«Sorrowful ball of the epoch»: representations of social context in the Russian popular music of the 1990s

The article considers a significant number of the popular russian songs dating back to the turbulent 1990s - the first post-Soviet and post-perestroika decade. The author analyzes how the song discourse represents social context and reflects the main tendencies of social relations and components of public consciousness of the epoch. Based on the analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that the musical works created during this period are largely determined by the social context and offer verbal and musical models of social life. Text-sound incongruence, postirony, implicit polemics with the Soviet, escapism, and the cult of youth are highlighted as noticeable trends in song culture of the decade.