TUBULAR HELLS
Russian YouTube serves up authentic thuggery, faux folk.
By Sergei Verkligen

 

Seeking fame on YouTube is like tossing your hat in the ocean. Your clip will stay afloat for a bit, perhaps for a full Warholian 15 minutes, but sooner or later it will sink, and you will get sunstroke. Looking at the kings of Russian YouTube in 2007 – Nambavan and Petr Nalich – a common recipe for success does emerge: Borat-ize yourself into a brute caricature of a rampaging Slavic id. The results, though, couldn't be more different. 

Nambavan grew up in Kazan as Linar Bilalov – a bright young man with a passion for Rodchenko, Bauhaus and '70s gay disco, thrust into a vortex of small-town degradation. He tried to fit in with the local gangs, but his crew's exploits had a performance-art edge: they did things like breaking into empty kindergartens at 3 a.m. and staging pillow fights there. Finally, Linar began mocking the monsters. He christened himself Nambavan (a corruption of Number One) and recorded a couple of albums’ worth of aggressive minimal techno with crass, no-holds-barred lyrics. "Chechnya on the Dancefloor," "So Many Men, So Little Time," "I Passed Your Girlfriend Around," "Slam Bitches In the Face" were all shock value and no hidden message. The music, however, was quite remarkable for something recorded on a home computer with a cheap guitar and a karaoke mike. Nambavan got signed by a small Dutch label, and his ear-scarring barrage of raw hate and stories of abuse spread over the Web like fire through a city dump. A gig in Berlin and a dozen good reviews later, Linar decided that simply singing from the dark corners of a thug's skull was not enough. Why not adopt the monsters’ code of behavior and wage a little media war, disguised as a foul-mouthed troll?

Taking a cue from Eminem, Linar created an alter ego to his alter ego – Yura, a lumpen-proletarian brat – and videotaped a mini-series entitled “Bratan (homeboy) Info”, a mock training course in how to swear, scrounge cigarettes and kick hippies. One of the five-minute movies featured Linar/Nambavan/Yura in full bully mode, ranting about Stravinsky and "other cool music." Another was a "letter to the American president," with Linar and his track-suited "bro" reading out a garbled plea for a green card from a piece of paper: ‘Russian people every day drink vodka and do nothing. We are two guys from this horror land." The joke was as multilayered as anything by Sasha Baron Cohen: it was impossible to pinpoint exactly who was being mocked –dumb bratans, liberal Russians supplicating before the West, or Westerners who might take this bullshit seriously. Other videos were significantly less fun, particularly one spine-chilling re-enactment of a mugging and a "lesson" in hurling bricks from a balcony. In Nambavan-land, ill judgment always prevails.

Linar has just turned 20 and looks it: his prolific output is all naiveté and passion, overeager shadowboxing and instinctive limit-testing. Half of it is clearly subpar. Thrilling sonic assaults rub shoulders with puerile musings on random subjects. Still, our cynical hero makes the root cause of his frustration very clear: "Russia has always been grim, desperate and with a strong sense of church guilt," he states in one of the videos, this time seemingly serious. "Name a Russian folk song in a major key, name a painting that does not stink of oppression and shades of grey… Indignity is in our blood. Glossy mags are pimping an alien culture of snowboarders and cool clothes… our ideals are labor camps, Orthodox crosses, graves, vodka and dirt."

Fake or real, within weeks of its premiere "Bratan Info" shot to the actual nambavan on YouTube, and its creator became the most hated young man in his native city of Kazan. Complaints and death threats followed suit. Soon enough, Linar was summoned to the Public Prosecutor (District Attorney)’s office and told to stop. Stardom over, Linar returned to his favorite pastime – blogging about Goebbels and geopolitics, and lovingly taking pictures of sleeping hobos and his remarkably obliging girlfriend.

With such a vacancy open, it was inevitable that a more crowd-pleasing, less genuinely pissed-off  version of Numbavan would soon pop into frame. The audience was craving tamer, cleaner highs – something folky yet with an obvious urbane wink, something so bad it’s good. YouTube answered the hipsters’ prayers with "Gitar," a video of a guy named Petr Nalich singing a Gypsy number in pidgin-English synthax reminiscent of Nambavan's letter to George Bush. The refrain goes, well, "Gitarrr, gitarrr, gitarrr."  This novelty Goran Bregovic-as performed-by-Borat number has notched 270,000 views to date. Conceived as a joke, it ended up with Nalich gracing the recently launched Russian front page of YouTube (http://ru.youtube.com/). The tongue-in-cheek ‘welcome Russian YouTube’ video features Petr at his piano, as he gingerly attempts to play a new tune, but slips into another rendition of ‘Gitarr’. The fad proved so sustained and sustainable that the editor of a respected Moscow biweekly has temporarily quit the magazine trade to become Nalich's producer.

Gitar, gitar, gitar. Pocket freak shows like this are a dime a dozen on the internet: monosyllabic drones (‘badger badger badger’), or an a capella scat loop culled from a Finnish polka (by a folk band called Loituma), or hardcore hilarity entitled ‘I Like Bukkake’… Those mantras got their share of laughs, but they failed to stir and unite bored yuppies and students all the way across Mother Russia because of one missing ingredient: Gypsy flavor, which Nalich has by the truckload. Back in the 19th century, Gypsy songs were the epitome of freedom and the obligatory soundtrack to merchants’ orgies. Modern Russian "chanson" and "bard" traditions are largely based on Gypsy songs blended with copious amounts of klezmer. A few generations down the line, all it takes to get the intellectuals’ heads a-bobbin’ is the same old "crazy" touch of vagabond arpeggios propping up a whiskeyed vocal (one reason the Russians are uniformly crazy about Tom Waits). It could be the dusty notion of ‘true soul,’ or the simple fact that this music goes well with beer. Either way, the Web-enabled intelligentsia took to "Gitar" like the new state anthem; it will continue whistling this tune until the new, even angrier Nambavan issues the next disgusting corrective.

 

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