Now Hear This: Jaques Peretti (Sleazenation Magazine - UK)Time of publication: 16.05.2003 |
I went to Russia just after the fall of communism, when the whole place was powered by a 60 watt bulb. Blackmarket racketeers did their Tony Soprano thing, selling broken fax machines, fleets of Mercedes cars factories full of latex gloves. The new mafia policed their self styled 'Wild East Frontier' with a militia armed by corrupt army officers and nefarious bureaucrats. The whole place reeked of stale vodka and belched sweet meats and looked like a video that joy division never made.
Ten years later, what does Russia offer the world? tATu. They may be a pseudo-lesbo circus at one level, but to me there an emblem of what Russia has become after ten years of capitalism. We in the West kindly gifted pop music to Russia in the shape of George Michael and Marillion, and they've done the only decent thing back to us: regurgitated up tATu like an owl might spew a pellet.
Long before tATu were even a cynical paedo-fantasy of a glint in the eye of their Russian Simon Fuller, the world was waiting for them. There were stadiums of confused pre-teens to serve. More importantly, their were their dads: the silent majority of busy-fingered middle aged men, poring over kiddie internet porn from Texas in the wee small hours, a computer glow eminating soft-focus sadism from a bedroom in Rotherham.
The Russian economy today is approximately the size of London's. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, when Boris Yeltsin was so perpetually drunk that no Western leader bothered meeting him, the economy was the equivelent to the amount a small time drug dealer might make on an average night in Leicester.
But what the country had was this incredible, bombastic tATu culture. The TV was filled with ads for privatised armies: ex-soldiers who'd cobbled together enough money to buy a tank and were now hiring themselves out to buisnessmen in order to protect their department stores and warehouses. Primetime TV featured shows with soft-core lesbian leaning pornography so regularly, they'd even appear at the time British Tv transmits Blue Peter. Russians hadn't a problem with this: they have no essential beef with incest or paedophilia. The whole nation has the same sensibility to sex that Fred and Rosemary West had towards their children.
There was a kind of fascist porn to the entire culture, with machine guns and Miami Bass, arse merging with militaristic pomp rock in 90% of pop videos: all bathed in blue subterranean light, crossed by stadium rock searchlights. This unique crossover took place, in which pop videos resembled military parades and military parades resembled pop videos.
This was Russia reaching back to Tsarist nationalism, crossed with the iconoraphy of endgame Cold War. It was a response to Afghanistan, Russias version of Vietnam: an abject humiliation of the nation, which the fall of communism healed in some sick, super-macho way via the re-discovery of this new aesthetic.
Russia paraded it's Afghan wound in a Richie Manic kind of way, but looked forward also to the bright new dawn of capitalism. When the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1985, the US embassy was inundated with letters of commiseration from Russians who felt a blow had been struck to their beloved capitalist dream. Russians then had a ludicrously idealized view of capitalism would bring them.
By the time I visited Russia, that had been tarnished by the reality. It was this depressed fascist porn Russia that began to throw up weird cultural mutations of things that existed in The West. Hence, nihilistic techno that wasn't quite right, and a St Petersburg version of the Brit-Art scene called White Night, involving copious consumption of cheap prescription drugs and work that satirized the communist past, such as a giant 100ft high penis in the style of a statue of Lenin. Or a swastika made out of fairy lights and adorned with Nike swooshes. Young underground Russia simultaneously embraced the ati-capitalist movement and fascism.
The first proto-tATus came out of this time ... so hyper-weird and simultaneously pro and ant-Western that they appeared avant-garde. When they arrived here a couple of years after they had become a beloved institution in their homeland, there was a substatial furore around their faux-lesbianism and cynical plan for world domination. No one bothered to attack them on the grounds that they were crap.
tATu (and their even more tawdry Eastern European counterparts, The Cheeky Girls) are part of a wave of pop tat to come from the land of asylum seekers. People who according to the Daily Mail, steal swans off lakes in our public parks and burn cook them in the bushes; i.e they transgress every British value of what's decent (only the Queen is allowed to eat a swan). tATu are the music equivelent, challenging new ideas of what is crap and what is sincere.
I think this is fantastic and disturbing. If music put their prejudices aside they'd see that tATu are more revolutionary than the Sex Pistols. Once upon a time music waged a very English kind of class war, with bands like the Stone Roses and the Pistols providing emblems for class affiliations. This asylum-seeker pop is a fitting addition: it's a bit like us already: a bit like what we know, but it's also very different: tawdry and bombastic and fascist and softcore. I find them stragely alluring, but maybe I'm just a dirty old man. |
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