KYIV -- A rosary with five bullet casings interspersed among the beads is the first lot to draw bids.
"What I really like is how here we've got a weapon remade into art," says the auctioneer, a big, bearded man with thick-rimmed glasses, rolling the beads through his fingers and twisting them around his heavily tatted forearm.
But it's the last lot of the day that is the most lucrative: a hand-painted and deactivated rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher along with a black flag bearing the iron cross, crescent, and curved sword of the Bureviy Brigade, the beneficiary of the bidding.
The auctioneer gets some traction in a bidding war between Danya in the front row and a couple way up in the dark of the balcony.
Danya wins with a bid of 37,000 hryvnyas -- under $1,000 but almost double the average monthly income in Ukraine. He proudly drapes the flag around his shoulders like a cape.
The venue is no auction house. It's a concert hall called Atlas on the outskirts of Podil, a low-lying area on the Dnieper River's right bank that is arguably the hippest neighborhood in Kyiv. It is ground zero for rap shows like this one, by OTOY (real name Vyacheslav Drofa), one of the new generation of hip-hop artists that have risen to fame in wartime Ukraine.
It's a rise that's inextricably intertwined with the war.
As OTOY returns to the stage, Danya goes back to jumping up and down in what are now the freshest threads in a full crowd, though the RPG launcher swings perilously on his shoulder. These auction intermissions have become a standard practice at Atlas's concerts, tonight bringing in enough for another half-dozen of the cheaper line of drones.
War Drums
Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 galvanized Ukraine in many ways, culture and the arts among them. More than two years later, the war still rages -- and art shows, poetry readings, concerts, and stand-up comedy still resonate with the need to supply the front.
Rap was already primed to play a central role in this phenomenon. A new generation of Ukrainian-language artists who were just getting started rose to fame, with war now at the core of their work.
OTOY, for example, shot to prominence after the release of his second EP, Okolofront, toward the end of 2022. Its title means "around the front" and is something of a call to arms. For the opening track, Enemy, OTOY released a video of himself digging a trench.
"We have lead in our veins from childhood," OTOY raps. "Grandpa taught me the words, 'Where the enemy is, there will be murder.' I'll stuff the black earth down the throat of those who bring ruin. I'm from Ukraine."
OTOY is far from the only hip-hop artist whose career took off as Ukrainians banded together in the country's defense and sought outlets for a surge of patriotism.
Perhaps the most prominent representative of this new generation is Kalush, sometimes appearing as Kalush Orchestra.
A folk-rap group fronted by Oleh Psyukh, Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2022 with the song Stefania. While the song itself predates the full-scale invasion and is about Psyukh's mother, Stefania, it became a war song after the group released a music video that showed them performing it in bombed-out buildings.
The chorus, "The fields are flowering, but she is graying," took on a whole different meaning as concrete was blasted to rubble by Russian attacks across the country that spring.
Another major rising star is Kalush Orchestra's labelmate, Skofka. Skofka (real name Volodymyr Samolyuk) went from promoting a single in December 2021 called Po Barabanu -- literally "along the drum" or colloquially "Whatever, I don't care" -- to releasing Chuty Hymn, or To Hear The Anthem. The transition is a sample of the war's infusion of purpose into the genre.
Chuty Hymn would become a Ukrainian anthem, racking up over 20 million YouTube views and becoming a kind of theme song for Ukraine's successful counteroffensives in the east and south in 2023 -- akin to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Fortunate Son being used in American movies about the Vietnam War.
Skofka finished his first tour of the United States and Canada at the end of March.
'Our Own Rap'
The war is not the only commonality among the newest generation of Ukrainian rappers.
In a country experiencing a generational linguistic shift away from Russian and toward Ukrainian, rap artists were ahead of the curve, giving up on Russian-language verses long before the full-scale invasion, and almost all hailing from longtime Ukrainian-language bastions in the country's west.
"We don't listen to our own rap," Lviv-based performer Stepan Burban rapped back in 2019, sending up a widespread Ukrainian attitude to the genre with an ethnic pejorative and the name of a traditional pork-fat dish. "Khokhly (topknots) on the microphones, we reek of salo. Why would I still believe in hip hop? Because I don't have a dumpster."
Those lyrics come from hip-hop duo Hlava 94, on what became a touchstone Ukrainian album -- and the only one the group would complete before launching successful solo careers. Burban became Palindrome.
"During the war, the audience for rap has grown palpably, that's the truth," Burban told RFE/RL.
"When the war started, I saw a boom of creativity. And generally, through organic processes, it increased the quality and quantity of artists," said Dima Makareyev, a producer based in Kyiv.
"Ukrainians started to listen more consciously to Ukrainian music. The audiences of listeners grew as most people swore off what was Russian," Ivan "Vanyok" Klymenko, the biggest producer in the country at the moment, said in a message.
"Ukrainians are showing the whole world that you need to fight for what's yours. You need to fight for freedom. It's not just some kind of slogan from pickets. They demonstrate freedom in literature, in film. Maybe it doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but Ukrainians are demonstrating what building freedom looks like," Burban said. "Music is another place where this resonates, another place it is conveyed."
During Ukraine's performance at Eurovision last year, the stage lit up with a similar message: "Music is an essential part of history."
'I Love My Neighbors'
The rise of Kalush and Skofka is linked by a long track record of collaboration and by Project Enko, their music label.
At the center of that is Alyona Alyona.
Alyona Alyona -- real name Alyona Savranenko -- rocketed to success well before the full-scale invasion. Her video Fishes made waves when it came out at the end of 2018, with goofy home visual production values that belied an arresting flow. A kindergarten teacher at the time, she became an overnight icon, in part because she ditched the Russian language before many others did.
She was also an early adopter of Internet virality and social media community as the central marketing nexus for an industry that barely existed in the country.
"One of the strengths of my work is to develop Ukrainian rap," Savranenko says at the beginning of a song from August 2020 called Sterzhen (Core). It features Kalush, OTOY, and a whole roster of others. "I love myself and I love my neighbors."
A few months later, Savranenko and her producer, Klymenko, founded Enko, a combined label, studio, and artist management service that has formalized their musical approach and vision.
Enko has become the core of the new generation of Ukrainian rap. That goes both for label members like Skofka and Kalush and artists like OTOY, who remains independent and has accused Klymenko of stealing his music -- a claim Klymenko denied in a statement to RFE/RL.
Representatives for Alyona Alyona did not return requests for comment.
'Too Dark'
As rap became a key medium for Ukrainian voices during the war, it has followed the hype-and-bust cycle of the counteroffensive remarkably closely.
Taking followers into account, perhaps none is more conspicuous than Kalush, which picked up over 350,000 Instagram followers in a single week around Eurovision in May 2022 and has been losing them in an outbound trickle ever since, according to data from Social Blade, which tracks social media statistics.
In contrast to many of her peers, Alyona Alyona, who in 2019 rapped, "Blood runs cold in veins/drones fall from the sky/the Earth shakes and moans," has softened up since the war started.
She has been on a religious kick, putting out an EP called Dai Boh-God Willing -- and releasing singles like Shchedra Nich, a feast day for St. Basil on New Year's Eve, which predates the Soviet-era secularization process.
OTOY is a singular example because his original branding was so militaristic. OTOY himself has not fought at the front, but he volunteers and often posts pictures of himself in camouflage and armor. In interviews, he regularly mentions a cousin, Dmytro Lisen, as among those who died defending the Azovstal steel plant during the Russian siege of Mariupol two years ago.
But musically, OTOY has become more reflective of late.
As he took over the stage after the auction-intermission for the second half of his show at Atlas, the corona of light on the screen behind him that had been a fiery red went a smoky blue, a solar eclipse gone lunar.
What followed was a set more heavily derived from his first two full-length albums, Dark, Vol. 1 and 2. He explained their titles as a joke about an ex-girlfriend telling him his music was "too dark."
The result is broody and ethereal. Despite war chants like "Potiy abo Pomri" -- "Sweat or die" -- the overall product is less explosive than Okolofront but more musically intense. His unsettling song Lurker, for example, is built around a track that sounds like an upright bassist sending out distress calls from the bottom of a well.
Judging by streaming on Spotify, the biggest songs from these recent albums are hitting numbers not far shy of the biggest songs from 2022. Still, when the time came for the encore at Atlas, OTOY returned with the title track of Okolofront.
'The Time Of The Independent Artists Has Come'
Independence is a key question within Ukrainian rap, just as it is for the country.
The headliners of Ukraine's hip-hop scene are heavy on IT specialists -- technologically savvy, Western-oriented, and used to working alone, hunched over keyboards. Self-production is the rule rather than the exception.
Alongside drone donations to the Bureviy Brigade, OTOY lists on his Instagram page his day job designing and coding the public-facing side of mobile banking applications. A quintessentially Ukrainian story.
Dima Makareyev is another. A producer for a small studio called Glad, based in Podil, he spends his days designing computer applications. By night, he makes beats with a heavy debt to retro and 8-bit sampling. He cites Soulection and Flying Lotus as main influences.
"The more you invest in equipment, the fewer ideas you have about real music, melodies, and final results. When you have good ideas, good songs in your head, there is no dependence on equipment or a certain kind of microphone," says Dima. But the IT worker overlap is, he says, a no-brainer.
"Once you know how to use all this software and you understand the physics, you can make the music," he says.
What's also apparent is just how omnivorous this brand of music is in terms of influences.
In May, Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil will play their song Teresa And Marie to represent Ukraine at Eurovision. It's an act that bookmakers still set as the odds-on favorite to come out as the winner. A song named for the respective saints, it is Alyona Alyona's first No. 1 in Ukraine.
"All of the divas were born as human beings," the pair sings.
Though Alyona herself still raps within it, it's much more choral, a far cry from what anyone would first identify as hip-hop.
'Any Style'
In a series of yet-unreleased demos he shares with RFE/RL, Dima vaults from ethereal techno to folk. He makes a beat a day, he says, and he's working on a short play of blues written by a leading actor for the Kyiv National Operetta Theater.
"Hip-hop and rap, this is the first level for us," he explains. "I started from hip-hop, but now I'm making any style of music."
Burban took off within Hlava 94, a duo he calls "classic hip-hop," before setting off on his current solo career as Palindrome, an eclectic pгoject that blends hip-hop with elements of metal and '80s pop, as well as confessional vocals by Burban that verge into emo. He is, he says, now focusing on rehearsing his live band intensively.
"Look, at the moment, independent music in Ukraine has a definite boost," Burban said. "Because the so-called stars from show business, who one way or the other always filled up the airwaves before the full-scale war, were working with the Russians. And they've faded into the background. People stopped trusting them. And because of that, now the time of independent artists has come."
