Still from Sobor’s video Sisters of Victory – With Russia in the Heart.

Still from Sobor’s video Sisters of Victory – With Russia in the Heart.

Peer-reviewed articles Performing homeland and the de-/legitimation of war. A multimodal analysis of music videos

How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2025:3, pp 32-42
Published on balticworlds.com on October 23, 2025

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abstract

How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.

KEYWORDS: Multimodal analysis, music video, violence, Russia, legitimacy.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PAPER OA (see upper right corner)

Anna Schwenck and Anastasia Bondarenko

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