Too Much, tATu Young! ("Sunday Herald" - UK)

Time of publication: 08.03.2003

Pop music has a long history of breaking down sexual taboos. But as a Russian girl duo is apparently marketed to paedophiles, Iain S Bruce asks: is this a step too far?

In the end, it only took two pretty girls to blow a gaping hole in the smug complacency that cocoons modern morality. Armed with only a catchy beat, a savvy producer and a raunchy promotional video, tATu may have been billed as just another teenage pop act, but their arrival on these shores has thrown a savage new light upon popular culture's attitudes to sex, money and childhood.
Already eastern Europe's biggest selling band, the UK debut of Lena Katina, 18, and Julia Volkova, 17, is hotly tipped to storm to number one when the top 40 singles chart is announced today, propelled to the top by a wave of controversy virtually unparalleled in the annals of pop. Backed by a slickly produced video in which the Muscovite duo are seen dressed as school girls and locked in a passionate kiss, All The Things She Said was always going to attract notoriety, but it is claims that the act was specifically designed to tap into the paedophile market which have provoked real outrage.

'This is absolutely sickening. Courting controversy purely for the purposes of selling records is bad enough, but to cynically manipulate young people in order to wring profit from such a depraved section of society is nothing short of horrific,' says John Beyer, director of the broadcasting standards watchdog Mediawatch-UK. 'The whole scheme is entirely inappropriate, and we would strongly urge both parents and the media to enforce a strict boycott of the group and their products.'

Provoking conservative outrage is hardly unfamiliar territory for the pop market, but claims by tATu's creator that the band were deliberately crafted to meet the requirements of men seeking underage sex go well beyond anything seen before. Former child psychologist and advertising executive Ivan Shapovalov, who recruited Katina and Volkova following a 1999 public audition, is reported to have hit upon the idea after researching paedophilic material on the internet.

'People visit pornographic sites above all others. I analysed it and found 90% of people using the internet go to porno sites first, and of these nine in 10 are looking for underage entertainment. This means there is big interest as well as some dissatisfaction -- their needs are not being met,' he said last week.

While shocking, Shapovalov's comments have been dismissed as pure showmanship by many music industry insiders, who suspect the Svengali-like figure of courting approbation to generate publicity. At no point in tATu's three-year history had paedophilia been mentioned before last week, and that the producer should choose to reveal this new angle so close to the girls' debut release reeks of opportunism.

'If you can whip up enough controversy and generate calls for a record to be banned, you're almost guaranteed major sales,' says Hooman Majd, who for 11 years served as vice-president at Island Records, stablemate to tATu's label Interscope. 'NWA did it with F*** The Police and Frankie Goes To Hollywood did it with Relax -- it's a well-worn tactic.'

Similarly dismissive of the paedophile claims is the retail industry. Around the country, record stores report that the hordes who snapped up 21,000 copies of All The Things She Said on the first day of sales alone consisted largely of the expected teenage audience. 'The idea that this is being snapped up by seedy old men is ludicrous. It's just media-generated hype,' said HMV's Gennaro Castaldo.

The tATu machine is certainly no stranger to the stench of media manipulation. During Katina and Volkova's few rare and carefully managed interviews, the duo had consistently claimed to be lovers on stage and off, but in the wake of revelations that both have boyfriends, Shapovalov has recently begun hinting that his protЋgЋes much-vaunted lesbianism is just another of his promotional inventions.

When considered calmly, many would argue that, for all the hubbub, the Muscovite minxes have merely taken the continuing sexualisation of the music business to its next logical step. Clad in provocatively skimpy high school chic, Britney Spears emerged in 1999 looking like an identikit porn princess and made her name with tracks like Born To Make You Happy that blatantly pandered to stereotypical male fantasies, yet endured only the briefest of controversies before being installed as the acceptable face of teen titillation by a slavering media. In reality, the journey from suggested locker-room seduction to explicit playground clinch is a short one.

'At the end of the day, the chances are that people will look back on this in a few years and wonder what all the fuss was about,' says music journalist Ian Peel . 'The fact is that we should be welcoming tATu. Their output may only be throwaway pop, but it's original, well-produced and shaking up a UK music scene that has been stagnating for far too long.'

If adults are in a lather over Russia's all-time best-selling musical export, it would appear that kids aren't. Increasingly bombarded by sexual issues and provocative entertainment stars, most are already veterans of shock marketing tactics and ready to take such strategies in their stride.

'I don't think the majority of kids will be shocked by this video -- they've seen many a lesbian kiss on TV shows like Brookside, Hollyoaks and The Real World. This is obviously a publicity ploy, but teenagers today know all about styling and marketing. They'll understand the video was made to shock and create playground talk, so this doesn't exploit them anymore than Friends did when Winona Ryder and Jennifer Aniston kissed,' says Lisa Smosarski, editor of the teen music magazine Smash Hits.

Not everyone is so sanguine, however. The music industry abandoned all pretensions to an artistic ethos long ago, and is now undisputedly geared solely towards creating the right product at the right time and selling it at the right price. All may be fair in love and capitalism, but when the major labels feed children a constant diet of sexual imagery to turn a profit, many experts fear they are doing irreparable damage.

'Sexual problems in Britain have reached alarming levels. One in 40 girls conceive before they are 16, one in eight before they are 18 and one in six children are sexually abused,' says Dr PJ Nelson, author of Sex In The Media. 'As the amount and explicitness of sex in the media have grown over the past 50 years, so too have these problems grown. Just how far will these companies go to make money?'

Paedo-popsters, lesbian evangelists or plain old rock'n'roll mercenaries? The truth behind tATu, it seems, is almost impossible to pin down. Perhaps that is a measure of the act's genius, but it is just as likely to be an indicator of the confusion that befogs 21st-century attitudes to sex and youth.

Where do the boundaries lie? For many observers, the band's real significance is that they expose a fact from which society has long tried to hide -- the simple truth that we don't really know. Were the saucy sixth formers of St Trinian's paedophilic? Did the light-hearted spankings and gym-slipped waitresses of London's once fashionable School Dinners restaurant pander to unspeakable desires? Probably not, but where is the line to be drawn?

The unfathomable mix of primeval instincts, psychological flukes and a thousand random factors that determines each individual's erotic triggers make generalisation difficult, but the risquЋ tradition that motivates fancy-dress wearing 40-somethings to don school ties and fishnets isn't that hard to understand. The juxtaposition of mature sexuality with the uniform of innocent youth offers a marriage of the available and the forbidden that titillates the latent rebel in many and, like a curvaceous nun or sultry nurse, plays on an established madonna/whore complex that is as old as sex itself.

'Put a 40-year-old in a vamped-up school uniform and she's saucily sexy, do it at 25 and she's looking hot. At 16 the same outfit is perfectly legal, but six months earlier, fertile and blooming into womanhood, and you're delving into the realms of perversion,' says psychologist Francis Black. 'At 15 a girl has most of the attributes that will make her desirable as a woman, but to recognise her sexuality is taboo -- who wouldn't be confused?

'Whether their act is carefully cultivated hype or not, tATu have served to highlight the extent to which the boundaries of acceptable behaviour have become blurred. Hysteria over paedophilia is at an all-time high, but in the same breath teenage girls are being encouraged to mimic the dress, behaviour and sexual personas of adult entertainers. As a society we've proved reluctant to bring these issues out in the open, but the need to do so is becoming increasingly obvious.'

There can be little doubt that the world is having trouble coming to terms with sex. Civilisation quite rightly demands the taming of animal desire, but it has also created a series of internal conflicts that even the most diligently considered morality cannot resolve. Modern women might be free of the domestic yoke, but within most still burns the procreative instinct that perpetuates the human race. Men may meanwhile embrace a non-sexist, anti-ogling mantra, but in doing so they struggle against a thousand generations of genetic programming that powers their involuntarily responses to a well-presented cleavage or flash of sensual flesh.

Society has long sought to contain sex within a fluctuating set of philosophical standards that sit uneasily with its animal nature. A process that reached its puritanical zenith in the Victorian concept of inviolable marriage and unwed chastity, every generation has since challenged these boundaries in a bid to see how far they could go, and nowhere has this process been more vigorous than in pop.

The pelvis of Elvis outraged post-war parents, now he's an icon of more innocent days. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's sexually loaded lyrics horrified in the 1980s; today they're a staple of in-store muzak. From the unseemly physical abandon of the Charleston to Madonna's triumphal eroticism, it has been an evolutionary process that many commentators argue has inevitably led to the provocative phenomenon that is tATu.

'Until now we've been able to take the music industry's shock tactics in our stride. It's a machine that has turned redefining what's acceptable into a highly profitable business, and the paying public has played along with that,' says Black.

'Yet if schoolgirl lesbians with paedophilic overtones are the marketing gimmick today, what taboos will they plunder in 10 or 20 years? There are no easy answers here, but if society has been waiting for a signal that it is time to start tackling the difficult questions, we certainly have it now.'

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