In addition to being a centre for classical music, the multicultural city of Kharkiv is considered the country’s capital of hip hop, a genre that Helbig (2014) argues that in Ukraine ‘oscillates between the highly politicised and the farcical.’ Throughout the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union the Ukrainian language was suppressed, and the decision to rap in Russian or Ukrainian, continues to politicise the genre. As in all occupied regions, the Soviet authorities had identified a music which carried a strong national sentiment and attempted to change its meaning, an example of how musical styles can be made emblematic of national identities in contradictory ways (Stokes 2014). These new performances consisted of censored versions of traditional kobzar repertoire and focused on stylised works that praised the Soviet system. As Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights (2018) argue, ‘the re-territorialisation of local heterogeneous musics to nationalist ends has often signalled the death or near-fatal displacement of regional identities’ (12). Stalin’s violent transformation of the rural society essentially ended the kobzardom, and performing on the lute-like instrument kobza was replaced with performances of folk and classical music on the bandura – in an attempt to re-territorialise the tradition. Invited under the pretense of attending a musicians’ convention in 1932, notes Viktor Mishalow in his 2008 dissertation “Cultural and Artistic Aspects of the Origins and Development of the Kharkiv Bandura,” the kobzars and the ethnomusicologists who researched and documented their music, were executed. Soviet authorities exterminated hundreds of kobzars in Kharkiv, the wandering and often blind minstrels of Ukraine. As part of cultural ethnic cleansing, countless Ukrainian intellectuals in literature, theatre, arts, and music were killed. The city of Kharkiv was a key site of Stalin’s ‘brotherly terrors’ in the 1930s, most well-known of which is the Holodomor Famine Genocide of 1932-33, when approximately 4 million people died. It also became an example of a filmed musical event that gained viral international attention through social media and evoked an expression of solidarity from the song’s authors. The conflicting feelings evoked by this one scene alone, while the Russian army was advancing on the city, are powerful.
![desiigner panda push on floor desiigner panda push on floor](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8be5b010a8636669e1c7e14a6ad2ecc8/tumblr_opa6hvijZ61w4znn6o1_500.jpg)
It is a child’s peaceful reaction to violent intentions.
![desiigner panda push on floor desiigner panda push on floor](https://musicfeeds.com.au/assets/uploads/Desiigner08.png)
![desiigner panda push on floor desiigner panda push on floor](https://www.e-techuk.com/uploads/1438958968_panda.png)
#DESIIGNER PANDA PUSH ON FLOOR FULL#
The city of Kharkiv was the first in Ukraine to wake up to missile strikes that very morning – the first day of Russia’s full invasion. In the late morning of February 24th, 2022, an American journalist captured a young boy on the grand piano in Kharkiv Palace Hotel playing Philip Glass’s composition ‘Walk to School’. Note: To see these tweets and videos embedded on an interactive map, click here. Boy playing piano in Kharkiv, still from wleaming‘s video by author