Hip-Hop, with its tenacious relevance and sympathetic virality, despite its “niche” favorability and opinionated reception throughout the ages, is a fundamental element of contemporary youth culture on a global scale. Originally hailing from the 19th-century plantation-work song and its “call and answer” tradition [technically called antiphonal singing], the typified musical genre of rapping can trace its heritage to the West African “griots” [musical storytellers, equivalent to English Bard or French troubadour] and Jamaican practice of “toasting” [monotoned, rhythmic oration over recursive beat]. However, rap’s lineage can be traced even farther North to the Gaelic practice of “Flyting” [versified insult-flinging battle between two parties] and the Norse poetical tradition of “Senna” [oral/written, two-person exchange of insults and admonishments]. However, its ‘modern’ identity grew from the 1910s jazz movement and its improvisational base-beat/fugitive-melody structure which, through the interwoven polyphony of 1940s bebop [the “jazz for intellectuals”], expanded into the sonorously cacophonic 1960s Free Jazz aesthetic [Ornette Coleman ‘Free Jazz’ c. 1961 for a taste].
But it wouldn’t technically be “Hip-Hop” until after the “electrified 70s” when jazz not only got funkified but rocked, digitalized, and experimentalized upon, all thanks to revolutionary innovations such as the modular Moog synthesizer, Dr-3 Drum machines, synth-pianos and MIDI technology, along with exploratory instruments and compositional post-isms [e.g., Serialism, post-tonalism, microtonality, Musique Concrete]. In this creatively saturated environment, bolstered by the 30-40 year development [1940-1970] of Jamaican Disc-Jockey and turntable culture Hip-Hop was born as a musical personification of marginalized, 70s urban youth.
As Adia Winfrey so curtly said:
But far away from its 1970s, Bronxian home, Soviet Russia would get to rap 10+ years after everyone else [late-1980s] and only as America’s commercialist equivalent 10 years after that [early 2000s]. Once Perestroika began and “The Transition” [1982-1991, meaning state-to- private capitalism] started advancing Soviet youth’s restlessness, coupled with further societal inculcation of discotheque, dance, Electronica, and Punk as a result of the 1980s Moscow Olympics and 1985 International Youth Festival, once Soviet breakdancing conjoined with rapping in the mid-late 80s, Russian Hip-Hop had begun. What it meant to be Russian was changing and no longer looked like anything but could very well look like anything. As Russian Scholar Dr. Irina Six stated:
“rap is the first genre...that shows a strong interest in reconsidering the Soviet past through its meaningful and relatively deep lyrics” (Six, 2008)
Russian Rap, like its American variant, was birthed during profound socio political change, as Yuri Andropov’s 1980s “Acceleration” campaign [Ускорение, 1982-1988], a tenant in the tripartite campaign of Gorbachev's Perestroika [Reconstruction], had essentially killed public interest in the newly liberated amateur rock scene. Not only was there a published list of 38 inappropriate bands published (Jones, 2015), but it was said that in 1984 not one single, “unofficial,” amateur pop performance was scheduled. Why? “The musicians themselves say that they have simply given up, as they are unable and unwilling to cooperate with the authorities” (Bright, 1985). This expressionary purge and resulting fuming antipathy thus leaving a gap quickly taken a hold of by excited youth who were less enthralled by Soviet wannabe-“British-invasion” 60s pop-rock and less socially-reflective, more commercially-focused Russki rok [Russian rock] gusto, and more by the deconstructed, synth-sonorites of New Wave rock and discotheque/dance grooves. The history of Discotheques in Russia starts in the 1930s via approved films, but didn’t kick off until the 70s with the “typical anti-capitalist's style” [whatever that means], however getting a liberating boost by the Moscow 1980’s Olympic Games.
So boom!
Rock may had lost its seminal place but Disco filled its spot, however not for long as breakdancing [B-boy] culture would begin its cultural ascent, accompanying in-suite by proto-Hip Hop in the mid-late 80s, spearheaded by the rhythmicality tests of the group Rush Hour, one of the first if not the first rap group in Russia. The late Russian 80s to early 90s saw phenomenal popular-cultural change as “breakers” [breakdancing boys and girls] and graffiti-artists became the go-to youth movement, supported by first-time breakdancing competitions (1984 in the club Milk), films (1985: Dancing on the Roof), and festivals (Papago-86). But remember how Russian rap tested the waters in the early 80s? Well by the late 80s-early 90s it had feet and began walking, the hesitancy towards using the Russian language was gone and fully-blown Russian groups like Bad-Balance, D.O.B. Community and Bachelor Party emerged, along with cultural catalysts like rap-battling (1990: Бит-Баттл) and rap-festivals (1991: Peak Rap-91). Despite being fairly mimetic of the West in Russian rap’s “first-wave” [late 1980s-late 1990s], “a great deal of fidelity to the forms of 1990s American rap music and retains similar themes with very little Russification of the genre that occurred with rock” (Feyh, 2012), sounding [and looking] more like 90s gangsta rap [or Russian Blatnaya pesnya / criminal songs], by the early 2000s Russian rap had become [in-part] Russified. As regions all across Russia started generating their own artists, not to mention the growth of the omnipresent hand of commericalist enterprising, “In the 2000s, rap culture in Russia was commercialized” (Frolova, 2015) [again notice the 10 year lag, in American commercialization began in the 90s], Russian rap become synonymous with collective youth angst and became the outlet for sociocultural perturbations.
In Elena Frolova’s lengthy analysis on Russian rap’s topologies and ontological chronology from 2009-2015 [but more like 1960s to 2010s], she makes the point that up until the mid-2000s, Russian rap was mostly about self-aggrandizement which put political instigations as a secondary attribute, only in 2009 coming to public purview. But as she also states Russian rap [like Russki rok] was political regardless of its textual politicality, and thus even from the beginning [late 90s/early 2000s] the relating of unprocessed Russian existence was the baseline for all further innovation. When rap was first “borrowed” [I am not a fan of such Western-first/Russian-second narrative], themes such as “Family conflict, City trap, Drug use, United community, Street danger,” and “Police power,” were used to exemplify the tumultuous state of Russian cultural affairs.
However, groups such as Bachelor Party and Bad Balance used these themes in a more generalized and observationist way. But in the early 2000s Russian politics became increasingly more disharmonious and downright maniacal. The downfall of Yeltsin during his 2000 Presidential campaign befell the scene at the [already sullied] hands of Putin, NOT to mention the impact of the Second Chechen War, Putin’s failure to handle the K-141 Submarine tragedy, topped by Putin’s return to the Soviet-tide national anthem [this having huge backlash the world over] and multi-tiered “Great Recession” in 2008-2009 sparked by Russia’s single-commodity reliance. This was the world which Russian Hip-Hop was born into, and as digitalization started changing the scene [websites, social-media, file-trading], along with the rise of rap battles and festivals, artists became [albeit strategically] political invested with socio-political themes like governmental corruption, ideological blindness, and societal homogeneity. Stylistically, the rap sound became much more pluralized, with infusions of contemporary R’n’B and what is called the “New jack swing” [marriage of the rhythmicity of funk and jazz with synth/electro-school adaptations] began shuffling in, creating the presence of “alt-rap” groups [2H Company] quite literally abreast with their mainstream variants (Jin, 2014).
[All 3 of Bad Balance's members]
Russian Hip-Hop serves as the vehicle for rearticulation of self in a cultural environment which breeds animosity and animus towards anything which presents itself as unorthodox, “foreign” [broad sense], and wholly liberated from ideological positionalism. But more than that, rap in Russia serves a synergistic, communal function and just like amateur, Russian rockers in the 60s-80s, musicians and their “in-the-know” fans are carefully questioning what a post-Soviet, Russian identity looks like in a country where laws seem meaningless and dogma reigns supreme. This is why Husky, one of the Russia’s most culturally poignant musicians and yet fiercely reviled, philosophical orators has rampaged his way through his 10+ year career with the singular goal of addressing the Russian citizenry’s torpor with “lyrical bullets in rap form” (Liebig, 2020) in the hopeless attempt to induce some type of conscious awareness of their own neo-Serfdom.
The cretins who designate themselves representatives of the Russian populace are no more political leaders than they are rappers, but the same cannot be said in the inverse. As Frolova indicates, rappers have become makeshift politicians and hold just as much if not MORE sociopolitical agency than those in elected offices across Russia. But this power is stratified of course between those with state “ins” [Timati, Slava KPSS, Black Star Label] and those with state “outs” [Husky, Pussy Riot, IC3PEAK] although the line is not at all black and white. In a 2017 interview with Afisha Daily, Husky squarely admitted that Russia has no claim to having created rap. However, in the same breath he mentioned Russia’s “chanson” heritage. This shows that, at least for Husky, Russian rappers know Western rap history, but they also know theirs. That’s huge.
- [Dmitry Kuznetsov a.k.a Husky, Afisha Daily (2017)]
Sources
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