Are Tatu the most shamelessly manipulative pop act ever, or is there more to them than meets the eye?
Text: Peter Robinson
Julia Volkova and Lena Katina are Tatu, the teenage electropop duo who conquered the charts in Russia, then America, and finally, this week, the UK. In Russia the girls, who look something like a cross between Britney Spears and Daphne n Celeste and a Raelian pop experiment, have officially sold more than one million copies of their debut album "200 km/h in the wrong lane"--not bad for a country where the black market accounts for 80 percent of all records sold. They sing of alienation, oppression, betrayal, rejection and inhibition and they have, by way of illustration, covered The Smiths "How Soon is Now?".
Julia and Lena are not average pop stars. Average pop stars rarely choose MTV as a platform to snog each other, masturbate, run down pedestrians in stolen juggernauts, or kill themselves and their lovers with dynamite. Except while Julia and Lena are Tatu, Tatu really isn't about Julia or Lena, it's about eerily handsome, 36-year-old-ex-child psychologist Ivan Shapovalov. And to say that Shapovalov is a Svengali--even in the term's original, literary context as villainous hypnotist--is to portray him in a sympathetic light.
The Tatu story takes us back five years to the summer of 1998, when an economic disaster hit Russia. Shapovalov's work in child psychology had already been superseded by a career in advertising but, with his business in ruins, he decided to combine the two and assemble his Tatu project. Of course, he put the whole thing together using other people's money. "I can't follow the listeners," he declared last year. "Listeners must follow me. I can create interest in the group, but to satisfy it--it is not my aim."
Universal Music were satisfied: after success in Russia, the music giant signed Tatu for the rest of the world and recruited Trevor Horn--the production wiz behind '80s posters Frankie Goes to Hollywood--to rework some of the duo's tunes. Horn reckons Shapovalov is like Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager who recalls seeing Jagger and co. for the first time as like seeing "a cash machine, a sex-machine, a bank machine". Except the Stones were heterosexual male teenagers. Tatu are not. They were also underage when they dressed as schoolgirls for the "All The Things She Said" video, and they still look it today.
In the current climate, most managers would play down the paedo-friendly aspects of such a project, but Shapovalov seems unconcerned. "At first," he admitted to a US magazine last year, "the idea was just underage sex. What the audience needs are new images. For this project, the new images were lesbian teenagers."
The images are blunt, too. Last may Shapovalov unveiled the video for "Simple Motions". It began, continued and climaxed with Julia masturbating, as Lena sat alone in a cafe. "The simple motions," said a press statement undoubtedly written by Shapovalov, "are ones we all do often, all we need do is learn to do it with pleasure, when you'll see Julia's eyes at the moment of orgasm, you'll understand everything's real."
But, unsurprisingly, everything with Tatu is not real. Lena and Julia are not lesbians. Two weeks ago the Daily Express ran a story about the girls' boyfriends, adding that they have a "healthy interest in men". Two days before "All the Things She Said" was released, The Sun triumphantly declared the whole thing a sham, with a screen grab from one of the girls' videos, in which Lena cavorts with a man on a fairground ride. Except they hadn't actually watched the video: in it, Lena's spurned lover Julia is driven by an insane, jealous rage. She makes a bomb with which she eventually blows up not just the fairground boy, but herself and Lena, too.
Shapovalov may be exploiting two young girls. In another sense, he and Tatu are exploiting the supposedly acceptable face of straight voyeurism and highlighting the unsettling truth that society still isn't ready to acknowledge or understand lesbianism. Tatu may not themselves be lesbians, but that doesn't undermine the fact they are the first mainstream pop act to articulate the true emotions of sexually-repressed youth. If anything, the fact that they're straight makes that truth all the more poignant.
Shapovalov has spent the majority of the girls' career shooting a documentary. He claims it will tell the true story behind Tatu, but he's probably already filmed or at least scripted the end, as he's often talked of a sex-year plan for the band. What will he do when the sex years is up? It's difficult to imagine him pulling off the same trick again. Then again, perhaps Lena and Julia have younger brothers...
Transcription by Belinda. |
