Russian Pop

The big event of May was, of course, the Eurovision Song Contest. Maks Fadeev’s protegees Serebro, despite a very impressive impersonation of Girls Aloud, only came third. They were beaten by Verka Serdiuchka’s cheeky dalliance with anti-Russian sentiment and a leaden Serbian ballad by flag-waving Marija Serifovic, whom NTV likened to an equally heavy-set Harry Potter. Well-funded, sexually charged elegance was beaten by a drag artist and a fat lesbian. Oh, dear. Moscow’s Gay Pride march ended in fisticuffs and the B1 Club planned a “March of the Sexual Majority,” who would be represented by Neschastnyi sluchai, Khoron’ko orkestr, Bi-2, Irina Bogushevskaia, Alena Sviridova “and others.” Both sides of the sexual spectrum were being politicized in ways that seemed abnormal or unnatural: they became farcical or forceful.

Slivki posed nude (again), this time for Playboy in a stubbornly “radical” PR gesture; Gorod 312 celebrated their new album with equally extreme optimism. Any kind of persistence “will get you noticed” they said, but the huge financial backing behind Slivki and Serebro led Nikolai Noskov to counter this disproportionate hopefulness with a cynical suggestion that Serebro had paid Nikolai Baskov’s back-up singers to sing for them off-stage, hidden away as a dirty secret. Noskov’s skepticism implied that traditions of profiteering dictate the political stances we see on today’s stage, be they liberal or conservative. Artists will say, do, and promote whatever makes money.

If Noskov is right, then we should be very worried by recent performances like the new video (“Zlo”) by Diskoteka avariia. Purportedly a tirade against all kinds of “evil,” it mixes patriotic black and white footage from WWI with pro-Soviet newsreels, and scenes of churches demolished by the Soviets. The film is so confused that it could be applied to any period; it becomes a strange nostalgia for any power structure, for governmental power per se. If this, too, is designed for profit more than for principles, then we end up with a sad paradox. Performers will laud the nature of power, in this case of conservative, long-familiar structures, at the expense of their own self-definition. They will, oddly, move with greater extremism towards a greater conservatism. Profitable pleasure becomes synonymous with restraint. Serifovic’s “liberal” sexuality takes second place to her role as conservative nationalist; Diskoteka avariia’s “revolutionary” call to fight evil takes second place to roles defined by the distant past (and then sold in shops). The sexual and ethical dramas here now mean nothing; they never happen because their passions are never fully enacted. So why is Aleksei Kortnev so upset?

Take the planning this month for the Novaia volna festival. Both this and Fabrika zvezd 7 announced in May their plans to foster new, groundbreaking talent from the 16-30 age group. In reality these newcomers already include Polina Smolova and Oksana Pochepa (ex-Akula!), both well-established performers. The strange, cynical choice of including Zara in Fabrika zvezd 6 last year is now becoming increasingly normal. The longer we watch this process, the more we understand why one per cent of all published music in the West accounts for eighty per cent of musical business.

In the UK, by way of example, Joss Stone’s album was designed to show “who I am as an artist” – this from a woman whose voice is clearly designed to invoke an already-familiar tradition. Coldplay released a singles retrospective (what, already?), while Arcade Fire unveiled the epitome of marketable, polite and quintessentially “Canadian” innovation with their “Neon Bible” album. Even their compatriot Avril Lavigne morphed from “outrageous,” sullen teenager into the tawdry, profit-driven kitsch of “Girlfriend.”

These instances of repetition have a sad and specific meaning within the field of already-popular artists. Although in a position to afford the risks of innovation, these singers will opt for polite, profitable conservatism. Over time, however, any stylistic replication by those stuck outside business will take on a different meaning. It will become a kind of “consoling realism,” to use a term applied more than twenty-five years ago to Men’shov’s film “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.” Familiar, generic repetitions will console struggling performers and listeners by maintaining a key tension between duplication (of something old or pleasantly familiar) and the fact that perfect pleasure (a final coincidence of text and life) is unobtainable. Thus happiness is always chased (it’s always there - perhaps!) but it is never found (we never discover that it’s not there).

This is what we need to consider when we hear polite conservatism in any independent popular music from Russia. Firstly, “independent” is not a suitable term. This is not proud, self-sufficient independence from anything, especially given the inability of anybody in our playlist to enter the world of ORT, Fabrika zvezd or Novaia volna. This is a consoling interplay between familiarity and innovation that produces pleasure in a world which denies it. The familiarity of popular songs by people who will probably never be popular is a beautiful, bitter-sweet expression of desire itself: the repetitious, heartening interaction of old, recognizable limits and occasionally unfamiliar variation. This has nothing to do with a defeatist “comfort in misfortune,” to quote Akhmadulina.

In order to explain things, let’s start with an “old” and regionally familiar artist. Sed’moi prokhozhii have been a vital member of the Vladivostok scene since 1987 – early enough to have produced a magnitizdat album, play in perestroika festivals with Japanese bands, and attract the (positive) attention of Soviet TV. Their tracks offered this month actually come from their 2003 album “Rossyp’” and were written even earlier. The band is brave enough to publish a devastating review of that album on their site, where it’s dismissed as “completely retarded” (polnyi otstoi). This wonderful, voluntary self-effacement on a promotional site(!) suggests that repeated, replayed songs are serving a different, second purpose outside of (but not “independent” from) a business unaware of their existence.

So what is that second purpose? Other artists help to answer the question, those who are most clearly recognizable or generically conservative, such as KlipSa or Tasha: both recall the post-Akula work of Oksana Pochepa mentioned above. Tasha has enjoyed chart success in Moldova, together with local TV coverage, just like Sed’moi prokhozhii. She also took part in the 2006 “Ty zvezda” contest, i.e. on the periphery of national Moscow shows like “Narodnyi artist.” Here we could add Violetta Iskritskaia’s “Colombian” rhythms in “Polnolunie,” which even the youngest listener would associate with Shakira, yet Iskritskaia sings of local, Russian wolves howling at the moon (na russkoi zemle). Likewise, Tashkent’s KlipSa hope their contributions will become “steps towards the Russian market” (shagi na otechestvennyi rynok). All these performers sound like international, profitable artists inside the market, but in actuality they are all outside. Any familiar, repeated elements will take on a more powerful, reassuring meaning for other distant performers and audiences far from the world of cash. They embody the looping structures of desire – something that endures even when hope starts to fade.

The clearest example of this double-position comes from Novosibirsk’s R&C E-motion. Their track could easily be some outtake from an Aleksa-Timati duet in Bondarchuk’s “Zhara,” but if we look at how they define themselves verbally elsewhere, this apparent depiction of rap-tinged “positive feelings and sex” is also called “a parody [steb] of glamour.” In other words, real membership in Moscow’s glamour is invoked - and then dismissed ironically as impossible. This is exactly what happened with Men’shov’s film, criticized upon its release as both politically conservative and melodramatically apolitical. These radically different intentions both resulted from repetitious, recognizable formats. The Soviet press – just like today’s blogs – was full of letters from people who remained “outside” Moscow, far from its glamour. For them the film’s conservative, unoriginal plot structure meant more because of its unoriginality. Provincial viewers never stopped dreaming of finding their “Gosha”; they were consoled by the film’s conservatism that promised a Cinderella ending – one it would never produce in reality outside the cinema. This happy, positive tension kept hope and desire alive. Thank heavens, therefore, for the conservatism of these songs in our playlist, written far from anything resembling a secure life or the silly success “promised” by Gorod 312. This conservatism is a form of stubborn, courageous dreaming in a cruel country.

Perhaps the best example in this month’s playlist of elusive, desperately-sought consistency comes in the songs offered by Kraski. The reader’s first reaction will probably be: “What? The same Kraski from Belarus?” Well, yes and no. These artistes reached the peak of their popularity around 2003… and then faded away, due in part to a change in managerial support. Now with a new lead singer (Ol’ga Khimich), arguments have begun over which version of the group is more “real” or consistent. Accusations fill the Minsk press every few months that “false-Kraski” are touring the nation: the fickle nature of profiteering has made conservative, stable identities impossible. Belarusian forums are full of both support and abuse, all directed at two versions of “one” band.

The strange, paradoxically positive role of unchanging, unadventurous formats always requires its mirror image: experimentation, the kind of impulse that leaves Murmansk’s SV Clinic, in their own words, somewhere in between “AC-DC, Radiohead. Coldplay, Led Zeppelin, Him, and Paradise Lost.” Whatever the common ground may be between those artists, it’s obviously virgin territory. Likewise, Yekaterinburg’s “The Invisibles” (Nevidimki) list Blur, My Bloody Valentine, Suede, and Slowdive as their primary, familiar influences. They then stress their relationship to novelty in a clever way. The band’s full name includes the phrase “Staring at their Shoes”; this refers not only to the “shoe-gazing” of ‘90s britpop, but also to a Yekaterinburg statue of H.G. Wells’ “Invisible Man.” The figure is both present and absent. In the same way, Nevidimki’s offerings hint at early Megapolis and the gently ironic vocals of Oleg Nesterov, who frequently invoked and then sidestepped the constraints of traditional melodies.

Equally delicate in their manipulation of conservative pop formats are Moscow’s Novye prazdniki, who have also been explicitly likened by the press to Megapolis, together with Nogu svelo, Uma2rman, and Essex’s Saint Etienne. Amongst all these justifiable references, we can also hear the influence of their earlier, much darker and experimental hypostasis from the early ‘90s, Drugoi orkestr. For this reason they define themselves as “alternative estrada,” i.e. an alternative which needs an accompanying tradition. This musical idea, which leads to some witty, very novel tracks (especially “To ta zhe”) is buried amid a wealth of literary aphorisms on their site, including one Russian adage: “A woman got angry at the world… but the world knew nothing about it” (Serdilas’ baba na mir, a mir pro to i ne vedal). The outside world, the land of fame and fortune, is not open to all dreamers (and it doesn’t care). The romantics who get there have to sell those daydreams, anyway. Rather than get angry, they stay at home and take long, vital consolation from the same recurring and familiar wishes - no matter how bad things get. In fact the worse the world, the braver and more insistent the reverie.