Authors

David-Emil Wickström¹;  ¹ Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Discussion

Along with estrada, the VIA repertoire has been a central component of Soviet popular culture becoming a shared heritage in today’s former Soviet republics. While the VIA heydays are long past, contemporary post-Soviet popular music still contains their traces. This ranges from groups playing on the name over VIA references packaged within contemporary popular music to parodies. One source of musical and visual inspiration here seems to be the Belarusian group Pesniary.
Pesniary and Belarus point at an interesting aspect of VIA legacy: descendants of the original group - including a Belarusian state sponsored group - are still active today. This is also valid for other Soviet Belarusian VIAs such as Siabry, Verasy and Charovnitsy. While possibly a musical coincidence, Belarus is arguably the post-Soviet republic that still most closely resembles the Soviet Union and thus legacy is maybe not so surprising.
Focusing on Belarus, my paper explores the legacy of the VIAs in contemporary post-Soviet popular music. After briefly outlining how current (non-VIA) groups draw on the past and play on or repurpose the material in their own oeuvre, this paper will focus on the aforementioned still active VIAs in Belarus. Discussing the cultural and political context of post-Soviet Belarus including the ongoing post-election protests, I look at what the reason can be for the musical longevity of the mentioned VIAs.