Iuliana Matasova

This study reads Ukrainian women singer-songwriters’ popular project as a precariously joyful audiotopia of the Ukrainian 1990s, thus attending to the interplay of precarities and joys in the operation of women musicians who defined the new Ukrainian popular culture. Identifying the ethics, aesthetics, and materialities of what can be called a women’s decade in Ukrainian pop, this critique posits that Sestrychka Vika, Iryna Bilyk, Marichka Burmaka and others musically claimed new personal and national stories and translated diverse Ukrainian experiences and imaginations of past, present, and future into music genuinely loved by audiences. In the immediate encounter of the event of post-Sovietness, theirs was a joyful, and challenging, search for a nomination other than post-Soviet. Taking their labor in the domain of popular culture as inherent to a singular spatio-temporality of the Ukrainian 1990s, this critique aims to locate women musicians’ artistry, affect, and agency within the conditions of a ‘happy’ precarity. Their lyrical, musical, and performative articulations highlight cultural, socio-economic, political, and identity dynamics in Ukraine of the 1990s, and these articulations remain decisively audible today. Inevitably then, this study stands as an exercise in recent cultural history and in the history of the present.