Thousands of TikTok videos have been created in Ukraine using Jockii Druce’s music, garnering millions of plays. His most viral song, titled What Are You Brothers?, is aimed at Ukrainians but is an obvious play on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine and Russia are “brotherly nations”. The song, released in early March, angers Russia through its satirical lyrics, telling Ukrainians to let go of the idea that they can convince their “brothers” across the border to stop their invasion. Like an estimated one in four Ukrainians, Jockii Druce has relatives, albeit distant, in Russia. The song ends by citing the historical and recent tragedies that Ukrainians have survived – serfdom, genocide, revolutions, coronavirus – and poses the rhetorical question of whether they should cry over the full-scale invasion, followed by the final line: “No way – Russian warship, screw yourselves,” which has become a rallying cry of the Ukrainian resistance. Jockii Druce’s viral song What Are You Brothers? He is represented by Khvylia Records, a Ukrainian label founded during the war. His music represents a trend of Ukrainians turning to Ukrainian culture as a way to connect with each other and, ultimately, as a source of strength, academics say. Young Ukrainians are leading the way in reflecting on Russia’s colonial legacy, they say, a topic little studied in the West or in Russia in relation to the former Soviet and tsarist empires. But the recent rejection of Russian culture in Ukraine has led Russian cultural actors to argue that Russian culture is being invalidated and its role misunderstood. Jockii Druce is not the only Ukrainian artist who gained popularity after creating a song about the invasion. However, he is one of the few who does it with subtle and compelling irony – a talent that makes his music stand out from the mainstream and has made him popular with younger Ukrainians. “I’m not really an emotional person. [My work] it’s mostly about understanding different contexts and things that people tend to manipulate,” said Jockii Druce, in a cafe in central Kyiv, wearing a monochrome Adidas tracksuit. “When you realize what they think of us, that we’re some dirty fucking pigs that just get up and storm [buildings]and you just started being ironic about it,” he said, referring to the lyrics of another of his songs, We’re Going to Have Breakfast. For Jockii Druce, there is no point in trying to change the minds of the Russians, because their state propaganda apparatus is too powerful. “You could send them a picture of dead children in Bucha or whatever,” he said of the site of an infamous Russian massacre. “And they’re going to take 100 million fucking pictures or make people say that [Ukraine] he did it.” Jockii Druce, who grew up in the southern city of Dnipro, said he grew up a Russian-speaking Ukrainian and started rapping with his friends after school for fun. He said he wasn’t really interested in politics or geopolitics, but after a while it became “impossible not to get into it because people died en masse.” He switched to using Ukrainian several years before the war when he got tired of rapping, he said, and found that rapping in Ukrainian allowed him to explore uncharted territory and renewed his enthusiasm for making music. “I thought a long time ago that it had a more organic and more authentic vibe when I do it in Ukrainian,” said Jockii Druce. “I quickly realized that no one could do it like me. The Ukrainian language itself, and the cultural context and all of that, offers a big fucking field of experience to experiment and observe and work with that no one has done. “The Russian language is all over the world,” he said. “There is much that has already been said and written in Russian, and there is much to be said and written in Ukrainian.” Regarding the question of Russian artists, Jockii Druce said that he listens more to electronic music than rap, but he liked some Russian artists before the war and he won’t go back. “Would I support them? No. But to say they are ungrateful or evil because of the war would just be hypocritical. This kind of logic feeds the Russian narrative against Ukrainians – that we are Nazis or haters,” he said. “It’s not about pushing others, it’s about standing up for yourself.” The role of Russian culture has been a hotly debated topic since February in Ukraine and in the West. Figures in Ukraine’s music scene say they have stopped trying to communicate with their Russian peers since the invasion. “[Our Russian counterparts] I don’t understand why we are so radical. They don’t want to process what’s happening and understand that it’s an imperialist country and as cultural figures they have to do something about it and think about it,” said Maya Baklanova, who has been active in Ukrainian electronic music since 2014. Baklanova presented the example of Russians who have taken refuge in Georgia and Armenia and held events without listening to the views of people in their host countries. “They’re promoting it as ‘Armenia is the new Russian rave scene.’ They are trying to Russify the scene.” This week, Mikhail Shishkin, an exiled Russian poet living in Switzerland, wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic arguing that Russian culture had been suppressed by successive Russian regimes and unfairly linked to Russia’s war crimes. If Russian culture had been freer, Siskin wrote, the invasion might not have happened. “The road to the Butcha massacre leads not to Russian literature, but to its suppression,” Siskin wrote, adding that he hoped Ukrainian poets would speak about Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, whose statues may be removed from public squares of cities in Ukraine. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Shishkin’s article has been criticized by some academics specializing in the area as “tone deaf”. “There is very little evidence that Russian culture has been relegated to oblivion,” said William Blacker, associate professor of comparative Russian and East European literature at University College London’s School of Slavic and East European Studies. “Russian culture has hundreds of years of great prestige in the West.” Blacker said that in the current context, replacing a Russian composer in a concert program with a Ukrainian one was a small gesture that “would correct a very large and very deep imbalance in our perception of culture from this part of the world.” Ukrainians distance themselves from Russian writers not only because of a particular writer’s views, but because they see how they have been weaponized to colonize them, according to Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic literature at the University of Kansas in the US. “[Pushkin] he was a talented poet … but he is also someone who had a very imperialistic and condescending attitude towards Ukraine,” Chernetsky said. “This was something that was missed in the past. [Ukrainians] it always had certain aspects of it [Russian] some authors are highlighted and others are obscured. “The war has caused many problems,” he added. “Younger people are way ahead of the older generation.”
