The bodily bottom at an existential height - Weekend - Kommersant

The bodily bottom at an existential height - Weekend - Kommersant



It is generally accepted that Russian rock in its classical version is more about the soul than about the body: the lack of animal energy is compensated in it by sincerity and thoughtfulness. In the late 1990s, Mumiy Troll, and then Zemfira, "turned the game around." But even a decade earlier, during the most heroic perestroika period, bright, alluring and intricate plots were played out on this stage.

Text: Yuri Saprykin

“The hammer and sickle is a true symbol of copulation. The hammer here is the exact symbol of the phallus - if you look at how it is located. And on the other hand, the sickle - with its gentle curve - is a completely feminine symbol, into which the hammer suddenly rudely penetrates. And at the same time, already within the party’s interpretation, this is really a union of peasants with workers,” Anzhey Zakharishchev-Brausch, leader of the Obermaneken group, broadcasts from the pages of the first issue of the samizdat almanac Counter Cult Ur’a.

Obermaneken has a studio in the Anatoly Vasiliev Theater on Povarskaya, and recently (and with the participation of the group) an exhibition of erotic art was held here - in particular, a “cake woman”, a naked beauty covered with multi-colored cream and fruits, was brought into the hall on a huge platter . In an interview, "Obermanneken" promotes "new eroticism" - the cultivation of sublime sensuality, comparable to sliding in the stratosphere; her messengers in music are Bryan Ferry and David Sylvian.

All this decadent languor flourishes in Moscow in 1988-1989, next to the queues for the Ogonyok, the “Boris, fight!” badges. and the flourishing of the Riga market, where the newly legalized co-operators are trying to satisfy the rush demand for posters with Samantha Fox. Frightened viewers still make claims to rock musicians about their appearance - “what is it all sticking out of you, Saturday from Friday?” - and here is the stratosphere, Bryan Ferry, the cake woman. "Obermannequins" tells, among other things, about the shooting of an erotic film in the backyard of the Moscow hippodrome; so that the difference in potentials at that time was clear: a film called “Oh, Marquise de Sade ...” is being shot at the Tsentrnauchfilm studio.

Among other perestroika freedoms, the legalization of everything “erotic” is perhaps the most obvious, and the broad domestic public, who have not seen anything sharper (and more relevant) than Maupassant and Kuprin, pounces on the former “forbidden” with the naivety and zeal of a seventh grader of the pre-Internet era. Everything became possible: in video salons - "Emmanuelle", in bookstores - a poorly xeroxed brochure "Now that you got me here, what are we going to do?", in the periodical press - an article by Yevgeny Dodolev united by a common theme Vladimir Kunin "Intergirl". It turns out that there is prostitution in the country! It is said about this in a revealing tone, but also with interest: the lights of the hotels burn so temptingly.

Russian rock, which has already received many freedoms without permission, is not quite ready for such a turn. Eroticism is also present here, but in homeopathic doses, in a down-to-earth and everyday way and exclusively in a male interpretation. You sleep with my bassist, come on, mother, run to my bed, I can't finish, it's all vodka - shit. The undoubted leader of this faction is Pyotr Mamonov, who regularly brings his lyrical hero to hysterical feverish exaltation: I want to become a sweetie! so that you go naked! every woman has her cradles!

It's stupid, of course, to demand from serious people who shoot Dylan by ear that they compete on equal terms with Samantha Fox - but this communal sexuality was definitely not for everyone. The aforementioned "Counter Cult Ur'a" is the collective ideologist of the rock underground, whose editorial staff is definitely no stranger to carnal aspirations (the founder of "Counter" Sergei Guryev has his own group, "Pure Love", whose main hit is called "Deadwood"),— turns in search of inspiration to the singer Katya Semenova, then to the Mirage group. Within the rock community, attempts are being made to correct the gender balance, but the “female rock” of those times, with rare exceptions, is a completely different league: representatives of this industry are distinguished primarily by shortened leather and latex, combined with completely impossible lyrics. The rock journalist Vladimir "Adolfich" Nesterenko, now known in his other guises, writes a mocking report on the Miss Rock 1988 festival in the Kiev magazine "Bonba": whether unbuttoning, or stroking (in the sense of stroking). I wonder why it is this part of the men's suit that attracts women so much? Is there something more under it?

Russian rock has always sought to escape from the bodily bottom into the existential depth, although the degree of immersion could be different: in the same issue of "Counter Cult Ur'y", where the revelations of "Obermaneken" appeared, the manifesto of Yegor Letov and Kuzma Ryabinov "Conceptualism inside" is published - and in his universe the erotic dimension either does not exist at all, or it must be overcome, like everything mortal. And, for example, in Shevchuk, the sexual line is quite traceable - in the slyly good-natured twist characteristic of the author, but still. But the picture of the “heroic period” of Russian rock, where there are two colors - chaste spirituality or unbridled obscenity - will obviously be wrong: on the canvas of the late 1980s there were many much more interesting shades and nuances.

Some of the observers or participants in the process recalled: they say, in the 1970s, Russian rockers froze for a long time on stage in static poses - exactly the way their idols looked in photographs; with the advent of the video, it became clear that it was possible to move on the stage. The heyday of MTV and VHS and their creeping penetration across the Soviet border also coincided with the best days of the new wave: music inseparable from games with physicality - ranging from the display of the most glamorous exterior to all sorts of dressing up, embellishment and carnivalization. Clips of Duran Duran look like animated pictures from Pirelli calendars, about the stage representation of Boy George, the leader of the Culture Club, Seva Novgorodtsev jokes on BBC radio: they say that Zhora can be called a boy very conditionally. Annie Lennox of Eurythmics in "Who's That Girl?" plays both a man and a woman, in the final video, both incarnations of Annie kiss. Young talents from the Soviet rock and roll capitals watch all this and shake their heads.

This entire stream of visuality collapses at once - without many years of preparation, which included the system of art schools, the culture of gloss, the experience of the sexual revolution, the travesty of the era of glam rock and disco: in Russia, as often happens, you have to waste a long process and work with the results , and all at once. The year that the Obermanneken interview came out is the time when eyeliner and falsetto breaks are becoming more of a norm for a rock club frontman. Butusov, in a military jacket with whipped bangs, deduces in a fragile childish voice: “You can believe even in the absence of faith.” Kinchev, in combat make-up, moves from an insinuating fox whisper to a warder's command shout in two minutes in the track "To Me". Even the “Auktyon” of 1988 includes “Lisa”, a song on behalf of a seducer, sung in an insinuating Peredonovian voice, and the dances of Vladimir Veselkin, half-naked: about them, the indignant correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda in France publishes an article entitled “POP -music". Perhaps the main Soviet new wave hit - "At Dawn" by the Alliance group - is built on a lightning-fast vocal transition from a masculine baritone to an androgynous treble; the picture is complemented by long curls and theatrical epaulettes of the singer. Why, the same Kino group is inseparable from the tastes of its drummer Georgy Guryanov - who, as an artist, depicted muscular "strict youths", gymnasts and sailors, and looking at these pictures, you begin to better understand where the ascetic visual aesthetics of the group comes from .

"Obermanneken" with his somewhat hypertrophied eroticism was not alone and, perhaps, not even in the forefront: his contemporaries, often unconsciously, played on the finer strings of attraction, seduction, flickering identities, and somewhere simply theatrical and carnival game on a barely noticeable erotic edge: as noted in the already mentioned article about Boy George, "he takes us away from everyday routine into a sparkling multi-colored world of a fairy tale, where it is cozy and funny and where there is no place for the dangerous feeling of physical attraction of the sexes."

The notion of Russian rock as something straightforwardly masculine is a typical mistake of a survivor: in the 1990s, it was precisely those who survived, or, well, the survivors became such. This time generally cut corners and eliminated surpluses: in the late 1980s, every village had its own new wave experimenters - google, for example, the video "Ballad of a Pink Mother" by the Neoretro group from the city of Kostomuksha - but after a few years nothing was up to such degree gentle-mannered could not survive in Kostomuksha purely for economic reasons. Nevertheless, those of the old, who cringe today from the mention of non-binary and fluidity, can simply rustle in the bins of their own memory: you literally grew up on these songs.


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