Yet no one can accuse two giddy teenage would be lesbians of following the herd. One of the most debilitating aspects of new Russia is its popular music, a great deal o which sounds like the soundtrack for a mandatory calisthenics workout. By contrast, Tatu’s songs, and their videos-which are played frequently on MTV Russia and are now getting airplay on music channels across western Europe and the U.S.-are extreme, if in a clumsy, heartfelt way. In the video that established them “Ya Soshla S Uma” (“I have lost my mind,” released in English as “all the things she said”), the singers dressed in school uniforms, smooch and caress behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire (and beneath a torrent of sexy rain) while shocked older Russians look on. In another, Julia packs sticks of dynamite to blow up the half-naked Lena for kissing a boy on a carrousel while curious kindergarteners watch. In a third, the lovelorn girls hijack a truck at the airport and knock down an innocent road worker. The girls are most proud of their new video, “Prostye Dvizheniya” (“Simple Motions”), in which Julia is supposed to be masturbating with Lena in mind, although all you see is her contorted face. She looks like a wounded otter.
The offices of Tatu’s production company are a few blocks from Moscow’s expensive main thoroughfare, Tverskaya. I expected a Slavic pheromone factory, but instead found an average office filled with dull western furniture, the kind of place that takes up most of Moscow’s prime real estate. Instead of the knee socks and children’s underwear the girls wear onstage, Julia was dressed in modest Daisy Duke cutoffs, and Lena, the redhead, was snug in bell-bottoms and a simple red sweater.
The bands manager, producer, and founder is a former child psychiatrist named Ivan Shapovalov, who quit the medical field because he couldn’t keep from yawning whenever a patient entered his office. Shapovalov was working as a copywriter in Russia’s nascent advertising industry when he was struck by the idea of a teen-age girl band with sexual overtones. Julia and Lena were picked out of five hundred hopefuls at a casting call in 1999.
I was interviewing Shapovalov in his office when the boisterous Tatu girls burst in, shouting in Russian “We’re Tatu!” Shapovalov, who is thirty-six, hardly seems the Svengali the Russian press has made him out to be, and he gently shooed then away. “Girls, behave yourselves!” he said. He appeared less a Russian music producer than a jittery, soft-spoken grad student in American studies. (He’d taken film-directing courses at UCLA, but found them second rate, he told me.) He talked like a grad student, too, attributing Tatu’s success to the “dramatic emptiness of Western images.”
“Why are Western images empty in a dramatic context?” he asked, fidgeting in his chair. “The source of drama is where life and death exist in proximity. In Russia they are closer to one another. Drama can be based only on absolute categories, which we cannot doubt. These are life, death, and love. Although love is also a fraud. So really what we have is life and death.”
But what I really wanted to know was how a former child psychiatrist put together a popular duo based on twin taboos of homosexuality and children’s sexuality, and launched one of the first pop acts in Russia’s history to be exported to the West.
“Because of my advertising past, I’ve made no branding mistakes,” Shapovalov said, in the serene but assured tone of someone who, because of his advertising past, has made no branding mistakes. “And all the ideas were generated by one person. I shot the video clips, I thought up the ideas for the songs. There were no mistakes because it was all done by the same vision.” He said the last word “vision” in English.
When I asked how he chose Julia and Lena, Shapovalov revealed his formula: “Lena has a voice. And Julia had a sexual energy. It was impossible not to feel it. She had wild sexual energy.” We looked at each other closely.
“Tatu is the result of historical processes,” Shapovalov informed me.
Julia and Lena are middle class and, shielded from Russia’s poverty and free-fall moral climate, in some ways seem oddly virginal. Contrary to rumors that they share a love nest, the girls live with their parents when they’re not on tour. Lena is studying psychology by correspondence at a Moscow university, because, she wants “something to fall back on.” Both have had musical training, and have sung in another band. Despite their occasional hand-holding and desultory cheek-pecking, they look as if they could have been Young Pioneers.
“We had a good childhood!” they insisted, almost in unison.
“We did everything,” Lena said, speaking in the serious, careful way that educated Russian girls do. “Music. Mountain Sports. Tennis. Swimming. Figure skating. Ballroom dancing.”
My attempts to steer the conversation towards the topic of their unquenchable homosexuality met a kind of bland resistance.
Is it true, Julia, that you were kicked out of the children’s band Neposedy--
Julia (bored): For corrupting the band members.
So it happened?
Julia (bored): Yes. I corrupted…I corrupted Lena.
Lena (with mild enthusiasm): She corrupted me. She corrupted me and now look what’s become of me.
I brought up some rumors in the Russian press about Julia and Lena getting married in an underwater ceremony in Amsterdam.
“They’re giving us an idea,” Julia said.
“It’s good P.R.” I said.
“It’s cheap P.R.” Shapovalov said. “Marriage, lesbianism,” he added, his tone dismissive. “There’s a relationship here, and there are real emotions. I’ve always thought of it as a friendship that grew into love. That happens a lot between girls. Not between boys. It doesn’t mean they’re lesbians.”
A few weeks later, I met the girls in New York, where they were doing publicity. I played Tatu’s new English language record for some friends at a dinner party in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “They sound like chipmunks,” one said. Well, yes. Perhaps the girls may not be pop geniuses, like Outkast, or verbal stylists, like Eminem, but, despite the techno-enhanced quality of their music, they are able to communicate the loneliness and insecurity of youth.
Julia and Lena looked tired and unhappy, even in the opulence of an expensive midtown restaurant. Julia was skeptical of the image strategy that their new handlers at Interscope had in mind for them. “The Americans want us to sound smart. We’re two little girls and we have to remain little girls, not be grown women,” she told me.
“My pussy hurts,” Lena said, perhaps summing up their travails abroad.
Thanks to Michиle |
