Review Summary: Руки из карманов..
Growing up as a punk kid in the 90’s in St. Petersburg, Russia was a tricky game. Grunge was a bit slow on the uptake, and rave kids, along with thrash skinheads from the nationalist front were in much greater numbers. Archaic and deeply corrupted import/export laws, along with lingering anti-American tenets made bringing in Western music into the country troublesome. And so bootlegging cassettes and later CD’s was a booming industry. You could find scores of randomized selections at sidewalk lots and kiosks, home-printed covers, choppy fidelity et al. I still have the cassette of
Are You Experienced that I had purchased at a boulevard lot when I was 13, the band’s name misspelled, reading The Jimi Bendrix Experience. Because most of the people bringing all this in weren’t informed by music so much as being driven by money-making, the choices weren’t geared strictly towards popular music, and so you could stumble onto proper treasures. I discovered The Cramps, The Fall, X, The Butthole Surfers, Mudhoney and shamefully, Marilyn Manson through those lots. In just a few years, new trade relations and the Internet would blow the bootlegging industry wide open, establishing more abstract piracy standards. But at the time, it was the only way to get music that wasn’t mannered Russian lounge and pop, or f#cking opera.
Leningrad were a local band, but their partisan approach to recording and performing meant their tapes were easier found at those lots than in record shops. A punk band for all intents and purposes, albeit one that ditched guitars for accordions and brass, they were my teenage gateway into music that walked a more singular, cynical and rebellious line. Their sound nowadays most closely resembles the kind of rowdy, Slavic tints that Gogol Bordello briefly became popular for in New York. But Leningrad were utterly unhinged, and despite their Baltic cabaret and occasional baroque slants, were my first venture into punk, at least from an ideological standpoint. They were faithless and anti-government, regardless of what party or leader was around. Their anti-establishment tendencies also had seemingly little to do with factual misery, and everything with love of sheer anarchy. The Russian word for that at the time was ‘buza.’ It meant embracing ruckus as an end in itself. Their shows were streaked in nudity, violence and free-flowing booze.
In ways, Leningrad had their feet firmly planted in the curtailed, reductive image of the post-Soviet Cro-Magnon - reeling in unemployment, soaked in vodka, casually violent, staunchly nihilistic, pissing away all that pointed education the paranoiac Cold War era had pumped him full of. They were banned from Russian radio for years for the vulgarity of their lyrics, which generally orbited alcoholism, chain-smoking, f#cking, and the pessimistic boredom that permeated the Russian working class at the time. It was in those latter moments that politico angles would slip into their work. Describing the dour and aimless days that a man went through in those years invariably carried socioeconomic criticisms, whether they were intentional or done simply for literary beauty.
As the softened regime of Yeltsinism petered out, giving way to Putin’s first rise into power, the leash around artists started tightening, but at that point, Leningrad were already so beloved that there was little the new state could do with them. Like Viktor Shenderovich, an iconic political satirist, Leningrad had become too much of a public entity to be killed off, vilified or exiled. So they were left alone for the most part, their shows occasionally broken up by riot cops.
This album, arbitrarily titled
The Great Big Encyclopedia of Russian Rock Music Volume 29, was released after the group had initially split up in the early 2000’s. The arrangements here run the gamut of Baltic and Slavic punk, at times too kitschy for its own good, always fun and raucous. The lyrics delve into binge-drinking, mutual domestic abuse, bright-eyed Western tourists, the best rye bread to sniff after a shot of Polish vodka, the uselessness of morality, the depression Gagarin felt after he came back to Earth, and on one occasion, a caricature mocking of Russian rappers, who were starting to emerge at the turn of the century, heavily-informed in their mutant form by Eminem’s shrill anger. None of it is particularly relevant or relatable to non-Russian speakers, but the music carries enough primal pleasure to put on at a party. It’s loud and brash, and intones vulgar abandon, even if the lyrics are incomprehensible. Most importantly, it is a snapshot of Russia’s discontented youth, mired in the still well of post-Soviet economics and politics. It is the sound of my own teenage upheaval and it is a f#cking cheeky good time.
