The difference, however, between American-style performance art and what Pussy Riot does is immense, and mostly has to do with the context. After all, Madonna and the like managed decades-long careers without being whipped by Cossacks in the streets. In that sense, then, it’s clear that although they use the symbols of rock and roll and of the art world, their actions are more political than artistic, and that they are utilizing those artistic tools as a way to make statements against tyranny in their home country.
In that New York press conference, Tolokonnikova states “We’re not here as the leaders of Pussy Riot, or determining what Pussy Riot is, what it does, what it says. We are just two individuals that spent time in jail for taking part in a Pussy Riot protest action.” The implication here is clear: that the individual members of the group do not care about the cult of personality that is so much of what rock and roll is about in the West. The messages, the slogans are the key, and Pussy Riot is intent to using rock and roll images and sounds to anger people to action.
The “Punk Prayer” performance initially had no music; an act of defiance that resulted in arrest, it was only wedded to punk rock when it was released as an online video, with footage of the performance intercut with another guitar-wielding performance, with music put on top. It wound up being a PR powerhouse, with support spreading outward from music-oriented outlets to eventually land the group’s name in the mouths of people not accustomed to saying the word “pussy” on air.
Of course, the group are in many ways caught up in an ever-escalating PR war with Putin himself — for starters, the release of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina so soon before the beginning of the Sochi games was clearly a gambit to evaporate worldwide martyrdom of the pair. In a sense, the actions of both Putin and Pussy Riot are a complicated dance, with Putin and his administration wanting to find a way to negate the impact of Pussy Riot’s actions as, all the while, the Western media increasingly takes their every move seriously. Upon her release, Maria put it succinctly: “This isn’t amnesty, this is PR.”
The thing is, the intersection of music and political action, at least in our Western tradition, is often an uncomfortable place, with the artist put in the unenviable position of balancing personal vision with an intentional statement that can so easily teeter into sloganeering, or worse. In pre-rock terms, the righteousness of a group like Pussy Riot is similar to the approach of someone like Woody Guthrie painting “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. But as Greil Marcus commented, in a 1997 interview, on Guthrie’s famous phrase, “It wasn’t a machine and it didn’t kill fascists. It made Woody Guthrie and the people who listened to him feel noble. I’m not saying that he wasn’t against fascism, but to say that you could defeat it by singing songs is not helpful in the war against fascism.”
The response, in our Western rock tradition, to this sense of futility has been to up the crazy ante. Shock, in large part, has made rock and roll what it is today, and that sense of desperately needing to fight against the overwhelming pointlessness of it all had a large hand in creating punk culture in the first place. The false or meaningless nobility that Marcus spoke of began to create perversities in punk, culminating in characters like G.G. Allin and the like, rolling around in their own shit while no one cares in hopes of at least becoming legendary.
In the last few years, the band that has embodied this sort of abandon the best has probably been Death Grips, a rap/punk hybrid duo that, through a series of highly-publicized stunts, attempted to elevate their art past music to the point of being potent punk protest; they leaked their own album, getting themselves dropped from their label, put a photo of a penis on the cover of an album, and, in perhaps their grandest statement of shock, conducted a U.S. tour where they themselves did not actually attend their own performances. Viewed from afar, their antics were highly volatile, setting them apart from other current acts who do things like play albums and release records on labels, making everyone else look level-headed and boring in comparison.
The thing is, though, that if a band like Death Grips are the best we in the West have in terms of potent music-related protest, then we clearly have a pretty weak and compliant set-up here; after all, there is a world of difference from Pussy Riot getting beaten and jailed while intentionally attacking their nation’s most highly treasured institutions and two guys trying to wriggle out of their major label record deal. Of note as well is the fact that the Occupy protest movement in America came and went with essentially zero participation from anyone in the Western rock world, with a few minor exceptions. It can be argued that five decades of rock and roll culture, with electric guitars and stadium seating and a solidified system of press and PR in place to properly praise the cream of the crop, have drastically eliminated the ability of the rock and roll machine to kill the metaphorical fascists.