Politics

"The Tiny Hole of X-Ray Rock 'n' Roll"

|

Here's something special: an old Soviet propaganda film on the evils of rock 'n' roll. From the narration:

Suddenly this merry chorus of voices is invaded by a sound that resembles the screeching of car brakes that they consider music. We are growing suspicious. It turns out that these youngsters who loiter in shady alleyways behind the GUM instead of going to school are here to peddle a product of their own making. Foxtrot on x-ray plates that, instead of intricate anatomic details, capture a crude image of their intellectual poverty.

Listen, Zhenya Garkun, what does the world look like to you through the tiny hole of x-ray rock 'n' roll? It's a small, cramped world of shadows exchanging furtive looks. Shadows whose nickname is fartsovshiki (smugglers) selling old junk with fancy foreign labels.

Watch it here. Bonus reading: Charles Paul Freund's Reason classic "In Praise of Vulgarity," which discusses the USSR's jazz- and rock-loving stilyagi subculture, and Michael C. Moynihan's "Red Elvis," on an East German effort to promote a rock star of their own.