Motherland-mat – Newspaper Kommersant No. 167 (7368) of 09/12/2022

At the Grand Sports Arena in Luzhniki, the Leningrad group gave the first stadium concert in the capital in several years. Despite the fact that the composition of the group has changed by 90%, it is still able to bring the masses of the audience into ecstasy. The performance of Sergei Shnurov and his colleagues seemed Boris Barabanov the most patriotic spectacle in all of today’s Russian culture.

In 2022, Sergei Shnurov wrote mainly satirical verses, the targets of which were cultural figures who had “left”; governor. The leader of “Leningrad” put an end to the practice of filming expensive large-scale clips and went to the other extreme. The videos for the songs of 2022 were filmed for the most part in an artisanal way, without pavilions, costumes and special effects, right where the muse found the poet. But they went out often, and Cord actually turned into a feuilletonist. Evgeny Prigozhin was called the customer of the “anti-Beglov” clips, there is even a bold version, according to which the influential businessman sees the musician as the new St. Petersburg governor.

In the bustle of the St. Petersburg showdown, songs were lost in which one could theoretically hear Sergey Shnurov’s sincere reaction to the events of February 2022 and the subsequent cataclysms. For example, in the song “Little Things” with a chorus from Boris Ryzhy “How well we lived badly,” Cord sang: “A mouthpiece is aimed at the brains of propaganda. / Whatever you turn on – wild-wild op there. / Instagram feed posting corpses / ladies who worked as escorts.”

This song was not performed at the Leningrad concert. Of everything that has appeared at the present time of its history, the group performed only “Smallpox” (Cord asked which of those present had already had monkeypox) and the song “Farewell, Elite”. If someone at this stadium seriously decided to figure out what Shnur’s beliefs are today, then from the concert program it could be concluded that good times are in the past, the future can only be described with obscenities, but the songwriter is not going anywhere, even if he refers to the very concept of “patriotism” with caustic irony – this can be heard, for example, in the unfading song “Patriot”.

However, people gathered at the BSA not at all in order to compare their own beliefs with the position of their favorite artist. The audience did not go to the concert in order to think. You can analyze the texts of today’s “Leningrad” as much as you like, or the group leader’s answers to journalists’ questions, but the trip to Leningrad is not an intellectual act, just as it was not a visit to the concert of the “Hands Up” group, which also sold out in Luzhniki last summer.

People came to the concert to stretch their bones, yell familiar songs with their friends and thus discharge their emotional power bank. In this sense, the current performance of “Leningrad” was no different from any other concert of the group.

Whatever hidden meanings commentators would like to find in her texts, for many compatriots she has long been a symbol of stability. Cord did not change a single line in his songs. On the day of the city, “Moscow” sounded at the stadium from beginning to end, and absolute happiness was written on the faces of people from the fact that right now they can sing along to their favorite artist at the top of their lungs: “No one survived – everyone burned down, / all Pussy, Putin and Sobchak, / and at the wall of the Kremlin spruce / burned … [офигенно] So”. It is unlikely that someone here compared the text of the song with the news of this particular Saturday. The picture of the capital’s apocalypse, which Shnur created at the beginning of the last decade, will always be relevant. The more luxurious the next day of the city, the higher the new Ferris wheel, the brighter the fireworks, the sharper the sense of absurdity and falsity of the holiday. But this feeling is part of Moscow’s DNA. Love for the city may well coexist in the mind with the idea that it would not hurt to burn it to the ground.

In the cauldron of the stadium, the masses wandered, overflowed and flickered with telephone screens, for which this concert was freedom. In the stalls there were ladies from the song “Little Things” and rudely knocked down men over forty, there were students and clerks, Muscovites and visitors. If someone told them that now such a holiday is inappropriate or looks strange, they simply would not understand what it was about. They have long resigned themselves to the fact that they will never see Rammstein and Muse on this stage, and hardly soon – DDT and Bi-2, but most likely they did not think about it at all. As well as the fact that next to Sergei Shnurov there is no longer either Vsevolod Antonov (Sevych), or Alexander Popov (Puzo), or Alexander Stepanov (ST), who were an integral part of Leningrad some four years ago. But there are two absolutely phenomenal vocalists Florida Chanturia and Ksenia Rudenko, perhaps the best in their field in today’s Russia.

And there was also an orchestra that added scale to the spectacle, and during the intermission they performed a wonderful medley of Leningrad melodies. On the screens at that time there was a cutting of photographs symbolizing the brightest moments in the history of mankind over the 25 years of the existence of the group, from the Russian default and the fall of the Twin Towers to Elon Musk and the death of the Queen of Great Britain. It could be assumed that the creators of the video series are finally leading the viewers to an important thought about what is ahead, or at least let them understand what is most important right now. But in the “now” nothing was more important than the death of the queen, and the historical carousel on the screen started spinning again.

In the first part, Cord and the company performed virtually all the most important hits, and everything that happened after the orchestral interlude, up to the choral “The Stars Just Shine”, could be regarded as an after party or safely skipped. As a result, “Leningrad” as an idea confirmed its status as the most powerful Russian bond. While the leader of the group is involved in political squabbles, the songs written by him continue to live among the people, responding to their basic aesthetic needs. These “talks about the important” will gather stadiums for a long time to come.