яTunes. The RUSSIA! Playlist
Meanwhile, Russia’s not-for-export music scene offers a glimpse of a complex and varied nation – a glimpse that can be captured only by putting profanity-rich, reproductive-organ-referencing rap next to metaphor-drenched Eastern Orthodox reggae. Picked by a consortium of Moscow’s top music critics exclusively for RUSSIA!, here are the songs that reflect the Motherland in fall ’08 from all angles, even the ones that aren’t altogether flattering.
Munipov laments the fact that horrified Westerners fail to grasp the humor behind Verka, a.k.a. Ukrainian Andriy Danylko, who dons garish drag and pumps out one Kylie Minogue-inspired dance hit after another. Munipov cites lyrics such as the roughly translated “Life is just a bed of flowers/I’ve been dancing with some raccoon for the past three hours” as one of the knee-slappers regrettably lost in the cultural conversion. Non-Russian speakers might want to sample another song, “Kiss Please,” since the English refrain “I need your dance, I need your kiss, I need your sex,” is unlikely to go over anyone’s head. Europe already had the pleasure of experiencing Serdyuchka shock in 2007 when the starlet took silver in the Eurovision Song Contest, shouting, “I am your new peace dove,” in an intentionally brutal accent that flattened the words “peace dove” into an unprintable Russian obscenity.
A melodramatic house hit is a must on any successful playlist, and the repetitive female-sung “Ya Lyublyu Tebya, Moskva” (“I Love You, Moscow”) of this Slavic Sandstorm, complemented with a booming male voice and patriotic undertones, is sure to give you a rush of “idiotic communal ecstasy.” Barabanov warns that symptoms of nausea may result from listening to the remix by rapper Timati, whom the critic calls “a symbol of the pseudo-elite.” Among the sleazeball one-liners beckoning likeminded party animals to join the ranks of raging Muscovites in Timati’s pastiche is, “If you think like we do, you’re ready for Moscow, you’re just like us.” Yikes.
“Russia is not all about vodka, balalaika, ***Tetris***, Putin, and invading Georgia,” Chernyavsky cautions. “Web 2.0 and indie rock also exist here, and Samara-based Cheese People are the proof.” The People claim to hail from “the middle of nowhere,” but their English lyrics atop a bed of punchy indie-pop have allowed them to be that breed of nebulous that begets web-grown fandom, cult followings, and shared stages with the likes of Datarock and Junior Boys. Frontwoman Olya Chubarova’s cutesy voice and quirky, ambiguous accent should be the giveaway that this band got its start on Russian MySpace.
Yes, the title, “Overslept,” is oozing with symbolism. After all, this “song-manifesto,” as Alexander Gorbachev calls it, “captures the mood and spirit of Russian twenty-somethings” with the line, “We overslept / It’s not our oil / It’s not our gas.” But, one expects nothing short of well-putisms from this rock-pop hybrid, which Gorbachev calls the most influential Russian group of the last decade. Among their achievements? They’re “the first to rid Russian rock of ideology and infuse it with sex.”
Packing enough hard street slang and vulgarity to make even a deaf babushka blush, this rap aria about wanting to get high, but being unable to locate one’s dealer – Zhora be thy name – is, according to Barabanov, “a credible glimpse of criminal hip-hop culture” in Russia. The hook, a nearly untranslatable something-something close to “Fucking cock, Zhora, where have you been?” has garnered so much buzz, Munipov tells us, it’s rumored to appear on an upcoming line of shirts by designer Denis Simachev.
Noize MC – a cheeky, testosterone-driven, sexually explicit rap-guitar star with humble beginnings as a street musician – puts on his sensitive hat for this “funny but sadly accurate track about a girl in military boots and her bald, violent soccer-fan of a boyfriend,” Chernyavsky says. Ethnic conflicts in Russia are complicated, he adds: “They’re different from racial problems in the U.S. and Europe, but mass culture rarely addresses them.”
Titled “Evil,” this is a scathing and scary light-rock lecture proclaiming that Russia has forgotten its noble past in favor of a slothful and easy present defined by money, corruption, computers, and soft-core porn. Then there’s the line about Russia’s enemies pressing from all sides (even from outer space). Yeah. Gankine describes the content as “fervently patriotic, anti-American rhetoric,” and says the composition as a whole is a “good indication of the mood of its wide scope of listeners.” That’s comforting. Be sure to check out the music video, a black-and-white patchwork of Russia’s dismal war history that includes a dig at old birth-mark himself: Gorby.
A deeply religious group of Russian Orthodox youths from the provincial town of Kostroma, Komba Bakkh has 42 self-recorded spiritual hip-hop albums to its name, and at least eight members. They employ traditional Russian instruments and “have their roots in reggae and confessional folk,” as Alexander Gorbachev puts it. “They’re perhaps the most ‘Russian’ of today’s existing bands.” The particular acoustic, flute-flaunting song in question, called “Fragmentation,” explores the division of self in modern society, and is a representative taste of KB’s subject matter. Ivan Chernyavsky seconds the nomination: “The importance of ‘Komba’ is that they are normal people of today, who blend the true roots of Russian music – Christian chant and folk – with modern songwriting. They aren’t ‘Russian Coldplay,’ ‘Russian Timberlake,’ ‘Russian Iron Maiden’ or anything else.”
Sampling ironically from a power ballad by heavy metal old-timer Valery Kipelov, Saint Petersburg’s notorious 14-member ska-punk supergroup launches into “Svoboda” (“Freedom”) with the words, “Only when you swim against the current / Do you understand what having freedom of opinion means.” According to Chernyavsky, “What possibly started out as a joke turned out to be a serious political announcement about the fate of infamous oligarch [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky and the possible restoration of a Soviet police state. And we won't even begin to describe what happens when Leningrad plays the song live.” Fine then. We’ll just Google it for ourselves.