Questions of Comprehension, Language and Meaning in Soviet Popular Music

Abstract

This article explores the role of language, comprehension, and meaning in Soviet popular music, using Estonian composer Sven Grünberg's 1979 film score for Dead Mountaineer's Hotel as a central case study. Grünberg's deliberate use of an invented, incomprehensible language in his score reflects a broader phenomenon in Soviet musical culture: the appeal of linguistic unintelligibility as a form of aesthetic and political freedom. Drawing on historiography and original oral history interviews, the article traces how Western music's popularity in the USSR was partly driven by the very opacity of its foreign-language lyrics, which listeners experienced as liberation from the ideological weight of Soviet-Russian cultural production. It further examines how domestic unofficial music evolved through the 1960s–1980s from imitation of Western sounds toward authentically Soviet voices – grounded in lived experience and emotional honesty – ultimately culminating in music's central role in national sovereignty movements and the collapse of the USSR.