Music
Notes From a Russian Musical Underground: The Sound of Chanson
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Correction Appended
MOSCOW
IT’S another busy night at the noisy Casino de Paris here in the Russian capital, a grown-up post-Soviet Disneyland where burly men with expensive cellphones, their dolled-up companions and aging, wide-eyed foreigners play blackjack amid swirls of cigar smoke and snifters of cognac. But what makes the scene truly Russian is the musical entertainment. On a vintage-looking stage framed by red velour curtains, a group of musicians is livening up the proceedings with tunes inspired by an unlikely source: the gulag, the notorious system of forced labor camps of the Stalin era.
Mikhail Shufutinsky, a star of Russian chanson, in November 2005. The genre’s romantic take on crime has drawn comparisons to gangsta rap.
Some of the songs played by the band, Lesopoval — the word means timber-felling, after a brutal form of forced labor in the camps — are jaunty; others are plaintively romantic. Backed by accordion, synthesizer, guitar, drums and choreographed singers, Sergei Kuprik, the lead heartthrob, sings of the long train ride to the barracks, life in the barracks, love in the barracks, memories of the barracks. His lyrics are sprinkled with untranslatable prison slang but have the unmistakably epic sweep of this nation’s history.
This is Russian chanson, an amorphous genre (not to be confused with the French cabaret style made famous by Édith Piaf and Charles Aznavour) that has become the soundtrack of contemporary Russia. The dignitaries arriving for the Group of Eight meeting this weekend in St. Petersburg, its epicenter, may not hear much of it; it’s not the sort of thing one plays for out-of-town guests. But on any other day, in almost any other city, it booms from kiosks and cars and casinos and discos, with gritty songs of Russian life that appeal to pre-teenagers and little old ladies alike and contrast sharply with the bland vanilla pop of the payola-ridden state-controlled media.
With its deeply, even brazenly romantic take on crime and punishment, it has often been compared to American gangsta rap (and, in its more soulful, renditions to country music), and it has similarly attracted an audience of people far beyond the actual criminal underworld. When Mikhail Krug, often called the king of Russian chanson, was murdered in 2002, hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. Fans still descend on his home and grave as if they were Graceland.
But even more than gangsta rap, Russian chanson has attracted the ire of politicians. In a widely broadcast denunciation, Vladimir Ustinov, who was then Russia’s prosecutor general, referred to a chanson competition in Russia’s prisons as “propaganda of the criminal subculture.” In Siberia, a public official recently announced that intercity bus drivers would be “banned from listening to chanson and other obscene music.”
In Russia, where radio and television are often subject to bribery and political influence, that official disfavor can have real consequences. And so chanson, despite its popularity, is relegated to sporadic broadcasts and late-night time slots.
“They’re afraid that people who listen to pop will suddenly hear chanson and they’ll like it,” Mr. Kuprik said. “Maybe there are other reasons. Maybe censorship. There’s an idea that Soviet people shouldn’t think, reflect.”
As a result, it enjoys a strange double identity, of a sort possible only in a country balancing the liberties of wild capitalism with the legacy of recent totalitarianism. It is a forbidden product that flourishes in the brightest spotlight, a phenomenon that is officially discouraged but tacitly indulged, a status symbol all the more powerful because it’s illicit.
“I like the phrase of one D.J.,” said Mikhail Medvedovsky of Radio Petrograd Russky Chanson, a St. Petersburg radio station that has thrived despite the strictures on its music — a paradox that is characteristic of the Russian media. “ ‘Russian chanson is like a pornographic magazine. Everyone reads it, everyone listens to it, but they’re afraid to admit it.’ ”
Some officials and bankers, he said, don’t hide it and ask for advance copies of the latest releases. In fact, some of the most popular performers earn their biggest paychecks at parties and weddings for Russia’s rich and famous. And Lesopoval recently played at the birthday of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist Russian politician.
THE deep roots of chanson stretch back to prerevolutionary Russia, to the songs of serfs and czarist political prisoners. (They may reach back even further: one of the highlights of Holy Week in the Russian Orthodox Church is a hymn called “The Wise Thief,” which Russians are known to race to church to hear.)
Some of these songs sound like Russian equivalents of chain-gang songs and have deep folkloric roots. The protest songs of future Bolshevik leaders held in czarist prisons are also part of the genre’s history. Meanwhile, blatnaya pesnya (literally translated as “criminal songs”) have a distinct underworld air.
The roots took hold in the early Soviet era, with its bloody period of civil war and nationalization, followed by the New Economic Policy, a brief, chaotic period of liberalization — and criminality — that many have compared to the current era. The port city of Odessa, an economic and ethnic crossroads, was one of the centers of that period, and it became the spiritual home to this kind of music. When a number of Russian musicians went to sing for their supper in Paris, the musical style got a name: chanson.
Stalin’s repression and camps added another layer of meaning, and the result was a vital new form: songs that told of the pain of life under the Soviet system while at the same time mocking it. Or at least tweaking it: these songs are sometimes referred to as blatnaya muzyka — criminal music, which is also the name of a guide to criminal slang used by agents of the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor. (President Vladimir V. Putin has been known to slip into it when angry, irritated or speaking of Chechen terrorists.) As Anton Yakovlev, the chief editor of Russky Chanson radio, says, “The totalitarian system of Soviet power gave rise to a second culture in everything.”
During the Khrushchev era’s thaw and the “period of stagnation” during the Brezhnev years, the songs were sung at home and in closed concerts, and recorded in secret apartment studios. Recordings were distributed samizdat, passed hand to hand like carbon copies of Solzhenitsyn’s banned novels.
By 1980 the music had become so popular that the death of Vladimir Vysotsky, a gravelly-voiced bard who is the genre’s godfather, nearly shut down Moscow. But the music also developed on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain.
In the 1970’s, Little Odessa — New York’s Brighton Beach — became the Western cradle for chanson. On the émigré circuit, these uncensored evocations of Soviet life gave audiences bittersweet memories of home. But the recordings also made their way back to Russia, sneaked in by sailors and diplomats, many of the same people who were bringing in banned books.
Some songs might even have made their way in with direct American assistance. The C.I.A. used various means to disseminate anti-Soviet literature. It might have done the same with music, said Aleksandr Abramov, producer of a chanson group named after a prison break from Butyrka (the Russian equivalent of Alcatraz). “As far as I know, American structures enabled these recordings to get to Russia,” he explained. “When this wave of émigrés came, this probably enabled its development most of all. In the 1980’s, namely the American government enabled the development of chanson in Russia. It was ideological warfare. The collapse of the Soviet Union. America helped.”
And when that collapse occurred, the music flourished openly. “Now you can say the word Russian chanson,” said Mikhail Shufutinsky, one of the genre’s émigré stars. “Before, this was a word that sat behind bars. Now it’s been allowed to go free, and it’s turned into song.”
Aficionados say it has become the ultimate crossover genre, with Johnny Cash-type singing about sin and redemption, a Spice Girls-style girl-group singing about girlish antics, and a remarkable number of very tough-looking, thick-necked middle-aged men in gold chains singing about a mother’s love. (The genre’s popularity has even spurred an indie backlash, including “Gulag Tunes,” a version of Stalin-era prison songs set to surf music and produced by a music critic who derides Russian chanson as the déclassé music of “drivers and security guards.”)
A strong strain of political protest runs throughout. “That’s one of the themes,” said Dmitry Andreyev, the executive director of Russky Chanson, a Moscow recording label that trademarked the term in the 90’s, “the injustice of the system, which is characteristic, if you draw parallels, for rap and chanson.” One of the biggest stars, Sergei Trofimov, recently filled a Moscow concert hall playing “Generation Pepsi,” which expresses disappointment with the post-Soviet experience. And Lesopoval recorded a song that honors soldiers fallen in Chechnya, a subject usually swept under that carpet.
But as diverse as the style and delivery may be, the lyrics almost inevitably return to “blatnaya pesnya.”
Chanson’s popularity is undeniable, but it is hard to quantify. Piracy accounts for such a vast and uncounted portion of all music sales that concerts do not so much support record releases as make up for them. “There is no doubt,” Mr. Andreyev said, “that pirates produce millions of our discs.”
Whatever the numbers, with its simple, hummable melodies and resonant subject matter, chanson “can be defined as songs about life, from the soul,” suggested Mr. Kuprik, the singer from Lesopoval.
SONGS about Russian life, Soviet or post-Soviet, necessarily involve an ambivalent relationship to the government. And when it comes to chanson, the feeling is apparently mutual.
For all the official condemnations of the genre, Radio Chanson, an easy-listening version based in Moscow, is No. 3 in the market, and no less than the choir of the MVD, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, performed the station’s theme song at a recent awards show.
In St. Petersburg, the imperial city that is the music’s unofficial capital, Aleksandr Rozenbaum is one of the biggest stars. “It’s an oppressive city formed by czarist power,” he said. “You feel it most near the State Department. If you’re here, you feel it near the Kremlin, near the Winter Palace.” But Mr. Rozenbaum embodies the paradox of chanson’s forbidden-but-cherished status: onstage, he sings of lone wolves and bandits in the night, packing halls across the country. Offstage, he has a seat in the Russian Parliament as a member of the pro-Putin United Russia Party.
Though he is not a fan of the term chanson, he openly mocks the former prosecutor general’s fear of it. “It’s better that prisoners are in a song contest than a knife-making contest,” he suggested.
That said, he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for the airwaves. “Can you imagine an amateur night from Sing-Sing being broadcast on television in America?” said Mr. Rozenbaum, who has performed in the United States dozens of times since the early 1990’s. He also used his position in Parliament to wage a war against lip-synching, the bane of the Russian pop scene. Chanson is performed live, if occasionally out of tune.
Mr. Rozenbaum appears regularly in televised, state-controlled holiday concerts, leading to complaints of favoritism. On the other hand, a televised documentary about the contract killing of a crime boss referred to a close friendship between the two men. Mr. Rozenbaum, it was noted, named an album “A Slow Schizophrenia,” after the diagnosis given to the underworld figure.
Even Mr. Putin may have given chanson a boost.
In 1999, the weekly Argumenty i Fakty reported that one of his pastimes as a student at the KGB’s foreign intelligence school in Moscow was making copies of recordings by Mikhail Shufutinsky and Villi Tokarev, both of whom left flourishing mainstream careers in Russia for the United States in the 70’s.
Mr. Tokarev drove a New York City cab and plowed his earnings into recordings that made him a star all over again, in Brighton Beach and across the entire Soviet Union. But this time around he wasn’t performing pop; he was singing songs about émigré life that sound as if they’re set to Balkan turbo-rock.
Now 72, he still performs them with unfathomable energy for any age. He drew the largest crowd ever to the Lubavitcher-run, oligarch-financed Moscow Jewish Community Center in May. Concert organizers credited him with helping to raise the Iron Curtain, and despite his Kuban Cossack origin, there are plans to nominate him as the Jewish community’s man of the year.
In an interview after the concert, he said that chanson’s “main mission is to convey what happens to people.”
“These are very truthful songs,” said Mr. Tokarev, who has a handlebar mustache and performed in a canary-yellow suit. “There can’t be any lies or hypocrisy in them. Such songs would immediately betray themselves.”
As for Mr. Shufutinsky, he now has a home in Los Angeles; both his sons attended Beverly Hills High School, and one serves in the American military. Mr. Shufutinsky has even played keyboard on some tracks for Run-D.M.C. But he, too, spends much of his time in Russia, performing with Hollywood production values and with model-beautiful backup singers and dancers who look as if they walked in off an MTV video. Sitting behind his Mac in his corner office in the Hotel Pekin, he said of his time in America, “I could have been imprisoned here for what I sang there.” A few years ago he performed songs written by a fan who spent 18 years in Soviet camps.
Though the threat of imprisonment is no longer so pressing, he says prison culture is still every bit as relevant as it was in Soviet times.
Speaking of the prison markings that are the subject of one of his most popular songs, performed recently to great success at Moscow’s Polynesian-themed Tropikana nightclub, he said: “Everyone here is ‘in tattoos,’ the whole country, because there’s not a single person who might not by accident end up in prison tomorrow, because they continue to imprison whoever ends up in their hands, while sometimes they continue not to imprison those who should be imprisoned. In that respect little has changed.”
“What’s different today,” he continued, “I’m amazed by it myself, is that I can sit in this office, in this place, which is, as any office could be, bugged, and completely freely speak these words. This is a huge change in this country.”
Mikhail Tanich, Lesopoval’s octogenarian inspiration and author of all its lyrics, who suffered six years in the camps for praising German roadways after he returned from the World War II front, has his own deeply felt understanding of Russian chanson. “For Russia,” he said, “this genre is especially organic because we have such a chanson life.”
“We have a saying: ‘Don’t rule out prison or poverty,’ ” he added. “In other words, in this country, it can always happen to you. Maybe that’s why these songs first appeared there, on that side of the barbed wire. They blossomed wildly in Soviet times when the entire country was in camps, when these zones, barbed wire, guard towers with guards and machine guns, were everywhere. What kind of songs do you sing there? Not Prince Igor’s aria, that’s for sure.”
Correction: July 16, 2006
A front page Arts & Leisure article today about Russian chanson music, a popular but banned genre, incorrectly translates the last word of a proverb. It is “Don’t rule out prison or poverty,” not insanity.
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