V–A–C Sreda presents a new issue accompanying the release of V–A–C Sreda 2: Krugozor, a special printed edition dedicated to the evolution of pop music from 1985 to 2008.
In this issue, we publish an essay on the three stages in the evolution of the Russian show business by Anton Vagin, a consultant on the Krugozor project, member of the band Mare and Corpse-Eyed Toads Seeking Cesia, Found Late Morning Whistling Henna, and author of the Persimmon YouTube channel.
Anton Vagin compiles a short guide to Soviet and Russian pop music scene from perestroika to 2008 and offers his own view on the muscial periodisation, which formed the basis of V–A–C Sreda 2: Krugozor. The essay explores the similarities between the songs of such bands as Aquarium and Kombinaciya, where such a huge proliferation of musical genres came from, and a band that managed to create its own multiverse.
Any division into stages is provisional, and the time period from 1985 to 1993 in the development of late-Soviet and Russian pop music is no exception. However, it was precisely in 1985, when perestroika began, that global changes touched not just the political life of the USSR, but became noticeable in cinema, literature, and, of course, in music. At the time, the sound of the Soviet estrada changed fundamentally, groups of a new order appeared, and a music market gradually began to form. Before 1985, all artists who had wanted to perform officially and earn money had had to be formally registered in philharmonics, houses of culture, and concerts halls, strictly following the approved repertoire. This repertoire, in its turn, went through all the torturous stages of approvals, and was subject to censorship. During perestroika, the situation became different—state control weakened, and, although censure was officially abolished somewhat later, artistic freedom, as it often happens, preempted the law.
It was also then, at the end of the 1980s, that the work of cooperatives became legal—now everyone could engage in private business. In these conditions the formal requirements on artists almost disappeared: gone were the mandatory work contracts and education profiles. One thing became important—did people listen to an artist or not. Both fledging and experienced musicians were helped to find listeners by people with what was then still an unusual-sounding profession, producers. It is easy to recall the businessmen who assembled musical collectives for tours across the country. This was how the story of Laskovyi Mai, Kombinaciya, and other bands began, which have since become symbols of their times. Their appearance before 1985 would have been impossible, and this is why precisely this year should be taken as the starting point.
Why then did the end of the first period in the development of modern pop music take place in the year 1993? There are many reasons, but the main one is connected to sound. From 1985, a genre that I call “Red disco” formed in the USSR. As can be easily guessed from its name, the genre was based on disco, and, more specifically, on the Italo disco genre that had been very popular in the Soviet Union from the start of the 1980s. At first, the rhythms of Italian discotheques were imitated by amateurs only just emerging from the late Soviet underground, but, with time, important artists also began to copy the sound of Red Disco, which remained mainstream until 1993.
Of course, the influence of the Italian stage is not the single distinguishing characteristic of Red disco. Besides this, it is important to consider at least two other aspects. The first relates to the means through which Red disco was created. The majority of estrada artists in the second half of the 1980s had walked the same path as rock musicians—they had bootstrapped their first records, using the simplest synthesisers and microphones, which could be found in any house of culture. One needs only to listen to the first album of Laskovyi Mai to understand what it is I’m talking about. Today, this style is in fashion, and it is commonly called “lo-fi.” But by the standards of the 1980s, it was openly bad sound, and it only acquired its charm retrospectively. It seems that at the dawn of contemporary pop music, stars made themselves and skipped no steps in their rise from amateurism to Olympic Stadium.
Another interesting characteristic of Red disco is the topics artists working in the genre addressed. During perestroika, many important social subjects ceased to be taboo, and this is particularly noticeable in the case of rock music. The antics of musicians from the Leningrad rock club and Moscow rock-laboratory, the song “This train’s on fire” by Akvarium and “Bound by one chain” by Nautilus—everyone knows about them, and such audacity is no longer surprising. Rock music was characterised by protest and attention to social problems. However, it’s particularly interesting that from the middle of the 1980s pop singers also strove to tell listeners about real life. The interest of audiences in what was taking place in the country and around them coincided with an unprecedented flowering of the estrada. The lyrics of songs by Kombinaciya are representative, expressing many of the realities of life under perestroika—the hunt for a Moscow registration, dreams of that American Boy, and endless queues for two pieces of kolbasa.
Red disco did not remain the main direction of the Soviet and Russian scene for long. By 1993, the branches of genres, styles, and directions of pop music had spread and interwoven to such an extent that it became impossible to talk of the primary and secondary. Variety came into fashion, and this is how a new epoch, which would last until 2000, began.
During perestroika, artists had been permitted a lot, but by the 1990s no prohibitions or boundaries remained, and trash and kitsch became some of the most important aesthetic categories. The stage turned into a full-fledged business: more money, professional sound-recording studios, the possibility of bringing in the best instruments from abroad. In the chase for success, producers released more and more new projects—this could not but lead to serious competition for attention and air-time. At the same time, a demand for something cheerful, exotic, formerly unknown appeared in audiences. It is not difficult to guess that the costumes and performances of musicians on stage became, following the wishes of the public, more and more fantastic.
When speaking of specific artists, the first, in my opinion, worth mentioning is Valery Leontiev. It’s difficult to call him a freak, but this said it’s also impossible to forget his outrageous stage personas. Even at the start of the 1980s, Leontiev was bolder than many, but it was precisely in the 1990s that the canonical persona of the singer in a tight-fitting suit with feathers was formed. On a par with Leontiev was Philip Kirkorov. The atmosphere around the “King of the Estrada, ” the constant scandals, accusations of plagiarism, and mannered apparel created an image that ideally responded to the demands of listeners. One more hero of 1990s burlesque, perhaps its central figure, was Boris Moiseev. A professional dancer, he transformed every appearance into a performance. One of the artist’s first concerts was dedicated to the memory of Freddie Mercury, and I would advise everyone to watch this wonderfully mad performance in order to appreciate the artist’s introduction of something purely Western onto the Russian stage—a show as flawlessly performed as unimaginably strange.
Describing the 1990s without mentioning rave culture would be a crime. At the same time as raves were being banned as dangerous for youth in Great Britain, in the last decade of the twentieth century, they were at the height of fashion in the young Russian state. I am going to assume, however, that the explosion of Russian rave was a symptom, only one of the means through which a general desire to breathe in the air of freedom was fulfilled. Alongside rave venues, clubs were opening daily where pop, electronic, and rock music was performed—everyone could find something for themselves. And so the popularity of rave nights is part of a more complex phenomenon, of a general diversification of musical consumption.
Schematically, one can imagine this process as follows: in the middle of the twentieth century, the mass of pop music listeners was maximally homogenous, but, gradually, more and more new sub-genres appeared, which in turn continued to subdivide endlessly. And so, today, you won’t find people with absolutely identical music tastes, and the list of genres with at least a “pop” element is striking in its diversity: dreampop, Britpop, Indie pop, K-pop… It was specifically in the 1990s that the period of rapid acceleration of genre “growth” began throughout the world, and Russia was no exception. Why did questions of the “What is correct rock?” type gradually come to seem ridiculous? If at the end of the 1980s the average rock musician presented himself as a severe fighter for justice, solitarily rebelling against an unjust world, then by the end of the 1990s pop rock, or “rockapops” had gained in popularity: it turned out it was not just the most serious of things you could sing about to the guitar, you could exploit simple subjects yet still not be seen as “popsa.” In a word, the 1990s were a time when, on the one hand, dozens of new genres appeared, each of which could neither be ascribed to the mainstream or to the underground. Everything both divided and converged—such was the paradoxical time.
Following this trend, from 1993 to 1998, the musical industry in Russia gained momentum in its development and attained supersonic speed: international labels entered the market, serious concert agencies opened, everyone knew the main producers by name. But in 1998 the default took place, and for a time it was over for the still-fledgling show business. True, it’s worth remembering that any crisis is always a selection: the strong remain, and young ambitious artists fill the spaces of the weak. These were groups such as Demo, Virus! , Gosti iz budushchego. They were united by sound in the spirit of electropop and the fact that relative fame came to the groups in the critical year of 1999, followed by nation-wide fame at the start of the noughties.
The noughties began with the emergence of drum and bass and hip-hop tunes from the underground, and the band Diskoteka Avariya— about which the country learned with a slight delay due to the crisis that broke out from the curtain of the previous century—became the trendsetters. But it seems to me that it is more important to pay attention not to the nuances of musical trends, but to the spirit of the times in general. It was precisely in the 2000s that the contradictory word “popsa” decidedly came into common usage, becoming almost a symbol of any popular music. The reason for this seems to have been the particular path taken by the Russian show business. The ultrafast leap from the “self-made” cassettes of the 1980s to the full-fledged industry of the noughties was inevitably accompanied by commercialisation, and this in turn led to rejection—it began to seem to people that everything done on stage was done exclusively for the sake of money, without thought for the quality of material and the feelings of the listeners.
The noughties gave rise to one more musical paradox. The full-fledged music industry that formed in Russia was, unfortunately, not without negatives. Odious producers sometimes made stars of anyone through television, where it was almost impossible to appear without money and connections—a closed, almost impenetrable environment was formed. At the same time, “real” rock musicians gave concerts in small, crowded clubs. Despite the presence of a full-fledged show business, the situation recalled the middle of the 1980s, and pop and rock became antagonists once again. Pop-rock, which had been popular in the second half of the 1990s, ceased being youthful, Splean and Mumiy Troll simply seemed too esoteric to millennial-teenagers. They wanted their own music, which would answer to the spirit of the times, and be daring, youthful enough—like Blink 182, Sum 41, or Avril Lavigne. At roughly the same time, in the middle of the 2000s, Disney series, the plots of which were constructed around the musical careers of their main characters, became enormously popular.
In a word, Russia was awaiting its Hannah Montanas—and was met with Ranetki.
Ranetki was a band unique in all respects. Formally, the band was created in 2004, and their first album came out two years later, but it was the year 2008 that became a turning point in the history of the “girls with guitars.” It was then that a semibiographic series about the lives of the band members came out, making Ranetki a phenomenon. Ranetki was, probably, the first truly popular female band, all members of which played on musical instruments. Of course, we could recall Zhensovet, formed back in the 1980s, or R@mashki, which began around the same time as the heroines of STS—however, these projects didn’t attain even a hundredth of the share of Ranetki’s popularity. It was a female voice that audiences were lacking, and feminine intonation. In the similar genre of pop-rock, Zveri were hugely successful, but seemed as it were too universal, suiting everyone at once, when what was critically lacking was decent female pop-rock. And even knowing that Ranetki was entirely a producer-project, with songs written by Sergei Milnichenko, for some reason, one can’t seem to stop believing in their harsh, somewhat naive sound, full of youthful rebellion and maximalism.
The success of Ranetki and their influence on the Russian pop scene could be compared to the phenomenon that Laskoviy Mai had become somewhat earlier. Probably, the girls were able to go even further than the performers of “White roses, ” becoming not just a band but a full-fledged media brand in which music was far from playing the central role. Real musicians became heroines of a series and computer games, they released their own magazine, and sold merch to suit all tastes, from school bags to bicycles. One could say that a Ranetki multiverse appeared. Similar stories about the transformation of a band into a franchise are common in the West, and today the brands of pop groups from South Korea are structured around similar principles—but in Russia, nothing similar happened before or since.
It so happened that the series about Ranetki came out in 2008, when the country was rocked by yet another economic crisis. Money from the show business rapidly evaporated, and listeners, more and more frequently going on the internet, almost stopped buying music on physical carriers. The result was a noticeable stagnation of the pop scene at the end of the noughties and beginning of the 2010s. The daring girls singing “We are just such babes” would be the last, blindingly bright flare of the classical Russian show business.