Yesterday, 60 years of Victor Robertovich Tsoi. I want to write about the Kino group as a whole, but I will start from afar.
For younger children (and that’s anyone under 35), I think it’s necessary to mention a little bit of background.
Long ago, even before Putin (but after Peter the Great), in the same years St. Petersburg, there were two groups. They were almost equally popular. The leader of one – an intellectual, a brilliant intellectual, translator of Richard Bach and the only musician in the country at that time who played the blues – Mike, Mikhail Naumenko. The group was called “The Zoo”.
The latter is a little out of the way, but a man with a touch of Smiths and Cure. From the treatment, it was mostly exposure. By the way, the pose was from Joy Division, but let’s not confuse the reader. To briefly describe the work of a young man, it looked like this – the countryman standing motionless at the microphone in a black cloak with a stone face, protests against the universe to the well-known combination of three chords. Everything Tsoi did implied deep meanings and coolness for those who were not used to listening, but had already seen someone else’s coil, western and trendy.
For those who are currently sitting in a burning chair, I propose to conduct an experiment.
Right now anyone can open the song Barbarism Begins at Home by the Smiths vocal and instrumental ensemble. And then the “Change” group “Kino”. Don’t be lazy.
I’ll give a dozen examples of Viktor Robertovich’s original music.
In general, I have not loved the world and those around me since I was 13 because he, the world loves Tsoi instead of loving Mike. “Poet of the Year for Housewives” – This is what Andrei Burlaka writes in the legendary “Encyclopedia of Rock”.
Meanwhile, Ekaterinburg group Chaif (which I don’t really like) immortalized the historical dilemma with this line: “One of them said he loved Kino, but I realized he loved the Zoo.
Unfortunately, I can say a lot about Russian rock. My strange hobby began when we found in our library at home various Aurora magazines, in which Zhitinsky’s Adventures of a Rock Amateur was published. 13-14, I was in the nineties in the garden (innovators, I’m writing to you). This is a time when youth hobbies include bottling and alcohol “Royal” by weight seeds.
And here, exactly our “Radio” appears, peers remember. Apart from Philip Kirkorov, Alla Pugacheva and the vile “Sun Hands” that plays at school, it’s the first radio station in the world to try to tell you that there is music. I listened in general, reading “Adventures” in parallel with my mouth open. They wrote about the big – about BG, about Kinchev, about the very young and funny Shevchuk.
Then St. I will enter the St. Petersburg Faculty of Journalism and defend my diploma on “Music Criticism: Russian Rock in Samizdat Materials of the 70s and 80s”. The choice of topic will surprise my teachers who specialize in “political journalism”!
“Maria, are you out of your mind?”
By the way, it seems to me that an important fact here is that next door to the Faculty of Journalism leads to the Helikon Plus publishing house. Later I found out that the publishing house belongs to the same Alexander Zhitinsky, the author of Adventures of a Rock Amateur, because the semantic lines in the wild are funny.
That’s why I always had an ironic and bad attitude towards the Kino group. But for a moment it worried me. It happens when you’re logically right, but as if something inside you is itching and haunting. Then I understood.
If you drink it, you will definitely sing to the Tsoi guitar, not to Mike. Moreover, if you feel bad standing on the banks of the Neva, you are navigating between “Red-yellow days” in your head, instead of “sitting in the white lane”.
That animal, chthonic thing that takes control within you. The pinnacle of intellectual oppression. It takes all your education, all your ideas about semantic and musical configurations at once – well, it just sings to itself.
I’m 38 and now on the verge of a pension fund I’m not ashamed to admit that I love Kino. On the third day at a nightclub, at karaoke, only the gorgeous vocals of a girl there (hello, Diana Karenovna) kept me from the urge to howl for a silly “Cuckoo” or “Cigarette Pack”.
Now I understand – Tsoi did what Russian culture has done for centuries. He takes someone else’s big idea and elevates it to deification. There was once a French novel where realism was incubating somewhere. And then Tolstoy and Dostoevsky got to work – and here you have a great philosophy in literature, a great idea, anthropological tortures, religious dilemmas, you read – and in general you do not want to live.
Sorry, what? Interested in post-punk? we are coming to you.
And Tsoi here is like the essence of Russian culture: a man with a non-Slavic face, non-Russian on stage, Western manners, with a completely supernatural appearance – rather Buddhist, oriental – take him and do the main thing. Drinking Russian songs of the last twenty years, which he wrote (this is the most important). He wrote down what he said at the karaoke, what these beautiful women were saying without a brain and silently. They will sing for a longer period of time.
Russian culture is born not where there are shoes and shirts, but where there are meanings. And they’re international, running over swamps and rivers, cutting off the head – like a knife through butter. And you will remember Tsoi. And hum. Untimely, a quote from our great literature will pop up in your mind and shorten and restrain you.
Today is not the most fun time. But after the red-yellow days – everyone knows what will happen.
And of course Choi is alive.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.
Source: Gazeta
