Going Native/Viral in Russian Popular Music: Aesthetic Populism, Patriotic Anti-racism, and the Quest for Hip-Hop Authenticity in Timati’s Teymuraz Music Video Trilogy
Journal: IASPM Journal
Year: 2024

This paper critically analyzes the 2010s’ viral music video trilogy featuring Teymuraz, a stage and video persona of the Russian/Tatar/Jewish hip-hop artist Timati. Using hyperbolized stereotypes of a racialized taxi driver from the Caucasus/Central Asia, the hybrid aesthetics of Teymuraz fuses the elements of New East style, post-Soviet cultural recycling, social critique, and appropriates the voices of the subaltern. Contextualizing Teymuraz as a strategy of racial translation of US hip-hop an