The Birth of Pussy Riot: Six Early Songs

Egyptian air is good for the lungs

This is a reference to the Egyptian revolution of 2011, which at its height saw around 2,000,000 protesters occupy Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Pussy Riot is encouraging this kind of “recent revolutionary glory” to happen in Moscow’s Red Square. Philosopher and theorist Judith Butler described the historic actions in Tahrir Square in her lecture “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” as “Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also, quite clearly, a way to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy and precarity, overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space and time of the event with such tenacity to bring the regime down.”

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