Contemporary post-Soviet popular music: Politics and aesthetics

Popular music is produced, listened to and distributed all over the world. While there is no doubt that popular music studies, as well as popular music histories and the commercial popular music industry is predominantly Anglophone, popular music is not. This might seem like an obvious statement but looking at current discussions in the field of popular music studies it is a statement that needs to be made again. While there are exceptions, popular music studies in general have a problem with pseudo-universalism. As if the Western English-speaking mainstream reflected ‘popular music’ as a whole. This special issue of IASPM Journal focuses on popular music in the post-Soviet space, imagined as located between Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but also all over the world in reproduction of sounds and the diaspora. The contributions challenge the Anglophone centre of popular music studies.