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Artist News
Jailed Pussy Riot members confirm protest remains the priority
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 28 March 2014
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, the two members of Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot who were jailed after a performance in a Moscow church in 2012, have told Estonian music convention Tallinn Music Week that they’ve had plenty of offers to tour as a group, but that they have declined, stressing that their objective remains political protest, with their creative output basically a means to an end. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina for certain don’t currently have any more conventional ambitions in the music space.
“We started our band when it became clear that the people in power in Russia were moving to ensure Vladimir Putin got a third term in office”, Tolokonnikova explained. “We could see that the government was increasingly targeting its opponents. I saw it first hand – a guy I studied with was sent to prison for a year over political matters. So we formed the band to support these political prisoners, and to try and start an alternative discourse”.
“Our mission remains staging protest performances, often in illegal spaces”, she went on, confirming that, for her at least, the political protest came first and the music second, it being a medium for the desired ‘alternative discourse’. “A conventional music career is not of interest to us”, she said.
Joining Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina on the TMW panel was Russian promoter and journalist Artemyi Trotisky, who tackled the question of why – when so many high profile Western artists quickly spoke out in support of Pussy Riot after their arrest and during their trial – the Russian music community showed a lot less solidarity.
That protest came first for Pussy Riot was a big part of it, Trotisky noted. “I think Russian musicians didn’t consider these girls as their colleagues, unlike their Western counterparts”, he said. “They tended to hone in on Pussy Riot’s musicianship – and took offence that this group didn’t care so much about playing good guitar, that it didn’t matter if the singing was out of tune – so this was a protest group rather than a band”.
Which in essence it was, of course, though the power of the message, and the creative and contentious way in which it was delivered through song and performance nevertheless appealed to artists outside Russia.
“The Russian rock community is generally very quiet on political issues”, he continued. “Though that might now be starting to change. But I think any failure to speak out in support of Nadezhda and Maria in 2012 was mainly down to fear – which is something rock stars don’t like to admit to – and also a little jealously, that this group was getting so much worldwide attention by using music as protest, rather than making music for the sake of it”.
