• Banned in the USSR

The New Zealand Herald carried an article about a recently discovered Soviet era blacklist of “ideologically harmful compositions” including Tina Turner, Madness, and The Village People. The list, which was put together by the Communist Party’s youth wing, was distributed to bureaucrats in January 1985, two months before Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to the premiership. Banning the artists only helped to make them more popular in Russia, according to Alexei Yurchak, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who unearthed the blacklist: “The measures proposed to curb the spread of Western music helped to create the conditions that enabled its further expansion.” Continue reading “Anthro in the news: 6/9/14” →