Sonic Subversion

Sonic Subversion

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

The extremes eventually end up finding each other, and in the case of the ultra-conservative agenda of Czar Putin in Russia, it is beginning to resemble the repressive agenda that the PCUS and the KGB exercised in the country during the Soviet Union, today in day, at hand with the Russian Orthodox Church, the ultra-conservative agenda of the Putin government begins to become suffocating for a youth that unlike their parents, who feared him, and their grandparents who loved him, no longer fear, nor feel a moral debt to him, they have learned to think for themselves, to look for information other than that provided by state propaganda agencies, read Boris Pasternak, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, and have begun to exercise criticism in their own way, as the conservative agenda begins to attack hard aspects of young people's life such as sex, music and art, which increasingly reflect the reality of a country with wide inequality and every time more poverty away from the big cities, although Putin has made his agenda offensive to the "liberal decadence of the West" globally, within his own country, this agenda increasingly hits frontally against the youth, and It seems that the generational clash begins to become increasingly evident and noticeable, to the extent that the authorities have once again begun to apply old repressive tactics of the Soviet era.

 The history of Russian punk rocker Egor Letov has always seemed fascinating to me, a young musician considered subversive and persecuted by the KGB in the Soviet Union of the 80s, isolated by police harassment to the point of having no more musicians to play with, Letov saw bordered to create most of his recordings in a primitive way, playing all instruments and recording in remote and abandoned places late at night in his native Siberia, Letov would become a fascinating iconoclastic character in the middle of an oppressive reality , the Russia of today, after the fall of the Soviet Union should be a very different place than the one lived by Letov, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the hegemonic party of the USSR no longer exists, the KGB, disappeared and the communist dictatorship is gone, today, the United Russia party overwhelmingly dominates the majorities in the chambers, the FSB has replaced the KGB as the repressive arm of the state, and a former KGB has been in the presidency for almost 20 years (with a brief intermission in which he was "only" prime minister), continuing with the irony, it seems that the persecution of musicians away from the commercial sphere begins to increase, artists such as Hip Hop musician Dmitry Kuztnetsov, known as Husky or Techno duo IC3PEAK begin to suffer a strange interference in their presentations that begins to arouse suspicion, obscene calls and bomb threats are made to the promoters of the events in which these musicians appear, premises closed by supposed health and safety agencies, failures in the electric power during the presentations and arrests of the attendees of these events begin to appear with more and more frequency.

The most notorious fact is the recent arrest of musician Husky, his music more in the tradition of American "gangster rap", with a penchant for weapons, violence and sex, than in the tradition of the most politically active Public Enemy, He was arrested recently in the city of Krasnodar, after the place where he was going to present was closed, Husky decided to climb to the roof of a car to improvise his performance in front of a crowd of his followers, immediately followed by security agents. and they detained the musician, who would be released later, within the same sphere of Hip Hop that seems to begin to become a powerful source of expression among the youth, another young musician Face, who strongly criticized the regime denouncing the lack of liberties and corruption in the midst of "football tournaments" to distract society, canceled a tour of several cities after receiving anonymous threats against his life.

But the "witch hunt" would not end there, it would continue against the techno duo of Nikolai Kostylev and Nastya Kostylev, known as IC3PEAK, whose videos reflect an extremist view of youth, with more and more cancellations in their presentations due to anonymous bomb threats. , in addition to the absurd attack on the band Friendzone, in the tradition of the American "teen bands", they have been accused of promoting a decadent lifestyle, more and more prohibitions towards a youth that seems to be stronger before the attack and that seems benefit more from censorship, a reality that becomes increasingly harsh and hostile to youth and artistic forms of expression that begin to become uncomfortable for the state.