As I was working today on gathering more information on Hip-Hop and the rap community in Russia, I stumbled upon the discovery of a recently launched streaming series called "Soldout" which documents, using real-life issues and long-standing polemics, through a factious lens, the difficulties in making a name in the modern rap scene from the perspective of rapper Drumma'K (played by 23 year-old, Russian actor Gleb Kalyuzhny).
The plot takes you through his fraught, Joseph Campbellian, hero's journey, beginning from a growingly despondent point in his potential rap career, currently only being a small-time bedroom rapper whose tiny EP, while showing potential, is slowly losing its prestige as his creative juices stall in composing a full-length album abreast others releasing their own. This causes an incredible amount of strife in his life, pushing him to self-destructive habits like drinking and drug-use, an all too common reality for many in the popular music circuit, especially Hip-Hop as access to such nefarious substances is made incredibly ubiquitous in the scene and never entirely out of reach. Such self-defeating actions cause him to miss out of many important deadlines that are needed to jumpstart his career, and instead of sobering up his spiral only continues to get worse, as his personal record label is scorned by the public and critics alike, and that glimmer of prestige is pretty much extinguished.
This reminds me of Rodion Raskolnikov from Dostoesvky's Crime and Punishment, you?
The second half of Drumma'K's journey find himself painted as the black sheep and the untouchable outcast of the rap industry entirely. Everything is going wrong, as he lost the rights to his stage-name, no longer has access to his apartment, financial insecurity, his music is expunged from digital platforms, and many other extremely detrimental acts. But he finds solace and a path forward with the likewise scorned rapper Mikhail "Starina" Staritsyn, a once well-known Soviet rocker whose livelyhood is now spent playing in bars across Moscow (played by the burley award-winning actor Alexei Shevchenkov). Together, they set out to recraft their musical identities, although the rocker doesn't really have much care for Hip-Hop. [This is an important point, as this mirrors the real dialectic in Russia today of Soviet rock musicians, early 90s and 2000s rappers, along with Soviet DJs, and their distrust/antipathy for post-Soviet rappers, especially Timati and the uber-mainstream]. However, this relationships proves advantageous for both parties, as Drumma'K is in love with his daughter, a vlogger who has become estranged from her rocker father. Another representation of the rocker/rapper dialectic is through the portrayal of the serie's main Hip-Hop oligarch being portrayed by the real son of the original lead of the 70/80s "VIA" band Time Machine [Машина времени] Ivan Makarevich.
In coverage by Gazeta.ru's Pavel Voronkov, they note how the series seriously paints the harrowing truth about the Russian rap scene, where the "old School" methodology of ground-up advocacy of the artist and ownership over their own image and musical sound is being sacrificed willingly, but in most cases, unwilling to the dogs of capitalism and market currency. Expertly put, the note how the modern Russian rapper has turned into a "monetary battery," whose usefulness is only as good so long as they bring in money and lots of it. One can see how uncomfortably real the subtextual philosophy of this series is, especially today. I don't need to put it here, but we are all aware of the behinds-the-scenes red-tape, law-binding restrictions, and other truly authoritarian edicts delivered by record labels and music conglomerates which dictate in excruciating particular and paradoxically ambiguous detail what is and is not allowed on behalf of the artist, the public, and other related parties.
He goes on to name some of the artists that are [in my opinion] purposefully insinuated by the relational dynamics depicted on screen, such as the cloud-rapper Pharaoh, the ultra-capitalist anti-rapper Timati and his corporate greed-machine Black Star, Basta, and probably many others. For example, many young faces like Big Baby Tape, OG Buda, Soda Luv, and others have signed to many Western labels like Universal and Sony, and this corporate dependency is shown through their musical and visual aesthetics, clear as day!
But the more important through-line that the series is portraying is the dramatic clash between worlds, the "Old School" rappers and late-Soviet rockers whose societal influence is in contestment with the "New School" aesthetic of hedonistic electro-trap and what could be called "non-euclidean musicking," or undefinable and purposefully eclectic musical aesthetics that don't necessary belong to a single epoch, but somehow entirely belongs to the current era. The pluralizing of musical vocabularies with the sounds of past epochs of Russian popular music is thoroughly infused in the genetics of Russian rap, but there still remains the very real fear that with the ever burgeoning new, the roots of where Russian rap came from, and not just the early 2000s and late 90s but Soviet rock and earlier, will be slowly forgotten and underappreciated. We all must thank the 60s Stilyagi culture for rap, as it really was their fearless adoption of jazz that Russian Hip-Hop had the chance of being born. Here is my final word: To love Russian Hip-Hop, you must know where it came from.
Check out a trailer for the series "Soldout," being streamed on the Russian service Premiere.
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