‘People Were Waiting for That’: Protest Rap and Public Mood in Bishkek

Abstract

This essay investigates the mechanisms that led to a wave of protest rap in Bishkek in the first half of 2020. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it draws on interviews and observation to include the perspective of the musicians themselves. It finds that the protest songs were facilitated both by a context of social mobilisation and by shifts in the rappers’ terms of bargaining that eventually led them to release the songs.

‘Your dark thoughts overpower you/ Your words are lies/ How many people elected you/ Pinning hopes on you’: the song ‘Sayasat’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Politics’) by Kyrgyz-language rapper Begish,¹ released on YouTube on 8 May 2020, was a harsh critique of corrupt politicians. It was also a small revolution in the local rap scene: Begish is one of the most popular musicians in Kyrgyzstan, making ‘Sayasat’ the first protest rap to reach a wide audience outside of Bishkek and the local hip-hop scene.² A week later, Russian-language rapper Ulukmanapo, arguably the most successful Bishkek rapper at the time of writing, released his protest song ‘Vystrel v pustotu’ (Russian: ‘Blank Shot’). Together, the two tracks reached a total of one million listeners on YouTube by August 2020.

The original abstract for this essay, written in January 2020, departed from the observation that there is almost no protest rap in Kyrgyzstan, arguing for stepping beyond the dichotomy of ‘protest’ or ‘pro-regime’ in assessing the political content of popular music in the post-Soviet space. But in the following months, several rap musicians released tracks about key political issues such as corruption and violence against women, sometimes even calling for action against these abuses. A first peak was reached in May, towards the end of the pandemic-induced lockdown, with the two tracks mentioned above.

Why this sudden politicisation of rap music in Kyrgyzstan? On the one hand, protest songs are set in a specific socio-political context. They express discontent at a given situation and/or call for mobilisation, using a range of textual or symbolic means (Damodaran 2016). On the other hand, to write and release such a protest song is most often the decision of its composer(s), navigating within their ‘art world’ (Becker 1982). This essay investigates the individual and social bargaining that prefigured the release and distribution of the songs in question to define the conditions that encourage protest rap in Kyrgyzstan. It refers to discussions about protest music and artistic labour, putting the focus on the musicians themselves. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic field research within the Bishkek rap scene, undertaken between May 2019 and July 2020 for a doctoral project focusing on the economy of hip-hop music in Bishkek. The collected data include notes from participatory observation in places of music production and performance, semi-structured biographical interviews, and numerous media reports, social media posts and published or unpublished artistic ‘output’.

Music, as a set of symbols, a catalyst for emotions and group identification, can be political. It is used both by public authorities and by protesters to achieve mobilisation, whether for maintaining or for changing the social order (Street 2012; Kutschke 2016). Existing works on popular and folk music are mostly concerned with the connection of protest music to important political mobilisations such as the civil rights movement (Denisoff 1968; Eyerman & Jamison 1998) and to political opposition or minority movements, like most of the case studies in Peddie’s Music and Protest (2012). Both Peddie’s work and Kutschke and Norton’s edited volume Music and Protest in 1968 (2013) have an extended geographical focus.

Within the wider category of ‘political music’, which also includes music used to maintain social order, protest songs have been defined in different manners. One approach is to focus on their effects. As Peddie argues, ‘the music of protest is made rebellious or political by the meanings the audience imbues it with’ (Peddie 2012, p. xiii). The socio-political context is important since such music usually relates to some form of political mobilisation against the status quo (Eyerman & Jamison 1998). Other definitions look at the protest songs themselves. Against the background of US protest movements in the 1960s, Denisoff defined a ‘propaganda song’ or ‘song of persuasion’ teleologically, claiming it ‘may be conceived of as a song designed to communicate social, political, economic, ideological concepts, or a total ideology, to the listener’ (Denisoff 1966, p. 582). Such songs may call for the listener to join a protest or merely ‘criticize the existing social conditions by means of their pithy lyrics and thus help to convey the protesters’ grievances’ (Kutschke 2016, p. 267). There are no criteria of form or of genre to define protest songs, which tend to convey their message verbally. In fact, as Moore (2013, p. 389) argues, one must also take the ‘performance’ itself into account when analysing ‘performed words’. It is the second, ‘teleological’ approach that will be taken here, since the essay focuses on the decision to release what can be considered ‘protest rap’. For a working definition, and since rap is a text-intensive genre, I analyse songs that express protest in a significant share of their lyrics while also briefly discussing non-verbal aspects and the artists’ performances. By ‘expressing protest’, I mean voicing public grievances as well as calls for mobilisation.

Particularly in authoritarian contexts, protest in popular music tends to be pictured as something that arises organically out of its political environment. In her book on Estrada (a form of popular music) in Uzbekistan, Klenke identifies a ‘subversion bias’ of music studies as well as an ‘expectation of opposition in the field’. Whereas the former concerns the existing body of literature, the latter describes a biased approach by researchers themselves (Klenke 2019, pp. 54–61). It is with such a bias that I came to ask myself and certain interlocutors, ‘what about political rap?’, a question also asked by the audience in virtually all public talks on my research.³

Indeed, research on hip-hop music tends to overtly politicise the genre and to stylise it as some voice of the unheard (Schneidermann & Abraham 2017, p. 4). While most of the early academic work on hip-hop was set in the United States and generally considered the culture through the prism of its Afro-American origins,⁴ works such as Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA—the title of the seminal volume edited by Mitchell (2001)—also tend to focus on the ‘transformative power’ of this ‘organic globaliser’ (Malone & Martinez 2010). This is notably the case in postsocialist contexts, where the genre is pictured as ‘giving voice’ to minorities or expressing opposition to the dominant social or political groups (Pasternak-Mazur 2009; Ventsel et al. 2017; Poliakov et al. 2020). Miszczyński and Helbig’s volume Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge (2017) is tellingly subtitled Music, Agency and Social Change.

As for Central Asia, academic work on music has mostly been concerned with so-called traditional music (Klenke 2019, p. 53; Otan 2019, pp. 8–12), in line with nationalistic tendencies in the region that seek ‘authentic’ cultural forms from pre-Soviet times. The volume Music of Central Asia, for example, considers contemporary popular music in the region merely as a ‘future of the past’, referring to reappropriations of traditional music (Levin 2016, p. 22). Another strand of research is concerned with the way music and the arts more generally interact with nation-building and identity in the region (Sultanova 2005; de Tiesenhausen 2021). Popular music, which includes rap music, has received limited attention beyond such approaches, although a body of work is building up, notably with recent works about the negotiation of authenticity in popular music in Kazakhstan (Otan 2019) and Estrada artists in a context of state regulation in Uzbekistan (Klenke 2019). Rap music in Kyrgyzstan, finally, has been discussed in Kirmse’s work on youth and globalisation in Central Asia (Kirmse 2013, pp. 157–63) and Lebedev’s (2016) comparison of rap music in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia.

Save for some exceptions, such as Street’s discussion about why musicians may feel compelled to engage with politics (Street 2012, pp. 41–61), protest music is mostly considered for its form, content and its effects rather than its production mechanisms. The latter is precisely what this essay is about. Taking a socio-musicological approach, it considers both ‘dynamic processes, actions (Handlungen) and practice’ and ‘the conditions of action (Rahmenbedingungen des Agierens)’ (Huber 2018, p. 138). It posits Bishkek rap as an ‘art world’ in the sense proposed by Becker (1982), postulating that artistic creation is best understood as a ‘collective work’ set in a given institutional, social, political and economic context. In any case, according to Menger (2014, p. 3), ‘artistic labour is shaped by uncertainty’ and by unstable economic situations, whereby artists act more rationally than often assumed.

As I will argue, it is productive to understand the act of releasing a protest song from such a perspective. The essay therefore attempts to explain why or in what conditions hip-hop musicians in Kyrgyzstan decide to release a protest song rather than to analyse the songs and their social effects. Although not all the musicians referenced in this essay are of an age usually considered to be part of ‘youth’, their music can be understood as one of the cultural factors in which youth mobilisation is embedded (Krawatzek, this issue), serving as an echo to existing popular grievances.

After an overview of the historical developments of hip-hop music in Kyrgyzstan with a focus on the conditions in which it is produced, I will introduce and contextualise some of the ‘protest rap’ released up until August 2020 and show how it echoed the social movements that preceded and accompanied it. Finally, I will turn to the bargaining processes and the rationale that may drive a rap artist to relay messages of protest in his or her songs. The political change Kyrgyzstan went through in late 2020 is briefly addressed in an afterword.

Historical background

In his thesis about hip-hop in Russia, Ivanov draws a parallel between the socio-economic situation in the United States of the 1970s and Russia in the years following perestroika, whereby ‘a highly unstable socio-economic environment has encouraged the search for new forms of creative self-realisation’ and favoured the development of hip-hop as a ‘means of creatively reflecting the negative manifestations of reality’ (Ivanov 2012, p. 87). I could find no such equivalence in Bishkek, where early hip-hop and rap largely attracted fans who could gain access to foreign music and media. Early rappers do not mention subversion as a motive for getting involved with the genre; instead, they talk about the pleasure evoked by this new kind of music, with its beats and cyclical structure. Throughout the 1990s, the hip-hop scene in Bishkek was confined to subcultural gatherings and rap music was generally unrecorded and its audience limited to those who attended such community events.

‘Styles Tournament’, the first hip-hop festival in Bishkek in August 2000, prefigured an important wave of popularity for the musical form and its culture, fostered by new options for music distribution via radio and cassette sale networks. In a critical report on that event, a journalist from Delo № expressed her surprise at the content of rap songs: ‘They’re all about love and friendship between brothers [bratki] from different neighbourhoods [raiony] of Bishkek’. Later in the article, she lamented the participants’ lack of patriotism in view of the recent ‘Batken events’, an armed conflict between the Kyrgyzstani army and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in summer 1999, and their individualistic outlook, which she attributed to the ‘Western culture’ from which hip-hop had arisen (Saralaeva 2000). Ironically, her critique provided the impetus for the composition of the first local rap hit, released the following year: the lyrics of ‘Apake’—‘Mum’ in Kyrgyz, although most of the lyrics are in Russian—by the rap collective AP Clan, take the form of a letter by a conscript, sent to Batken, to his mother. The song was widely played on the radio and always requested during concerts.⁵ ‘Apake’ mirrored its socio-political context and the patriotic feelings it evoked; it was not a call for change but merely reflected collective memories of the events.

Rap music in Bishkek evolved along with its modes of distribution. The peak of its popularity in the 2000s coincided with similar evolutions in Russia (Ventsel et al. 2017, p. 174) and the United States (Beckwith 2016). It was the time of radio distribution, whereby the evening programme of the public radio station Radio 21-ii vek (Russian: ‘Twenty-first Century’), almost entirely dedicated to rap, considerably widened rappers’ reach, to the point where rap concerts filled the Sports Palace, the biggest concert venue in Bishkek. Popular songs by famous rap acts such as Akapella or Kiggaz were mostly a reflection of youth fantasies and the neighbourhood (raion) lifestyles described by Schröder (2017, pp. 39–46). Eventually, this ‘golden age’ of rap in Bishkek fell victim to an oversupply of new rap bands, reduced public interest and the end of the evening programme on Radio 21-ii vek in 2006. Most of the rap stars of that time ended their musical careers in their early 20s (Coppenrath 2020).

But the rap scene did not come to a halt. The next phase, running approximately from 2007 to 2015, was marked by increasing internet access, albeit often limited to local domains, as internet providers offered different tariffs for local and international traffic. A multitude of specialised music studios and labels fostered group identity and competition. This led to a prolific and very active, although mostly inward-looking, rap scene.⁶ Only a few labels, primarily Connection Pro (approximately 2008–2012), made significant efforts to distribute their music via large-scale concerts and the production of videos. It was also the time of the development of rap in the Kyrgyz language, popularised by rappers such as Dobr and the ‘ethno-poet’ Tata Ulan (though the latter has been somewhat marginal in the rap scene) (Schenkkan 2012), which eventually allowed the genre to reach an audience beyond the urban centres (Coppenrath 2019).

The rap collective Zamanbap (Kyrgyz: ‘Modern’), founded in 2013, is representative of rap music drawing on the trend for ‘ethnic nationalism’ against the background of internal migration and the changing composition of the urban population (Schröder 2017, pp. 215–16). There were three rappers behind this musical project: Bayastan, Begish and Casper (aka G-Voo). An Instagram post in 2015 by one of Zamanbap’s founders described the goals of the project: ‘Through their songs they [the three rappers] promote the main human values: love for the Homeland; respect for the elders; healthy lifestyle; to be well-educated and cultured’.⁷ In December 2015, the group released what was claimed to be the first rap album entirely in the Kyrgyz language, ‘a new standard’ in the local music industry according to a review praising its technical quality and its resonance with a growing ‘need for national self-identification’ (Omuraliev 2016).

The eponymous album Zamanbap also marks the beginning of the most recent phase in the development of rap in Bishkek, shaped by increasing access to worldwide distribution channels. With the wider availability of unrestricted internet subscriptions, local video- and music-sharing platforms such as Blive.kg, Namba.kg and specialised online forums gave way to international sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud (blocked for ‘extremism’ in 2018; see Arykbaev 2018) and, more recently, music streaming platforms.

Throughout these years, most local rap lyrics featured typical elements of global rap semantics such as ‘the streets’, self-staging, urban hardship, boasting and ‘lighter’ topics such as love or patriotism. Protest rap songs, although never completely absent, rarely reached a wide audience. One noteworthy exception is the song ‘Patriot’ (Russian: ‘Patriot’) by rapper L’Zeep, a critical engagement with the political elite under President Kurmanbek Bakiyev (2005–2010). Although it was released in 2008, and independently of the composer’s intentions, the song was later stylised as an ‘anthem’ for the ‘revolution’ of 7 April 2010 (Trilling & Schenkkan 2012). These events also led to the release of a dedicated rap sampler called ‘Sed’moe chislo’ (Russian: ‘Seventh Day’). Despite such exceptions, political upheavals merely appear as side notes in the historiography of local hip-hop. In my conversations about the evolution of the rap scene in Bishkek, mentions of the two ‘revolutions’ of 2005 and 2010 were strikingly absent, unless I brought up the topic myself, indicating that changes in political leadership barely affected the evolution of rap music.

Protest rap songs in context

Political activism has thrived for many years in Bishkek, the ‘city of two revolutions’ (Nasritdinov & Schröder 2017, pp. 110–15). However, since November 2019 protest activities have developed anew.⁸ The publication of the findings of a joint investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Radio Free Europe and Kloop.kg about large-scale and systematic smuggling and money laundering in Kyrgyzstan⁹ sparked public outrage. Reports about high-level corruption and the capture of public offices by private interests have been made before (Engvall 2014) but, this time, the protests gave a face to the problem, crystallising around the persona of Raim Matraimov, former vice-director of the Customs Service, named as a key figure in the OCCRP report. Besides corruption in the wider sense, other issues stirred social mobilisation in Bishkek, both online and offline, most of all, a significant number of reported cases of violence against women and domestic violence since the beginning of 2020 (Margolis 2020). Environmental issues were particularly prominent in winter 2019/2020, as the levels of air pollution in Bishkek skyrocketed. Finally, the coronavirus crisis further accentuated public discontent in a context of increasing economic hardship and an overwhelmed health system (Doolotkeldieva 2021).

A loosely organised social movement emerged following the OCCRP report. Three demonstrations called ReAktsiya (Russian: ‘ReAction’) brought around 1,000 people together in Bishkek on 25 November 2019, 18 December 2019 and 29 June 2020, according to media reports (Baymuratova 2021).¹⁰ Another important moment of activism was the women’s march in Bishkek on 8 March, which was violently interrupted by masked men and the police and followed by another demonstration against violence two days later.¹¹ The core demonstrators of ReAktsiya and similar events tend to identify as urban, in opposition to the perceived ‘rurality’ of the participants in other movements, such as a large-scale protest in support of the imprisoned politician Sadyr Japarov on 2 March 2020 (Filatova 2021). Such dividing lines between ‘urban’ inhabitants and ‘rural’ newcomers have been shaping collective identification patterns in Bishkek since the late 2000s (Schröder 2017, pp. 171–74). In fact, the existence of two antagonistic and hardly connected protest movements can be understood as a sign of polarisation in Kyrgyzstani society around more liberal, Russian-speaking and affluent defenders of the rule of law and more conservative, Kyrgyz-speaking and deprived ‘defenders of tradition’ on the other side (Filatova 2021). Several local rappers expressed their support for demonstrations of the first protest movement, sharing information on social media or, in rarer cases, attending in person, as I could notably observe through their Instagram stories.

Considering the interrelations between music and social movements in the twentieth century, Eyerman and Jamison showed how social movements, being cultural as well as political actors, ‘reinterpret established and shared frameworks of meaning which make communication and coordinated action possible’, thereby both creating a ‘movement culture’ of their own and serving as a cultural catalyst (Eyerman & Jamison 1998, p. 160). In its visual communication and its slogans, the ReAktsiya series of demonstrations also appeared as a cultural actor in this sense, mobilising national symbols such as the flag or the national anthem, together with elements of pop culture. For instance, Matraimov’s image and the red and black colour code of the poster of the November demonstration refer to the image Obey Giant by US street artist Shepard Fairey,¹² itself a political piece in a ‘Russian constructivist propaganda style’ that calls for people ‘to question everything’, according to the author (Schulte 2002). This image has become a globalised symbol (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1. (left) Poster for 25 November 2019 Demonstration, Including Portrait of Raim Matraimov, Based on Obey Giant, by Shepard Fairey; (right) YouTube Visual of AP's Track ‘Million’.

Unlike the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, which was ‘a singing movement par excellence’ (Eyerman & Jamison 1998, p. 171), music was not central to the ReAktsiya demonstrations in Bishkek. However, the visuals that accompany some of the rap songs on YouTube refer to symbols of the protest or to social activism. For example, the visuals for the songs ‘Million’ and ‘Uurda’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Steal’) and the video for ‘Bizdin Mafia’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Our Mafia’) all make use of the portrait of Matraimov inspired by Obey Giant (see Table 1 for a list of the protest rap songs mentioned). The track title ‘#Tajadym’ (Kyrgyz: ‘I Have Had Enough’) is a reference to a protest page on Instagram with the same name.¹³ In the video for Begish’s ‘Sayasat’, the actor playing the policeman is Bolot Ibragimov, a well-known activist against police misconduct in Bishkek.

TABLE 1 List of Protest Rap Songs Released in Bishkek, Autumn 2019–Summer 2020

Composer(s)	Title	Language	Date of release on YouTube	Topics	YouTube views (as of 15 August 2020)	URL
Belgisiz & Akai	‘Ay kim bilet?’ (‘Oh, Who Knows?’)	Kyrgyz	24 December 2019 (with a lyrics video)	Corruption, migration, ecology	13,700	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llNTyn3glgw
Biykech	‘Kyrk kyz’ (‘Forty Girls’)	Kyrgyz	28 February 2020 (video on 20 March 2020)	Violence against women, rallying	24,600	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0FP5fw6rV0
AP	‘Million’	Russian	29 February 2020	Corruption, rallying, ecology	13,400	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkGx1oSP49s
Belgisiz & Akai	‘Bizdin mafia’ (‘Our Mafia’)	Kyrgyz	1 March 2020 (video on 18 July 2020)	Corruption, migration	3,900	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8iTbRauUoU
Begish	‘Sayasat’ (‘Politics’)	Kyrgyz	8 May 2020 (with a video)	Corruption, coronavirus, rallying, migration, border issues	365,100	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VHsu82IkeU
Ulukmanapo	‘Vystrel v pustotu’ (‘Blank Shot’)	Russian	14 May 2020	Corruption, rallying, migration	682,700	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEnhhynDws4
SHXMDUK	‘Mama Freestyle’	Russian	17 May 2020 (with a video)	Violence against women, rallying	200	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcDUvPTlVNU
Aga-Ini	‘Parakor’ (‘Corrupt Official’)	Kyrgyz	29 May 2020	Corruption	10,300	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ehPGGiEoE8
Aga-Ini	‘Kechir bizdi ayalzat’ (‘Pardon Us, Woman’)	Kyrgyz	24 June 2020 (with a video)	Violence against women	4,300	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D__gVnbTHA
Bayastan, Begish & G-Voo	‘Kachan kaytat’ (‘When Will They Come Back’)	Kyrgyz	3 July 2020	Migration, rallying, corruption, violence against women	74,100	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrfiS7I_gOc
G-Voo	‘Otdavay’ (‘Give Back’)	Russian	3 July 2020 (with a video)	Ecology, rallying	8,000	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNIXuxmJKs
SHXMDUK	‘#Tajadym’ (‘#IHaveHadEnough’)	Russian/ Kyrgyz	15 July 2020	Rallying	1,300	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQupPDgz800
SHXMDUK & XSerial	‘Uurda’ (‘Steal’)	Russian	23 July 2020	Corruption	500	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPxfx8Ur6AY
Begish	‘Bir zhakadan bash’ (‘United in Harmony’)	Kyrgyz	8 August 2020	Rallying, corruption, migration	37,100	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEvCW0laorY

The protest rap songs identified in Table 1 touch upon topics also addressed in the demonstrations, first and foremost the ‘hijacking’ of the state by private interests (referred to here as ‘corruption’) (Engvall 2014, p. 69) and violence against women. Further topics echo news reports and other forms of activism encompassing ecology, border issues, the handling of the coronavirus crisis and issues relating to migration, along with more general concerns about social inequality and a lack of prospects. Some of the tracks exhort their audience to become politically active. The songs are ordered by date of their first release on YouTube. The number of views can be read as an indicator of the overall reach,¹⁴ although it should be considered that older songs had more time to build up an audience and that this number includes views from all over the world. I coded the lyrics of the songs with the thematic categories listed in italics above. The order of appearance of a topic indicates its prevalence within the lyrics.

Not all the songs were written in the social context described above. While ‘Sayasat’ and ‘Parakor’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Corrupt Official’) were written, recorded and released in April and May 2020, others are older: the first verse of ‘Vystrel v pustotu’ was written several years earlier and ‘Ay kim bilet’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Oh, Who Knows’) had been finalised for almost a year before its release in December 2019. But it is the release of a song, together with its subsequent promotion, that sets the context for its reception. Musicians may set or underline the message of their music by tying it to a certain political or societal context (Kutschke 2016, p. 265), which may also play a role in a song’s promotion.

The composers of the songs were diverse. The two members of AP (a reformation of AP Clan, including one of its original members) were in their mid-30s and had been active in the rap scene for about 20 years. Both were rapping as a hobby as they had full-time jobs. Other tracks were released by relative newcomers, mostly students. ‘Kyrk kyz’ was the first song by Biykech, the only female rapper in the sample, previously known as a dancer and activist (Wood 2020). As I learned from interviews and from a study of the rappers’ release records, SHXMDUK had been active in the rap scene for less than a year at the time of writing and belonged to the younger generation of rappers, together with Belgisiz. Bayastan, Begish, G-Voo and Ulukmanapo had been in the rap scene since around 2010 and were pursuing musical careers; they also had a more substantial fan base than the others. Akai started rapping after he moved to the United States in the mid-2000s, although he targeted an audience in Kyrgyzstan with his Kyrgyz-language lyrics.

The majority of the Russian-language musicians featured here were raised in Bishkek. Among the Kyrgyz-language rappers, only Aga-Ini and Biykech were born and raised in Bishkek, but almost all had been living in the city for ten years or more. Most of the rappers shared a rather middle-class background (although more socially than economically) and a university-level education, and can be related to what Abdoubaetova calls the urban middle class (Abdoubaetova 2020, p. 108). They tended to spend a lot of time among fellow ‘creative people’ (tvorcheskie lyudi), a milieu conducive to a critical outlook if not activism, and to articulate social issues raised by the group of activists identified by Filatova as the ‘law as a value’ group (Filatova 2021, pp. 2–4), as I observed on numerous occasions during my fieldwork.¹⁵

How did the songs express protest? First, there were relatively few elements of what Denisoff called ‘magnetic’ protest songs, where the composer tries to rally people around a movement or a cause (Denisoff 1966, p. 584). Such calls for collective action are identified as ‘rallying’ in the Table. Although certain images, such as the representation of Matraimov referred to a specific political movement, organised around the ReAktsiya protests, most rallying cries were general, invoking notions of (ethno-)national unity (‘We are together to repair wounded Kyrgyzstan’ in ‘Kachan kaytat’) or vague references to a collective ‘we’ such as ‘Time for change, time to get up off our knees’ (‘Vystrel v pustotu’). In most cases, this ‘we’ corresponds to an abstract people rallying against a parasitical ‘elite’, whereby rappers present themselves as representatives of that people, as exemplified by Begish: ‘All I’m saying is just public opinion’ (‘Sayasat’). His song ‘Bir zhakadan bash’ (Kyrgyz: ‘United in Harmony’) is mostly composed of rallying elements, as the chorus and the bridge are calls to the youth to remain united in order to ‘choose a bright future’ and ‘live in a developed country’.

Most of the protest in the tracks merely expresses public grievances, describing problems and sources of discontent. As with the ReAktsiya demonstrations, the main source of the dissatisfaction they mirror is corruption, mostly described as the illegitimate enrichment of an incompetent political elite at the expense of the ‘simple people’. The songs point to a situation where ‘the most powerful politicians are simultaneously the biggest businessmen’ and ‘pecuniary corruption is inherent to the organization of the state, i.e. it constitutes the rules of the game, not infringements upon the formal rules’ (Engvall 2014, p. 79). In the refrain of ‘Sayasat’, Begish lists how they steal at every opportunity, while in ‘Vystrel v pustotu’, Ulukmanapo is more explicit: ‘Dirty wirepullers [politikany], greedy bastards … . They don’t care about the homeland’. Migration is described as a consequence of the country’s poor economic opportunities, whether labour migration (‘How many Kyrgyz are flying far away/ Looking for their happiness?’—‘Kachan kaytat’) or brain-drain (‘The educated ones are abroad, having found a warm nest/ The others are in one room, enclosed in darkness’—‘Bir zhakadan bash’). Three songs are dedicated to the issue of violence against women. ‘Kyrk kyz’ takes a self-deterministic stance—‘Bad [kara] girl, bad girl, when will we be free?’—while ‘Mama Freestyle’ calls for an intervention by witnesses—‘If dad is beating your mum in your presence/ Run away with her and call the cops’—and ‘Kechir bizdi ayalzat’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Pardon Us, Woman’) calls for men to refrain from violence: ‘No, no, you’re not a man/ A man doesn’t abuse his wife’. The third song was released shortly after a viral video picturing a case of domestic abuse reignited public discussion around the topic (Kurmanbekova & Rittmann 2020). Finally, environmental issues are only mentioned in passing in a couple of songs, except for ‘Otdavay’, which is dedicated to this topic.

The coproducers of the rap songs also resort to non-verbal and performative techniques to underline their messages. These include musical associations (Kutschke 2016, p. 264). The beats to ‘Million’ and ‘Bizdin mafia’ both evoke criminal imaginaries: a Mexican/South American atmosphere with a satirical tone in the first case and an Italian mafia film in the second. Protest may be expressed visually via video, for example, state repression (‘Sayasat’), harassment (‘Kyrk kyz’) and pollution (‘Otdavay’).

In other cases, associations evoke local ‘traditional’ forms and symbols, drawing on such cultural resources to accentuate their message and to exploit the tensions such a mixture with rap may induce.¹⁶ This is particularly prominent in ‘Kyrk kyz’ and ‘Sayasat’. In the first one, Biykech raps to a beat using ‘national’ folkloric instruments such as the Komuz, while referring to and sometimes subverting recognisable cultural elements. For instance, in one scene of the music video she also directed (at about 02:30), she poses as the Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia, the 1948 painting by Semyon Chuykov, holding a penal code instead of the book in the original painting. The title ‘Kyrk kyz’ itself is a reference to a Central Asian epic about warrior women (Mayor 2014, pp. 403–6) and further underlines the song’s emancipatory message. In ‘Sayasat’ (from 1:08 in the video), Begish’s manner of rapping (his ‘flow’ in rap terms) follows the seven-syllabic metre of the aksak verse (Dor 2004, pp. 433–34), which can be found in traditional Kyrgyz poetry, as in the epic of Manas¹⁷ and the performances of akyn, traditional bards.¹⁸

Certain Kyrgyz-language rappers also mention akyn as a source of inspiration, notably the popular and politically outspoken Aaly Tutkuchev, who staged a protest-performance on 31 August 2020, during the official celebrations of Independence Day. However, in most cases, rappers also draw a clear distinction between akyn and their own music, rooted in hip-hop culture. In Begish’s words: ‘I cannot see myself as an akyn, because akyn are better [kruche]. … they are promoters [podvizhniki] of our culture, a part of our culture and they are better than rappers’.¹⁹

Finally, the protest character of the songs may also be reflected in reactions and content produced by the rappers’ audience. One of Ulukmanapo’s Instagram feeds shared a video from a listener combining ‘Vystrel v pustotu’ with footage from the 2010 revolution.²⁰ The most liked user comment (at the time of writing) under the song ‘Parakor’ on Youtube places the song in a continuation with previous, local protest rap songs: ‘Begish–“Sayasat”/ Aga-Ini–“Parakor”/ Ulukmanapo–“Vystrel v pustotu”’. This and numerous other comments under the listed ‘protest raps’ indicated that listeners were receptive to the message and noticed the multiplication of such songs’ releases. As these songs echoed the general socio-political context in Kyrgyzstan and social activism, they were received in this context by the audience. However, the tracks referenced in this study were not fully embedded in social movements, in contrast, for example, to the engagement of rappers in the United States against Apartheid in South Africa abroad and tensions of race and class in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s (Malone & Martinez 2010, p. 537). There is a difference of scale, of course, but also of structure: in the absence of a music industry worthy of the name and in a context of judicial insecurity, rappers in Bishkek navigate a different system of incentives.

Releasing protest rap as economic, political and social bargaining

As described earlier, there is no reason to assume that pop singers or rappers—even in contexts deemed authoritarian—are necessarily inclined to produce protest songs. According to Becker, a significant proportion of artistic work can be explained by artists’ interaction with their art world, referring to all collective interactions that work induces, and the economic, institutional or technical restraints of this ‘world’ (Becker 1982). In this special issue, Olena Nikolayenko discusses the lasting importance of such restraints when analysing how contextual factors, such as local university traditions and political circumstances, affect the level of political activism at different Russian universities. More specifically regarding the music genre examined here, Ranocchiari noted in his study of rap music in Lisbon:

To split MCs into those who work with the system and those who oppose it, is an ideologically valid operation within the internal debates of the hip hop movement and the discursive rhetoric of artists in their lyrics. But those who invoke it uncritically in their analyses make invisible the processes of continuous bargaining that occur between artists, audiences, the marketplace, and the mass media. (Ranocchiari 2011, p. 6)

Below, I will introduce some of the main aspects that impact on such bargaining processes in the case of rap music in Bishkek.

First, music is costly: ‘Making art works takes time, and making the equipment and materials takes time, too. That time has to be diverted from other activities. Artists ordinarily make time and equipment available for themselves by raising money in one way or another and using the money to buy what they need’ (Becker 1982, p. 3). In my conversations with coproducers of rap in Bishkek, this translates into the commonplace remark, ‘you can’t live off hip-hop’, despite the relatively low costs of rap production compared to other more instrument-intensive genres.

Since 2019, the rap (and pop music) scene in Bishkek has increasingly made use of online streaming platforms for distribution. While, from a Western European perspective, streaming may have a negative impact on musicians’ economic position (Huber 2018, p. 153), in the case of Bishkek, it allows for the previously non-existent direct monetisation of music, with all the motivational effects it may have on musicians (Coppenrath 2021). The amount of royalties earned that way often remains limited but may offset some production costs and provide a material measure of the ‘value’ of the songs and a sense of career progress. Streaming also brings along other positive externalities, such as a greater focus on intellectual property: in the absence of a functioning system of copyright protection run by responsible government agencies, it is the licensing of songs in the process of digital distribution and the copyright controls of streaming services that guarantee the protection of musicians’ rights.

Given that almost no artists can survive solely on their main artistic labour, Menger likens the range of income received and jobs undertaken by the average artist to a stock portfolio (Menger 2014, p. 125). In that sense, as rappers can hope to obtain extra remuneration and reach via streaming services, they may rely less on other sources of income, such as gigs in clubs or private events. Ultimately, this allows for more artistic freedom, as musicians are less dependent on their public image or television and radio appearances. There is also an important difference between rappers who rap in Russian and those who rap in Kyrgyz, as the latter depend more on a domestic public beyond the urban centres, which tends to be more conservative. A successful Russian-language rapper such as Ulukmanapo generates the biggest share of his streaming outside Kyrgyzstan, as reflected in the international profile of those who comment on his songs on YouTube.

Kyrgyz-language rappers may also take advantage of structural changes to assert their independence from local circuits of distribution. The career evolution of Begish is interesting in this regard. Begish started rapping in 2009, first building up his own music studio and releasing many songs that did not find a wide audience, then joining the label Connection Pro and becoming involved in the collective ‘Zamanbap’. It was during the preparation of the album Zamanbap that he started to envisage rap music as his profession, consciously building up an audience for himself, as he explained in an interview in November 2019:

I needed to write commercial songs at the beginning, songs that would be closer to the people. And then when you become famous, you will already have a certain strength [sila] with the appearance of your audience. Then you can write about those topics that come from the heart [tebe po dushe]. So at the beginning you write what people like and then you write what you like.²¹

While these ‘commercial’ songs mostly address topics such as patriotism or love, Begish announced his intention to write more about ‘social’ and ‘political’ topics. In parallel, the increasing reliance on online distribution freed him from the constraints of other distribution channels:

I don’t want to cooperate with radio and TV, because people make money on our backs and want to dictate and to control us through that. Now there is the internet, YouTube, where you can promote yourself [propiarit'sya] just as well. If your song is good, people will find it themselves.²²

In that sense, the release of ‘Sayasat’ may well have been facilitated by the fact that Begish is less reliant on offline distribution channels. About a week after its release, he described the reactions he received in an Instagram post: ‘Many people are writing “watch out” [abayla] or “stay safe” [sak bol]. Some say, “We’re waiting for a video apology from Begish”’.²³ In fact, I observed this kind of reaction on social media or in conversations around several of the protest songs mentioned above. Such reactions expressed a notion of risk linked to the release of such material, a factor that becomes part of the bargaining by artists when they decide whether to release a song that may be perceived as subversive or contrary to certain public or private interests.

In neighbouring Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the state attempts to directly influence the content of pop music via cultural programmes such as ‘Rýhani Janǵyrý’ (Otan 2019, p. 5) or various institutions and decrees governing the creative sector (Klenke 2019). In Russia, there have been attempts by the state to co-opt rappers for political goals (Birger 2018) in what can be called a ‘flexible authoritarianism’ (see Schwenck, this issue). In Kyrgyzstan, however, state agencies are largely absent from the pop music sector, whether as a guarantor of intellectual property rights, sponsor or censor. In fact, the infiltration of the state by private interests (Engvall 2014) hinders the formulation of coherent public policies, a fortiori cultural policies. There may be state interventions, though, to defend ‘the preservation of public order—the arts being seen as capable both of strengthening and of subverting order—and with the development of a national culture, seen as a good in itself and as something which promotes national unity (“our heritage”) and the nation’s reputation among other nations’ (Becker 1982, p. 180). In the case of Kyrgyzstan, this often translates into charges of ‘inciting racial, ethnic, national, religious or interregional hate’ (Article 313 of the Criminal Code of the Kyrgyz Republic). In the first half of 2020, several such cases caught the public’s attention, notably the arrests of a blogger known as Sydyman in February and the businessman Daniel Azhiev, well-known in rap circles as the former rapper and music studio owner MiNo, in late March.

A risk of intervention is also evoked in some of the lyrics, as in ‘Bizdin mafia’, where the referenced threat is associated with organised crime: ‘The mafia is the cause of all your sufferings/ If you want to beat it standing tall, it’ll cut off your head’. The first video produced for this song made its political character more explicit with the use of news footage suggesting political complicity with the ‘mafia’. That version of the video was never released and was eventually replaced by another, more light-hearted version. In an interview, the rapper Belgisiz describes the concerns that made him decide to withhold the video:

Everyone was like, ‘You tell the truth, well done [bazara net], great, that’s how it is’. And my close friends were like, ‘Bro, be careful, you’re playing with fire. Don't do that anymore’. Our country doesn't like people to stand out [ne luybit vyskochek] … . At the beginning, I thought, ‘If I don't do it, then who will?’ Like I was putting myself forward as a hero … . But in the end … I was afraid for my health, for my family. Mostly for my family. And I didn’t release the video.²⁴

Although I have not heard of any direct threat or legal prosecution in connection with the content of a rap song in Kyrgyzstan,²⁵ this kind of risk assessment, combined with social pressure, influences rappers’ artistic decisions. Notwithstanding the possibility of state intervention, publishing protest songs can have other, more indirect effects on artistic opportunities. Later in the interview, Belgisiz described how early discussions about joining a music label in Bishkek came to a halt because of the release of ‘Bizdin mafia’ and ‘Ay kim bilet’, deemed contrary to the label’s business interests (although he eventually joined the label in August 2020). In another case, one member of AP complained to me that the song ‘Million’ received very little support from fellow rappers or on social media. He attributed that to the song’s political character, noting that many people were presumably afraid to support it publicly. Moreover, when AP proposed performing the song on Curltai, a YouTube channel launched in Bishkek in December 2019, mostly featuring live studio performances, they were told to choose another song, since the channel did not want to release content of a political nature.²⁶ Eventually, they performed a light-hearted track about the Issyk-Kul lake.

When I accompanied them to the filming session in mid-March 2020, an early conversation quickly moved towards ‘Million’. One musician called the track ‘daring’, while another observed, ‘You can do that, you are older, and people know you’, implying that AP’s long track record as rappers and their social recognition protected them from reprisals. ‘Million’ was not AP’s first protest song, so it presented little risk of alienating an audience used to lighter content. Along with the fact that the group members had other jobs and did not depend on their musical activity for an income, their pre-existing reputation may explain why they were among the first to release a protest song that resonated with the ReAktsiya movement. ‘Ay kim bilet’ and ‘Bizdin mafia’, for their part, were both released at the initiative of Akai, who was living in the United States and thus less likely to be affected by negative reactions.

These early protest songs were not followed by any form of intervention against their composers. Accordingly, the perceived risk of following suit was reduced, especially since the public mood became more critical of the authorities during the pandemic-induced lockdown imposed in late March 2020. Notable shifts in the expression of public opinion around the ReAktsiya demonstrations and other mobilisations may also have encouraged rappers to voice their protest publicly. This corresponds to one hypothesis of the ‘spiral of silence’ theory, according to which ‘Willingness to expose one’s views publicly … is greater if he [the individual] believes his own view is, and will be, the dominating one or (though not dominating now) is becoming more widespread’ (Noelle-Neumann 1974, p. 45). Rappers, who tend to keep an eye on their actual or potential audience, are even more likely to follow the dynamics in their social environments.

Once the public consensus shifts towards more political criticism, protest songs may even yield certain positive returns. According to Menger, one explanation for taking risks in artistic labour is ‘hope for high gains’, which are not necessarily monetary rewards (Menger 2014, p. 100). Although rappers in Bishkek cannot count on a full-blown music industry keen to gain new markets, they can hope for non-monetary gains, both in connection with an increasing demand for protest songs induced by the context and on a subcultural level, responding to an often-voiced self-understanding of rap as protest music. In some cases, one can even suspect that a self-stylisation of transgression may be part of a ‘bad boy’ image of the author to ‘market himself and his music as something unique’ (Perullo 2011, p. 109). This may be the case of SHXMDUK, judging by his provocative stance on social media. The song ‘Uurda’, for example, is a particularly virulent and vulgar diss-track (from ‘disrespect’, form of rap-song directly attacking an opponent) against Raim Matraimov.

In mid-June, Radio Azattyk, the local branch of Radio Free Europe, organised a round table titled, ‘Creative youth openly expressing their criticism to the authorities’.²⁷ The two members of Aga-Ini Kaibar and Emir were also invited. In the introduction, the presenter noted the recent increase in protest rap songs, naming ‘Sayasat’, ‘Parakor’ and ‘Vystrel v pustotu’ as examples. When addressing Aga-Ini, he remarked, ‘Rap in itself is protest music’, recalling a wave of protest rap that appeared in Russia in previous years. One of the group members agreed but pointed out that rappers in Bishkek listened more to US than to Russian rap. The idea that rap music is by its nature a form of protest was also mentioned in some of my own interviews and informal conversations during fieldwork, particularly when talking about the protest songs referenced in this essay.²⁸ Equating rap and protest is more than a reiteration of a cliché in this case, as Aga-Ini’s reference to US rap showed: releasing a protest song may be perceived as paying tribute to the origins of hip-hop culture and as demonstrating one’s belonging to its global ‘imagined community’ (Williams 2013, pp. 10–3).

During the Radio Azattyk roundtable, the journalist Meerim Osmonova mentioned how the ‘Sayasat’ video prompted excited reactions from her entourage and in online comments, as it resonated with the ongoing political and societal situation: ‘People were waiting for that [el kütkön]’.²⁹ Other participants came to similar conclusions, observing how certain commentators on social media explicitly called for individual rappers to release protest songs. As rappers (and other public figures) are increasingly expected to express their position openly, releasing a protest song can be seen as responding to an audience demand. By doing so, rappers hope to improve their public image and to build their audience. This may also explain the bandwagon effect as seen in the increase in the number of protest rap songs in a relatively short time span.

Conclusion

The 2020 wave of protest rap songs in Bishkek can be explained by a change in the bargaining terms that influence rappers’ artistic choices. On an economic level, the recourse to streaming platforms makes them less dependent on local distribution channels. On a socio-political level, changes in public opinion both reduce the perceived risk and increase the perceived gain of releasing a protest song, especially since the release of ‘Sayasat’ in May 2020, the first high-profile protest rap in the Kyrgyz language. Additionally, protest songs tend to be released in interaction with social movements and the present wave is no exception, as it occurred in parallel with protest movements such as ReAktsiya and raised awareness about issues such as corruption and violence against women.

To be sure, considering pop music and particularly rap as oppositional a priori does not do justice to the artistic ambitions of many musicians and the decision to release protest rap songs cannot be fully understood by this type of risk–benefit analysis. For those artists I followed more closely, I have no reason to believe that the content of their protest songs did not express their genuine opinions and feelings regarding the political context. However, looking for the rationale behind artistic decisions allowed me to avoid indulging in a mythologisation of artistic work, where ‘the dimension of choice is negated by the notion of an irresistible vocation’ (Menger 2014, p. 104).

In the end, it is also about demythologising perspectives on cultural actors and youth in Central Asia. As Kirmse notes, much academic work on the region:

still discusses Central Asians as predominantly ethnic and religious personas … . Against this background, the observation that leisure practices, political and religious views and activities, and sartorial and musical styles among young people in Osh were just as diverse, complex and integrated in global cultural flows as they are in many western and non-western cities, is an important conclusion in its own right. (Kirmse 2016, p. 345)

The same holds true for the observation that the mechanisms of rappers’ artistic labour in Bishkek are not inherently different from those of their peers all around the globe and can be analysed in the same socio-musicological terms. Individual bargaining processes may explain the ultimate decision to release a protest song or not, but they must be understood in their social context. In this regard, rap music in Bishkek tends to be a mirror of social processes rather than a frontrunner for social change. Through protest songs, rappers address a certain group of people they deem receptive, contributing to defining such a group at the same time. In the absence of a critical mass of politically engaged people and of mobilising ideas, that target audience remains equal to the abstraction of the ‘people of Kyrgyzstan’, which also explains why rallying calls invoke the hardly transgressive idea of national unity.³⁰ For that reason, following rap (and further cultural) production can be a good indicator of social dynamics, particularly against the background of the formation of some—at this point still relatively elitist (Filatova 2021)—social movements around ReAktsiya.

Before there is such a critical mass of public mobilisation, rappers are also unlikely to position themselves fully as protest rappers. As Begish answered the presenter of the evening programme Vecher trudnogo dnya on the private television channel TV1:

Presenter: It seems you have some hard-hitting [vnushitelnye] texts in reserve that can stir up [vsbudarazhit’] the public. Let us into the secret: are you planning to release them or produce a video?

Begish: Yes, sure. We have a couple of videos in production right now. One is already finished. Some are commercial songs, advertisement songs.

Presenter: Even that [dazhe tak] … 

Begish: Yes, and I wrote four songs during lockdown, which I’m planning to record very soon. But I would not say that they are all about protest. They’re the usual kind of thing, romantic songs, patriotic songs … ³¹

Afterword: a sign of things to come?

After the first draft of this essay was handed in, Kyrgyzstan experienced dramatic political (although arguably little social) change, resulting in the snap election of the populist leader Sadyr Japarov as a new president (Doolotkeldieva 2021). The wave of protest rap continued as the general music production in Kyrgyzstan increased with the loosening of pandemic-induced restrictions. In the context of the parliamentary elections of 4 October 2020, several rap songs called for the audience not to sell their vote, while the issue of vote-buying by political parties increasingly raised public attention. Further protest tracks accompanied the political transition period in autumn and the presidential election in January 2021.³²

In hindsight, it is tempting to see this as proof of the idea that music is a harbinger of change. As Cameron suggests, if ‘harbinger properties might be found in musical evolutions’, this could be explained by specificities of creative work and its economics (Cameron 2015, p. 4); for example, a particular sensitivity to the mood of a perceived audience. It is beyond the scope of this essay to test that hypothesis and examine the co-occurrence of the appearance of protest music and actual social change. However, when looking back at the protest rap songs released up to August 2020, certain parallels with later political discourse are striking.

To take just one example, the new president’s populist opposition between an essentialised ‘people’ and corrupt officials was already contained in several of the songs examined here, though this is hardly a sign of political allegiance. In fact, I would argue, while rappers’ appeal to ‘the people’ may have participated in ‘preparing the ground’ for the rise of a populist leadership, they may also further challenge this leadership’s interpretation of that notion. Some protest rap songs released after the political turmoil of October 2020 call on their fellow citizens not to blindly believe the promises of the new elites, who, they suggest, do not genuinely care about public grievances. This is the sense of Begish’s joint track with the singer Abir Kassenov ‘Elim aldanba’ (Kyrgyz: ‘My People, Don’t Be Fooled’, released with a music video in late November 2020) and of the rapper Osmon’s similarly titled song ‘Aldanba’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Don’t Be Fooled’, released in March 2021). Both call for a critical stance against the new authorities with lines such as, respectively: ‘Don’t employ a driver who fools the people’ and ‘We don’t need a khan/ What we need is a guarantee [amanat]’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research this essay is based on was supported by a PhD scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation: [Grant Number Promotionsstipendium]. I would like to thank David Leupold, Julien Bruley and the anonymous reviewers appointed by Europe-Asia Studies for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes on contributors

Florian Coppenrath

Florian Coppenrath, Associated Researcher & PhD Student, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin, Germany; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Invalidenstraße 118, 10115 Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Rappers are identified in the essay by their most common stage name or the name of the group of which they are members. The English translation of the lyrics of ‘Sayasat’ is the one provided in a pinned comment on YouTube. Except for this one, all other translations are mine.

2 By ‘rap’, I refer to a musical genre historically bound to a wider ‘hip-hop culture’, which also includes other forms of cultural expression (namely DJ-ing, hip-hop dance and graffiti). For a discussion of the difference between rap and hip-hop, see Krims (2001, pp. 10–2).

3 For example, the talks ‘On a commencé tout en bas—Rap et stratégies économiques à Bichkek’ (French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Bishkek, 15 February 2020) and ‘Kyrgyz Raptrepreneurs—Ekonomika repa v Bishkeke’ (American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, 3 March 2020).

4 See, for example, Rose (1994).

5 Interview with former rapper Seventeen, a member of AP Clan, who wrote the lyrics for ‘Apake’, Bishkek, 25 January 2020.

6 In the thread ‘Relizi otechestvennogo repa za 2009 god’ on the forum ‘Diesel’, participants counted 18 rap albums and samplers for 2009 and 32 for 2010, available at: http://diesel.elcat.kg/index.php?showtopic=3068461&page=1, accessed 15 March 2021.

7 Post on mirlansatkymbaev’s Instagram feed, 15 November 2015, available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/-HgxLVS2vR/, accessed 15 March 2021.

8 The first draft of this essay was finalised in August 2020, before a third violent change of government in Kyrgyzstan (Doolotkeldieva 2021), addressed in the afterword.

9 The OCCRP Report, entitled ‘Plunder and Patronage in the Heart of Central Asia’, is available at: https://www.occrp.org/en/plunder-and-patronage/, accessed 15 March 2021.

10 See also, ‘#REaktsiya 3.0: V Bishkeke proshel mirnyi marsh za svobodu slova. Kak eto bylo’, Kloop.kg, 29 June 2020, available at: https://kloop.kg/blog/2020/06/29/live-mirnyj-marsh-za-svobodu-slova-prohodit-v-bishkeke/, accessed 1 March 2022.

11 ‘Bishkek: Na mitinge protiv nasiliya potrebovali otstavku nachal'nika Sverdlovskogo ROVD i rassledovanie ataki na zhenskii marsh’, Kloop.kg, 10 March 2020, available at: https://kloop.kg/blog/2020/03/10/live-miting-protiv-nasiliya-v-bishkeke/, accessed 1 March 2022.

12 The image was realised by the graphic designer Ruslan Tokochev in response to a request by the political activist Shirin Aitmatova to ‘do a symbol against the Matraimovs and corruption’. As one can read in the Twitter-thread that first introduced it in June 2019, reference to the Obey Giant is deliberate (see the Twitter post by ‘Rutobo’, 21 June 2019, available at: https://twitter.com/Rutobo/status/1141948862049001472, accessed 1 March 2022).

13 The page is called ‘tajadymm’, available at: https://instagram.com/tajadymm, accessed 1 March 2022.

14 Measured on 15 August 2020 and rounded up to the nearest hundred. When there are several versions of the song (for example, the song alone, or accompanied by a video), I count the one with the highest number of views.

15 The observation that the creative milieu is perceived as more open-minded than society at large was made in several of my interviews, and such political and social topics also came up in conversations among rappers and music-makers I followed in places of musical production and in some of their social media presence. For example, interview with 7Gen, Bishkek, 15 January 2020; visit of the Curltai filming session in Bishkek, 15 March 2020.

16 In a similar vein, Otan (2019, pp. 49–52) describes how the use of an electric version of a traditional instrument, the dombrya, sparked controversy in Kazakhstan.

17 An about 500,000 lines long epic, mostly transmitted orally by specialised performers (the so-called manaschy), and holding an important place in Kyrgyz nation-building.

18 According to Julien Bruley, author of the doctoral thesis ‘The Manas Epos. A Historical, Patrimonial and Ethnographic Study’ (personal communication, 7 March 2021), Begish’s rapping and gestures in the clip evoke performances of akyn bards more than Manas recitations.

19 Interview with Begish, Bishkek, 22 November 2019.

20 Post on theulukmanapo’s Instagram feed, 11 July 2020, available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCgZ2qcFnpl/, accessed 15 March 2021.

21 Interview with Begish, Bishkek, 22 November 2019.

22 Interview with Begish, Bishkek, 22 November 2019.

23 Instagram post by ‘begishzbp’, 13 May 2020 (the post was later deleted).

24 Interview with Belgisiz, Bishkek, 12 March 2020.

25 One exception came up after the finalisation of this essay. In a video-interview published on the YouTube channel ‘Seyteq’ on 9 January 2022, the rapper SHXMDUK claimed that, following a public performance of his song ‘Uurda’, he and his friends were subject to physical violence by a group of masked men, presumably associated with Raim Matraimov, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zYkzHuS9Tw, accessed 1 March 2022.

26 Nonetheless, in September 2020, Curltai introduced a new section called ‘Public’, with ‘interesting content of social character’, according to the description on YouTube, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZjQ5l6Zu5w&list=PL5FXg2KFZmmmCAl0n2T3O-i6G8wX96GDq&index=2, accessed 1 March 2022. The section includes two rap songs calling for listeners to not engage in vote-selling, a practice that was allegedly widespread during several elections in Kyrgyzstan and the prevention of which was the object of several public campaigns ahead of the parliamentary elections of 4 October 2020. See, ‘“Tsena svobody—5000 somov”. Kak ulichnoe dvizhenie pytaetsya ubedit' izbiratelei ne prodavat' golosa’, Radio Azattyk, 23 September 2020, available at: https://rus.azattyk.org/a/30853757.html, accessed 1 March 2022.

27 In Kyrgyz: ‘Biylikke synyn achyk aytkan chygarmachyl zhashtar’, released on YouTube, 16 June 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4zDBsoGQTE, accessed 15 March 2021.

28 For example, interview with the rapper Baha Panatsea, Bishkek, 26 June 2020.

29 ‘Biylikke synyn achyk aytkan chygarmachyl zhashtar’, released on YouTube, 16 June 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4zDBsoGQTE, accessed 15 March 2021. The referenced section starts around 14:06 in the video.

30 Many thanks to David Leupold for inspiring these ideas.

31 ‘Vecher trudnogo dnya #323/Iskusstvo menyayushchee mir’, TV1, 12 May 2020, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAPvtax1GfE, accessed 15 March 2021.

32 For example, ‘Shayloo’ (Kyrgyz: ‘Elections’) by Begish, as well as ‘Kandidator’ and ‘President’ by the Kyrgyz language rapper 7Gen. The latter is a year-old song that was officially released just two days before the January 2021 election. As discussed above, such timing can be an indication of the author’s political intent.