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I did not give up hope, though. It was not as if popular musie did not have an audience in Georgia -1 could see all kinds of people listening to it on the bus and in the streets. The musie was there, but I was enough of a cultural outsider that I did not know how to find it. I tried other methods to learn about local popular musie, such as looking in record Stores and talking to as many people as possible. There were only two such Stores and kiosks, both located in the most posh, touristy sections of the city.^{1 2} No matter when I dropped by, they were practically abandoned; no one seemed to want to buy the mp3 albums of American and Russian rock and pop that lined the shelves. One of the Stores had a tiny section devoted to Georgian musie, but it was filled with albums of traditional musie, which was not what I wanted. The people that I asked, almost all contacts from the Conservatory, did not deny the existence of Georgian popular musie, but they said it was too horrible and tasteless for them to contemplate studying and they seemed not to know anything about it.

My big breakthrough happened after about two months in the field. A friend of one of my roommates invited us to a concert where one of her friends was performing. Finally I was going to attend an actual popular musie concert by a local band! The group, Mgzawebi (Passengers), had formed only a few months prior, but it already had enough of a following to attract an audience of several hundred people. For the life of me, I could not figurę out how all those people knew that the concert was taking place, sińce the musie was not played on television or the radio and there were not any advertisements of the concert in the local press. It was puzzling to say the least.

A few months later, I knew the group well enough to sit down and interview one of its members, the singer Nini Dedalamazishvili. Out of curiosity, I asked how they advertised their

1

These are GURU Musie in the Vak'e neighborhood and Shardeni Musie Box in the downtown area.

2