What bands were topping their charts? Did they even go the top thirty route? Did they have anything like rock and roll, or were they listening to old style music?
I can’t wait for an answer on this…
** Jesus Christ Superstar ** was not allowed to be performed in the Soviet Union when it first came out in 1971. Someone took the music, re-wrote the lyrics for Soviet approval, and produced the show as “Rock and Roll At Dawn.” If I ever find ANYTHING from this obscure Andrew Lloyd Webber connection, I will die happy.
Smuggled in copies of the cast LP (and other popular music LPS) use to go for the equivalent of $500. Tapes copies for around $50. There are still copies of the LP with classical covers taped over them, a device used to get them into the Soviet Union.
Oddly, the original LP has been released in Russian in both LP and CD form (with a cool Russian lyric booklet). The show has also been done in Russian and released on CD. The Moscow production cut the title song.
Since this is about music, I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Depends on what point in the Soviet era. I was there in '89, and there were a number of homegrown rock and pop bands and some heavy metal. Check out tunes by Kino, Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), Nautilius Pompilius, Alisa, and the USSR’s answer to the Grateful Dead, Akvarium. An extremely important name in political/social commentary type music was Vladimir Vysotskii; he is a national icon, and died young (like many Russian artist types), some say through alcohol abuse and some say through government conspiracy.
Most of the Top 40/pop type stuff was insanely cheesy; you wouldn’t believe the videos! They all looked like they’d been done in someone’s basement. Especially earlier into glasnost, a lot of music was transmitted in a semi-underground manner, with people passing copies to friends and with informal “concerts” taking place in people’s homes.
I love Kino, though. I must have 6 of their albums. You can find guitar tab for modern Russian music at www.akkords.ru, if you can puzzle your way through the partially Cyrillic menus.
I believe the most popular underground band was Fuck You Yanke Blue Jeans with their big hit, “Do You Want To Making Fuck.”
“In Soviet Russia, music pops you!”
I always thought that Viktor Tsoi from Kino…was the russian Kurt Kobain…just an amazing musician and lyricist…
Ill Mitch is dreamy.
In the Seventies, the government (which always finds you) was heavily promoting Pesniary, a Belarussian group described here as “Eerie, cheesy, emotional, embarrassing…”
I do have one of Pesniary’s albums, and, while it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t that good, either. It’s all either inoffensive old folk songs done to a rock beat, or simple schmaltzy pop (not inoffensive, but not political, either).
Lead singer Leonid Bortkevich married gymnast Olga Korbut when both were at the height of their stardom in the USSR. They’re both in the “Whatever happened to …?” stage of former stars’ lives now.
I can’t remember any specific bands, but I remember reading punk scene reports in MAXIMUMROCKANDROLL from the USSR and Soviet Bloc Countries. I have a few Russian punk LPs I got in the 80s from a mailorder distro (Subterranian maybe?) that are kind of like lo-fi indie fuzz rock but with stereotypical russian vocals (whatever that means) and more than a hint of traditional Russian musical influences. I have no idea what the name of the band, album, songs, or label its on since everything is written in Russian.
Jon
Absolutely all that, and hot, too! Another amazing artist who met an untimely death…and of course, there were conspiracy theories about that, too. (He died in a car crash on the road between Leningrad and Riga.)