What are you listening to now ?

Rammstein - Engel (Official Video)

System Of A Down - Toxicity (Official Video)

Guano Apes - Big In Japan (Official Video)

------------

Great White - Can't Shake It

AC/DC - Whole Lotta Rosie (from Countdown, 1979)
 
Last edited:
So, when I was a kid, this was a popular Soviet era cartoon about a trio of friends - Crocodile Gena, a furry toy Cheburashka and an old lady Shapoklyak. And they all sang just the sweetest songs eer. And then Gena and Cheburashka became not only part of the Soviet culture, they became very popular in several other nations too.



And Gena's song becoming Soviet/Russian "happy birthday" song.


And here in Japanese.


And here in Swedish

 
One of the greatest rock albums ever, usually ranked in the top 30 by the various smart music peoples.

 
1989 Moscow Peace Festival, aka the Soviet Woodstock. A two-day concert of (mostly) hard rock/heavy metal acts that were extremely popular in the former USSR (Ozzy, Scorpions, Skid Row, Cinderella + a non-metal but still hairy Bon Jovi), on top of several Soviet acts. Staged at the 100,000 seat Luzhniki Stadium (then officially called the Lenin Stadium). An unofficial end to the era of Soviet communism.

 
DLD said:
1989 Moscow Peace Festival, aka the Soviet Woodstock. A two-day concert of (mostly) hard rock/heavy metal acts that were extremely popular in the former USSR (Ozzy, Scorpions, Skid Row, Cinderella + a non-metal but still hairy Bon Jovi), on top of several Soviet acts. Staged at the 100,000 seat Luzhniki Stadium (then officially called the Lenin Stadium). An unofficial end to the era of Soviet communism.

Click to expand...

This festival plays a significant role in the excellent new podcast Winds of Change, which investigates the rumor that the CIA actually wrote the Scorpions’ biggest hit as a tool of anti-Soviet propaganda. Definitely worth a listen.
 
. “In 2020, we look back and are like: ‘Of course the Berlin Wall was going to fall, of course the Soviet Union was going to collapse,’” he says. “But people in the CIA at the time didn’t take that for granted at all. There was a sense that the Soviet Union was going to last for ever, and the CIA needed to do everything they could to undermine that.”


This meant using every weapon within its arsenal – including that most American of cultural exports: heavy rock. “Soviet officials had long been nervous over the free expression that rock stood for, and how it might affect the Soviet youth,” Keefe says. “The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.”
Click to expand...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...id-the-cia-write-the-cold-wars-biggest-anthem

On YouTube - where else? - there are series of the annual New Year Soviet TV broadcast concerts called Song of the Year (Pesnya Goda). The series still goes on (in a pretty feeble form, I must add). It was a Soviet equivalent to the Grammys back then. The last one I saw live - though it was prerecorded, in order to avoid all the potential mishaps - was on January, 1, 1978. I caught up on the rest within the last decade. Each show was about three hours long - yes, really like the Grammys - and I generally skipped forward since I didn't really care about the music but watched it for cultural significance.

There were several periods, each with a different approach. It started off as a typical "celebration of the Soviet culture" with about half hour of the three devoted to the popular Soviet music of the day. Toward the late 1970's, there was a slight thaw, anticipating the 1980 Olympics. There were some foreign guests, some dance/disco style music. After the Olympics that the US boycotted, there was an expected turn toward patriotic styles. Yuri Andropov, who succeeded the diseased Leonid Brezhnev in November, 1982, decided to tighten up the screws on everything and actually disbanded a number of popular acts for "not having the official music degrees". However, Andropov himself lasted a little over a year and was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. Chernenko was mostly laid up in a hospital and didn't have desire to bother with trifling details. And so, by 1984, one started seeing women with the western style (garish) makeup, slightly lower cut blouses and shorter hemlines. The time allotted to popular music grew in length.

Chernenko died a year later - in the USSR, this period is referred to as Era of Lavish Funerals - and was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Almost immediately, the rigid control over arts disappeared. The January of 1986 show was full of Michael Jackson and Madonna clones. Gorbachev authorized "glasnost' and perestroika" early in 1987 and that, X-rated material aside, abandoned all control over the popular culture. Pirated recordings of music and films came out of its underground closet. Gorbachev even ended up firing the KGB chairman Victor Chebrikov, who then promptly became the "head of security" for a veteran singer (and an alleged Mafia Don to the point of being banned from entering not only the US but Israel) Yosif Kobzon.

In summary, none of what Keefe is alleging about life in the USSR by 1989 was even close to being accurate.

This is the 1989 Show (I wouldn't want to have anyone suffer through all of it ... music starts at 10m and Masha Rasputina comes on at 16m mark)

 
Last edited:
BTW, if anyone is (still) interested in the "Winds of Change" story, Klaus Meine was on Dennis Miller's podcast within the last few days.

Here with a symphony.


 

There's apparently a story - likely fiction - behind this performance.

Josef Stalin calls the symphony conductor and asks to hear Yudina's performance. he was a big fan. That was no secret. On a record (the Soviets didn't have decent tape recorders until they stole German equipment after the war ... well, no one had decent reel-to-reel tape decks until Jack T Mullins brought one from Germany to Bing Crosby). The conductor called up Yudina and informed her that Stalin wanted to hear her. She showed up and played this all night until they got a good take. The recording was then delivered to Stalin in the morning.

A week or so later, Yudina received an envelope with 20,000 rubles as a gift from Stalin (about half a year worth of wages, although money wasn't as important as food stamps in 1943). She replied, "Thanks. I am giving the money to my church. Maybe they can pray for your sins". Everyone expected the worst but Stalin shrugged it off.

Yudina did get involved in some controversial for the Soviet era activities, was banned from performing live in 1965 and died in poverty at the age of 71 on November, 19, 1970
 
DLD said:
Ah, the 1980's.

Click to expand...

Nice find and good tune. Thanks.
As I said to someone recently "Music is a memory trigger". Non related memories->
-----
* The Korg (and probably the wine at the moment) reminds me of: (Kinda too long I know)

My dad let me trade in my very expensive electric accordian for a Korg Synth around 1974.
Synths were new then. When I found a store that would do the trade-in, at first he said "Oh no,no. Those things cost $20,000".
After 'updating' him on the subject he looked into it and we got a deal for a low cost monophonic 3-octave Korg synth. My dad loved playing around with it too when I wasn't home haha.

I played it at high school in our new rock band and afterwards the science teacher asked me to bring it to his class to explain how it worked to the students. He hooked an oscilloscope in the audio loop so the class could watch the wave shapes change and hear what those shapes sounded like.
I was the first one in my little town to own one so that was cool too.
-----
* The face Tattoos:
Met a guy with tats 'covering' his face and arms. Short of it is I thought he was trying to be all badass at first but after chatting, he's a tattooist by trade, worked next door and a really nice non-violent
kinda guy. Such are false first interpretations sometimes I remind myself. ;)

K. Back to the music. -Cheers and thanks again for the tunes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top