Never Underestimate the Audience

Cultural historians have long remarked on America’s need for a frontier. First there was the American West, conquered by covered wagon. Then more distant continents caught the national eye, sought by ocean steamer and battleship. Since the early 1980s, America’s frontier has been the Soviet Union.

This is less farfetched than it sounds. Ever since Mikhail S. Gorbachev parted the Iron Curtain, Americans have been romanticizing the Soviet Union and its apparent barrenness. By the thousands they have sent themselves and their culture to this New World, and the Soviet Union, with its archaic rituals and puritanical cultural traits, has in turn bestowed an aura of exotica on each endeavor--just like a new Amazon or another North Pole. Unfortunately, Americans have all too often selected the mediocre from their culture for such evangelizing, as in sending Big Macs and Motley Crue to the Soviet Union.

Consider this past weekend’s two-day heavy-metal showdown in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium. Hyped as the Soviet Union’s “Woodstock,” much of the press coverage has made imperialistic assumptions about the Soviets who flocked to the extravaganza. Many reports implied that this was Moscow’s first taste of real heavy metal, for instance. In fact, such Western bands, including one of the festival’s headliners, the Scorpions, have toured the Soviet Union in past years.

Other reports assumed that Soviet spectators had learned their concert behavior from Western videos. In fact, there is a large, well-developed “metalist” culture in the Soviet Union that has a complete set of its own rites, including concert rituals. There was also an expectation that this event was an unmitigated thrill for poor heavy-metal-deprived Soviet adolescents. Did anyone consider that maybe this concert could have been no more and no less than a big, fun party for Soviet heavy-metal fans--as it would have been for their American peers? There was a pervasive and unwarranted assumption throughout all this hype that the Soviets were ignorant of heavy metal and grateful for the brush with anything American.

This arrogance has fed into a new cultural fad: Everything Soviet is hip. Every interest group--from trout fishermen to disabled boaters--wants to hook up with a Soviet counterpart. Corporations want to sell their wares to the natives; performers gain prestige by singing to them. The Soviets have become a bulging reservoir that Americans tap to feel good about themselves, their economy and their culture, no matter how mediocre.

So before this American cultural imperialism gets out of hand, we’d like to put in a plea for respect and moderation. The heavy-metal fest revealed less about changes in the Soviet Union than it did about static American attitudes toward the rest of the world.