Hello, I’m John David Vandevert, a postgraduate (soon to be Doctoral student) in Musicology. My interests include Russian hip-hop, “Russianness” through musical aesthetics, identity construction, cultural aesthetics, and the mediation between nationalism, popular music, and belonging. Of course, I am mostly interested in how these themes personify themselves in Russian hip-hop culture, but seeing as Russian music is on one chronological timeline, one must keep themselves open to understanding how the present marries itself to the past and the future as well. As Claude-Levi Strauss said in his 1963 monograph,
“What is called a “culture” is a fragment of humanity which, from the point of view of the research at hand and of the scale on which the latter is carried out, presents significant discontinuities in relation to the rest of humanity.”
“A society consists of individuals and groups which communicate with one another.”
“Structural Anthropology” [1963] by Levi-Strauss, Claude (pg. 295-296)
Symphonic Juncture 