Soviet-era punks
Murilee sez, "English Russia has dug up some excellent photos of crypto-punks of the Late Brezhnev Era, when it still took plenty of guts to dress like a freak."
Soviet Punks (Thanks, Murilee!)
Murilee sez, "English Russia has dug up some excellent photos of crypto-punks of the Late Brezhnev Era, when it still took plenty of guts to dress like a freak."
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Punks Rock!
This is cool.
You gotta love englishrussia.com
Its a quality place to spend some time.
I'm guessing that a Rambo T-shirt in the USSR was roughly equivalent to a Che Guevara T-shirt in the West. (With the added edge of it being under a totalitarian police state not known for its tolerance.)
In Soviet Russia, punk rocks you. Well, actually that's true everywhere.
This photo, in particular, is speaking to me in all kinds of ways. Something about their faces, their posture. I wonder what kinds of stories they could tell.
Very true ACB,
Brave punks indeed.
They would probably have been targeted/attacked by both the general public AND the secret police.
Brave punks.
BTW
Some of my other favorites over at EnglishRussia are the "mobile nuclear powerplants"
http://englishrussia.com/?p=2355#more-2355
And the nuclear autonomous lighthouses,but i can't find a link to that one.
So what i was really thinking in #4 was that the Soviet Punks should have travelled in said mobile reactors,as a kind of tour bus;while their homes would have been nuclear lighthouses!
PROPER punks.
Maybe thats how they kept the KGB at bay :)
et la:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/01/19/abandoned-nuclear-li.html
mobile nuke plants; tres cool!
my love for you is like a truck,
Berzerker!
Would you like some making fuck,
Berzerker!
And for once, the afformentioned punks may actually be punks.
Though I'm wondering where crypto is supposed to come into this.
I'm wondering what these guys look like now.
They must all be in their forties.
@#8, that totally just dislodged some small memory stalactite in my brain, which came crashing down and pierced a thick membrane of my experience of living in east germany shortly after the wall came down. besides watching the entire decade of the 60s happen in the space of a year (which was cool and horrifying), i will always remember how fucking awesome those eastern bloc punks were, how much they'd been through, and how universal it was to rebel from the oppression of youth, the oppression of the state, the oppression of the society, and how amazing i felt as a kid who traveled all those many thousands of miles to go live in another continent, with another language, and find my tribe as if i'd never left.
A tad cheesy, but it's honest, and from a bunch of Soviet-era punks. This was from the late 90's, and the band was called Begemot, after the cat in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. As I understand it, the members were all "there":
"
Our Life
Back then in the 70s
The sounds they were so rebellious
Spike hair dirty jeans
We all lived life to be free
We had our life to be free
Stood for our rights and believes
Back then we were hated
For having our own opinions
But still we survived
As Joe we kept it alive
His life was so full of meaning
He stood for what he believed in
This is our life
This is our rebellion
This is our life
The 1977
This is our life
This is our life
Back then in the Soviets
We lived the life you dont know yet
Back then in the 80s
All we could say was we hate this
They felt our vibrations
We were the lost generation
Forbidden music we listened
They sent us to the Afghanistan
We shocked the public opinion
We were all ones in a million
For our clothes and haircuts imprisoned
We hated their Communism
"
The lead singer has a band doing 70s New York style garage punk now.
@2 ACB: I get the impression that it would have fallen under the category of luxuries that could only be had on the black market for about half a month's pay per item, along with such things as records of Western music.
He probably had to save for months just to buy that thing, and valued it appropriately.
@13: I was thinking more of the symbolism of wearing a T-shirt of an American action hero known for blowing away Communists. That can't have gone down well in the USSR.
Once again, this only shows that the Soviet Union was not the totalitarian nightmare that 99% of americans like to pretend it was. My parents, who lived in Russia in the 70s and the 80s, told me there were plenty of garage bands back then. And parties, and getting drunk, and clever criticism of the institutions, and so on. Stalinist Russia died in the sixties, not in nineties.
"And parties, and getting drunk, and clever criticism of the institutions"
That's a great name for an '80s "modern rock" album.
You know, the kind of thing that used to sell really well at Tower Records at the store next to the university, where ...
Oh never mind.
Artemy Troitsky has written a couple of books about rock music in the USSR which are well worth reading. It is amazing how much struggle people went through just to play in a rubbishy punk band- something which seemed to be a taken-for-granted rite of passage for most of my peers.
It's also hard to believe that not much longer ago, people were regularly beaten up in the street in the UK for dressing like that...
Those photos are outstanding! Old Soviet pictures + punk rockers = AWESOME!
#3 Antinous, I swear, I'm going to use that or some variation, as a title of a paper or chapter!
#17, Beanolini - Yeah, it's kind of hard to believe that people were beaten up here as well for dressing like that not too long ago (although the events weren't so well documented as in the London Scene - John Lydon getting assaulted, for example). Or that we had TV shows dedicated to the "punker problem" (Serena Dank was pretty famous for her campaign against punk, Parents of Punkers, though I've had a tough time finding primary sources on that... I found on video I think...). But now that punk is a fully integrated part of the music industry, and is a "safe" form of rebellion (or that is the perception, I think, but I think many still find it a powerful enough term to use), no one so much as bats an eye. You know how many kids (young kids, with no clue about punk) I see nowadays with mohawks (I'm talking school aged, elementary kids, with Mohawks)? It's utterly surreal! But then again, there was that kid who was killed not too long ago in a parking lot fight in Texas. Maybe I read about that here?
Beanolini, Troitsky sounds interesting! I'll have to see if I can find his books. The only one I found on Amazon was "Back in the USSR", are there others that you know of? I've read (or plan on reading) several books on Eastern bloc punk and I've never read him, maybe because I'm looking for academic works, mostly? But, I've read Timothy Ryback's book, "Rock around the Bloc", which I think sadly was written by a guy who just didn't get punk, but to be fair, when he wrote it, he was already an older guy. The awesome political scientist Sabrina Ramet, however, has written several articles and chapters on punk in Eastern Europe (her article from 1984 on punk in East Germany was great - she called them punkers, bless her). It's not really about punk, but there is also Alexei Munroe's book about Laibach, "Interrogating Machine", which I still have not read (from Slovenia, which was of course, part of Yugoslavia, not a Eastern Bloc country per se, even if it was Socialist). Oh, and then there is Eric Gordy's book on Serbia, which deals a little with punk and alternative music in Serbia, but mostly during the wars in the 1990s, post-Communist era. Seems like there are more, but these are the ones that spring to mind immediately. Funny, I'm not sure how many people are writing about Eastern European Punk in the English? Anyone know anymore?
the punk on the far left looks like a young Sid Vicious doesn't he?
http://www.sportcartoons.co.uk/wallpaper/sidvicious.jpg
#18 the sketchiest possible music scenes are now considered a safe outlet for youthful resentment because today's parents remember going through the same phase themselves ... those kids may have mohawks because mom likes mohawks.
it certainly seems strange to people over 40 ... in the '70s and '80s the idea of a "rock and roll camp" for young children would be beyond the pale ... "rock and roll camp" would have been considered just as sleazy, inappropriate, and dangerous as, say, "pole dancing camp," or "drug paraphernalia camp," or, uh, teaching kids to make explosives camp ... rock music was really in the same mental category
#19 there never got to be an old sid vicious
#18, mindysan33:
There's also 'Tusovka- who's who in the new Soviet underground', which was published in about 1990, and deals mostly with 1980s bands. He was supposedly working on a larger history of Soviet rock, but I don't know if this was ever published.