This article was written as an online submission to The-Village.ru digital magazine.
The date was 1984 and Perestroika was soon to begin. Yuri Andropov had recently died, having spent the last two years viciously decimating rock's presence in Russia. Prior to the 1983 Party Plenum on Ideology's instatement of heavy regulation on the public consumption and creation of Soviet popular music, specifically newly emerging strains like seditious New-Wave, Metal, and Punk rock, "popular music" could be found nearly everywhere. From cafes, bars, colleges and clubs, the galvanizing presence of this DIY genre was irrevocably saturated into late-Soviet life, the culture made even stronger through the practice of illicit magnizdat trading, self-produced samizdat rock journals, and prioritization of building likeminded tusovki (communities). As youth became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet isolationism and its fabricated mythos of national excellence, the late 70s rock scene quickly became all about strategically disproving the narrative that Soviet life was great. Thus, it was the more outspoken, in-your-face cultural subgenres, along with the punk and hardcore musical scenes that would push Soviet popular music into its next phase of development. At the beginning of the decade, in 1973 at a birthday party in the Bronx, the genre of Hip-Hop would begin its glocalized take-over, and it would only take about 10 years for it to make its debut in the USSR thanks to the huge sociocultural impact of the 1980s Olympic Games, held in Moscow much to the international communities' disapproval.
The "Sistemi" youth culture (a sobriquet for a plurality of Soviet subgenres from the 60s to the 80s), which already was incredibly diverse in the late 70s (punk, hard rock, metal, hippie, goth) and going strong as a informal expressionary lifestyle, became only more complex and multifaceted as an increasingly overwhelming amount of European and American styles flooded past the Iron Curtain. Thanks to the Moscow Olympics, and then the 1985 International Youth Festival, genres like seductive Eurodisco and neoprene pop, electropunk and German krautrock, techno and clean house, along with post-punk club culture, psychobilly, b-boy dance culture, and American "old-skool" found their Soviet home. Conglomerating nearly every subgenre that had come previously and then some, from the 60s beatniki and hippie rock n' roll to 70s glam/punk rock and "hippy hate" belligerence, the late 70s and early 1980s in Soviet Russia prior to Perestroika was one of temperamental experimentation, where youth unapologetically tested the boundaries of artistic expression. The black-market culture, known as fartsovka, supplied youth with the costume of Western 80s party culture, and when partnered with the burgeoning discotheque and nightclub scene, along with blossoming break-dancing trend, Soviet youth had lots to chew on. But tastes in jazz-fusion and groovy post-disco had already begun in the early 70s. So when, in the early 1980s due to the Olympic game's influence, some of the first dance events and pop festivals began emerging from within the Baltic states, it was only a matter of time before Hip-Hop culture's musical variant (rap) would suffuse itself into Soviet dance culture.
The four-man rock group Rush Hour (Час Пик), whose short lifespan (1982-1986) disgraces their seminal influence on the trajectory of the genre in Russia, and the tale of how they came to create their 1984 album "Rap" (Рэп) is both humorous, marvelous, and quite disheartening. Known for their covers of Western artists and 70s Soviet rock ballads for discotheque audiences, the regionally-bound band from Kuibyshev, Novosibirsk would've fallen into obscurity if it hadn't been for a very special set of circumstances that all fell in-line at the perfect moments. Kuibyshev's youth culture was rife with musical festivities, in the 60s under Komsomol leadership GMK-62 (the local youth club) and again in the late 70s following a move to the "House of Youth" in Samara where the "golden youth" could go, learn about jazz from lectures. But it was in the late 70s to early 80s when the first official disco halls would be created. Named Lucky Sound, discos began emerging everywhere and with them, social events like local and regional competitions. It was in 1982 at the Canon disco competition at the Gaudeamus student club when the newly organized Rush Hour would coalesce with eminent DJ Alexander Astrov. After liking the group's simple prog-rock vibe, he agreed to be their producer, and in 1983 "to find an entertaining move that no one thought of" Rush Hour, with Astrov as the creative director, would begin creating the first Russian rap. Marvelously that year the silky electro-funk track "The Message," from the fabricators of American rap Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had found its way to Kuibyshev, but its jarring atmosphere and busy textures proved incompatible with 80s Soviet disco sensibilities. In a 2016 interview with Afisha Daily Journalist Nikita Velichko, Astrov noted that it was an "outrageous recording... too much funk, let alone rap."
It was concluded that Russia wasn't yet ready for the mellow, break-beat style and emptier boogie-funk rapping flow just yet. So the way forward was identified in English punk-rock musician Captain Sensible's 1982 hit single "Wot," a more rhythmically-grounded synth-pop track, melodically danceable yet technically rap enough to serve as Rush Hour's guide. As Astrov remarked, "Everything was done there much softer, much more commercially," the Europop aesthetic being a feasible first-step into the aggressive nature of American Hip-Hop. With the musical side being outlined, it was time to address the elephant in the room, how was the Russian language supposed to fit to this novel flow of rhythmic syllabification? Because of the elongated word lengths, breadth of word forms, dense consonant clusters, phonological idiosyncrasies like palatization and velarization, along with the articulatory absence of tone changes and set notions of rhythmic prosody, fitting a steady lyrical beat to the Russian language proved difficult. But this fusion of cultures was fueled by more than artistic interest, but to prove to his Canon audiences it was possible to retrofit this fresh genre to the Russian language, thereby silencing critics and bringing this new Western sound to Russian soil. Astrov struck a reluctant deal with Rush Hour, who were originally hesitant about disco's societal popularity but still interested in adapting it for themselves. He'd help them create their vision of rap-funk fusion (equipment and all) in exchange for some much-needed disco repertoire for an upcoming discotheque competition in Togliatti.
The proposed five-track album would include a variety-pack of 80s people pleasers. From quintessential glam-rock, 70s rockabilly, and funk-infused rock n' roll (Disco, Saturday), to "primitive [spoken] rap monologues" overtop old-school funky-bass guitar (Rap, Dance), and even melodically-detuned surfer rock (Time passes), the album fully embodied the societal energy of the pre-Perestroika, Soviet mindset almost perfectly. Within the habitual usage of old musical customs lied the seeds of radical cultural change. The fact that the Russian language, in all its metrical flaws, had been successfully grafted onto a Hip-Hop beat showed that Russia was more than capable of taking Western styles and creating their own unique versions. Despite Astrov's petition that the album's inclusion of the rapping style was merely an ad-hoc, "frivolous" creation and "another accident" in the process of the album's original production, it set the unintentional and more subliminal precedent for another seminal opposition track called "Totalitarian Rap," recorded in 1989 by the rock group Alisa whose own path to creation was just as unexpected and expedient as its earlier colleague, the need for programmable material for an upcoming festival proving vita to their creation.
In 1984, after having worked together for about a year creating the track's instrumental lives, in his signature non-chalant way Astrov transformed the tracks from insignificant, up-beat "light music" to proto-rap prophecy thanks to the Elektronika MP-01 mixing console, two Olympia tape recorders, and auxiliary audio like noise and voice-over "rapping" overlays. The whole affair only took a couple of days, and when the music finally arrived to the Togliatti discotheque competition, it was an instant hit with audiences and critics. Astrov points to the track's novelty as its main selling-point, "[...] it was one of the first experiments on a funky basis," as throughout the creative process neither Astrov nor Rush Hour considered the album to be anything more than an experiment. In a 2016 interview for Fresh Newspaper, Astrov notes that in the early 1980s, Hip-Hop and rapping in Russia wasn't yet understood as a legitimate culture. So the album was treated as a recognizably significant but ultimately passing fancy, "And the day after tomorrow everyone will forget."
But it was Olga Opryatnaya, the second director of the Moscow Rock Club and then Ministry of Culture member, who would help secure the album's place in history. After hearing Rush Hour in Togliatti while on the competition's jury, Rush Hour was asked to professionally record their five songs, and this invitation would inevitably give rise to the 25-minute album known only as "Rap," the name sourced from the third song. Once it was finished and hastily sent to Moscow, Astrov notes his partnership with both the music and Rush Hour ended, but also his involvement in the world of Russian rap and disco. The album was officially published in 1985 right in time with Gorbachev's newly instated policy of Перестройка, Ускорение, Гласность [Reconstruction, Acceleration, Openness]. But the liberated atmosphere and public party culture of the mid-late 80s, with break-dancing becoming the youth's beau ideal and the second window into Western Hip-Hop culture, was not enough to help the album reach its full potential. However, Rush Hour would try to recreate their momentary glory in their 1986 album "Disco Marathon," an archetypal dance-rock album which used the same Grandmaster Flash synth-funk bass as its textural nuclease, albeit skipping out on the rap inserts for 70s-revivalist vocals. Without that essential element and Astrov's compositional expertise, Rush Hour failed to make the same impact and fell into underground obscurity, eventually fading away from public knowledge in the wake of the International Youth Festival of 1985, the many break-dancing festivals of the late 80s, and the eventual popularization of Alice's Totalitarian Rap in 1989.
The story of Rush Hour and the path they took in creating what was ostensibly Russia's first experiment with Hip-Hop is not unknown to contemporary rappers, nor is the innovative lyricism used lost on them either. Astrov, in creating the lyrics of the track "Rap" for the 1985 album, had used what's called "double rhymes," a type of versification where two words at the end of each line rhyme as opposed to one. This is said to induce in listeners a sense of frisson, or a highly pleasurable feeling colloquially known as "chills." In a 2016 tweet by the Russian rapper Oksimiron, he notes that such linguistic habits were ahead of the curb and were absent in the 90s Russia rap scene, while Nikolay Chumakov notes that such poetic techniques are only recently being discovered by 21st century Russian rap artists. Rush Hour's attempt at rap may have been off-the-cuff and all-together musically inconsequential, but it laid the inadvertent groundwork for what would become one of the most popular genres in Russia, and the tool post-Soviet youth used to define themselves in the new era.
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