Oil martinis, or the Russification of the West

At last, the day’s work was done, and that blissful time of satisfying my TV junkie cravings was nigh. Having entered Western pop-culture through the highly informative channel of MTV, I was most soothingly pacified by music videos and their ethereal parades of sexy appearances flashing to familiar sounds, pleasantly titillating the appetite with impossibly beautiful bodies. Lazy zapping around the Russian black box led to the discovery of hip hop, the new wave in Russian entertainment, which captured the full range of western styles from mob rap, to pimp videos, R&B and glitzy pop remixes, and dominated all music channels. Once again, that ethereal parade of sexy appearances began flashing before my eyes, at the same time offering uproarious entertainment in their clever assimilations of the West, previously unknown to my junkie eye.

The Russian rap scene as channeled through my screen, was a contentious battle between gangsters and pimps, Tim Big Family claiming the ultimate gangster title with his callous boasts and monotonous beats. In the hit ‘Mani, mani’ Tim boasted about how cool, slick and clever he was – his only message was that having “mani” was good. The entertainment value lay in the video, which offered poignant social critiques between traditional gangster shots. Gangsta-style, Tim rapped through the video on swaying TV screens occasionally crashed by diamond-encrusted bling signs. One TV screen even served to replace the human head on a dancing body in a rather unsubtle pun on TV’s alarming influence on our minds. A cardboard target of Tim with various guns then popped up amidst Lichtenstein’s beach blondes. Bullets rained in the foreground and Tim rapped “It’s nice when all a girl needs is money.” This critique of Russian materialism reminded of one émigré’s complaints back in New York. “I would date Russian girls, I know so many of them, hot and smart, but so materialistic! Addicted to clothes! I would go absolutely insane with someone like that,” my friend griped over beer. And here I was in Russia, seeing these cross-Atlantic grumblings in Lichtenstein’s blondes, which were much classier than the grotesque over-weight women flashing designer labels in Western rap videos. However, Tim’s most clever critique was political, showing a screaming oil worker unloading his gun into the mouth of an unusually hooked-nosed Uncle Sam who was reaching for an oil pipe. Upon exiting the back of Uncle Sam’s head the bullet turned into a missile that burst open the pipe and sent forth an oil fountain gushing into a half-filled martini glass. In it I was expecting some frisky frolicking Beyonce or Jessica Simpson Russian-style look-a-like, but the oil martini offered up a smug lounging Tim instead with a phallic Kalashnikov between his knees. The video’s political spin continued with a caricature of Khodorkovsky behind bars and graffiti “Freedom to Oligarchs” splashed across the wall below his cell. Tim’s blasé monologue boasted that life was completely different once you already had “mani,” concluding with the wisdom of an oligarch child, who no longer got by hook and crook like his parents, but openly rode the oil windfall from Uncle Sam’s Middle Eastern forays. With his sharp social commentary Tim had certainly surpassed the traditional callousness of gangster rap.

The exemplary pimp representative battling Tim for the scene was Timoti, an overly brown Tatar – courtesy of lighting, touch-up and over-done bronzer – who donned a short curly beard and pointy Latino mustache. In ‘Dance with me’ Timoti surrounded himself with a hooded posse of tan Kyrgyz, Tatars and Tajiks in dark baggy clothes. To enhance their presumed blackness everything happened in the dark. Timoti callously admired a skanky blonde in a fuzzy snow-flake stripper outfit, stuffed some dollar currency in her already busting bra, and rapped what must have been complimenting insults in her direction. At the end of the song the Western designer logos and bling were broken up by a traditional “ushanka” fur hat, the pimp’s Russification well under way if only on a grotesque superficial level. The hat’s ear pieces naughtily dangled with Timoti’s gesticulations, a reminder that the pimp therein was still Russian at heart.

The soulful theme of love, popular in traditional Russian chanson, had apparently found its way into rap too, and infused the thuggish music style with passion as monetary machinations often went hand in hand with unrequited loves and broken hearts. ‘Leave’ was one such song where the artist lamented his broken heart as his ex-girlfriend emptied out their apartment with the help of a little mobster posse. Here I discovered that not just our microfinance clients, but also the rap gangsters were under-banked in Russia: the ex folded over a piece of gray bedroom carpet and gathered a whole suitcase of $100 notes. In ‘The Cry of Spring,’ Basta, a blond Eminem look-a-like with exceptional mastery of classical piano, bemoaned his unrequited love for a down-cast blonde with a jet-setting lover. Although together, the post-modern couple were still apart as the man got busy with his sleek laptop while the girl wistfully gazed out the window. When he finally sought out the comfort of her soft accepting body, a nostalgic love scene ensued, interrupted by Basta’s rhymes and washed out images of rain, puddles and the Kremlin wall. The next morning the man awakened to the sound of his beloved machine and jet-set away, leaving his lover to play over the night’s memories in her mind. Only at the very end, when she stopped by the entrance mirror to check her make-up, did I realize that the love scene was a mere business transaction. The girl picked up some hundred dollar notes, rustled them with her red manicured nails to double check the amount, and walked out of the room. Basta’s tender lyrics, piano interludes and somber nostalgic imagery gave a sad human touch to this transaction between two lonely people in need of different, but also similar comforts.

However, the craftiest Russification of the West in pop was Bianca – the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of R&B of the Russian People.’ Her corporeal beauty thwarted the world of glitzy split-second appearances, creating a strong physical presence. In no rush, Bianca offered up her waste-long chocolate curls, green almond eyes, shapely red mouth and petite hourglass figure of perfectly round breasts and behind pinched by a thin waist. Although her name sounded like the Russian equivalent of Beyonce’s, quite unlike Beyonce, Bianca looked beautiful from all angles and none of her videos had the manic zooming and heavy editing so typical in Western pop. Her voice wailed like a slightly more pleasant version of Beyonce’s. At this the Western similarities, which put the real Beyonce to shame, stopped. Bianca’s R&B was infused with folk guitar and accordion interludes, and her visual imagery brimmed over the top with Russian folk, following the hearty tradition of “horoshego dolzhno byt mnogo,” where the more of a good thing one has the better. In ‘About Summer’ Bianca’s posse of muzhiks playing accordions and balalaikas flew on a steaming village “pechka” (stove) to a beach-side “isbushka na kurriih noshkah” (a folklore witch hut on hen’s legs) named “Little House by the Sea.” With a single pop of her pink bubble gum she bewitched the guards outside and spell-bound the house, turning herself into a gypsy effortlessly popping her breasts and shimmied her jewelry-laden pelvis at a samovar-laden feast. The lyrical ‘Unhappy Love’ was another marriage of folk and pop, where Bianca wailed around her dead lover in floral Gypsy skirts and shawls, and belly-danced barefoot, a silver anklet sparkling on her elegant narrow foot. Bianca’s unbelievable beauty, traditional music and magical fables made her R&B distinctly Russian – the R&B of the Russian People indeed!

While musicians like Bianca endowed their work with traditional Russian elements, others went even further to superimpose Soviet themes upon the West. In their jaunty video ‘Karl Marx Stadt’ Megapolis posed the question: What if the Soviets won the Cold War? The video began in London with a “subotnik” boy meets girl scene – “subotniks” were mandatory Saturday cleaning duty for all Soviet citizens. By the time we began school they were reserved only for students to tidy school territory, or rather fool around with sticks and brooms in the school yard, which, despite our mischief, became miraculously clean at the day’s end. Summer trips to pick harvest in state farm “kolkhozes” no longer existed either, and I deeply envied my parents’ kolkhoz shenanigans, which seemed so tempting with their singing, bonfires and tents. Of course, mother’s memories of these trips were less romantic, especially after an emergency hospital stint from working extra hours to fulfill her quota and falling into a ditch while carrying tomato pails to collection points. At the end of her labor trials she was deemed a weak working citizen, and cleverly got around the harvest rule by forming a traveling band to cheer on the strong mighty workers with tent-side evening camp-fire songs.

But back to the London communist: he pulled out a small lily of the valley bouquet the likes of which we had drawn in elementary school to congratulate our parents with May Day. The girl shyly accepted it with lowered eyes and flushed cheeks – a spitting image of socialist realist innocence, and the happy-go-lucky couple went off to discover the world. In Japan “Fish is Bread,” while Soviet army feed-stock, tinned stewed meat “tushenka,” became food staple in Jamaica. The African sun set upon indigenous dances in front of a pile of red-mud Marx and Lenin heads, while Mexico’s Teotihuacán pyramid was a monument to repatriated Trotsky. The couple wed in the mighty capital, Moscow, where they queued up at the marriage registry, and their union was stamped as 117 on the bride’s palm, and off they left to conquer the Wild Wild West. The frontier husband filled his five-year plan in a “kolkhoz” at the foot of the Grand Canyon, while his pregnant wife stayed at the ranch, happily petting her swollen belly and sipping boiled water from a white metal teapot similar to the one in my apartment. The family’s May Day parades took place in New York where the powerful communist of USSR’s Mosfilm film symbol joined sickle with a hesitant Liberty’s flame, hot air balloons of popular fruit stew “Compot” traversed New York skies in place of Coca Cola, and a blow-up Marx sailed up Fifth Avenue past the Flatiron building. A red theater curtain dropped on this idyll and out rolled a handicapped Marx in a creaky wheel-chair, thanking the audience for watching his splendid show. Instead of applause, dear old Marx received the boot, landing under the blaring Samsung and Mercedes ads of present-day Moscow with a beggar’s tin cup in his hand. Passers-by threw in some kopeks – the ultimate rejection of past Soviet ambitions and a reminder of where Marx’s dreamy ideology led us in real life: disabled, begging pensioners.

Occasionally this thought-provoking musical entertainment was interrupted by snippets of modern slang contained in intermittently aired ring-tone ads. These expressive vulgarities that I could even order to ring on my phone by punching in a bunch of numbers, demystified many a baffling phrase heard earlier in the office. The least nuanced such ring-tone lauded Russians’ eternal battle with the white devil of vodka: “If you don’t pick up the phone, I will tell everyone that you’re an alcoholic,” jeered a mock child voice. Another one, sung in a low Caucasian accent, impersonated a band of hooligans: “Nafiga nam belye kaifushki na kavkaze tozhe prut chudo kalatushki.” From “belie” – white dissidents who left during the revolution – I inferred the following meaning: we don’t need their white pleasures, we in the Caucuses have magic things for beating up people. The meanings of “kaifushki” and “kalatushki” could also only be inferred from their roots – “kaif” meaning pleasure and “kalatit” meaning to beat someone. However, the slang expression “nafiga” was ubiquitous both on the street and in the office, meaning not giving a shit in its declarative, and “why the hell?” in the interrogative form. The origin of this versatile phrase was completely unrelated to its multifarious incarnations, its root being “figa” – a closed fist with the thumb between index and middle fingers, signifying that the “figa” recipient would not get whatever it is that they desire. The ubiquitous “figa” is also the root of another indispensable slang phrase: “offigenno,” meaning cool. “Offigenno” was the main refrain of a mock rap song by stand-up comedian Pavel Volia, “Vse bydet offigenno. Vperedi bolshie peremeni. Neprimenno vse bydet offigenno. Ia smotrel na internete” (Everything will be cool. Big changes are ahead. No doubt, everything will be cool. I checked it out on the internet). Even slang was brimming with satire, first on Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s promises of sweeping changes prior to their troubled reigns, then on the popular new Internet media, a key information source despite all its fraudulent promises and infamy of Russian hackers. I marveled at this richness of social commentary in Russian humor, which went beyond the superficial and material even in the seemingly shallow advertising media.

However, the most imaginative and amusing slang that I also heard earlier in the office evoked the image of a sausage. Losing her patience, one of the young accountants had broken the room’s reigning silence with the following screech, “Blin, chiass menia kak zakolbasit!” (Crêpe, I’m gonna wiggle crazy like a sausage!). The importance of “kolbasit” in modern day slang was solemnly relayed to me in the following ring-tone ad: “Bochka bas kolbasit solii kolbaser po poias golii” (Barrel goes crazy and the sausage-man is half naked). “Kolbasitsia” was the slang expression du jour for being driven insane and had a double meaning: to wiggle about like a sausage trying to bust out of its skin, or to hang together like a bunch of sausages. A stretch of imagination could make this into a cruel and unusual punishment whereupon the victims were wrapped straight-jacket in a gargantuan sausage skin; the sausage smell permeated their entire body and faculties; and wiggling about was the only way out of this predicament until they gave up and just hung together. This was by far my favorite new slang phrase. I vowed to use it and ruminated on some food concoction to add in place of the commonplace “blin” (crêpe).

Justice must be given however, to the reverse Russification simultaneously taking place in Russian pop. Some artists sang in English, with or without heavy accents, or took on English names, while English words bastardized the Russian language both on and off-screen. The Russian Eurovision winners Serebro (Silver) were all the rage that summer – their winning song was played in English on all music channels. Another ubiquitous English-singing pop star, Dima Bilan, had a noticeable accent. The Bentley Sisters, Tim Big Family and Timoti, although singing primarily in Russian, chose to brand themselves with English names. Western words polluted the Russian language: band was translated as “banda”, the most common original meaning of which was a gathering of criminals, hits as “hiti” and MTV celebrity news as “news blok.” My boisterous co-workers heartily bellowed “O-kei” instead of the Russian equivalents “horosho” or “ladno”. In the food shop the phrase price list was translated directly as “prais list.” Slowly but sure bastardized versions of English crept into, their bland “O-keis” encroaching upon the country’s rich and boundless tongue.

Despite its bastard name, MTV’s “news blok” kept in line with its Russian character. Although concerning itself with Western stars just as much as with the Russian ones, “News blok” reported completely different content and perspective. News focused exclusively on who bought what, for how much, and what kinds of expensive possessions that Russian and Western celebrities were toting on their precious persons. Russian stars happily paraded their luxuries and eagerly volunteered prices to the clamoring press. When not reporting on celebrity purchases, the “blok” coverage enthusiastically trashed
Western celebrity bodies. Russian celebrity polls advised JLO to lose at least three kilos from her famous posterior, and lauded the fleshy Beoynce as a meaty cow. Indeed, next to Russia’s slim voluptuous divas, American celebrities appeared chunky and short, or overly heavy and wide-boned. Stripped of their make-up and cleverly concealing clothes JLO and Beyonce would look quite ordinary, while the leggy Russians could knock the wind out of any audience even in their hair-rollers.