit visa, there was basically no legal means to
keep them from travelling wherever they wanted. O’zbeknavo did, however,
have the opportunity to act on the artists’ return, and as it did sometimes
resort to sanctions, artists often preferred to keep concert trips secret.34
Between 2008 and 2016, however, O’zbeknavo’s grip on artists’ activities
abroad seems to have considerably tightened. When I returned to Tashkent
in March 2016, several artists and other contacts from the estrada scene told
me that singers’ journeys abroad had become closely monitored – at least
those of singers above a certain level of reyting. According to these accounts,
if singers tried to cross Uzbekistan’s borders, whether for concerts, wedding
engagements or completely private reasons, border guards would phone
O’zbeknavo and ask whether the trip was authorised. The producer of a
well-known male singer became very agitated when talking about this issue:
“For all trips abroad, estradniki have to ask permission from O’zbeknavo
now. That’s just like in the Middle Ages, during the Inquisition! But we are
supposed not to live in the slave era any more!” (03.2016).
Due to poor foreign policy relations at that time, some countries had
become no-go areas for concerts and weddings, such as Tajikistan, Kyr-
gyzstan, Turkmenistan and Turkey. For precisely this reason, friends of
mine had not been able to engage Uzbek artists for the wedding of their
daughter in Kyrgyzstan.
It had become unmistakably clear to me in 2005, how strong – and how
consequential – this concept of estrada singers as state artists was in Kari-
mov’s Uzbekistan, when Yulduz Usmanova, estrada singer of top reyting
and good government standing at that time, sang at the invitation of then
Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov. This engagement caused an up-
roar in the government and dealt a severe blow to her career from which it
Mobilising estrada 277
would never really recover in Islom Karimov’s lifetime. The problem with
her performance was not, however, that she had accepted an invitation by a
ruthless head of state and sang for him. The problem was that the invitation
had not been filed through official channels and approved by Islom Karimov
himself. Initially Saparmurat Niyazov’s negligence, his lapse in protocol be-
came Yulduz Usmanova’s fault when she did not ask for official permission
to perform when the invitation was addressed to her p ersonally – a per-
mission that most probably would have been granted. That she, allegedly,
went to Turkmenistan on Niyazov’s private plane and, also allegedly, was
presented with expensive gifts (among them, according to some rumours,
a horse), made matters worse. As one journalist said: “You just cannot do
this, if you are a singer on the government level” (08.2006). In contrast to
2016, however, in 2005 only about a handful of singers would have been
considered official state musical ambassadors and subjected to this kind of
monitoring – and sanctioning. How the situation will change with new prior-
ities in Uzbek cultural politics under president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, remains
to be seen. But whether promoters of milliy or defenders of a more voracious
kind of estrada, when it comes to Uzbek estrada’s successes abroad, still al-
most everybody concedes that it is not in shape yet – or not in shape again –
to make a grand entrance in the global music market and function properly
as state sound abroad.
Conclusion
Islom Karimov’s national independence ideology is key to understanding
why the Uzbek government selected estrada as state sound – and what milliy
estrada is imagined to effect within and beyond the borders of Uzbekistan.
Even though questions of ideology had been an issue earlier, from the year
2000 onwards they were formed into a more fixed canon of socio-political
theory, not only codifying the country’s history, but also defining its future
path of development and determining its final destiny. Until Islom Kari-
mov’s death in 2016 they remained the central ideational foundation for his
presidential rule and government politics in Uzbekistan.
National independence ideology adopted some of the main tenets of
its predecessor, Marxism-Leninism, among them the basic principle that
socio-political development proceeds as a unilineal, orderly progress to-
wards a predetermined endpoint – now towards a democratic nation state
instead of communism, echoing classical transitology. It also kept an un-
derstanding of the role of the arts in state and society that accorded them
considerable importance. They were to be a vital part of, if not the impetus
for socio-political development, a means to enlighten and form citizens’ con-
sciousness, thus moving them along the path of progress. In the realm of the
arts, it was estrada that was considered most suitable to instil newly codified
independence ideology into the Uzbekistani population and thus became an
integral part of authoritarian state-craft. The institutionalisation of this new
278 Mobilising estrada
patriotisation initiative via music was effected in 2001 by the reorganisation
of O’zbeknavo into a government body solely responsible for estrada.
Estrada’s ability to react quickly to socio-political affairs and its popular-
ity with young people made it particularly suited for this task. At the same
time, its ability to signify modernity as well as rootedness – at least in its
imaginary ideal form as milliy estrada – qualified it to represent independent
Uzbekistan in sound more accurately than any other musical tradition in
the country. The ascription of this capability is essentially linked to the fact,
that in Uzbekistan estrada is generally not categorised as a direct heritage
from Soviet Russia, but defined as a neutral, unmarked, international genre
that can be enriched and thus nationalised with local musical substance and
which just happened to enter the Uzbek SSR via the Russian SFSR. This un-
derstanding rendered the choice of estrada as musical state insignia unprob-
lematic despite Uzbekistan’s strong de-Sovietisation policies at that time.
Under the aesthetic mandate of what I have termed nationalist realism,
milliy estrada was to sonify national independence ideology – to represent
an enhanced reality, life as slightly ahead of time, while ignoring more prob-
lematic facets of current reality. Whether sound is thought to transport tex-
tual content or to affect people more directly at a subconscious level, as
in the theory of intonatsiya, the genre is attributed immense powers and
the ability for immediate impact. And because of this political potency,
the estrada and estradniki need government direction and administration.
For if estrada is milliy, so government reasoning goes, it will instil ideology,
strengthen the nation and contribute to crafting the state; if it is not milliy,
but charged with too many foreign elements, it will jeopardise a person’s
identity and pose a threat to the nation’s progress, if not its very existence.
Also beyond Uzbekistan’s borders milliy estrada was to have an effect in the
Karimov era – as proof of Uzbekistan’s ability to master an international
art form and thus be a normal member of the global community of civilised
states, but also as a sonic emblem of the independent country as a modern,
but rooted, nation state.
On the whole, however, questions of cultural diplomacy abroad were sec-
ondary to concerns about milliy estrada’s workings at home in the Karimov
era. But what actually were the results of these imaginary workings? I will
conclude this book by looking at the outcome of 15 years of elaborate es-
trada administration in Islom Karimov’s Uzbekistan.
Notes
1 Lit.: “my holy Uzbek” [muqaddas O’zbegim]: this is a poetic way of saying
Uzbekistan.
2 Lit.: “to my father and my mother I am truly linked via the liver” [ jigarband
iman]: “linked via the liver” is an expression for an extremely close and affection-
ate relation.
3 Like other heads of state, Islom Karimov had staff to aid him in writing speeches
and other texts or to ghost-write them for him. This means that much of what
Mobilising estrada 279
was published in his name was in fact the outcome of a collective effort – with or
without his personal involvement (see Megoran 2017b: 27). While perhaps inter-
esting in itself, this fact is of minor importance here; what counts in this context
is the attributed authorship.
4 Islom Karimov most concisely expounded national independence ideology in
Karimov (1998; 2000a; 2000b; 2002). The most detailed analyses of Uzbekistan’s
national independence ideology in western scholarship are those of Andrew
March (2002; 2003), Nick Megoran (2008b) and Sarah Kendzior (2014).
5 Conservatory staff often complained to me about the great share that non-
musical subjects such as national independence ideology, spirituality, Uzbek
history and Uzbek language had in the overall result of entrance exams. To their
dismay, this, in their view, unbalanced scheme of evaluation often left them
with students who did not have the necessary musical qualifications, while mu-
sically talented applicants who lacked proficiency in these subjects did not have
a chance (unless they resorted to unofficial payments). Expertise in the same
non-musical subjects, however, was a prerequisite for Conservatory staff, too,
who, at least by 2016, had to regularly take and pass an exam, a so-called attesta
tsiya, which tested, among other things, proficiency in Uzbek and independence
ideology. Some pedagogically interested estrada singers did not even bother ap-
plying for Conservatory positions because of the prospect of having to sit these
attestatsiyas.
6 There actually has been an extensive debate on the ethnogenesis of the Uzbeks
and their subsequent formation into a nation. See Ilkhamov (2006a; 2006b) and
the diverse responses to his paper on the “Archaeology of Uzbek Identity” in a
special issue of Anthropology & Archaeology of Eurasia in 2006 (see also Finke
2014).
7 Islom Karimov’s most detailed writing on spirituality is High Spirituality: An In-
vincible Force (Karimov 2008), which is also the focus of some exegetic literature
(see, for example, Qarshiboev 2008). Sarah Kendzior has produced a profound
analysis of the concept of ma’naviyat within and beyond national independence
ideology. In contrast to her, who translates ma’naviyat as morality, I prefer the
translation “spirituality” in order to differentiate ma’naviyat from axloq, which
is the more common term for morality. As adjectives, both terms are often com-
bined to denote something of spiritual-moral quality (ma’naviy-axloqiy).
8 One can easily trace how Islom Karimov tried to somehow show reverence to
Islam, while at the same time being extremely uncomfortable about its role in
national independence ideology. Whereas in April 2000 he proclaimed that
“[w]e do not imagine our life without the sacred Muslim religion” (2000b: 457)
and included Islam in the list of national independence ideology’s components,
a month later he maintained that Islam should have a place in the ideology, but
that this was a “delicate and difficult” question (Karimov 2000a: 490f.). Already
in 1998, Islom Karimov had significantly restricted the activities of religious
organisations, though not only Muslim ones, with a new law on “Freedom of
Conscience and Religious Organisations”. On Uzbek policies directed towards
Islam, see, among others, Hilgers (2009: 24–37) and Steinberger (2003).
9 Nick Megoran has, however, shown that in his own analysis of the Andijon
events, Islom Karimov shunned independence ideology as a framework and used
other schemes to explain what happened and to justify his reaction ( Megoran
2008b).
10 This strategy of denying Islom Karimov’s conscious agency and individual
responsibility for the design and implementation of national independence
ideology can be seen as the main reason for the conspicuous lack of a proper
personality cult for Islom Karimov in Uzbekistan, which functioned more subtly
by proxy instead (Adams & Rustemova 2009: 1270).
280 Mobilising estrada
11 Alternatively, Islom Karimov used the metaphor of vaccination in this context;
this is what the term “ideological immunity” in the first quote of this section re-
fers to. Karimov’s successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, took up this metaphor in one
of his February 2017 decrees, where he writes about the “strengthening of the
immunity to alien ideas of radicalism and extremism” (UP-4956 2017). To avoid
a metaphor confusion, I will stick to the image of the liquids.
12 The image of Uzbekistan as a thoroughly endangered country has also been re-
produced in western scholarly discourse (see, for example, Everett-Heath 2003).
In western public discourse, however, Uzbekistan is perceived more as a danger-
ous place.
13 Socialist realism has been quite widely studied, also outside of the Soviet Un-
ion and socialist eastern Europe. For concise overviews, publications from the
1970s are particularly useful, such as Fox (1977), James (1973) and Laing (1978:
20–45). For an introduction to socialist realism in music, see Redepenning (2008:
301–322); for primary sources, see, in particular, Zhdanov ([1934] 1950) and
Gorodinskiy (1933). See Frolova-Walker (1998) for socialist realism in academic
music in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
14 In the 1970s, when Sadyr Vakhidov’s book was published, the term estrada still
partially denoted the art of variété performances, which did, however, include,
songs. Most of what Vakhidov described as Uzbek Soviet Song in his book would
be labelled estrada today.
15 The ability to quickly react to current events was also emphasised for estrada
when it was still understood as the art of variété performance:
One of the principal specific features of estrada … is the sharp socio-political
up-to-dateness of the treated subjects, the topicality, the quick reaction to
events that are occurring in life. This feature has been expressed in the fa-
mous aphorism: “In the morning in the newspaper – in the evening in the
kuplet [satirical song]”.
(Anastas’yev 1976: 24)
16 An important difference between socialist realism and nationalist realism is their
take on negatively judged eras of history. Whereas in socialist realism, depict-
ing enemies and hardships of the recent past was an important topic, represent-
ing foes and miseries of the Soviet era is not a subject for nationalist realism, at
least not for milliy estrada, probably because there are too many continuities in
p ersonage – in government, with Islom Karimov leading the way until his death,
as well as in estrada. One continuity from the Soviet era, however, is the use of
military terminology, when describing the role of art or the importance of ideol-
ogy. A document from 1949, for example, explicitly stated that “to wage a deadly
war [vesti neprimerimuyu [sic] bor’bu] against any manifestations and influences
of foreign ideology [chuzhoy ideologii]” was a task of the Filarmoniya (Central
State Archive, f. 2366, o. 2, d. 43, l. 7).
17 As arranging marriages is an activity that predominantly women engage in, it is
actually not a rare occurrence in Uzbekistan that men meet their daughters- or
sons-in-law only at or after the actual wedding.
18 The educative effect of various kinds of entertainment music was an important
topic in the GDR too. See Hofmann (1999: 148), Leitner (1994: 23) and Rauhut
(1998: 343) for details and interesting quotes from original documents.
19 In a similar vein, a 1984 Moscow central committee decree urged the Komsomol
to take concerted action to make young people fill their free time with reasona-
ble activities:
It is important that young men and women do not indulge in superfi-
cial amusement in their leisure time. Their leisure time activities rather
have to serve their ideological enrichment and physical development, the
Mobilising estrada 281
advancement of high cultural interests and aesthetic tastes as well as contact
with the best achievements of our country’s and world culture.
(cited in Kretzschmar 1993: 205f.)
“Best achievements of other countries and peoples” is, as was described above,
also a staple phrase in national independence ideology.
20 See Kendzior (2007: 320) on the great power ascribed to singers in Uzbekistan –
and the great power they actually sometimes have.
21 The belief that music has the power to influence humans, to affect their
thoughts and emotions, to alter their behaviour and, ultimately, to contrib-
ute to shaping society, is, of course, neither uniquely Uzbek nor extremely
new. Even the assumption of some immediate effect, bypassing intellectual
reflection, is quite common. Various western approaches to music politics,
music education and music therapy also assume music to have an intrinsic
power and thus ability to directly affect people. Plato and Aristotle, who dealt
with music’s power in the context of politics, are an early example. More re-
cently, campaigns like “an instrument for every child” among primary school
children in Germany, hope not only to level out class-based differences in
access to music education, but also to further social competencies via collec-
tive musicking. See Keller (2007) for a short overview on presumptions about
music’s intrinsic powers. The idea that music has therapeutic power is also
widespread in Uzbekistan.
22 I also often heard musical talent being described as genetically determined, ei-
ther individually, when children of musicians embark on musical careers them-
selves, nationally, when Uzbeks or Tajiks as a whole are credited with a high
level of musicality, or regionally, when, for example, Khorezmians are praised
for their special musical skills (see Turaeva 2008: 152). Just as often, however,
musical talent was said to be a gift of god, bestowed on an individual.
23 I am grateful to Davlat Mullajonov for providing me with a manuscript of his
unpublished PhD thesis (2004) and for allowing me to quote from it.
24 For reflections on and summaries of Assafjew’s theory in English, see, for ex-
ample, Brown (1974), Krader (1990: 8f.), Levin (1984: 85ff.; 2002: 198f.) and
Zemtsovsky (1997; 2002). See Lehmann and Lippold (1976) and Redepenning
(2008: 32f.) for a short overview of the intellectual context of Boris Assafjew’s
theory, his intellectual forerunners and influences; see Assafjew himself for his
perspective on Soviet musical culture ([1942] 1967).
25 The main part of Davlat Mullajonov’s thesis is an analysis of various estrada
songs with regard to the use of Uzbek intonatsiyas and foreign elements (2004:
65–129). In his study, he follows the objectified understanding of the concept of
intonatsiya:
An intonatsiya is a short motive. It can consist of three notes, of five or of
seven sounds. It is a very small musical fragment which is characteristic of
each people; [intonatsiyas are] its codes, this is a genetic code.
(06.2004)
26 A self-professed follower of Boris Assafjew, Izaliy Zemtsovsky, claims the per-
formance of music to have a similar effect as its reception due to the workings of
intonatsiyas: “[T]he performance … is a means of ‘feeding’ on culture by draw-
ing refreshment from the cultural well” (Zemtsovsky 1997: 192).
27 Curiously, but in line with the treatment of the Soviet era in national independ-
ence ideology, Davlat Mullajonov does not write about intonatsiyas that became
part of the Uzbek intonatsiya dictionary in the Soviet era or the fact that estrada
itself was originally an import, just like rap and reggae are now. Soviet intona
tsiyas were, however, still a topic in musicology in the late Uzbek SSR (Yusupov
1990: 12).
282 Mobilising estrada
28 In 1956, at a meeting of the Filarmoniya’s section of soloists in Tashkent, similar
concerns were voiced: “The education of taste. Who takes care of the educa-
tion of tastes? No one. We walk on the lead of a shoddy listener [nizkoprobnogo
slushatelya]. We do not have educators” (Central State Archive, f. R 2366, o. 2, d.
140, l. 3).
29 In Soviet era parades, where participants from all other republics were present-
ing their “national dress”, Russians often did not, but rather incarnated the uni-
versal in plain clothes or uniforms, “representing the essence of the Soviet Union
itself rather than a specific ethnic group” (Rausing 2004: 132). This was also in
line with the “elder brother” image of the Russians already being ahead of the
other Soviet national or ethnic groups.
30 With regard to Tajikistan, Federico Spinetti writes that “Both European art
music and pop music … have arguably remained steadily perceived as Europe-
derived and perhaps Europe-oriented traditions” (2005: 187). In Iran, as Laudan
Nooshin maintains, it is instead academic music that has stayed immune to be-
ing chastised as a western and thus unwanted import, while pop music has a
much more problematic position in this respect (2005: 268).
31 In the 1950s, Yugoslavia turned to jazz and popular music in international cul-
tural diplomacy for similar reasons – to present the country as modern and pro-
gressive (Vuletic 2008: 871).
32 This bid to master presumably international music forms is rarely endorsed,
however, by international audiences who are more eager to hear folk and clas-
sical music than proof of Central Asians’ proficiency in academic music and
estrada (see Rouland 2007: 214f.). Also members of the diplomatic corps in Tash-
kent were regularly astonished by the prominence of estrada in Uzbek cultural
diplomacy.
33 See Turino (2000) for a detailed study on how the demands of, as he terms it,
localism and cosmopolitanism played out in the history of creating a national
music in Zimbabwe.
34 Keeping trips abroad secret conflicted, however, with artists’ desire to present
themselves as being internationally popular, and as quite a few used stays in
foreign countries to shoot video clips (see Video I.8, for example), their travels
usually became known. Disguising them as private holidays was one way out of
this dilemma. Vice versa, when not expecting problems with O’zbeknavo, holi-
day tours or invitations to weddings abroad were often blown out of proportion
and portrayed as concert engagements in a move to fake fame.
Exiting estrada
Efficiency may indeed have been a reason behind the decision to merge the
two associations into O’zbekkontsert, but a strong general trend towards
centralisation seems to be more important. Other regulations leave no doubt
about this: The association O’zbekmuzey and the O’zbekteatr fund are to be
liquidated, their functions and properties handed over to the Ministry, the
responsibility for all music schools will transfer from the Ministry of Public
Education to the Ministry of Culture, as will the two large concert halls in
Tashkent, Independence Palace and Turkiston Palace, which up until now
had been managed by the Tashkent city administration.
This move towards centralisation had already reached O’zbeknavo back
in 2014, when it was made part of the Ministry of Culture and Sport and
its director tasked with overseeing other sub-institutions, too. This earlier
re-structuring measure strengthened O’zbeknavo’s position – and elevated
estrada’s status. The steps to be taken now, however, seem to herald a sharp
decline. O’zbeknavo personnel might profit in terms of power and reach if
chosen to staff the much larger entity O’zbekkontsert. But the dissolution of
a separate state institution solely dedicated to estrada and the dilution of a
separate fund for its development certainly seem to indicate the end of the
genre’s prominence in politics.
Overall, however, the decree points to a strong continuity with ideas about
culture and its role in society in Karimov-era Uzbekistan. In fact, the new
tasks it assigns to the Ministry of Culture widely echo – or even quote verba-
tim – the culture-specific tasks laid down in similar decrees in 2004 and 2005
for the Ministry of Culture and Sport. As before, the Ministry’s duties c entre
on “national cultural and spiritual heritage”. The population’s cultural –
now also spiritual-moral – level should be raised by means of “exposure to
the epitomes of national and world culture”; and the opportunities offered
by the various institutions in the field of culture should also be used for the
“education of spiritually mature [earlier: spiritually rich], intellectually de-
veloped and highly cultured personalities”. Just as it was supposed to have
already been doing for over a decade by this point, the Ministry is to ensure
that cadres are prepared “in the spirit of national and pan-human values,
humanism and high morality” and that citizens’ “aesthetic and cultural
Exiting estrada 285
needs” – now also “intellectual needs” – are fulfilled, among other means,
by “mass-cultural events”. Another responsibility, as before, is the “all-
sided support for creative collectives in the creation of works that express
the brightest pages of the nation’s history and its contemporary life, of the
free democratic development of the country” (UP-4956 2017).
Besides the astonishing overlap with previous legal documents of this
kind, there is one novelty that is not just a reformulation, but actually de-
serves to be labelled as something new. This is a task, which sounds as
if it has been taken straight out of one of Islom Karimov’s books: “the
strengthening of the immunity against the foreign ideas of radicalism and
extremism”. A striking difference from the 2004 and 2005 decrees, how-
ever, is provided by the complete absence of the phrase “idea of national
independence”, which was a recurring trope in these earlier official docu-
ments and had always denoted the conceptual core from which all activities
should spring. A similar formulation is used only on one occasion, when the
Ministry is ordered to implement “enlightening work for the further deep
rooting of the idea of independence in national consciousness” among the
population, in particular among young people. At the same time, Shavkat
Mirziyoyev’s February 2017 government policy statement act “On the Strat-
egy of Actions for the Further Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan”
(UP-4947 2017) points to a major re-evaluation of national independence
ideology by demanding the “developments and realisations of fundamen-
tally new ideas and principles for the further steady and advancing develop-
ment of the country”.
Should national independence ideology, as formed by Islom Karimov, in-
deed vanish or be substantially altered as an overarching ideational frame-
work under president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, this would most certainly affect
estrada’s significance for the project of governing. And one might even read
this decree to be hinting at the new priority in culture politics under the new
president. The second to last passage of its commentary assigns the new
“Ministry of Culture together with other interested ministries and institu-
tions” the following task, declared to be of “vital significance for the fur-
ther development of culture”: “to develop … a medium-term programme of
measures for the further development of the national dance of Uzbekistan,
which envisages the revival and careful preservation of the rich historical
traditions of Uzbek dance …” (UP-4956 2017).
The task’s phrasing sounds very familiar: Since the Soviet era, “further
development” has been a staple in official rhetoric for announcing coor-
dinated measures of state direction, not just a commentary on expectable
future processes without additional government involvement. After all, the
resolution that initiated estrada’s rise to prominence on the political agenda
in 2001 was called “On the further development of estrada-song art”.
It is too early to tell whether national dance will indeed be the new focus
in culture politics, as the decree has not been implemented yet. It is also too
early to tell what will happen to Uzbek estrada. But it is more than evident
286 Exiting estrada
that this point in time is exactly the right one in which to take stock of and
assess the outcome of the age of estradisation, the 15 years of concerted es-
trada politics under president Islom Karimov between 2001 and 2016.
Leaving hearts and minds out of the picture and turning our attention to a
different part of the body, however, brings us back to less speculative ter-
rain. Karimov-era estrada politics certainly managed to fill many people’s
ears with sonified patriotism – particularly through what I earlier termed the
supreme discipline of milliy estrada: vatan songs, songs about the homeland.
For outside observers, vatan songs are certainly the most conspicuous
part of the total repertoire of Uzbek estrada. For me, they were part of
the initial fascination for my research topic and they have also caught the
attention of other scholars, who have pointed to their important position
in the overall Uzbek soundscape. Dick Martin, for example, writes that
“[n]one of these songs are oddities occurring on the fringe of the Uzbek musi-
cal scene” (2001), while Tanya Merchant claims that they “occupy a significant
portion of radio and television broadcasts” (2006: 216), and Nick Megoran
states that “[s]tructurally, the government has fashioned an environment
that ensures maximum exposure of suitable music” (2005: 564), particularly
through its radio and TV policies. On the one hand, these observations seem
correct. As I have detailed in previous chapters, the Uzbek government un-
der president Islom Karimov expended considerable effort to ensure that
vatan songs were produced in significant numbers and showed a great in-
terest in disseminating them, even if they did not always succeed in this.
Exiting estrada 287
These songs are part of Independence Day and Navro’z celebrations as well
as minor concerts, and competitions spilled out thousands of them every
year. Every solo concert I watched included at least one vatan song in the
programme, and they were a regular feature on radio and TV, particularly
around Independence Day – not to mention the repeated broadcasts of the
holiday spectacles themselves. Moreover, the likelihood that one would,
while walking through the Conservatory, hear someone practising a vatan
song in one of the estrada rooms was rather high. After all, vatan songs are
a set component of the curriculum for students in the vocal department and
part of government exams for the BA and MA level.
While there can be no doubt about the unmistakable presence of vatan
songs in the public soundscape, I would not agree that they “occupy a sig-
nificant portion of radio and television broadcasts” and have thus reached a
degree of saturation that would justify to speaking of “maximum exposure”.
In fact, whenever I paid special attention to radio and TV play during my
field stays in Tashkent, I was always astonished anew to hear and see how
comparably little airtime they received – not counting the weeks around
Navro’z or Independence Day, which featured a heavier rotation of vatan
songs. There is no official broadcast quota for them and, as described ear-
lier, O’zbeknavo never managed to find a way to actually control playlists.
There are instead, as one radio journalist told me, “expectations” and some-
times calls “from above”, but the stations deal with these expectations very
differently.
When I talked to one journalist in 2005, she related that there were dis-
cussions about increasing the number of vatan songs in the programme at
the FM station where she worked, as various members of staff themselves
considered them necessary and useful. But my interlocutor had some doubts
about their effect: “I do not think that this will ideologically pay off so
much. Not 100 per cent. But if this were at least 50 per cent, it would already
be good” (11.2005). Another radio journalist took the reverse approach:
KK: Someone told me, I cannot remember who, that for vatan songs singers
don’t have to pay for promo [for being played on the radio].
X: No, that is not true.
KK: This means they have to pay?
X: If it is a vatan song, I do not play it at all … I may play it, if it is good, but
if it is just a hymn, like a hymn, and bad, [I will not] … Because I know
that people will not listen.
(10.2005)
Despite interventions like this to limit the number of vatan songs – or at least
unappealing vatan songs – on air, it is virtually impossible in Uzbekistan to
avoid them completely. But people do find ways to reduce their exposure.
Tanya Merchant, for example, witnessed instances where acquaintances
just turned off the radio or switched stations when a vatan song was on air
288 Exiting estrada
(2006: 216). Those people I met who did not like vatan songs at all usually
did not like Uzbek estrada in general and tended to listen to completely
different music – on Russian language stations, internet radio and TV, to
downloaded music or pirated foreign CDs. Most of my interlocutors, ac-
quaintances and friends, however, were not absolute in their rejection, as
this composer assumed:
I do not write any vatan songs any more, now, with the situation in the
country like this. If I earned 500 dollars for one, I would do it again. Or
if there were a war. They spit on these songs.
(08.2004)
Rather, they differentiated quite clearly within the category of vatan songs.
Their opinions often resembled what this recording engineer describes:
Yes, they want, they want [to propagate ideology via vatan songs]. But
they do not understand that by this, on the contrary, they make it worse.
Because people are already fed up [lyudyam uzhe nadoyela] with all this
ideology, to be honest. People see one thing, and they hear another.
They tell them that here everything is good, we already developed so
[much], everybody is free. But they see something else. And people are
tired. And when they sing to them about this, they, on the contrary,
will feel stressed and get very angry [nervnichayut i zlyatsya]. And those,
who sit there [above] either do not see this or do not understand this.
But by this, they make everything worse, I think. It must not be like
this … “my head of state [yurtboshim]”, “thanks to our head of state
[yurtboshimizga rahmat]” – this is very frequent and has a very bad in-
fluence on the mood of the people … Where there is no mention of our
leadership, there are such songs, yes, [they are better]. But now [after the
Andijon events in May 2005], they are also listened to a bit differently.
Now, [at] any mention of “homeland”, there are these ambiguous atti-
tudes [neodnoznachnyye otnosheniya].
(09.2005)
Direct accolades for the president did, indeed, not go down well with anyone
I met; reactions to songs about nation or country, the other core topics of
the category of vatan songs, on the other hand, varied considerably. If these
songs caused displeasure, the reason usually had less to do with their topic
and more to do with the perception that their composition was primitive,
the content banal and the performance listless. And due to the abundance
of this type of displeasing songs, some people I talked to considered them a
kind of aural insult. A female friend who accompanied me to the gala con-
cert of Vatanim Manim in 2004, was quite shocked, when confronted with,
what to her was an almost endless sequence of uninspired and unappealing
vatan songs:
Exiting estrada 289
You should sing about your people, about your homeland. This is right
and normal. But not like this … You have to make an effort, you have
to do it well. Like this, it is a shame – for your country, for your people
and for yourself.
(08.2004)
For her, these – and many other songs – certainly lacked the potential for
“genuine popularity as prior to policy, giving politics the passion without
which it falls upon deaf ears” (MacFadyen 2002b: 129), and this was a view
widely shared by others. Equally widely shared, however, was the opinion
that there are vatan songs which positively move people. And some people I
spoke with did indeed talk about how they were moved by them.
Interestingly, those songs most frequently mentioned as being moving
all stem from around the year 2000, when the image of Uzbekistan as a
country engulfed by dangers was shaped. Whenever someone described
how particular vatan songs had affected her or him, there was never talk
of a purely celebratory mood, a kind of rah-rah patriotism, but instead,
they almost always recounted feeling a mixture of pleasure and pain [dard /
bol’]. And never did I meet anyone who felt embarrassed about her or his
sentiments – or about a kind of sentimentality, which Martin Stokes ex-
plored in his study of cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music (Stokes
2010; see Herzfeld 2016).
Feeling a mixture of pleasure and pain was most often – and most clearly –
articulated with reference to the most popular vatan song throughout the
period of my research and across generations. This was Sevara Nazarkhan’s
“You Are My Grand One, My Homeland” [Ulug’imsan Vatanim], based on
a poem by Muhammad Yusuf. First performed on Independence Day 2001,
it was still very much cherished in 2016 and regularly moved people to tears
(Video C.1). A well-known male singer probably best described the song’s
impact, recounting how he himself was affected by it, before moving on to
talk about vatan songs in general:
I myself hear this song and cry to that song. In me emerges love for the
homeland, you know, after these songs. I myself listen to these songs
with pleasure, no one forces me. Occasionally I think, I could sing about
the homeland, too. Occasionally, if you come forth and sing about the
homeland, there are songs, which the people love … There are these
songs, that really [come] from the soul and [enter] the soul.
(09.2005)
I talked to this singer only a few weeks after I had found myself so deeply –
and completely unexpectedly – moved by Feruza Djumaniyozova’s song
O'zbegim (see Chapter 7). I still remember this interview well as the first
time in my research that I could really relate to the pleasure in propaganda,
to the affective power that people accorded to vatan songs, and see their
290 Exiting estrada
potential ability to “give politics the passion without which it falls upon deaf
ears” (MacFadyen 2002b: 129). But even with the passion of estrada, Uzbek
politics may sometimes still fall upon deaf – or rather distorting – ears.
On several occasions, I encountered clear misunderstandings in the re-
ception of vatan songs. In 2005, when I was watching the Independence Day
spectacle with some students on TV, for example, several wondered, why
one of the estrada artists, at a celebration for a modern nation state, sang
about a sultan who cares about his people. They were not so sure that Is-
lom Karimov would be pleased to hear that. They had missed completely
that this was meant as a metaphor for Islom Karimov’s current rule of the
state – and, compared to some of the other lyrics featured on Independence
Day and Navro’z, this particular metaphor was one of a rather simple kind.
When talking a few days later with a cultural manager about the Independ-
ence Day concert, she was still in shock about Gulsanam Mamazoitova’s
final song Uzbekistan:
How could she dare to do that! Stand in front of the president and sing
“Do not teach me how I should live”. I mean, no one can do that. But
as a young woman. That’s worse. She must be crazy. She will get into
real trouble.
(09.2005)
Gulsanam Mamazoitova did not get into trouble. On the contrary, as men-
tioned in Chapter 3, she was awarded the title Distinguished Artist the fol-
lowing year. After all, she was not addressing Islom Karimov as herself; she
was personifying Uzbekistan talking to Europe in the context of deteriorat-
ing relations with the European Union during the months directly following
the Andijon events, which had been met with dismay in the west and harmed
diplomatic relations at least for a short time. This performance, of course,
was to the liking of president Islom Karimov.
I always enjoyed these misinterpretations, as they often offered glimpses
into alternative forms of hearing and doing the state, but I found other con-
versations even more interesting, such as this one, which I once had with a
friend of mine from the estrada scene. We were driving through Tashkent at
night and a vatan song came on the car radio:
KK: What do you think about when you hear vatan songs?
X: I think about my homeland.
KK: Really?
X: Yes! I think about the Soviet Union. Because this is my homeland.
(11.2005)
When choosing estrada to be the sound of the nation and making it an in-
tegral part of its patriotisation policies and thus state-crafting, the Uzbek
Exiting estrada 291
government, I would suggest, succeeded quite well in claiming the genre to
be a universal and neutral art form, free from any Soviet birthmark and thus
the stain of being a “survival of the past”, one that just needed to be thor-
oughly nationalised into milliy estrada to function as the sonic representa-
tive of independence. It might not have devised cogent criteria for excluding
Uzbek SSR estrada and its proponents from a generally very anti-Soviet his-
toriography, but this indeterminacy at least left enough room for a positive
evaluation of estrada’s socialist history, which is widely cherished among
the population. At the same time, the parallels between national independ-
ence ideology and its socialist predecessor, M arxism-Leninism, in terms
of their ideas about unilineal evolution, artistic commitment and aesthetic
paradigm certainly facilitated the adaptation of estrada and estrada artists
to this new framework of socio-political development and made estrada pol-
icies and administration seem normal to many people involved. In addition,
estrada’s potential to signify rootedness as well as modernity, which it had
already proven in the Soviet era, was ready to be exploited, even though
both concepts required some modifications in their meaning.
But what the Uzbek government seems to have failed to take into account
when it started its concerted estrada politics in 2001 is the history of the
word vatan itself. At least since 1954, which is the earliest documented use I
have been able to find, songs about the homeland have been a fixed item on
the lists of musical works that were regularly commissioned from compos-
ers in the Uzbek SSR. Consequently, titles like “Grand Homeland” [Ulug’
Vatan], “Homeland” [Vatan], “My Country” [Yurtim], “My Homeland My
Dear Mother” [Vatanim Jonim Onam] were, if not nearly as frequent as they
are today, still a staple of musical life. The crucial difference was, that all
these songs did not reference the Uzbek SSR, but the Soviet Union.
In line with this, in 1976, Dadakhon Hasanov, as a representative of
the genre lirika, caused an uproar at a concert in Tashkent, when he sang
a song entitled “My Homeland“ [Vatanim], but with the following lyr-
ics: “Turkistan is my original homeland, Temur is my ancestor, world-
conqueror and sultan … My homeland conquered the world, my homeland
spread over the earth, let it sacrifice to you my body and soul” (cited in
Kendzior 2007: 323). The concert was halted, the audience was in turmoil
and Dadakhon Hasanov was sent to jail for 15 days for causing public
disorder (ibid.). What had then been a source of trouble, would have been
a perfect vatan song in the age of estradisation – apart from some wor-
ries, perhaps, that Turkiston could be read as a problematic appeal to
pan-Turkism.
For older generations in Uzbekistan, starting with those who have spent
only their childhood in the Uzbek SSR, vatan is at the very least a highly
ambiguous term, and for some, it is still fully charged with a very differ-
ent meaning of homeland than the one promoted by the government of
independent Uzbekistan. I would claim that those many continuities in
292 Exiting estrada
estrada’s conceptualisation that allowed it to be installed as state sound
also contributed to this blurring of meaning – to say nothing of the conti-
nuities in estrada’s personnel as such. To promote nostalgia for the Soviet
Union among the Uzbek citizenry was certainly not the intent behind the
choice of estrada as the sonic insignia of Uzbek independence under pres-
ident Islom Karimov. But it was one of its effects, and whether this should
count as a failure or a success, is in the eye – or maybe rather the ear – of
the beholder.
References
Legal texts
MinKult 2008. REGULATIONS on the Republican contest for best songs and
musical works on the topic ‘The Homeland is singular, the Homeland is unique’
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Min-Kult-203 2013. On the establishment of regulations about the procedure
of granting a one-off tour-concert certificate [Bir martalik gastrol-kontsert
308 References
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NN-I 2010. The system of granting a one-off tour-concert certificate for organising
concerts and show events on the territory of the Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston
Respublikasi hududida kontsertlar va tomosha tadbirlarini tashkil etish uchun bir
marotabalik gastrol-kontsert guvohnomasi berish]. Document signed by the minis-
ter of culture and sport and the chairman of the Council for the Development and
Coordination of National Estrada Art; 05.02.2010; Tashkent.
NN-II 2010. Untitled Document, signed by the deputy minister of finances, the dep-
uty chairman of the State Tax Committee and the general director of O’zbeknavo;
05.05.2010; Tashkent.
PKM-102 1997. On the strengthening of the material-technical basis of the tour-
concert association ‘O’zbeknavo’ [‘O’zbeknavo’ gastrol-kontsert birlashmasining
moddiy-texnika bazasini mustahkamlash to’g’risida]; Resolution of the Cabinet of
Ministers. No. 102; 21.02.1997; Tashkent.
PKM-116 2014. About modifications and additions to some resolutions of the Gov-
ernment of the Republic Uzbekistan … [O’zbekiston Respublikasi Hukumatining
ayrim qarorlariga o’zgartirish va qo’shimchalar kiritish to’g’risida …]. Resolution
of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 116; 06.05.2014; Tashkent.
PKM-163 1996. On the organisation of the activity of the tour-concert association
‘O’zbeknavo’ [‘O’zbeknavo’ gastrol-kontsert birlashmasi faoliyatini tashkil etish
to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic Uzbekistan.
No. 163; 26.04.1996; Tashkent.
PKM-169 2006. On the introduction of alterations into the resolution of the Cabinet
of Ministers from 25 August 2000 No. 334 ‘On the establishment of the ‘Nihol’
award for young talents’ and from 14 March 2006 No. 44 ‘On the adoption of
the decree about the ‘Nihol’ award for young talents by the President of the
Republic Uzbekistan’. [Vazirlar Mahkamasining ‘Yosh iste’dodlar uchun ‘Nihol’
mukofotini ta’sis etish to’g’risida’ 2000 yil 25 avgustdagi 334-son va ‘O’zbekiston
Respublikasi Prezidentining yosh iste’dodlar uchun ‘Nihol’ mukofoti to’g’risidagi
nizomni tasdiklash haqida’ 2006 yil 14 martdagi 44-son qarorlariga o’zgartirishlar
kiritish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 169; 09.08.2006;
Tashkent.
PKM-196 2014. About modifications and additions to and also about annulling
some resolutions of the Government of the Republic Uzbekistan … [O’zbekiston
Respublikasi Hukumatining ayrim qarorlariga o’zgartirish va qo’shimchalar kirit-
ish, shuningdek ba’zilarini o’z kuchini yo’qotgan deb hisoblash to’g’risida …]. Reso-
lution of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 196; 17.07.2014; Tashkent.
PKM-216 1999. On the further perfection of the activity of the tour-concert associ-
ation ‘O’zbeknavo’ [‘O’zbeknavo’ gastrol-kontsert birlashmasi faoliyatini yanada
takomillashtirish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Repub-
lic Uzbekistan. No. 216; 04.05.1999; Tashkent.
PKM-272 2001. On the further development of estrada-song art [Estrada qo’shiqchi-
lik san’atini yanada rivojlantirish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Minis-
ters of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. 272; 26.06.2001; Tashkent.
PKM-272 2004. On the questions of the organisation of the activity of the ministry
of cultural matters of the Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston respublikasi madani-
yat ishlari vazirligi faoliyatini tashkil etish masalalari to’g’risida]. Resolution of the
Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. 272; 09.06.2004; Tashkent.
References 309
PKM-285 2001. About measures for the perfection of taxation in the sphere of
tour-concert activity and distribution of audio-videocarriers [Gastrol-kontsert
faoliyati sohasida soliq solishni va audio-video kassetalari tarqatishni takomillash
tirish chora-tadbirlari to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of the
Republic Uzbekistan. No. 285; 29.06.2001; Tashkent.
PKM-295 2011. On the improvement of the organisational tasks of the competition
for the award ‘Nihol’ for talented youth by the President of the Republic Uzbek-
istan [O’zbekiston Respublikasi Prezidentining yosh iste’dodlar uchun ‘Nihol’ mu
kofoti tanlovini tashkillashtirish ishlarini takomillashtirish to’g’risida]. Resolution
of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 295; 03.11.2011; Tashkent.
PKM-334 2000. On the establishment of the ‘Nihol’ award for young talents [Yosh
iste’dodlar uchun ‘Nihol’ mukofotini ta’sis etish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the Cab-
inet of Ministers. No. 334; 25.08.2000; Tashkent.
PKM-403 1996. On Uzbekistan’s song holiday [O’zbekiston qo’shiq bayrami to’g’ri
sida]. Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 403; 18.11.1996; Tashkent.
PKM-451 1995. On the organisation of a song competition on the topic ‘Uzbekistan
– My Homeland’, devoted to the 5th anniversary of the Republic Uzbekistan
[O’zbekiston Respublikasi mustaqilligining besh yilligiga bag’ishlangan ‘O’zbekiston
– Vatanim manim’ mavzuida qo’shiqlar ko’rik-tanlovini o’tkazish to’g’risida]. Reso-
lution of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 451; 05.12.1995; Tashkent.
PKM-498 2003. On the adoption of the regulations for licensing tour-concert activity
in the Republic Uzbekistan and beyond its borders, concert services to weddings,
anniversaries and other festivities, activity for the planning, production, record-
ing, copying and sale of vinyl records, audio tapes and laser discs [O’zbekiston
Respublikasida va uning tashqarisida gastrol-kontsert faoliyatini, shuningdek to’y,
yubiley, va boshqa tantanalarda kontsert xizmati ko’rsatishni, gramplastinkalar,
audiokassetalar va lazerli disklarni ishlab chiqish, ishlab chiqarish, yozish, ko’pay-
tirish va sotish faoliyatini litsensiyalash to’g’risida nizomlarni tasdiqlash haqida].
Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers. No. 498; 11.11.2003; Tashkent.
PP-644 2007. On the preparation and implementation of the celebration of the 16th
anniversary of state independence of the Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston Res-
publikasi davlat mustaqilligining o’n olti yillik bayramiga tayyorgarlik ko’rish va uni
o’tkazish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the President of the Republic Uzbekistan. No.
PP-644; 30.05.2007; Tashkent.
PP-653 2007. About modifications to some resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers
of the Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston Respublikasi Vazirlar Mahkamasining
ayrim qarorlariga o’zgartirishlar kiritish to’g’risida]. Resolution of the President of
the Republic Uzbekistan. No. PP-653; 13.06.2007; Tashkent.
PVS-516-XII 1992. On the list of forms of activity, which enterprises (organisa-
tions) have the right to engage in only on the basis of a special permit (licence)
[Korxonalar (tashkilotlar) faqat maxus ruxsatnomalar (litsensiyalar) asosidagina
shug’ullanishga haqli bo’lgan faoliyat turlarining ro’yxati haqida]. Resolution of the
Supreme Council of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. 516-XII; 14.01.1992; Tashkent.
UP-360 1992. On the measures of the further perfection of the organisational struc-
ture and the improvement of the activity of the ministry of culture of the Republic
Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston respublikasi madaniyat vazirligining tashkiliy tuzilma
sini yanada takomillashtirish va uning faoliyatini yaxshilash tadbirlari to’g’risida].
Decree of the President of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. UP-360; 09.03.1996;
Tashkent.
310 References
UP-1419 1996. On the establishment of the tour-concert association ‘O’zbeknavo’
[‘O’zbeknavo’ gastrol-kontsert birlashmasini tashkil etish to’g’risida]. Decree of the
President of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. UP-1419; 05.04.1996; Tashkent.
UP-1550 1996. On the song holiday ‘Uzbekistan – My Homeland’ [‘O’zbekiston –
Vatanim manim’ qo’shiq bayrami haqida]. Decree of the President of the Republic
Uzbekistan. UP-1550; 27.08.1996; Tashkent.
UP-1695 1997. On the development of dance and the art of choreography in Uzbek-
istan [O’zbekistonda milliy raqs va xoreografiya san’atini rivojlantirish to’g’risida].
Decree of the President of the Republic Uzbekistan. No. UP-1695; 08.01.1997;
Tashkent.
UP-4947 2017. On the strategy of actions for the further development of the Repub-
lic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston Respublikasini yanada rivojlantirish bo’yicha harakat-
lar strategiyasi to’g’risida]. Decree of the President of the Republic Uzbekistan.
UP-4947; 07.02.2017; Tashkent.
UP-4956 2017. On the means of further perfection of the system of administration
in the sphere of culture and sport [Madaniyat va sport sohasida boshqaruv tizimini
yanada takomillashtirish chora-tadbirlari to’g’risida]. Decree of the President of
the Republic Uzbekistan. UP-4956; 15.02.2017; Tashkent.
Vatan Yagonadir 2007. DECLARATION of the meeting of the organisational
group for conducting the Republican competition for the best song and musical
works on the topic ‘The Homeland is singular, the Homeland is unique’. [‘Vatan
yagonadir, Vatan bittadir’ mavzudagi eng yaxshi qo’shiq va musiqiy asarlar Respub-
lika tanlovini o’tkazish bo’yicha Tashkiliy guruh yig’ilishi BAYONI]. 27.06.2007;
Tashkent.
ZRU-281-I 1996. About modifications and additions to some legislative acts of the
Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston Respublikasining ayrim qonun hujjatlariga
o’zgartishlar va qo’shimchalar kiritish to’g’risida]. Law of the Republic Uzbekistan.
No. 281-I; 30.08.1996; Tashkent.
ZRU-357-I 1996. About modifications and additions to some legislative acts of the
Republic Uzbekistan [O’zbekiston Respublikasining ayrim qonun hujjatlariga
o’zgartishlar va qo’shimchalar kiritish to’g’risida]. Law of the Republic Uzbekistan.
No. 357-I; 27.12.1996; Tashkent.
Index
Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and
page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.
Abdullaeva, Nasiba 23, 88, 189 birrov 89, 93, 95, 126, 207, 227; see also
academic music 16, 25–27, 29n7, 118–19, weddings
170, 272–73 Bolalar 23
Ajdodlar Ruhi (song) 159
Amanullaeva, Dilorom 129 censorship 67, 139, 207, 210–13
alternative music 25–26, 78; see also classical music 29n7, 44; in post-Soviet
electronic music; rap; rock music era 75, 118–19, 161–64, 172, 192n6,
Al-Vakil 23 272–73; in Soviet era 16, 25–26
amateurism 19–21, 52n4, 126, 131, Cold War 8–9, 63, 71n9, 72n12
168–72, 210 College for Estrada-Circus Art 21–22,
Andijon, events of 2005 67–68, 72n10; 36, 261
and music 68, 72n11, 98, 263, 288, 290 competitions: contestants 125–28; effects
Andijonda qatli om bo’ldi (song) 72n11 of 131–35; importance of 128–31;
art music see academic music juries 129, 153n2; organisation of
artisthood: importance of reciprocity for 129–30; rationale behind 134–36;
109–12; meaning of duty and service variety and abundance of 117, 124–25,
for 104–9, 160; regional historic 131; see also Diyor Ohanglari; Nihol;
models for 108; romanticist concept of O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim; Vatan
107–8; status in society 187–91 Yagonadir, Vatan Bittadir; Yagonasan,
Asal Choy (song) 258 Muqaddas Vatan!
Asrasin (song) 2–3, 159 composers: commissioned works 83, 110,
Assafyew, Boris 266–67; see also 128, 291; in estrada administration 41,
intonatsiya 84–86, 129; professionalism 167–72; in
auditions: artists at 73–76, 85, 88–91; Soviet era 16, 20, 210, 231, 275; state
procedures 73–76, 83–90; selection awards 51; see also bastakor; Union of
committee at 73–76, 84–88; in Soviet Composers
era 200 concerts by foreign artists 27–28
authoritarianism 7–9, 250; and arts concerts on state demand: artist
9–10; normal life in 66–68; see also involvement and resentment 101–4,
national independence ideology 215–16; categories and frequency
authors’ rights 110, 228 97–101; see also licences; state
Azizkhodjaev, Alisher 74–75, 85, 113n11 spectacles
Conservatory 38, 117, 125, 174, 254,
bard song 25–26, 54, 78, 169 259; degrees and professionalism
bastakor 172–73 172–74, 204; entrance exams 279n5;
binary models, critique of 60–63, estrada curriculum 232, 240n32, 287;
83–84, 87–88 estrada department/faculty 36; estrada
312 Index
teachers and students 85, 96, 118, fieldwork 5, 29n11, 57–62, 69–70
127–29, 177–78, 189, 194n16, 279n5; Filarmoniya 15–16, 28n4, 52n4, 280n16,
in Soviet era 15 282n28
corruption see unofficial payments folk music: in the post-Soviet era 25–26,
Council for Spirituality and 75, 161–64, 174–75, 242, 272; in Soviet
Enlightenment 38–39, 50, 121, 130 era 16, 19–20
Council for the Development and Fund for the Development of Estrada
Coordination of National Estrada Art Art 40–42, 41, 283
38–42, 41, 197, 258, 276 Fund Forum Uz (FFUz) 148–51
court music see classical music
G’anieva, Rayhon see Rayhon
dance: at concerts 77–78, 92, 184, Golubyye Kupola Samarkanda
186–87, 222; in culture politics 285; at (song) 230
Nihol 116, 118–19, 153n4; in post- government involvement in music:
Soviet era 23, 36–37, 45, 153n1, 176, control vs. attention 136–41; critique
180–81, 285; in Soviet era 13–14, of 141–45, 147–48, 201, 204, 276;
16–17; see also O’zbekraqs importance of 136–41, 203; real vs.
dezhurka 89, 176–77, 202; see also ideal 141–45, 147–51; Soviet models
weddings of 147
Diyor Ohanglari (competition) 131, 134 Group of Representatives of Creative
Djumaniyozova, Feruza 23, 242–43 Support 40–41, 41, 43, 175, 199–204,
dress and styling 180, 183–86, 184, 207, 215–16
191, 232
Dubai (song) 257–58 Hamroqulov, Samandar see Samandar
Hamza see Niyoziy, Hamza Hakimzoda
economy of prestige 51, 85–86, 91–94, Hasanov, Dadakhon 72n11, 291
110, 125–26; see also reyting Hech Kimga Bermaymiz Seni,
electronic music 25–26, 229 O’zbekiston! (festival) 98
Ergashev, Davron 23, 213, 258 Hech Kimga Bermaymiz Seni,
estrada economy see economy of O’zbekiston! (song) 122, 158
prestige; shou biznes; weddings historical musicology: subversion
estrada education 21–22; see also College bias 56
for Estrada-Circus Art; Conservatory; Holiqov, Rashid see Shahzod
ustoz-shogird system honorary titles see state awards
estrada history: before Second World Hoy ishchilar! (song) 14
War 13–16; during Second World War
16; 1950s–1970s 17–19, 229–35; 1970s ideology see Marxism-Leninism;
and 1980s 19–22, 229–35; 1990s 22–23 national independence ideology
estrada instrumentalists see instrumental Ilkhom Theatre 25
estrada Independence Day see state spectacles
estrada orchestras 16–19; see also Independence Palace see Palace of the
Estrada Symphony Orchestra; State Friendship of Peoples
Estrada Orchestra of Uzbekistan Inter (VIA) 21
Estrada San’ati – Milliy Ma’naviyat Institute for Art Studies 156, 161, 254
Ko’zgusi (conference) 145–46 instrumental estrada 25, 52n9;
estrada singers: status in society 187–91 performers 22, 52n9, 174, 193n14, 283
Estrada Symphony Orchestra 17, 19, 22, internet 24–26, 190–91, 216–18, 258
164, 193n14 intonatsiya 231, 266–70
estradisation 4–5, 50, 78, 94, 291 Ioshpe, Alla 18
ethnomusicology: expectation of Islam 67, 185, 192n4, 249, 251; and
affirmation 61–62; expectation of classical music 16; and concept of
opposition 54–61; implicit values spirituality 159, 247, 279n8; and
53–62; music policies as research topic estrada 98, 159, 161, 185, 258–60,
54, 61; subversion bias 54–55 262–63; sufism 108, 159–60
Index 313
jazz 16–18, 25–26, 26, 29n13, 78, 229, Ministry of Culture 34–36, 42–43,
240n32 50–51, 138–45, 251–52, 283–85;
Jo’raev, Sherali 239n19 competitions 121–25, 131, 134; state
spectacles 80, 83
Kamolot Youth Movement 39, 50, Mirziyoyev, Shavkat 43, 218, 280n11,
99–100, 115, 122, 130 283–85
Kandov, Eson 18 Moskalyova, Larisa 179–81
Karimov, Islom: and estrada 141, 212; Mullajonov, Davlat 162, 266–70
publications 244; on music 141–42, Musaev, Bahodir 190
254, 259; see also authoritarianism; Musaeva, Zilola see Shahzoda
national independence ideology music as state emblem 3–5, 235, 271–75
Karimova, Gulnora 27, 148–51, 195, musical instruments: accordion 16, 164,
209, 236n1, 236–37n3 242; doira 162, 164; dutar 164, 263;
Kari-Yakubov, Muxitdin 14 g’ijjak 164, 263; karnay and surnay
Kazakhstan: as market for estrada 181, 26, 193n7; keyboards and synthesisers
183, 190, 239n24 22, 110, 164, 176, 230; nay 164;
Khorezmian estrada 163, 242–43, piano, guitar, bass and drums 16–18,
281n22 164, 167, 230; sato 164; saxophone
khudsovet see radio and TV 16–17; tanbur 162, 164; trombone 17;
Kibergi 19 trumpet 17; see also milliy estrada
Muzykal’naya Chaykhana (song) 230
Les Filles de Mon Pays (song) 230
licences 36–37, 40–43; categories 43–46; national independence ideology 244–50;
contractual rights and duties 46–48, and culture 250–53
82–83; critique of 109–12, 200–4, National TV and Radio 26–27, 38–39,
219–22; fees for 43–46; issuance 43–44, 50, 130, 208, 238n14
199–204; meaning for radio and TV nationalist realism 253–59, 270, 278,
207; monitoring and inspections 280n16
205–13; numbers of 237n10; Navo (VIA) 18–19, 21
suspension and withdrawal 46–47, Navoiy, Alisher 157
213–22 Navro’z see state spectacles
lirika 25–26, 72n11, 78, 161, 239n19, 291 Nazarbekov, Ozodbek 23, 83, 92, 262–63
Lola 23, 183 Nazarkhan, Sevara 23, 208, 289; in
lyrics: content 158–61, 213, 199, world music scene 229, 233, 239n26,
257–58, 287–92; language 156–58, 213; 274–75
misinterpretation of 80–81, 290–91; Nebo Molchit (song) 195, 236n1
production 169–73 Nechitaylo, Oksana see Sogdiana
(singer)
Mamazoitova, Gulsanam 23, 93–94, 290 Nihol (competitive award) 115–20, 117,
Mario (song) 213 125–26, 131, 137–39, 181
Marxism-Leninism 244–45, 250, Niyoziy, Hamza Hakimzoda 14
253, 291 nola (vocal ornamentation technique)
Melodies of My Dear Motherland 34, 52n1, 163, 182
(audition/competition) 73–75, 124 normality 108–12, 147, 222, 225–26; as
milliy estrada (national estrada) 155–56, approach in research 7–9, 61–62, 65,
192; and ethnicity/nationality 177–83; 67–69
impact on people 263–71; importance Novaya Volna (competition) 92,
abroad 271–77; importance within 113–14n14
Uzbekistan 253–61; musical properties Nursaidova, Ozoda 2–3, 23, 95, 159,
161–67, 266–70; power of singers 217–19
261–63; status of 202, 226–29,
232–35; see also dress and style; Omnibus Ensemble 25
intonatsiya; lyrics; musical instruments; one-off tour-concert certificates 42,
professionalism; vatan songs; video clips 49–50, 204–6
314 Index
Oriat Dono (radio station) 155, 213 recording studios 89, 96, 179, 210
orientalism/pan-orientalism in estrada restaurant singers 176–77, 176, 202, 206,
167, 182, 184, 193n9, 229–32 239n24
O’zbegim (song) 243 reyting 91–97, 102, 125–26, 173, 189,
O’zbek O’g’lon (song) 205 212–14, 275
o’zbekchilik 158, 177, 192n1 rock music: in the post-Soviet era 25–26,
O’zbekiston – Vatanim Manim 54–57, 162, 202–3, 229, 238n11; in
(competition): 120–25, 128, 130, Soviet era 19–20, 54–57
132–34, 137, 251
O’zbekkontsert 283–84 Sado (VIA) 18–19, 21
O’zbekmuzey 284 Saidzoda, Ozoda see Nursaidova, Ozoda
O’zbeknavo 32–33; closure of 283–86; Samandar 23
critique of 142–48; founding as Samarkand (VIA) 21
estrada association 37–43; founding Sanaev, Anvar 23
as tour-concert association 34–38; Sen Borsan (song) 159
involvement in organising concerts Sen Bo’lmasang, Boshqasi (song) 218
84–88, 97–104; monitoring and Setanho see Setora
inspections by 205–13; tasks 40–44, Setora 23, 159, 224–25
46–47, 49; treatment of artists sexual harassment and exploitation
102–3, 111 220–25
O’zbekraqs 37, 42, 283 Shahzod 23
O’zbekteatr 284 Shahzoda 23, 190–91, 191
Shamaeva, Muhabbat 18
Palace of the Friendship of Peoples 93, Sharipova, Rano 18
100, 115–16 shashmaqom see classical music
patriotic songs see vatan songs shou biznes 92–94, 108–12, 138,
patriotism 195, 198, 203–5, 211, 227–28; 222–26, 235
in competitions 119–20, 122–24, Shoxrux 203
133–37, 151–52; at concerts 83, 87, 90, Sintez (VIA) 21
98; importance for state awards 51, social media see internet
242; patriotisation 242–43; 251–52, socialist realism 16, 253–57, 266, 280n16
260, 277–78, 286–92 Sodiqov, Tohir see Bolalar
Petrosyan, Tamara see Tamara Khanum Sogdiana (singer) 182–83
playback performance 74, 78, 89–90, spirituality 67, 99, 119, 145, 159, 191,
175–77, 179, 200 247, 252–56; see also Council for
popular music studies: subversion bias Spirituality and Enlightenment; Islam
55–56 sponsors see producers and sponsors
power: models of 69–70, 71n8 state awards 39, 50–51, 85–86, 93–94,
producers and sponsors 108, 204, 210, 110, 125–26, 181
213–14, 223–25; see also shou biznes State Conservatory of Uzbekistan see
professionalism 19–20, 52n4, 126–27, Conservatory
142–43, 154n9, 167–77 State Estrada Orchestra of Uzbekistan
16–18, 18, 230; see also Tashkent
Qirg’izlarga (song) 219 Music Hall
Qodirov, Botir 24 state spectacles: advantages and
disadvantages of participation in
radio and TV 24, 26–27, 42, 93, 133; 88–91, 94–97; preparations for 76–77;
khudsovet 210–13; and licences 207– reception of 79–82; structure and
13; see also National TV and Radio; staging of 77–79; see also auditions;
Oriat Dono; State TV and Radio O’zbeknavo; reyting
Radius 21 257 State TV and Radio (Uzbek SSR) 17,
Rahimhon, Sardor 23 19, 22
rap 23, 25–26, 202–3, 229, 257 Studio for Estrada-Circus Art see
Rayhon 23, 205 College for Estrada Circus Art
Index 315
Tamara Khanum 14, 15 vatan songs 158–59, 227–28, 240n32,
Tarona Rekords 39, 116–17, 223–25 242–43, 260, 286–92
Tashkent Music Hall 18–19, 230, 240n29 Vatan Yagonadir, Vatan Bittadir
taxation: O’zbeknavo 34, 42; performers’ (competition) 123, 129
exemption from 43, 90, 104–105, Vatanim (song by Dadakhon
108–11, 202, 204 Hasanov) 291
The Teahouse Forever (concert) 20, 230 Vatanim (song by Shoxrux) 203
Terra Group (media company) 222–23; VIA 19–21
see also Karimova, Gulnora video clips 24–25, 27, 45–46, 159, 164,
totalitarianisation 8, 22, 63, 68, 72n12, 170, 187, 190–91; and licensing
107, 198, 237n8 200–201, 207–9, 214, 216, 257–59
to’yxona see weddings vocal-instrumental ensembles see VIA
transition 5–7, 138, 152, 203, 209,
225–26; in independence ideology We are Children of a Great Country
246, 250 (youth festival, 2016) 99–100,
The Travels of Sindbad the Sailor – or 104, 190
Oriental Fairy Tale (concert) 18, 230 weddings 22–23, 25–26, 58, 153n1;
Tungi Kapalak (song) 257 artists performing for free at 114n16,
Turaev, Yunus 18 220; artists working at 89, 93, 95,
Turkiston Palace 31–33, 35, 73–75, 100, 228–29, 235, 276; inspections
100, 146 by O’zbeknavo 206–207; structure
TV see radio and TV of estrada performances at 89, 207,
226–27; to’yxona (wedding house) 207
Uchquduq (song) 20–21 World Festival of Youth and Students 17
Ulug’imsan Vatanim (song) 289 world music 229, 233, 239n26, 267,
Union of Composers 15, 38, 121, 125, 274–76
130, 146
Union of Writers 38, 121, 125, 130, 146 Yagonasan, Muqaddas Vatan!
unofficial payments 143, 279n5; at (competition) 123
competitions 116; in the context of Yalla (VIA) 20–21, 21, 36, 229–31
concerts 85–87, 94–96; 102; in the You Are Dear and Sacred, Woman
context of licensing 200–201, 222 (concert) 1–3, 183
Usmanova, Yulduz 23, 96–97, 155, 158; Yo’ldosheva, Lola see Lola
and government 219, 276–77; in world Yurchak, Alexei 63–66
music scene 229, 239n26, 274
ustoz-shogird (master-apprentice) system Zakirov, Botyr 17, 155, 229–31, 239n26
174, 194n17 Zakirov, Farrukh 216; see also Yalla
Uzbekistan – Our Shared House (festival) Zakirova, Luiza 17, 230–31
156, 157, 177, 181–82 Zerafshon Concert Hall 117
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