In a country under siege, you can hear war-ready pop music on the radio, patriotic songs on battlefields, and Disney covers inside bunkers.
Turkish-made aerial drones armed with laser-guided missiles have, in the past two weeks, helped Ukraine slow Russia’s invasion. Known as Bayraktar TB2s, the drones are not just a piece of military equipment anymore. They are symbols of Ukrainian resistance—and the inspiration for a very catchy song. A track titled “ Bayraktar,” of indeterminate origin, has been receiving hundreds of thousands of plays online, and is in rotation on Ukrainian radio. Over a simple beat, a gravelly voice insults Russian President Vladmir Putin’s forces—their equipment, their mission, and the soup they consume in their possibly doomed tanks. Roughly translated into English, here is how one verse goes: They wanted to invade us with force And we took offense at these orcs Russian bandits are made into ghosts by Bayraktar! “Ukrainians are very funny—there’s this deep, dark humor,” Adriana Helbig, the music-department chair at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on the country’s culture, told me on Tuesday. Listening to Ukrainian broadcasters over the past few days, she has been struck by a witty, even upbeat, tone amid the ongoing destruction. “They’re like, We’ll be back to our regular programming as soon as we kill off our invaders.” I had reached out to Helbig to learn about the sound of Ukraine, both during this invasion and before it. Last year, viewers around the world were mesmerized by the country’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest: an intense techno track about environmental catastrophe, featuring folk melodies from the Chernobyl region.
