Tsoi lives

I’ve long thought that more Americans could dig Kino, despite the language gap. The most important Russian rock band of the 80s were a mix of post-punk social criticism and New Wave aesthetics, all seen with the eyes and charm of regular Russian kids hanging around their yard. And today, if rock star fate hadn’t intervened, their charismatic leader, Viktor Robertovich Tsoi, would have turned only 45.

Unlike official Moscow, the home base of all the state-sanctioned pop crap, Leningrad had a true rock culture. Kino came out of that underground scene, performing in semi-legal venues and people’s apartments. Parts of their style suggests that the Iron Curtain was more porous than westerners think it was. They seem to have picked up pieces of what was happening in the west, but were isolated enough to retain all the attitudes of their time and place. Guitarists Yuri Kasparyan and Igor Tikhomirov looked like refugees from Joy Division or the Smiths or some other northern English band. Drummer Georgi Guryanov, who played standing up, seems like a character in a Dadaist play. And there was Tsoi, who has become by far the most iconic Russian rock star. And I hate to admit it, but the fact that he became so considering his father was Korean gives me hope that Russians may not be as deeply racist as I sometimes fear.

Their first album was released in 1982, 45, and became an underground hit. There is really nothing political about the first songs, and in many ways they touch on familiar rock themes: girls, your friends, worrying about your future, feeling alienated, etc. What made them dangerous to the established order is that underlying it all is the keen awareness that life in the Soviet Union was boring. And as anyone who remembers their teenage years with any lucidity can tell you, that’s dangerous stuff.

With time the message became clearer, especially once Glasnost got underway in the mid-80s. By then, they were popular enough to have a run at the “voice of a generation” title. And they were up for it. Their anthemic single from 1986, “Peremen” (Change) was the right song at the right hour. The narrative of the song is subtle to the point of abstraction, but the explosive tension is unmistakable… (apologies on the translation)

Electric lights continue into the day,
And the box of matches is empty,
But in the kitchen is the deep blue flower-flame of gas.
The cigarettes are in our hand, and the tea is on the table.
This system is simple: there’s nothing more,
It’s all up to us.

Then a much more straightforward chorus:

‘Change!’ our heart demands.
‘Change!’ our eyes demand.
In our laughter and in our tears
And in the pulse of our veins.
“Change!’ We’re waiting for change.

Here’s the song from a legendary June 1990 show at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, just two months before he died in a car crash in Latvia (those prone to motion sickness are forewarned about the 80s a/v club camerawork!).



They produced a remarkable number of albums in a few short years. They tackled social problems, personal entanglements, and their sound was all over the map -- from the early shuffling rhythms of their underground albums, to the New Wave synth-heavy later stuff. Throughout was Tsoi’s singular voice.

They got some attention in the West. Robert Christgau in the Village Voice gave them a B+ for their album “Gruppa Krovi":

Just Russian new wavers, their translated lyrics unobtrusively poetic, alienated by habit, politically aware, resigned. But Victor Tsoi's solidly constructed tunes have a droll charm that's fresh if not new, and to an English speaker, the physical peculiarities of his talky voice, which saunters along as if a low baritone is the natural human pitch, seem made for the offhand gutturals and sardonic rhythms of his native tongue.

The title track of that album is a thinly veiled broadside against the war in Afghanistan, about going off to a fight you want no part of, with your blood type and serial number stitched on your sleeve like an invitation to fate. Here's an early performance of the song:



Good old-fashioned “Rock n’ Roll” has made an awful lot of hay through the generations by affecting an outlaw pose. Truth is that whenever the law got involved it was usually the artists' own damn fault. But even in the waning days of the Soviet Union being in a rock band or going to a show invited trouble. It was, actually, the real thing. And it is a scandalously hilarious that Vladimir Putin and Sergei Ivanov, both career spooks before becoming politicians, have claimed they were Beatles fans all along.

There is something about Kino that slays that kind of cynicism. I think there is a law here that whenever four or more Russian teenagers meet in a yard on a warm evening, one of them must produce a guitar and they all must start singing. I’ve been surprised at the number of times I’ve heard kids warbling out Kino tunes. If American kids had the ability to concentrate on any such communal activity anymore, what they would sing?