A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters appeared a few years ago with the song “.”Stilyagi” by lo-fi LA hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic guy who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with his “magnichizdat” and guitar. Wait, what is he? magnity’s datMan! like samizdator underground press, magnity’s datFrom the words “tape recorder” and “publishing,” Soviet youth were kept informed by covert recordings of pop music. Stilyagi (a postwar subculture that copied Hollywood films and American jazz and rock ‘n’ roll styles) produced and distributed smuggled music in the Soviet Union. However, as NPR’s work “In the 1950s, before tape recorders were available and vinyl records were in short supply, inventive Russians began recording banned bootleg jazz, boogie woogie, and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital trash cans and archives,” we are told. See one such X-ray “record” above. here Of course, this fascinating process was dramatized in the first scene of the 2008 Russian musical. Stilyagi (Translated into English as “hipster”, the word literally means “obsessed with fashion”).
These records are called: Roentgenizdat (X-Ray Press) Or, as Sergei Khrushchev (Nikita’s son) says, “music of the bones.” Author Anya von Bremsen described them as “forbidden Western music that captured the inner life of the Soviet people” and said, “They cut the X-rays into crude circles with nail polish scissors and punctured them with cigarettes. Elvis would be in the lungs, Duke Ellington would be in Aunt Masha’s brain scan…” The brutal makeshift disc certainly looks cool enough, but what did it sound like? Well, it’s a bit like an old Victrola gramophone record played on a gnarly AM frequency through a small transistor radio, as you can hear in the Beatles sample below.
Dressed in fashions copied from jazz and rockabilly albums, Stilyagi learned to dance to little ghosts of Western pop songs in underground nightclubs and fought against the disbanded Komsomol (super-square Leninist youth brigade). Roentgenizdat created a ring and tried to suppress the influence of bourgeois Western pop culture. According to Artemy Troitskyauthor of Return to the USSR: The true story of rock in Russiathese records were also called “ribs”. “The quality was terrible, but the price was low: a ruble or a ruble and a half. These records often brought surprises to buyers. For example, after a few seconds of American rock and roll, a mocking voice in Russian was heard: “So, you decided to listen to the latest sounds, right?” followed by a few selected adjectives addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, and then silence. “
See more images of Born Music Records With laughing squid and wired Co-founder Kevin Kelly’s blog street youthand above, we unearthed some historical footage of Stilyagi jitterbugging through what looks like a Soviet training film about Western influence on Soviet youth culture, but was definitely produced during the Khrushchev thaw, when, as Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich told NPR, things were “a little more liberal than before.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
