Huinya

I have a truly soft spot for this collaboration between the Tiger Lillies and Leningrad. This is the title track off of the album, which consists of many Tiger Lillies songs translated into Russian and performed in a ribald and burlesque fashion by Leningrad (which is typical for Leningrad, of course), with the overseeing influence of the Tiger Lillies, except for two songs which are the reverse. While I like the Tiger Lillies, there is something about listening to them for long periods of time that makes me a bit nuts... this is probably due to Martyn Jacques' shrill voice, rather than anything about the music itself. I do like how bitter and hateful their lyrics are, though, and this song (which is "Crap" in English) echoes my own sentiments about popular media fairly well:

"there's crap on the records, there's crap on CD,
it's got to be crap, it's an industry.
this crap makes me angry, this crap makes me sad,
cause this crap, yes this crap, yes this crap is so bad.

yes, this crap, this crap, crap, crap... (etc.)

crap on the television, crap on TV,
it's got to be crap, it's an industry.
well this crap is a sickness, this crap's a disease,
this crap rots our brains and brings us to our knees."

Something about changing the linguistic code to Russian but not changing the lyrics substantially is pretty delightful, too. Russian pop music has always been pretty far behind Western music; in much of Eastern Europe, the pop music of the 90's and even the 80's is still much beloved. Russian rock music, developed in isolation from Western music for so long, is actually a pretty interested proposition, as it tends to include lyrics themes and even music motifs that are typically Russian, a sort of in-joke that outsiders might not enjoy without further study and decoding. Leningrad is a great example of rock music that is a pastiche of East and West, and includes many jokes and strong language that Russians, and maybe not many other people, would understand. (Actually, they aren't always understood at home; the group has been banned from plaing in several cities before, including their hometown of St. Petersburg.) However, Russian pop music and TV are both pretty godawful, and tend toward pretty blatant sexism and objectification of women, political extremism, banality, and other things that aren't enjoyable to many consumers. 

This song has always struck me as a great consumer's complaint; now that Russia has joined the capitalist world, they are well overdue for their own chance to find the product offered to them unsatisfactory, though doing it using a cultural idiom borrowed from Western culture is both strangely inappropriate (not that satirical songs haven't existed in Russian history, but actually translating and covering a British band's song directly?? This seems a little bit "foreign," still) yet perfectly appropriate in a historical sense (using the Western band's song and medium of choice for critiquing their own media, a media whose influences also come from the West; Russian media is now, of course, a privatized product, using the production, editing and semiotics of the West, etc.) Again, a great intersection of East and West can be found in Russian popular music, but this song makes that intersection a little more blatant in several ways.