Having completed more of my dissertation today, specifically the period from 2014-2015 (one of the most seminal periods in Russian hip-hop history), it's necessary to look back on the untold stories and albums from earlier chapters in Russian hip-hop's development.
And one undervalued (and hilariously caustic) moment would be the 2011 EP "One D**k Putin" by the underground group Cosmonauts featuring underground rapper Nikita Raskolnikov (just like Dostoevsky's novel, his debut album was named after his 1866 master work). As it stands, the group is no longer active and their VKontakte has been deleted. However, in a very brief interview on VKontakte from 2018 with one of the group's members, Vladimir 'Okhotnik Tom" Navtov explained that he's no longer in contact with his other group member, Barbiturny, and that the group had not managed to create their best rap album. He would go onto explain that the group had presented the last of their albums in 2015 at the BSB club and had gotten a small following. However, after this second album the group would no longer be active and stop releasing music. But as the album and its music below demonstrates, they had lots of potential, yet their lack of consistent music release and little market attention (even less publicity) doomed them from the start. Given the speed at which the Russian rap world developed in the early 2010s, if you didn't make it you were finished.
Raskolnikov on the other hand would release his debut album "Crime and Punishment" the same year, and go onto establish himself in the underground world, releasing music on a consistent basis until the present. Most recently, his 2022 album "Santa Monica" with his group SIX1SIX featuring his new rap name GOATT, although this persona's sombre tone is less his main aesthetic and more of a "side project" as Wiki News puts it. However, it has received minimal online feedback, although offline I assume this is a much different story.
Musically speaking, it's fully rooted in Old-School-styled transparent instrumentalism and atmospheric intimacy. It's really unlike anything you hear nowadays in the "New School" aesthetic, and yet, in a way, it was unlike anything you would have heard in the early 2010s as well. Quintessential West-Coast G-funk is on full display in the first and second tracks [Be Patient, Meeting], while the rest of the album is a coalition of smooth boom-bap with equally as silky jazz accompaniment. Saxophone moments and piano reveries adorn the other eight tracks, the quietly consistent boom-bap layer decorated with different mixtures of instrumental meditations, from the folk accordion [track no. 5, Not About That] to the tender dance of piano and saxophone [track no. 4, Russian Winters], to foregrounding the saxophone's tuneful beauty alongside fuller smoky aromas [no. 6, Goodbye Youth]. The folk-inspired sound comes back in track no. 7 [Mama], invoking with its synthy minor sighs to a life that could have been, while in no. 8 [Dance of Memories], the drum-kit boom-bap is expanded just enough with its synth-organ melancholically reminiscing in my left ear, to cause me to dwell on the days when life was one long dance and each day seemed forever.
However, it is the ninth track [один хуй путин] that this album is known for. Essentially, the texture is of a currently unknown [by me] speech by Vladimir Putin put over a smooth- jazz boom-bap beat and is meant to satirize Putin. The album had come out on December 8th, three days after the 2011 State Duma elections (which all Russians knew were entirely fabricated and not at all legitimate). But the track isn't about Putin necessarily but about how life in contemporary Russia cannot and will never change, only stagnate and dilapidate with every passing year. In a 2020 review, one of the very few actual that exist, he writes:
"Putin as an abstract fatal something, meaning that nothing will change, there is no point in doing something, because one fucking result will be predictable and unshakable."
The album reads a poetically melancholic testament to man's attempt to live a productive and fulfilling life despite the futility of change and the holes in hope of any kind. The album speaks of the attempt to hold oneself to the lofty belief in simple happiness while the world neglects virtuousness every chance it gets., and pursues its lusty desires. The album also reads as a premonitory farewell to a talented group that never truly got its day in the sun. Let's hope this album comes back someday soon, although in all truth it probably won't.
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