Uzbek Music Under Siege

A while back, I wandered into Registan.net and an entry on "three Uyghur girls from Uzbekistan" who turned out to be Shahrizoda. Since then, I've stumbled into mp3uz.com, uzfiles.com and a dozen or so videos on YouTube. Bottom line, there's a lot of cool Uzbek music. This gives us, among other things, one more reason to hate the despotic regime of Islam Karimov. A few months back, a number of artists, including some big enough that I recognize the names, even, were barred from publicly performing for being insufficiently Uzbek. Then they arrested a 66 year-old pop star from the 70's after his privately penned protest against the Andijon massacre became public (two people listening to it on a bus were turned in by a bus driver).

The good news about Uzbekistan is that its music, etc, indicate we are not looking at a country likely to join the Islamofascists anytime soon. The bad news is that's in part because it's still pretty close to being the Soviet Socialist Republic it once was. The aging pop star got three years house arrest today. It could have been worse. On the other hand, things could be a lot better.

The news is at the Long and Winding Road. Scroll the archives for more about cool Uzbek music and the threat it's under.