Intermediary III. The long shot. Grazhdanskaya Oborona.


So, this is it. The Big Wave had made a full circle. The high tide brought a new russian pop. It was great time, as it`s seen from now, and now it`s gone.

It is not so gruesome since enough time have passed, and we are awaiting a new big surge. The discovery of Big Waves gives us this hope. It has happened, that this discovery became the main contribution that was made by this book to the theory, history, or cultural studies, whatever, of the music, at least the russian music.

Russian popular music develops cyclically. We have witnessed two these cycles the first of circa 1989 – 1994, and the second 1998 – 2007. The second was under consideration in this book. These were the steep growths in an amount and quality of an russian musical scene. Between them and after was a death desert.

The changes at the beginning were always radical and as if from nowhere. Just yesterday there was nothing to listen to. And then during the first year appears a great amount of new groups. Their albums became kinda cultish. And farther surge only grows every year with new groups, styles, cult albums, legendary concerts, clips, soundtracks, celebrieties, everything in between, musical tastes and music folders.

It plumbs at one moment as it roars. Today you are a voice of a generation, but the wave ends, and you sound completely obsolete as if from another era. And it is irrevocable.

The russian popular musical culture divides in three part. It is a really popular artists, a show business, and an official scene. At the beginning of cycle a show business plays a positive role, it invents a new media, establish kinda shadowish but working channels of distribution, and it gives a way to artisists, which are really popular or have a potention to become so. The russians are very talented, and musical genuises are always in an abundance, but this is not the country where if you talented enough you can make it on your own. So the window of possibilities is necessarry.

For some time everything goes perfect. At the end a show business imagines, after a quite few good precedents, that it can make an artists. But to whose demand they must pander. Then anything succeed in russia it immediately attract ill atentions from the officials. Their role is to trample any healthy development among russians. Russian federation`s ruling clique spoils everything it touches. So when government money, and it has a lot, come to culture and producer make a line to take it, all ends up with a bunch of zombie artists which clog everything. Their art produces only barfs. And all falls in hibernation again to next the rite of spring.

The music is the most abstract of all arts. And russians are very reallistic nation, in sense that they need to know what is it all about, they need explanations, they can make a huge mistakes and dream unrealistic dreams, but not abstract without tangible content at least in perspective. It sounds misty itself, but clearity russians achieve in a process not at the beginning.

So what are the consequence that it brings to the popular culture. It`s the big one, the lyrics matters. Popular tracks must have good, or catchy, or senseful lyric. The lyric that can be sang. We love sang, even dances must have words, proof or doesn`t happen.

The good song in russian case it is also a good poetry. The poetry creates a backdrop, the concrete landscape where all happens. And in our case the concrete is a right word. Because the backdrop, the themes of this wave was absolutely urban. The big central city, not always its center, rather “sleeping quaters” that is there where the action took place. There where the huge amount of young energy condenced at the time.

They were good generation, university students, high school boys and girls. They were smart, honest, and beautiful. Too good for this country, lately occurs that it got for them only police batons.

But it was after the wave. Now all seems fine, not excellent, but going in right direction. And pop culture blossomed. Local night clubs thrived, peoples liked to meet each other, one perceived another as a good man or woman too, they even somehow began to trust each other. And the beauty was born.

This is another feature of this period that the beauty come into life. Not social concerns, struggle, yearning, longing, lusting, anxiety, pathos, prophecy, or extasy. But the beauty, some kind of everyday beauty of normal life. It was so new for russians to live without distortions, just straigthforward. As they dreamed of for so long. The way of living that suits them most. The good, quiet, bourgeois life. Middle class mightiness.

Of cause it was only shining ahead but young people start see it. A possibility of beauty, comeliness.