Singing Exile: Loneliness, Friendship, and Peace in the Music of Monetochka and Noize MC

Speaker: Dr. Sergei Akopov, Walter Benjamin Research Fellow, Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script”, Freie Universität, Berlin.

We are not always fully aware of the depth of our alienation in world politics. Often this awareness arises only retrospectively, or through encounters with those who arrive in our societies as exiles. Some of these individuals become our interlocutors and even our friends, subtly reshaping our own “regimes of loneliness”. This lecture examines how contemporary Russian musicians Monetochka and Noize MC transform the experience of exile into musical landscapes of solitude, friendship, and a political yearning for peace. Drawing on the concept of “topoanalysis” – the study of how spaces such as “home” are tied to affective forms of loneliness – we will together explore how their lyrics narrate dimensions of emotional displacement, gender resistance, and emergent forms of communal care. By tracing how music becomes a medium of testimony, critique, and solidarity, the lecture highlights the political significance of artistic voices that oppose war while cultivating transnational networks of empathy. Through close readings of selected songs and their reception among exiled publics, the session situates popular music as a vital arena in which personal affects unexpectedly crystallize into international political agency.

 Discussant : Antoine Nicolle, Université Bordeaux-Montaignе