Slag-Donalds (2004): A Hip-Hop F*** You to Americana

In the early 2000s, after a solid ten years of progress and rather rapid innovation, although it must be said unquestionably touched by the hand of consumerism almost from the jump unlike its Western counterpart, Russian Hip-Hop began diving head first into the 'conscious' route. As a result of the Soviet Union's dissolution, Westernism a la exoticism was the general M.O, and thus Hip-Hop became a vehicle that emboldened youth used to distance themselves from anything Soviet, a pathway to envisioning a life outside the bleakness that was their childhood and projected future for so long. However, the dream would soon turn sour as the West they had idolized for so long began atrophying under its own weight, and the contentious 'uniqueness' of Russian culture began being invaded by an unscrupulous devotion to the Western capitalism system.

Artists like Detsl, Timati, Oxxxymiron, Ellipsis, and many others got their start in this climate, helped along by technological progress and the late stages of the mid-20th century Digital Revolution and the unavoidable ramifications of the late-90s "Third Industrial Revolution." More importantly, once Vladimir Putin positioned himself as Russia's great saviour, whose brand of "Classical Statist" (Eurasian or pan-Slaviet?) chauvinism stoked the post-Soviet desire for civic safety and national security while the influx of Western values/lifestyle/culture complicated his imagined neo-Soviet restoration, genres like Hip-Hop (and really all Russian culture) had become laced with political discourses in some way. As Irina Six noted, the fall of the USSR had split the Russian civil consciousness and as a result of Yeltsin's failed strategy of unconditionally uniting with the Western world, not only had Western antagonism reached a sociocultural apex but it had infused itself into the consciousness of Russian life itself (2008). What I call the "Russian paradox," presents itself; Yes, the USSR was bad but the West is worse and therefore, I would much prefer the USSR.

The Russian Hip-Hop Ethos

Much of Russian Hip-Hop then and now operate in this skewed frame of mind, where a purposeful distance is kept from the West as too much would taint their domestic individuality and render them aesthetically displaced. So while I agree with Elena Grishina's comment that "Rap culture in Russia is multinational manifestations of youth maximalism and self-affirmation, protest against the injustice of life, seeking support in a rapidly changing 21st century world" (2020), I would push back and say that Russia Hip-Hop has never been about that at all. In fact, if anything Russian rap is the tacit embodiment of nationalist sympathies without having to say it out loud. What is being stated through their work is, "We (Russian rappers) are doing American rap better than you (American rappers." Given that political oppositionalism and political advocacy has taken a new and wholly subjectivized form in the post-digital era (post-politics era?), that being what Yuri Latov calls "New Extremism" (2013), post-post-Soviet youth today are so well connected and yet so unprepared for the landscape that has befallen them. As he stated, in the early 2000s Russia was faced with a choice as to the way it wished to proceed. But typically, the 'Old Extremism' (violence, xenophobia, duplicity, etc) rebelled against the 'New' (organized protests, digital networks, etc.) and much like the Soviet period, nothing changed and instead the rise of "positive patriotism" grew, leading to semiotics like the Z(apad Rossii) movement (reappropriation of the St. George Ribbon symbolizing Russia's military valour and loyalty to the state). More can be said about this ribbon but it is laced with radicalism and history. In this way, I would argue that Russian rap is not a force for good nor nefariousness in Russia but a place liminally in between. So just as Latov writes that the social equanimity is maintained but the allowance of "deviant...social activity” adjacent to politically-correct alternatives, along with the continual castigation of "destructive ideology," so too has Russian Hip-Hop embraced such a duty. In support of this idea, L. S. Rygina's four-pronged notion of nationalist philosophy (2006) is helpful in perceiving how Russian rappers, by their very nature, are nationalists even if they do not outright state as much. In her reading, there are the Primordialists (national greatness comes with waking the dormant consciousness of the public), Modernists (sociopolitical structure is made by and for the people), Anti-Realists (homogenized identity is formed, irregardless of its veracity), and the Constructivists (By developing culture, a national identity cane be holistically formed). Thus, during the "lost decade" (1990-2000) as Russian youth culture began splitting into 'informals' (enterprising, pro-Western) and 'formals' (conservative, pro-Russian) all in the name of "the search for identity" (Kultura, 2005), Hip-Hop quickly occupied the space between them, and offered youth a pathway away from the confusion caused by Institutional fluxus and into something recognizable but nevertheless their own. But like all things, this too split and the "Light" (mainstream) vs. the "Dark" (underground), and styles like "sport ditties" (pop-rap) and "red rap" (conscious rap) style would both underscore its Western dependency yet also offer a Russian alternative. But the vital part here is that as the Western capitalist system brazenly stole nearly every facet of Russian youth culture from the Russians, those derailing against it were participating in it regardless of their opposition. As Dziewanska et. al (2014) notes, the goal of the capitalist/consumerist mindset is to "pass through [societal] consciousness" without detection. In short, Russia operates on the plushness of capitalism, the mind control of socialism, the quixotic blindness of communism, the bitter rage but hopeful nostalgia of the USSR, and the calm that forced civil endorsement and chauvinism provides. This, in effect, explains the contemporary Russian climate. Yet, as Art Historian Ekaterina Degot wrote in the heat of the Crimean War, referencing the arbitrary censorial policies of Putin's government, "There is no guarantee of emancipatory potential in contemporary art, and neither are there specific forms that would assure us of the correct political behavior of their creators, let alone their owners. There are no rules anymore, and each case has to be taken separately" (2014). In this way, the truly liberal and extra-political "mind-liberating function of art" (Johnson, 2015) that was once the artist's raison d'etre in the Futurist/Constructivist/Avant-Garde Russian 1910s has died, and has now been replaced with the "power of convincing" and "political mass persuasion," the heart and life-blood of all propaganda (Cull, 2019). Russian Hip-Hop is nothing but expertly-crafted musical coercion, regardless of the creator's good intentions.

Slag-Donalds (2004)

But in the first-half of the 2000s, amidst the rapid (d)evolution of Russian society and Hip-Hop culture, e.g., digital platforms, festivals, concerts, rap battles, television programming, ad campaigns, simultaneous massification and subcultural homogenization, political discourses would begin to be used, and the relatively unquestioned devotion to Westernism would be fiercely critiqued by rappers. That is where Mister Maloy and Drunken Boys' album "Slag-Donalds" (2004) comes in, a post-ironic and very overt refutation of the West's desire for global hegemony and Russia's unthinking adoption of American Hip-Hop. Mister Maloy is perhaps one of the most influential people in Russia rap history to date.

Having been one of the first Russian rappers in the post-Soviet space along with groups like Bad Balance, Bachelor Party, Big Black Boots and rappers like Bogdan Titomir and Dolphin, one of the first to embrace the Russian language, and one of the first host rap-centered parties in the early part of the 90s (Frolova, 2015), his transition from breakdancing to rapping marked the radical change in the landscape of Russian Hip-Hop culture. In the post-Soviet interim, his music became synonymous with Russian rap and his track "I Will Die Young" (1995) was the earworm in the minds of nearly every liberated youth. However, this album was one of the last albums released during his nine-year partnership with the under-researched rap group "Drunken Boys," whose influence and lasting legacy as premiere alternative Russian rap has not yet been forgotten.

The album's music is unlike American Hip-Hop of the early 2000s and is more akin to the 1980s to 1990s, supporting another general assumption that Russia, really even now, operates 10 years behind the West. Therefore, to understand Russian Hip-Hop's development in conjunction with the West, you must look backwards a decade. Using funk as its foundation, connections to De La Soul, Jurassic 5, and the "gay-hop" style (light-weight party music which one can bop to), Run DMC, Snoop Dog, Ice-Cube (who had visited Russia in 1999), and a lighter version of the beats of DJ Quik and group The D.O.C, this album coalesced several strands of American rap and played with them in a rather sardonic and all-together seditiously humorous way. Fascinating too is that this West coast-type of environment, although its listenability could be attributed to the East-coast, is mostly associated with the St. Petersburg scene (whose music uses more Old-School aesthetics perhaps).

Because in/around 2004, Russian rap (and society) was completely commercialized and its 'authentic' phase annihilated thanks to Detsl and second-wave digital culture, the sickly "sweet" style of the rapping and funk/funk-rock environment tastes almost indigestible. There is something off-kilter about the music, given that its release was the same year as the controversial Beslan School massacre, the instatement of Law No.54-FZ on Freedom of Assembly, and Putin's ascension to the Presidency a second time. There is a moment of Soviet "nostalgia", apropos for the time as Soviet melancholy as evidenced by the phrase “Born in the USSR" (coined by rock group DDT in 1997) was the "formal" antithesis to the Western gaze of the "informal." Reference to the anti-global warming song "Пока не Поздно" (1983) is made in the track "Da Da Da," while in the title track "Slag-Donalds," they openly chastise the Russian public's desire to be like the Western world, so much so that they completely overlook the harmful effects of their desire if only for a short and fleeting moment.

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There are plenty more albums and music-videos connected to not only this album but the broader Hip-Hop continuum that Scholars have ignored up until now. Therefore, blog posts going forward will be targeted towards talking about them and looking into why they were important for the development of Russian Hip-Hop, what they meant culturally, and how their music/texts reflect this sociocultural importance. Enjoy the album and until next time!!!