From Russia, with lots of tongue (The Star)

Time of publication: 26.12.2002

by BEN RAYNER

It's the logical next step, really.
We've already witnessed stubbornly self-proclaimed virgin Britney Spears' panting, mid-song orgasm in the "Slave 4 U" video, seen a bondage-geared Pink kneel suggestively at crotch level before a male co-star in the clip for "Just Like A Pill" and watched in quiet awe as former good girl Christina Aguilera morphed into a full-on hoochie's hoochie to announce her rebirth as one very "Dirrty" young lady indeed. So how do you crank up this high-stakes, teen-queen titillation any further?
I'll tell you how: Teenage lesbians.

The recording and softcore-porn industries have always enjoyed a bit of a dalliance, but their final, overt convergence would seem to be signalled by the arrival of Tatu, two faraway-eyed Lolitas from Moscow known for cuddling in their underthings and singing about their illicit passion for one another. Already — and not surprisingly — a controversial hit in their homeland, nubile young Russians Lena Katina, 18, and Yulia Volkova, 17, are now poised for notoriety on these shores with the release of their English-language debut, 200 Km/H In The Wrong Lane. And notoriety will, in all likelihood, be theirs. Musically speaking, Tatu is essentially a younger, gropier Shampoo, serving up Sapphic runaway fantasies, chipmunk chants about how "they don't understand us" and existential cries de coeur ("Do we deserve to bear the shame of this whole world," they sing on "Stars") set to dramatic, trance-inflected breakbeats. It's excruciatingly vapid stuff, of course, not particularly well sung and awash in dance production tricks that were on their way out in 1997. But the music is obviously not the point: Tatu's manager/creator, an unapologetically sleazy former psychologist named Ivan Shapovalov, told Blender magazine earlier this year that his original ambition was to assemble a pop group that would address and exploit the lurid topic of "underage sex." Underage lesbian sex — or at least the suggestion of it; the true nature of the relationship between Katina and Volkova (who were 16 and 15, when they first formed Tatu) isn't known, but they routinely proclaim their "love between girl and girl" — seemed an even bigger goldmine. And indeed it is: There's no way Interscope Records would be releasing 200 Km/H In The Wrong Lane in North America, where there's no real mainstream audience or commercial-radio outlet for Tatu's overwraught brand of trancey Euro-cheese, unless there were a couple of panties-clad nymphettes swapping spit in the video. No way. Until enough cash trades hands to convince arch-rivals Britney and Christina to get down and, ahem, "dirrty" before the cameras on a Twister board soaked in vegetable oil, Tatu is the record-exec's ultimate wet dream.

I am, by no means, a prude, nor am I particularly troubled in a moral sense by the rampant sexuality that's always played a huge role in music marketing and, in particular, in music videos (hell, it's the only reason to watch most of them). And if the young women of Tatu are genuine teen lesbians, their willingness to delve into matters of homosexuality on a public stage could very well be a source of some inspiration to the many other teenage lesbians out there. If they're merely fanciful eye candy for men who dream of a world where women never wear outerwear and routinely drop giggling to the ground for tickle fights, the high-stakes pop market has hit yet another new low. In one of those peculiar, paradoxical turnabouts that could only arise in the recording industry, the year's biggest trend in pop music appears to be pop music that tries very hard to camouflage its pop identity. As the teen-pop juggernaut crashes and burns, veterans of the Britney and Backstreet years are scrambling to reinvent themselves as mature, credible artists while their handlers look for new ways to stoke interest in a flagging pop market they've nurtured — to the exclusion of singers, songwriters and bands with a shot at sustainable, long-term careers — since the mid-'90s Fall of Grunge. For the boys, "maturity" has meant at least vague attempts at expanding their stylistic palettes. Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, for instance, remade himself as a middle-of-the-road singer in the Hootie and the Blowfish tradition and mercifully sank like a stone doing it.`N Sync heartthrob Justin Timberlake opted, more successfully, for slick, r 'n' b and is currently working diligently to defile once and for all.

For female pop stars like Spears and Aguilera, though, artistic maturity is chronically equated with sexual maturity. Britney followed up last year's sweaty "Slave 4 U" video with the hormonally portentous ballad, "Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" and a calculated star turn in the movie Crossroads that allowed her a tasteful, cinematic shedding of her virginity. Aguilera's decision to tramp it up in the "Dirrty" video, doff her clothes for a Rolling Stone cover and chat about genital piercing in interviews has generated more Victorian backlash than she or her label had anticipated. The single didn't even crack Billboard's Top 40 but two months after its release, the "Dirrty" clip was still enough of a talking point last week to merit prolonged discussion on a MuchMusic Too Hot Or Not special. The would-be heirs to Britney and Aguilera's shared pop-queen throne are no less gimmicky or contrived, although most don't go to the titillating extremes of a Tatu in their efforts to make a dent. Pink's reinvention as the tough-talking, rock-friendly anti-Britney would seem a little less dubious if she actually backed it up with some rock songs. Ditto young, Napanee-raised sprout Avril Lavigne, who's been held up as some kind of skate-punk wild child. In both cases, a musical identity that doesn't exist has been established solely through video images. If it doesn't look like pop, it can't be pop, right? And suddenly, pop is dead. Ludicrous. At least Tatu is forthright in its intentions, subjugating music so completely to image that it really wouldn't matter if Katina and Volkova sang at all. Music is just an excuse someone's come up with to get two girls fondling each other on TV.

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