Our bud S47 hips us to the punk and metal haps in Rooshya, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. Damned intriguing stuff, if you dig this sort of thing. Which, y’know, I do, actually. This offhand remark caught my eye but hard.
I think this next band is from Novosibirsk or someplace like that, reminds me a lot of Fetchin’ Bones, a band from North Carolina back in the 1980s:
Fetchin’ Bones, HA! Although her musical tastes, interests, and proclivities never much coincided with my own—too jangly-pop and avant garde to suit me by a long yard, meaning no offense if that happens to be your bag—I’ve nevertheless been good friends with F-Bones vocalist Hope Nicholls and her bandmate/hubby Aaron since just about forever. Friendly, warm, unpretentious, soft-spoken; they’re good kids, boih of ‘em (Kids? Hope was born almost exactly a month before I was…OOF!).
Years ago, I read a similarly-themed article about the punk rock underground in some of the more obscure corners of the old USSR, can’t remember where. Kerrang!, Spin, Maximum Rocknroll, perhaps? Some other glossy mass-market publication or hand-Xeroxed, stapled-together fanzine? Creem? Circus? Tiger Beat? Rolling Stone, Gawd help us?
Wherever it was, I must say the grim, true-life accounts of quasi-legal obstacles; constant harassment and/or abuse by omnipotent authorities; unpromoted small-venue shows being shut down by platoons of nameless, faceless, truncheon-wielding goons; arrest, incarceration, vicious beatings, etc made me feel like a contemptible, spoiled little dilettante by comparison.
After expending scads of time and effort convincing oneself how horribly you’ve suffered and sacrificed for Your Art, learning about people who have really had it tough can make one feel mighty dang small.
- Entries
Here’s a pic of Fetchin’ Bones from a show they played in Jacksonville Beach: https://www.flickr.com/photos/streamfortyseven/52749021815/in/album-72177720306723780 and here’s a set of interviews with the group of people in Kazakhstan who put on the shows depicted in the two videos of theirs I posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5cmlg7SL0I – you can get English subtitles which are pretty accurate by clicking on CC, then clicking on Russian, then on auto-translate, then on English. You’ll see that a lot of the people there cut short university educations and careers in Russia due to the intense repression there. There’s still an underground punk rock and metal scene in Russia, but it’s in houses, or a flower shop, or in “Secret Place” – and bands still in Russia are simply impossible to find on the net. If you do see a video, downloading it is a good idea, because they don’t stay up for very long – this is why Putin tried to close down Youtube (substituting it with “RuTube”, lol).
By “intense repression” I mean a twentysomething girl artist in St Petersburg getting caught printing price tags with anti-war messages, and being sent to prison for 10 years – she was one of the people who was part of a prisoner exchange along with some more well-known people; a 15-year old who got caught putting up flyers with anti-war messages – that got him a 15-year sentence (he’s still in) – and so forth. Tucker Carlson is a useful idiot so far as I’m concerned, he swallows all the BS that Putin and Lavrov feed him – and then repeats it, and people here believe *him*…