University Place CREECA Lecture Series Artemii Troitsky, "Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia" 10/28/2010  UP 512   cc >> Karen Evans-Romaine: Good afternoon. A scholar likes to quote her sources, so before I even introduce our guest today, I'm going to thank the people who helped me prepare this introduction, unwittingly or not, and that is David McFadian at UCLA and Alexander --, from both of whom I'll be heavily citing material in my introduction, so many thanks to these colleagues. Our guest today, Artemii Troitsky, can without a doubt be considered the world's foremost expert on the history of rock music in Russia. However, this is only part of Mr. Troitsky's profile. Born in Yaroslavl and educated in Moscow as an economist, Troitsky became notorious for hosting illicit discos from a cafe at Moscow State University. In the late 1970s and 1980s he organized concerts that promoted the work of then-underground, but now famous, groups including Time Machine, -- In 1980, he organized a rock festival considered the Soviet Woodstock. His career as a music critic continued in the same vein with underground assessments of the Beatles and Deep Purple in illegal -- journals. With the era of Perestroika, Troitsky entered the mainstream as editor of the Soviet Union's most influential music publications. His views grew increasingly important, increasingly heard, and he was promoted to even more noteworthy publications and television positions, including music editor for Russian Television as the USSR collapsed. At the same time, he began organizing concerts of Russian groups abroad, including Avia, Zvuki Mu, and Bravo. 

In the 1990s, Troitsky's journalistic activity expanded in new directions. He worked at Novaya Gazeta, now one of the few opposition newspapers left in Russia, which regularly published the work of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered for her reporting on the Chechnya conflict. Disturbed and intrigued by the changing nature of modern Russian journalism, as McFadian has written, Troitsky, even with pronounced irony, accepted the position of editor at Playboy for a brief period in 1995. He's published as a musical commentator also in English at the Moscow Times and developed an Internet column, Diversant Daily, with a title parodying the newspaper which could earlier have been considered Russia's answer to Wall Street Journal. Today it's a bit of a different story. He has been active in projects for television since the Perestroika era, most recently on the channel --, which could be compared to PBS, and more recently on film. Troitsky teachers at Moscow State University's journalism school and the Russian State University of Management, and has a weekly radio show entitled FM Dostoevsky on the radio station -- FM and until last month on --, Echo of Moscow, the closest Russian equivalent to what we would know as NPR. The FM Dostoevsky play list represents contemporary music from various genres all over the globe. Troitsky can even still be heard regularly in interviews on Echo Moscow. The most recent interview, at least that I've kept track of, was two weeks ago on the morning program "Turnaround," with -- Since 1999, Troitsky has organized Moscow club concerts of music from abroad. 

He also runs a record label. Artemii Troitsky is the author of several published books, including the best-known earliest on, "Back in the USSR" from 1987, "The True Story of Rock in Russia," released on audio cassette last year. The 1990 "Tusovka: What Happened to Soviet Underground Culture?" A 1999 compilation of political commentaries entitled --, "Interesting Times." The 2006 "I'll Take You Into the World of Pop," -- And a two-volume collection of articles on Russian rock history published in 2008 entitled "Rattling Skeletons in a Closet." I am delighted to introduce Artemii Troitsky. (applause) >> Artemii Troitsky: Thank you. This is me. I will give a chance to those who are late, and I will play one more video now, which will put you into a nostalgic mood, I think. I also want to announce that there are some vacant seats. I can see some visitors over there who are not taking a very comfortable position, so here it's much better.  § § (video plays, singing in Russian)  § §  (rock music) § §  § §  § §  >> Nice still picture there. Good. 

This was a relatively new video by a moody Russian rapper nicknamed Zilfin, but of course, they have used the footage from 1980, the closing ceremony of Moscow Olympic Games. This, of course, was the mighty and peaceful, the multicultural and optimistic Soviet Union. At the same time, of course, the Soviets were dying in Afghanistan and this was also exactly the time when Vladimir -- has died. But still, you could see the tears of joy everywhere. In this beautiful country, we also had one little black beast, you know, the black sheep of the family and this was rock music. Of course, rock music was greeted with huge enthusiasm by radical young people all over the world, but also it was confronted by less radical and less young people also all over the world. This has also happened in the United States of America where Elvis Presley couldn't be shown on TV from his waist down, as you probably know. This has happened in England, home of the Sex Pistols, 20 years later when a guy was arrested in London for listening to Bill Haley records too loud. This also, of course, was the case in the Soviet Union. I think that in the Soviet Union, this case was even more dramatic than in other countries. 

Karen told me that she has shown you again a relatively recent Russian movie called "Stilyagi," "The Hipsters." Have you seen it? No? Karen! Whom did you show this movie to? (laughter) All right. Then, you must see this movie because I think it really is a brilliant film. It's a brilliant film which shows the first ever Russian youth cult of the '50s, Stilyagi. They were very few, but very brave, very independent. They liked American music, they liked American Zoot suits, and they liked... surrealist painters and they liked everything that in the Soviet Union was considered totally unacceptable, decadent, awful, and contaminated. Stilyagi movement took place in the mid '50s mostly, and they ceased to exist in the beginning of the '60s. Unfortunately, they haven't left any trace in Russian cultural history except for their funny costumes, usually self-made replicas of what they thought could be trendy American clothes. Unfortunately, Stilyagi didn't write songs, they just copied American styles. They even didn't listen to rock and roll. 

Their favorite music was big band jazz, the Glenn Miller type and their favorite song, the anthem of Stilyagi was a song called "Chattanooga Choo-Choo." Still, they paved the way to something that hasn't happened in the Soviet Union in the previous decades. They showed that it is possible, it is not absolutely lethal, to be different in a society of absolute uniformity. With rock music, in Russia, the situation was much more, well, much stranger than in the West, because the whole musical scene was completely different. Like in America, you didn't have rock and roll until, say, 1955, but you did have blues, and jazz, and also there was free market, and show business and all those things that literally did not exist in the Soviet Union up until the late '80s. When I said that there was no show business and no music market, I mean that, for instance, they only had one record label in the country. This was a state monopoly called "Melodia." And like every socialist or communist enterprise, Melodia didn't have to sell records. They had to produce records. They had their early plan of, say, to produce 100 million records in a year. And nobody cared whether these records will be sold or not. So they honestly produced these 100 million records in a year and then they've been, well, I don't know what they've done with them. 

For the first couple of years they were just gathering dust on the shelves of record stores and then probably they just put them somewhere in, you know, where they usually put industrial waste. These records, of course, they've been the beautifully packaged, gatefold albums, double albums or triple albums with Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party's speech at another party congress. Of course, there's been examples of slightly different music production and these were the albums of, say, Alla Pugacheva or --, famous Russian pop performers who also sold millions, maybe tens of millions of records. But the paradoxical thing is that they did not receive any money from the sales of these records. The concept of royalties simply did not exist in the Soviet Union. All musicians, singers and instrumental players, they've only received a certain fixed amount of money for spending some time in the recording studio. Then when the album was out, it could sell 100 copies or 10 million copies, it did not make any difference for those who have recorded these albums. Of course, there were some other interesting issues, like censorship.  Yesterday, I've been talking at Indiana University and the students there couldn't believe that censorship may be possible in music. But this is the fact. 

Actually, there were two ways of introducing censorship in music. One was obvious, and this was regarding the song lyrics. In the Soviet Union, every text, be it a novel or stupid lyrics to a stupid pop song, they all must have been submitted, presented to an institution called Glavlit, which was a big censorship organization of the Soviet Union. Then at this Glavlit, they had hundreds if not thousands of censors. I think they've been officially called "editors," who browsed through every text and of course they've had very good intuitive understanding of what is good and what is bad from the point of view of ideology, aesthetics, whatever. If they didn't like something, they could scrap this text completely. If the shortcomings of this text were not so big, they simply edited out the lines that they didn't like. Then they'd put their stamp of approval on this piece of paper and only from this moment this text could be published or sang, or performed in public. Another way, a more kind of uneven way of censorship was the fact that in the Soviet Union, only approved professionals did have the right to compose songs and to play in public and receive money for this. All those guys who've got this license, they had to be professionally educated. 

Like we had a big institution which I think exists even now, but of course it doesn't play any role in the society and general cultural scene anymore, an institution called the Union of Soviet Composers. All the Soviet composers, they've been graduates of various conservatories, some of them had been actually very talented, most of them were not. But in any case, it's only those guys who were approved and chosen to compose music in the Soviet Union. Like, if you were Lennon and McCartney, for instance, like Russian Lennon and Russian McCartney, --, who as you know didn't have any musical education, they wouldn't be able to do anything professionally in the Soviet Union, simply because they haven't graduated from a music college. This, of course, also was ways of censorship because in order to become a member of the composers union, writers union, and so on, all these "creative workers," as they've been called in the Soviet Union, they had to compromise. Thanks to this compromise, they've got the privilege of being accepted into this cultural elite of people who were allowed to be composers, writers, filmmakers, painters, and so on. The system existed everywhere, also in music. Moreover, of course, the Soviet Union as a whole, and Soviet cultural scene as a part of it, have been totally or almost totally isolated from the outside world. You have heard about the Iron Curtain. Usually the Iron Curtain is meant in a political sense, but there was also cultural Iron Curtain. 

Like Western radio stations, Voice of America, the BBC and so on, they had been jammed. All imported records have been considered a contraband, criminal activities. Even importing of musical instruments has not been allowed. So the cultural information, in our particular case, the information about rock music, has made its way into the Soviet Union in a very, very peculiar manner. Like, I was a student and a rock fan, and I was already a journalist, a writing person at that time. In order to obtain, say, new albums from, say, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, or Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, whoever, I had to use all kinds of cunning tricks. We had a black market. The records black market, which wasn't actually a market, because if there was a market, a place where people came and sold and traded records, then, well, it would be closed down and the participants, the sellers and vendors of this market would be arrested. In reality, the black market for Western records was a big chain of people who worked in different places, and it was like a -- or something. I made phone calls to various guys and they told me, "Okay, let's meet there and I'll take you there." It was an interesting adventure. 

The demand for this music was huge. I can tell you that a new album of a popular Western rock band, like in the beginning of the '70s, when I was especially active on the black market, could cost up to 80 rubles. At the very same time, the average monthly, not weekly, monthly wage in the Soviet Union was 150 rubles. So a new Led Zeppelin album would cost a music lover, a rock fan, more than half of his monthly income. But still these albums were changing hands and it was really a very big and successful black business. This was like, you know, the lifestyle, background, of what was happening, but now let's go back to actual music. As I told you before, Stilyagi, the hipsters of the '50s, did not create their own music. Generally speaking, the early rock and roll music, which emerged in the United States in the mid '50s, the rock and roll music of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and so on, didn't really become big in the Soviet Union. My humble theory is that this hasn't happened simply because American rock and roll was too unusual for normal Russian people, even less normal young Russian people. It was too aggressive. 

It was too fast. It was too strongly emphasized on rhythm, which is not actually the kind of qualities that Russian people traditionally value in music. I think that most of the Russians who are present here will agree with me that what we actually like is music which is melodic, a bit schmaltzy, what we call dushevna, you know, soulful. And by "dushevna" we mean that we can sing along to it. And before we sing along to it, we must drink a lot. This is how we usually perceive good music, not in the way it was done in South Bronx in the '50s, or even Memphis, Tennessee, or Chicago. The sound of rock and roll was a bit too alien for us. If you can imagine how a soulful company of drunk Russians would sing along to "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, then you may get the idea. Everything has happened in the blink of an eye in the mid '60s. This has happened thanks to another Anglo-Saxon musical trend, but not coming from the US, but from the UK, and I mean the Beatles. 

The Beatles marked the beginning of rock mania in the Soviet Union and I think eastern Europe in general. And again, I can understand why. You know, it's, I think, one of the greatest achievements of this fantastic band that they have managed to combine and fuse in a very talented and convincing way the two elements. The American, how do we say, the Black American, electric, sexy, funky rhythm-and-blues element and the traditional, melodic, European, romantic thing. They've done it so nicely and so organically that everyone, of course, immediately recognized that this is our music. This is also the time when Russian youngsters couldn't abstain from actually trying to perform this music. This is when the first generation of Russian rock bands emerged. Usually it is said that we had the first rock groups in 1964 or 1965. Some of them, by the way, have been formed by foreign students who have studied in the Soviet Union. Because unlike us poor Soviet boys, they did have access to both Western records and electric instruments. 

Up until the beginning of the '70s, no electric guitars had been produced in the Soviet Union. I think that the instrument was considered ideologically incorrect in the country. But a lot of self-made guitars have been made during this period. The toughest goal was to produce a bass guitar, because if you made a normal six-string electric guitar, one could always use the normal strings from acoustic guitar. But bass guitar demanded big, thick, low-frequency strings, which of course were not on sale. So thousands of grand pianos have been vandalized in the Soviet Union at that time... (laughter) In order to supply these bass strings to self-made bass guitars. The first generation Russian rock bands, again, like Stilyagi, they didn't bother about writing their own material. I started, well, until 1968, I, as a teenager, lived in Czechoslovakia, so I've only returned to Moscow in 1968 and started to attend rock concerts in the summer of 1969. All the bands that I heard, they all played cover versions of their favorite Western groups. 

Mostly, of course, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks, and Beach Boys, and so on. Then later, they played songs by the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, you name it. Very often the singers did not understand what they are singing about. They've just picked up phonetically the songs from bad-quality records and tapes, and sang something that probably the originators of these songs would not understand. This was also my first professional achievement because I, by that time already, could speak some English. By the way, I'm self-taught. I'm self-taught. I've learned by English from listening to thousands of rock and roll records, and translating of articles from music magazines and so on. My first professional work in the rock music field was that I put the correct lyrics to the songs of, like, Iron Butterfly, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby," and so on. I put the lyrics to the songs for my friends who played in bands who performed these songs. 

This has started to change in the beginning of the '70s, and I think that one particular person and his particular band must be blamed for that, and I mean Andre Makarevich and the band called Mashina Vremeni. They were not the first Russian rock band who sang in Russian, but they were the first Russian rock band who sang something completely different in Russian. Makarevich happened to be the first person who got, I think, the true message of rock music, that you have to write songs about real life, and your real feelings, and your real frustrations. So Mashina Vremeni, they were, again, an unofficial underground band. Makarevich himself was a student of Moscow Architectural College. They only played at student parties, dormitories, some dancing parties in the most unusual places. So they've been amateurs in the so-called -- "artistic self activity" as this has been called in the Soviet Union at that time. Now I would like to play a video by Mashina Vremeni, which I think dates back to 1995 or so. It's a very famous song by this band. But you know, why I've chosen this video is because it contains small extracts from their early days, and I think you can notice some shots from the '70s. 

 § § (singing in Russian)  § §  >> Andre Makarevich and Mashina Vremeni. Well, I must say that musically they haven't changed much since that time. I personally always found their music quite boring. And it still is boring, but, well, I might talk a little bit about it later, but in the classic formation of Russian rock, music did not mean much. The main thing was the message. "The message was the message," if we quote Marshall McLuhan. Throughout the '70s, the scene was developing rather slowly, but the popularity of rock music grew fast. There was even some kind of official answer to rock music and these were the so-called V-I-as, Vocally Instrumental Ensembles, who were actually not any different content-wise from the official Soviet pop music, as represented by all kinds of incredibly awful crooners, but this Soviet pop music was arranged with electric guitars. Well, of course, it was fake. It was vicious, but even those VIAs became very popular with the less discriminating young people and music lovers. 

By the end of the '70s, there was one very important development in the world of Russian rock and this was the fact that rock musicians have started to produce their own recorded product. You all, of course, have heard of Samizdat. Samizdat, you know, the illegal literature, be it --, even --, which was Xeroxed and typed and copied and distributed among intelligentsia. Now less well-known in the West, but much more popular and massive in underground production movement, if I can say, was Magizdat or Magnetizdat. When the songs of underground Russian rock bands have been, well, not actually the songs. Albums and concerts by Russian rock bands have been duplicated by millions of tape recorders. And these recordings have been distributed absolutely everywhere from Baltic Sea to Pacific Ocean. This also has led to a strange phenomenon when the bands started to produce their own handmade albums. They simply bought the cassettes and then they made photos and track listings and so on, with their own hands, like artisans, they created their own albums, which they usually simply gave away to their friends and sometimes even sold. For the authorities, this was the last straw. 

I must admit, that before the very end of the '70s, or even the beginning of the '80s, there were no bans on rock music and there were no repressions against rock bands. The authorities, both the KGB type of authorities and the cultural authorities, they simply either pretended or really didn't know that this movement exists. But when they found out that there's a whole uncontrollable industry and a lot of artists who undermine the whole culture and youth policy of the Soviet Union, and they found them right here in their backyard, this was, of course, a complete shock for the officials. So from the beginning of the '80s, we started to have really dangerous times on the Soviet rock scene. The bands were banned to play, and many concerts ended up in police raids. Some rather well-known rock performers have been even put to jail. Of course, all this did not happen under the banner that "we fight rock music," because it was too obvious. You can't really put people to jail for singing songs, even in the Soviet Union. Maybe this would be possible in North Korea, or China, or something, but in the Soviet Union, they found some other ways of frightening and taming musicians. Most of the criminal cases against rock musicians and organizers of rock concerts and festivals have been on the premise of illegal commercial activities. 

Of course, in the Soviet Union, any private enterprise was illegal. We were a communist country. There was no market, nothing like this. So the way-- The fight with rock music was that they sell illegal tickets, and therefore this is speculation. This is financial fraud. This is actually criminal. So we had very difficult times in the beginning of the '80s, but at the same time, I must say, we've also had the most fruitful period in the history of Russian rock music, which is, again, proof of the fact that the best in music is always born under the direst of circumstances. At that time, the hall of fame of Russian rock, where I can put Mashina Vremeni. It was increased by several other very important names. A band called Akvarium led by Boris Grebenshchikov. 

A band that may be considered the first Soviet Bob Dylan-orientated band. A band called Kino, led by the late Viktor Tsoi, the first Soviet kind of New Wave punk rock band. A band called Zoorapk, led by --, who was very strongly influenced by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. All those three are from Leningrad, which, by the way, was the only city in Russia at least where rock could be legally played. This has happened because the chief of Leningrad's KGB, General Kalugin, who by the way now lives in the United States. He was a defector, so now he is somewhere, I don't know where. But in the beginning of the '80s he was the head of the Leningrad division of the KGB and as the rock scene in Leningrad was the most powerful and most popular in the country, he has decided that it will be better to control this whole thing if they put them into some kind of reservation and let them do what they want and check up what actually are they doing. So they've organized the Leningrad rock club. But, well, I think that Mr. Kalugin was wrong, because the effort, the output of this rock club was so strong that the scene in Leningrad became even less controllable than it used to be. Of course, although they introduced this censorship in the rock club, when bands played in official festivals, they sang the songs that were approved by censorship. 

If they played in other venues, the small ones, in clubs, cellars, so on, they played the songs they wanted to play. In Moscow, I think the most interesting band was Zvuki Mu that may be called, like, the first and arguably the best-ever Russian psychedelic rock band. Later they recorded an album with famous English producer Brian Eno for Warner Brothers Records. There was a band called Bravo, which was probably the only Soviet rock band with some entertainment values. (laughter) They had a girl singer, which, again, was exceptionally rare. I think Zhanna Aguzarova, the lead singer of Bravo, was actually the first, the only, female species in Soviet rock.  Again, in my humble theory, I think that we've had so few girls on this scene because playing rock music in the then-Soviet Union was very dangerous. It was like working in a coal mine or something. It was an occupation for tough, brutal people, not for nice beings of the beautiful and opposite sex. Of course, there's been other bands. 

I think that I also must mention Nautilus Pompilius. And DDT. DDT are the most important Russian rock band still. Nautilus Pompilius disbanded a long time ago. The interesting thing about those two bands is that they didn't come from either Moscow nor Leningrad. Nautilus were from -- and DDT were from -- This has also marked the fact that the Russian rock revolution has expanded to the areas, which we traditionally consider a province and places where nothing happens, but this was not so. Interesting things also happened there and everywhere. Yes, I also want to write down one name, and this is Alexander -- He's my personal favorite. I think that he's by far the most talented, well, actually, genial Russian rock poet. He was a singer-songwriter of incredible force, energy and genius. 

All those bands, with the exception of Mashina Vremeni and Akvarium, made their debuts between 1982 and 1984. We had a fantastic explosion of the most talented rock music at that time. I think that, generally speaking, this was the time when every adventurous, talented young man who wanted to be maximally cool and take all the chances would end up in the rock pool, because everything else was far less relevant. Well, you probably know that in the first half of the '80s we also witnessed the agony of the so-called Soviet power. Each year another General Secretary of the Communist Party went down the drain. And finally in 1985, we had a new top guy in the office, and his name was Mikhail Gorbachev. And this is how Perestroika and Glasnost started. And I think that of all the cultural institutions of the Soviet Union, it was rock music that benefited most from glasnost and democracy. It was like a marriage made in heaven. Russian rock music, angry, underground, anti-Soviet, and the glasnost, which was more or less the same. 

But rock came from the bottom and glasnost came from above. Now I would like to play a legendary video, which was played millions of times on Soviet television at the end of the '80s, the ultimate glasnost/Perestroika music video. It's called --, actually a spoof of Bob Dylan's song "This Wheel's On Fire." A song by Akvarium, which of course tells the whole story of how wrongly we lived before, and that it's time to live in a somewhat different way.  § §  § § (singing in Russian)  § §  >> "This Train's On Fire," by Akvarium, 1987. I'm afraid I'm talking too much and I've already passed the time limit. So the following two decades I will touch upon very, very briefly. I will play no more videos, sorry about that. Although Soviet rock at the end of the '80s went like a rocket from underground to sports arenas, and for some time, was tremendously popular everywhere, and filled all the mass media, this soon was over. This soon was over for several reasons. One of the reasons was that the audience simply got tired of rock. 

Because, after all, as I told you, Russian rock is actually no fun. Russian rock is spiritual, significant, poetic, intellectual, but no fun. Usually. So the audience wanted something which would be more simple and something they could dance to. This is how we had a new style called popsa, which soon just removed rock from the charts and the media and many people's minds. Another thing is that Russian rock was a complete failure on an international level. In 1987, '88, and '89, there were several very serious attempts by Western producers and record labels to promote Russian rock bands and Russian rock stars in the so-called Western world. Many albums have been released, a lot of money had been spent, but the result was minimal. Not a single Russian rock act survived after the release of their first album. The contracts had been always terminated after the first albums, because these albums did not sell. 

The third and maybe the most important thing is that there was a certain identity crisis with all Russian rock musicians. They'd been inspired and motivated by protest, by fighting back the stupidity of the Soviet system, of -- and KGB Minister of Culture and so on. Also by the stupidity of Soviet pop stars, and now they were pop stars themselves. And the KGB was, you know, God knows where, and -- just ceased to exist. It was not clear what to think about, and how to go on in a situation when you have won the war and, you know, and what next? Also by tragic coincidence, a lot of our most talented rock musicians, they simply died. Like --, the front man of Kino, got killed in a car crash. -- also died of, well, because of his drinking habits. Alexander -- committed suicide. Several others have emigrated, including -- from Bravo, who went to the United States of America and hoped to break here. But again, she failed. 

By the beginning of the '90s, the whole thing smelled of the graveyard. But then a new generation of bands started to display their talents. They've been utterly different from the '80s generation. They've been more postmodern, ironic, less meaningful, more stylish, I would say, more about form than content, and so on. Arguably, the most convincing band of this type is a band from -- called Mumiy Troll. I was going to play their video, but we have no time to do it. Another interesting development in the '90s was that we've started to have a whole bunch of female rock singers. As I said before, there was a complete lack of female representation in Russian rock in the '70s and the '80s. But in the '90s, a whole group of very talented rock and roll girls became known to the public. The best known of them is a singer named --, whose video I played before the lecture. 

There are also some others. Then in the 21st century, we've had almost nothing. I think that generally speaking, these "zeros," yes? How do you call it? The zeroes? The 2000s? Yes, have been an absolutely wasted decade in Russia. Politically, economically, culturally. I mean, the whole country was in some kind of semi-totalitarian coma with Putin, and all those mediocre --, you know, those guys with guns in power. Culturally speaking, it was also totally boring and unfruitful. Music was no exception up until very recently. Now we have some interesting times again. I think there are two main reasons for this new music uprising in the Russian Federation. I wouldn't say it's only rock, because it's both rock and rap, hip-hop, punk, all kinds of styles. 

Not necessarily the guitar music. One is truly political. In my opinion and I also think in the opinion of many others, the situation in Russia is really, it's quite hopeless. It's very dark. There was a joke back in the '70s that Czar Nicholas II got the order, the medal of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Why? Because he helped to create the revolutionary situation. (laughter) So, I think that the vicious management of Russia, that weakness in the past decade, it has frustrated so many people, it has caused this real kind of sensation of that something must be done. You cannot be only happy if you get your credit to buy a cheap Korean car and once in a year go on holidays in Egypt. It's too boring. It's not a dignified life. 

This feeling, which was very muted up until quite recently, is very obvious now, and it looks like the musicians, rock musicians and rap musicians, are again in the forefront of this protest movement. The difference between now and what happened in the '80s is that now there's a strong support, a strong technological support for all this, and this, of course, is called the Internet. Internet is one tremendously powerful tool, which is totally outside of the control of the government. The TV in Russia is under full control from the state. I mean, it's either state-owned and state-run TV channels, or if TV channels do not belong to the state, then they are totally dependent on the state. So TV, just forget it. Same applies for most radio stations. The press doesn't have much influence, and also, of course, the press is not the medium which plays any role in the musical life, at least in Russia. But Internet is huge and very powerful. Now we've got a whole new breed of bands, which actually live in the Internet, cater to the Internet audience, and they feel very well. 

They promote themselves through the web, and they play live concerts in numerous clubs, which, by the way, is also a very positive development in Russia. We have plenty of live music. Clubs, I mean, in Moscow alone, we have maybe about a hundred of hangouts on a daily basis. You have live music of all styles. And in the past several years, this club movement also spread in the provinces. So now in Siberia, the Vologda region. In the north of Russia, in the south of Russia, there are really good clubs in smaller cities and towns. So, Internet and clubs, they make the musicians fully independent from the state and from the state-manipulated media. And of course, it does inspire them. But it inspires them in different ways. 

Some of those-- Well, I don't know whether I like them or not, like one of them is the fact that more and more Russian bands don't sing in their native tongue. They now sing in English. I personally was always opposed to singing in English by Russian bands, because you know, I thought that as Russia is not say, Sweden or Holland, where everyone speaks English as well as their native language, you know in Russia, we don't have that many young people who speak fluent English. So if a band sings in a different language, it simply means that they either have nothing to say or they don't care about, you know, how their music or how their message is perceived. But now, I think I've more or less changed my mind about it. I mean, you know, if you cannot fight something, join it, yes? So, I see that this is a very powerful trend. And I also see that it's actually motivated by a different thing. It's again, motivated by Internet. The Internet gives each artist an opportunity to promote themselves globally. So, you know, why restrict these by using Russian language? You know, if you can make your songs known everywhere, in Argentina, and Japan, Iceland, in Madison, Wisconsin. 

So I think that in a way it's an interesting and intriguing trend, which may finally lead to a wider, global recognition of Russian rock music. It's also supported with the fact that the young bands, they care much more about music and sound than the bands of the '70s and the '80s, who mostly were obsessed with, you know, with their poetry and the message of their songs. So I think that Russian rock is becoming more international, more internationally compatible. And that's good. Although I still remember the old times with great affection. Thank you very much. (applause)