Hi, I’m Theo A-Mullis, reporting for MetalTalk from Kyiv, Ukraine. Ukraine people are fighting for freedom. That is so much more than just a tagline or a cliché. I mean positive freedom. The freedom to live, to grow, to create and to love. The freedom to defy, to say “fuck off.”
It is this that is at the core of our subculture, as Metalheads, goths, punks, and whatever you may be. It is found when you pick up your first guitar and play and when you write lyrics that actually mean something to you.
It is there in the Sturm und Drang of the pit and it is there in the outfits we wear.
When I walk through Kyiv, I see a city that is both free and defiant. People are expressing themselves in a way that would have been unthinkable just forty years ago and is unthinkable now in Russia.
It is there on the frontlines. I was hanging out with a soldier called Demon, watching feeds from drones and listening to Sympathy For The Devil.
Ukrainians are punk as fuck. The music they make has attitude, often dealing directly with the war. Many bands have signed up to fight. Many talented musicians have tragically been killed.
They are not doing that to protect politicians or ‘national interests abroad’.
They go to the front because they want the music to go on. Because someone in another country has tried to control them, and they’re telling Putin, that po-faced fascist, to fuck off.
That is not to say there is no pain. This is a war. It hurts. Everyone knows someone who has been killed.
Ukrainians are suffering, but they are suffering in the belief that it is better to suffer and defy for a brighter future and the right to say “fuck off” than to bend the knee and obey as a slave.
Ukrainians are punks, and punk is not dead. It is in a trench in Pokrovsk.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, when Russian forces launched a full-scale military assault across multiple fronts. The invasion was widely condemned as an unprovoked act of aggression aiming to subjugate Ukraine and undermine its sovereignty.
Theo A-Mullis, is in Ukraine to report on music and how it is assisting the Ukraine people in dealing with the trauma they are experiencing through Russian aggression during the full-scale invasion.
