Conference Agenda

In June 2014, the militant extremist organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded Iraq from the Syrian border, quickly seizing extensive territories and initiating a three-year conflict alongside a global campaign to defeat it. Based on its extremist interpretation of Islam, the militant group's presence was marked by the implementation of extreme violence, ethno-religious cleansing, and sexual slavery that created an atmosphere of dread and terror across the country. ISIS propagated and put into action its rigid ideology, including the strict control over women’s corporeal presence and the erasure of music. Under these circumstances, the Iraqi government called on citizens to participate in the war against ISIS while also seeking to protect them from the spread of ISIS ideologies, rendering propaganda music a vital means of mobilization and persuasion. While military propaganda music in the Arab world typically features slow tempos, deep masculine timbres, and large vocal ensembles, in this paper, I will draw attention to the creative and unprecedented characteristics of anti-ISIS propaganda music, including its dance-inducing rhythms, vivid acoustic design, and representation of female body and voice. Building on my conversations with civilians about their wartime experience of this music, I will then address how the aforementioned musical characteristics acted as a direct counter to ISIS terror.

I argue that this deviant propaganda should be viewed beyond a mere dissemination strategy, and instead, as a symmetrical schismogenesis (Bateson 1935), wherein anti-ISIS responses transgress accepted Iraqi norms of wartime music in order to work in opposition to ISIS’s extreme misogyny and suppression. Focusing on the meaning created by these aesthetic elements, I will demonstrate how these propaganda music tracks encapsulate the idea of the nation’s immortality and endurance, what I call “musical lastingness”. Finally, in tandem with the recent scholarship on the terror-responsive effects of music (Crandy 2017; Young 2019; Thomson 2023), I will situate the idea of musical lastingness within Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al. 1986) to expand on the understanding of musicking as an existential practice.

The past decade has witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian forms of governance within formally democratic frameworks across multiple political contexts. Within this reconfigured political landscape, regimes stage authority through spectacle and affect, while oppositional actors craft sonic and aesthetic forms that render dissent creatively and collectively expressive. Taking Turkey as an analytic lens, I trace a repertoire of such oppositional practices that emerged with particular intensity during the 2013 Gezi protests and has persisted since, even as the protests were suppressed and political horizons narrowed under intensifying authoritarian consolidation.

This paper asks what becomes of such oppositional forms when political transformation stalls yet their aesthetic force endures. I argue that their continued circulation signals a form of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), in which aesthetic attachment to change endures beyond its material feasibility. This reveals the contours of a broader political impasse, one in which a carnivalesque aesthetic of dissent is desperately attached to even when it can no longer promise change. Framing Turkey not as a regional exception but as a paradigmatic site, this paper advances a musicological account of political aesthetics in the twenty-first century under conditions of entrenched authoritarian consolidation increasingly recognizable well beyond Turkey.

The Estonian nation has maintained a unique relationship with music over the course of the twentieth century, from protest music to a developing interest in the documentation of folk tunes. All these strains broadly ask what it means to be an Estonian, and to sing Estonian songs. These attitudes bleed into the twenty-first century with. Plixid, an all-girl pop punk band from a small rural village who asks what it means to be not just Estonian, but Estonian women. In the first track “Blond,” lyrics depict the band’s ironic perception of the Western “dumb blond” stereotype through the singer’s self-perceived lack of intelligence, then derogatory comments the singer receives from others. The final verse calls for a release of the expectations to be any which way, loudly and proudly proclaiming: “Plixid aru ei saa!” (Plixid doesn’t understand!)

Taking “Blond” and other Plixid titles as case studies, this project explores how the image of the “ideal Estonian Woman,” has developed as a response to the Soviet regime and neoliberal turnover. This image began as conservative, portrayed as the maternal figure that protected Estonian culture from Soviet influences. As post-Soviet capitalism took root, another option arose: the blond sex symbol, sold to the West as an image of Estonia’s validity as a capitalist world power. So, the “ideal Estonian Woman” is inherently contradictory, inherently impossible to achieve as it is both morally conservative and objectifying.

I trace this image as it is subverted and maintained in early and revivalist Estonian punk spaces. Using interview materials gathered by Brigitta Davidjants, I determine that while punk spheres did upset the ideal feminine image, this upset made punk women “unviable” as Estonian woman, by the wider society and by punks themselves. This attitude colors the scene that Plixid arrives on and their attitudes towards the songs’ subject matters. Through an analysis of their lyricism, I develop a picture of gender as a performance of the intersections of individuality and national image. This image is inextricably tied to the collective memory of its people, and subverted (or perpetuated) by expressions musical subcultures.