US, Russia Step Up Music and Culture Moves

Edited

International politics are messy but there’s one word that sums it all up: “power.”

Take it from a former straight-A political science student at Cal State Northridge who was afforded an opportunity to travel to Israel in 2002, returned to Kiev in 2006 to assume the national editor role at the Kyiv Post, and who’s spent roughly two months in Tanzania between trips in 2007, 2012 and 2020.

I am a brand manager on a portfolio of newsletters, so I spend a lot of time reading, and probably not enough writing, headlines notwithstanding). The recent developments involving the Recording Academy moves in Middle East and Africa and Russian government entertaintment initiative are interesting to me since the question of “culture” and “atturning” is not mutually exclusive.

In an election year, it’s flying under the radar of mainstream media outlets and personalities at CNN, MSNBC, Fox and elsewhere - despite receiving coverage in a Hollywood trade and at the WSJ, under the byline of my friend and legendary journalist Ann Simmons, the Moscow bureau chief (I’ve checked in with Ann, a Brit of Caribbean roots, from a cafe Dar es Salaam while hanging out with Biggs, a friend who is Jamaican concert promoter and safari organizer whose birthday just happened to be the day I last touched down in Dar es Salaam, October 18, 2020).

Ann’s article explores how Putin and Russia are approaching the entertainment, live music and arts space post-Ukraine invasion. It’s a visionary move by Putin, separate from what I feel amounts to shady, creative financial engineering by Biden and G7 intended to undermine Russian people by hedging against them using the ‘woe-is-me’ Ukrainian narrative that I am simply not buying into any more.

Any thoughts? Feedback? Let me know.