Jockii Druce, 22, provides a voice to other young people turning their backs on Russia’s long heritage to embrace their own arts.
When the invasion began, young Ukrainians were glued to their phones. The increased volume of traffic, says 22-year-old Ukrainian rapper Jockii Druce, has made his satirical song about the invasion of Russia incredibly popular.
Thousands of TikTok videos have been created in Ukraine with the music of Jockii Druce, accumulating millions of views.
His ultimate viral song, titled What Are You Brothers?, is aimed at Ukrainians, but it’s an apparent play on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine and Russia are “sister nations. “
The song, released in early March, expresses its anger against Russia with its satirical lyrics, telling Ukrainians to abandon the concept that they can convince their “brothers” across the border to prevent their invasion. As one in 4 Ukrainians, Jockii Druce has relatives, albeit distant, in Russia.
The song ends with the directory of ancient and recent tragedies that Ukrainians have survived (serfdom, genocide, revolutions, coronavirus) and raises the rhetorical question of whether they deserve to cry because of the large-scale invasion, followed to the last line: “No way – The Russian warship will you, which has a war cry of the Ukrainian resistance.
His music represents a tendency for Ukrainians to turn to Ukrainian culture as a way to bond with others and ultimately as a source of strength, scholars say.
Young Ukrainians are pioneers in thinking about Russia’s colonial legacy, they say, a subject little studied in the West or in Russia until the former Soviet and Tsarist empires. But the recent rejection of Russian culture in Ukraine has led Russian cultural figures to claim that Russian culture is being cancelled and its function is misunderstood.
Jockii Druce is the only Ukrainian artist who gained popularity after creating a song about the invasion. However, he is one of the few who did so with a nuanced and poignant irony, a skill that distinguishes his music from the mainstream and has made it popular with young Ukrainians.
“I’m not an emotional person. [My job] is basically perceiving other contexts and things that other people tend to manipulate,” said Jockii Druce, in a cafe in downtown Kyiv, dressed in a monochromatic Adidas tracksuit.
“When you realize what they think of us, that we’re filthy pigs that are fast and typhoons [the buildings], and you start to be ironic about it,” he said, referring to the lyrics of another of his songs. , Let’s go to breakfast.
For Jockii Druce, it makes no sense to seek to replace the minds of Russians, because their state propaganda device is too powerful. “You can send them a picture of young people killed in Bucha or whatever,” he said of the site of a notorious Russian massacre. “And they’re going to make a hundred million fucking shots or make other people say [Ukraine] did it. “
Jockii Druce, who grew up in the south-central city of Dnipro, said he grew up as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian and started rapping with his friends after school for fun. He said he wasn’t interested in politics or geopolitics but after a while it had become “impossible not to be interested in it because other people died en masse. “Array and discovered that rapping in Ukrainian allowed him to explore uncharted territories and renew his enthusiasm for creating music. “I learned a long time ago that it has a more biological and original vibe when I do it in Ukrainian,” jockii Druce said. “I soon learned that no one can do it like me. The Ukrainian language itself, and the cultural background and all that, provides a damn box of fun to have fun and practice and paint, which no one did. “The Russian language is all over the world,” he said. A lot has already been said and written in Russian and there is a lot to say and write in Ukrainian. “
On the factor of Russian artists, Jockii Druce says that he listens to more electronic music than rap, however, he liked some Russian artists before the war and will not listen to them again. because of the war it would simply be hypocritical. This kind of logic feeds the Russian narrative that opposes Ukrainians, whether we are Nazis or haters,” he said. “It’s not about alienating others, it’s about improving status. “
The role of Russian culture has been the subject of heated debate since February in Ukraine and the West.
Leading figures in the Ukrainian music scene say they have stopped looking at their Russian counterparts since the invasion.
“[Our Russian counterparts] don’t perceive why we are so radical. They don’t need to deal with what’s going on and they perceive that they are an imperialist country and that, as cultural figures, they have to do anything and think about it. “”said Maya Baklanova, who has been active in Ukrainian electronic music since 2014.
Baklanova cited the example of Russians who fled to Georgia and Armenia and organized occasions to listen to reviews from the population of their host countries. “They advertise it as ‘Armenia is the new Russian rave scene. ‘They seek to Russify the scene.
This week, Mikhail Shishkin, an exiled Russian poet living in Switzerland, wrote an editorial for The Atlantic in which he claimed that Russian culture had been oppressed through successive Russian regimes and unjustly linked to Russian war crimes.
If Russian culture had been freer, Shishkin wrote, the invasion might not have occurred. The Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, whose statues can be disposed of from the public squares of Ukraine.
Shishkin’s article was criticized by some scholars specializing in the region as “deaf. “
“There is very little evidence that Russian culture has been relegated to oblivion,” said Uilliam Blacker, an associate professor of Russian and Eastern European comparative literature at university college London’s School of Slavic and Eastern European Studies. years of wonderful prestige in the West. ” Blacker said that in the current context, replacing a Russian composer in a concert program with a Ukrainian composer is a small gesture that “would correct a very long and very deep imbalance in our belief in the culture of this component of the world. “
According to Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic literature at the University of Kansas in the United States, Ukrainians distance themselves from Russian writers not only because of the reviews of a particular writer, but also because they see how it was militarized to colonize them. [Pushkin] was a talented poet. . . but he is also someone who had a very imperialist and condescending attitude towards Ukraine,” Chernetsky said. “It was overlooked. [Ukrainians] have highlighted some facets of [Russian] writers and others have darkened.
“The war has provoked many reflections,” he added. The other young people are much more complex than the previous generation. “