Pop CultureAugust 20, 2018

Born in the USSR: A guide to the ‘red wave’ of Soviet rock

Guest writer

Inspired by the screening of Leto at this year’s International Film Festival, Auckland-based Moscovite Anastasia Doniants presents a guide to the first wave of rock from the USSR.

It’s been almost a year since Russia’s acclaimed theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov was confined to a house arrest – banned from talking to media, accessing the internet and attending his own film premiere. Serebrennikov was detained on charges of corruption and fraud, accusations his supporters call a politically motivated sham.

Leto – written and directed by Serebrennikov and filmed around the time of his arrest – tells the story of the Leningrad Rock Club, the first legal rock music venue established by the KGB in 1981. Let me take you back there…

In the 1980s, life behind the Iron Curtain was slowly starting to change. Pepsi (the first Western product) was widely available on Soviet shelves, tourists were welcomed and the state could no longer control the underground music scene which was spreading like an infectious disease. This is when some Communist Party genius decided to open a number of rock clubs around the Soviet Union to control and treat the rock mania from within.

LENINGRAD ROCK CLUB, 1985 (PHOTO: JOANNA STINGRAY COLLECTION)

For the first time since the early 1930s, the cool kids had a place to socialise openly, but still under the watchful KGB eye.

From song lyrics to clothes, everything had to be pre-approved by the State if bands wanted to perform legally. Some say the Leningrad Rock Club converted young rebellious musicians into good communist citizens, but perhaps these guys just had to work a little harder to find ways of connecting and influencing their audience. Sometimes lyrics would have hidden meanings, but mostly they just spoke about simple pleasures – like being a boy, walking home from a party with a girl. As Viktor Tsoi sings: “As long as you’ve got a pack of cigarettes, life can’t be all that shabby”.

RED WAVE COVER (PHOTO: JOANNA STINGRAY COLLECTION)

Despite all the effort from the state, products of the Western world somehow always managed to find their way into the USSR. Levi’s, Bowie and Marlboros were increasingly common, but not much Soviet product made the return journey. Some famous “exports” included Stoli, evil KGB movie villains and the nuclear spill from Chernobyl. But Kino, Akvarium, Centre, Zoopark, Alisa, Alyans, Bravo and Strange Games were bands you would never have heard of.

The Russian rock and roll rebellion was deeply underground, even after the establishment of the Rock Club. The West only got a taste of the Soviet sound when an American tourist in Leningrad, Joanna Stingray, smuggled a whole bunch of recordings back to the USA and released a double LP called Red Wave, 4 Underground Bands From The USSR, 1986, getting herself in a lot of trouble with both the KGB and the FBI in the process. She made music videos too, the only music videos to come out from that period in Soviet musical history. They are still available for your viewing pleasure at Joanna Stingray’s Vimeo.

BORIS GREBENSHIKOV AND JOANNA STINGRAY (PHOTO: JOANNA STINGRAY COLLECTION)

Here’s a taste of the Soviet rock contra-bands, my favourite from the era that the movie Leto was set in.

1. Boris Grebenshikov of Akvarium

Known as the Bob Dylan of USSR, Boris Grebenshikov’s character briefly features in Leto. Grebenshikov encouraged his peers to become the generation of janitors and night-watchmen, to find a job which requires the smallest possible input, then to go home and do something creative. Never mind the social ladder, sometimes losing is winning.

2. Mike Naumenko of Zoopark

A fictionalised version of Mike Naumenko is the lead character in Leto. The Russian Lou Reed, Naumenko managed to find the perfect balance between maintaining a bad boy persona and rubbing the authorities in the right way – a model pupil in the school of rock.

‘Leto’ translated into English means ‘summer’. Serebrennikov’s movie was named after this song, written by Naumenko for Viktor Tsoi. “It’s summertime and I’m fried like a schnitzel”.

3. Viktor Tsoi and Kino

Kino was the coolest band in Russia. They had the best clothes, the best instruments and the best looking guitar player. Viktor Tsoi’s name is sacred; he’s a cult figure, a poet, musician, actor and counter-culture hero. His life was cut short at 28.

Where does one begin with Kino? With ‘Ant Colony’ of course! A lyrical comparison of people and ants, sleepwalkers trapped in their little lives and minds. This song is super upbeat – suddenly being an ant seems rather attractive.

To see the band in action watch ‘Changes’, which features in the closing scene of the cult Soviet film ‘Assa’ (1987). Once the titles start to roll, do not hit the stop button – you’re about to be transferred to a live performance. This is the song with the words, “Our hearts demand changes” that the crowds are chanting at the anti-government street protests right now, 30-something years later.

To see Viktor Tsoi dancing is a thing of beauty. Just look at him in ‘Close the Door Behind Me’:

4. Alyans

It must have taken a lot of self-control for the audience to be so corpse-like during this electric performance by the A-ha of Moscow. Look out for the modest smiles and an occasional glad eye from the ladies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4xCSVl833I

5. Centre

Centre were a cult New Wave band from Moscow and ‘Forever’ was a faux propaganda song dedicated to Kalashnikovs, sputniks, blinis, etc. Here they are performing on the Soviet version of Ready To Roll.

6. Zhanna Aguzarova

The first female star of Soviet rock. In 1984, Aguzarova was arrested by the KGB at her concert; she spent six months at a hard labour camp, aged only 22. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles and became a cab driver by day, a performer by night. Another American dream turned to borscht. She winds up singing Soviet pop covers at a Russian Restaurant in LA to a crowd who were hungry for dumplings, not Zhanna. Here she is in her heyday.

7. Shona Laing (Yes, Shona Laing!)

Perhaps the most political song ever written about the Cold War came from New Zealand. ‘Soviet Snow’ (1987) a forgotten and under-appreciated gem by Shona Laing, a New Zealander who at the time was living in London, socialising with Soviet expats. Laing had a change of heart towards the reds and wrote a beautiful ode to Russia, asking others to follow her lead. She captured the feel of the time; her message is relevant today more than ever. History repeats, once again the world fears Russia, but cold winters do not make cold hearts. “Love is the one solution,” she sings.

Leto is the perfect heart warmer, not just because it means “summer” in English, but also because it reminds us that youth is the same the world over. There were and are like-minded folks in the USSR and Russia.

I’m a Moscovite of Armenian, Russian and Jewish descent living in Auckland. I have strong connections to Leningrad; some of my family perished during the Leningrad Blockade, WWII. I remember my father treating me to a Pepsi once sometime back in the late 80s. ‘Pepsi’ was the coolest word, I thought.

And I reckon now, despite its tough political climate, Russia is again experiencing a creative renaissance. The old Russian soul is back and so many wonderful things are coming out of the country. Movies are playing at the Film Festival, Gosha Rubchinskiy’s clothes are worn by hipsters all over Aotearoa, and bookworms are reading Vodolazkin. They even serve borscht at the Engine Room in Northcote!

I’m going to leave you with something new – my favourite St Petersburg band Shortparis (pronounced ‘Short Paree’) and their out of this world ‘Tutu’.

And a bolshoi thank you to Joanna Stingray, for letting us use photos from her personal collection.

Keep going!

Pop CultureAugust 20, 2018

World of Warplanes: Microtransactions from the Eastern Front

Adam Goodall

Contributing Writer

Intrepid gaming explorer Adam Goodall is dragged back into the world of battle vehicles with World of Warplanes.

“You see, we’re carving up!” Tim and I are flying over rural Ukraine, near an Old Fortress on the Eastern Front. It’s autumn – the trees are all a deep orange – and we’re caught in a thirty-person dogfight for the land below. We fight against a backdrop of canyons and cliff-sides, chasing enemy planes up the cliffs and over the forests. A 14th-century castle, the titular Fortress, perches at the top of one of those cliffs, surveying the battlefield, watching as I blow up some dude named Nils.

Nils is – was – flying a German AR 65, a Tier 1 plane that the World of Warplanes wiki says is “not too good”. “It gets better though as you go forward from here,” the wiki continues apologetically. “Don’t worry.” I’m flying a Japanese Type 91, which is zippy and comparatively nimble, able to pull off barrel rolls and other manoeuvres in a pinch. Tim’s in the cockpit of a more utilitarian Goldfinch biplane. He’s trying to get a better British fighter, he tells me, but you’ve gotta start somewhere.

We’re halfway done and racking up kills when Tim tells me we’re placed first and second on our team. Seconds later, I fly straight into another plane, by accident. But not only do I survive the collision, I take them out. They explode and there’s barely a scratch on me. I’m still coming second on the team. This is my second World of Warplanes match and I’m charged-up, invincible. After we win, I tell Tim how nice it is to feel competent, even skilled, after three hours of being absolutely dogshit at World of Tanks.

“I know,” Tim responds. “It’s a nice feeling, eh? Winning.”

World of Warplanes is the second game in Wargaming’s World of strategy series. Warplanes was released in 2013 after a lengthy beta; Tim got into the game during that beta period. “It was great,” Tim recalls. “I went up the German tech tree, because I thought the German planes were cool, and I got to the Messerschmidt 109 Zwilling, which is just two Messerschmidts sellotaped together to make a larger plane.”

Tim ultimately bailed out during the game’s transition from closed to open beta. As part of the changeover, every player’s progress was reset. All the hours Tim spent advancing through the tech tree, upgrading his planes with Wargaming’s mix of in-game currencies, were lost. Everything he’d unlocked was worthless in this new frontier. Faced with the possibility of sinking more hours into planes only to lose them again when the game released, Tim moved on. “It’s fairly normal,” Tim says, “but I obviously wasn’t as invested in it as I thought I was.”

A lot of people must share Tim’s attitude toward World of Warplanes, because it struggled to find an audience. In 2014, just under a year after the game’s launch, Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi told Rock Paper Shotgun that Warplanes hadn’t been an “automatic success”. Two years later, in an interview for VentureBeat, Kislyi revised that down. “World of Warplanes,” he said, “we can’t call that a success.”

Since then, Warplanes has had an overhaul. In October last year, Wargaming rolled out the 2.0 update which, among other things, replaced the game’s core dogfighting mode with an objective-based capture-the-point mode, added a new line of bomber planes and introduced player respawns. Pilots would no longer be booted from a game the moment they died. Instead, they’d keep entering the match as ‘reinforcements’ until a point near the end when a ‘squall’ would roll in and signal to everyone that their next death would be their last.

That update was divisive for the Warplanes community. A significant chunk of players felt that revisions to plane statistics and changes to plane customisation were inflexible and preventing them from having a good time. For players like Tim, though, Warplanes was never about complexity. “It’s the relaxation,” Tim says. “It’s a lot more relaxed [than World of Tanks]. You’re in the sky and it’s very pretty. It’s easy to play and the beta was even simpler, gameplay-wise – it had aim indicators, it would tell you where to put your mouse to hit people.”

While those recent updates have tried to reassert the importance of teamwork, it’s still stretching it a bit to call Warplanes a ‘strategy’ game. With its respawns and constant, mouse-led movement (you can ‘boost’ for a few seconds at a time but you’re mostly moving at a steady speed), it’s forgiving and plays more like dogfighting games from previous eras, like Microsoft’s Crimson Skies series or the Star Wars X-Wing games. Your planes have weight to them – they noticeably slow down as they turn and it takes time for your targeting reticule to balance out – but they aren’t awkward or slow.

In World of Tanks, I struggled to get kills with my clumsy, bouncy tanks. They were fun, sure, but they were sluggish. It couldn’t feel good about how I was learning when I was being mowed down and bounced back to the garage two minutes into each match. In Warplanes, though, I’m taking down planes almost immediately and regularly ranking in the top three of my team. When I die, I don’t get sent back to the garage like a naughty child, punished for flying too close to some AA guns or for letting Tim crash into me over Melanesia. I’m back in seconds.

Puffed up with hubris, Tim and I join a Tier 3 match, Tim piloting a Tier 3 I-15bis DM and me piloting a Tier 2 Ki-10. I’m deeply outmatched. I fly into a V1 rocket base and get torn apart by AA guns; I struggle to gain altitude and catch the AI pilots we need to shoot down; I face off against heavier planes and lose, again and again. I’m languishing at the bottom of the team table, struggling to find a combat zone where I’m not cut down immediately. “This is kinda my fault,” Tim apologises, “dragging you into this.”

He’s not wrong – after a year of messages asking me when I’m going to play World of Warships, it is Tim’s fault that I’m here now, a Tier 2 in a match full of Tier 3s, hobbled by the game’s currency grind and pressured to spend real life money if I want to get further faster. That’s not going to happen, not yet, so Tim agrees to drop back into Tier 2 matches. “I feel it especially in Warships,” Tim says, “a lot of lower tier ships and games are a lot more fun.”

I feel it too. The subtext of the grind isn’t lost on me – World of Warplanes is designed for people with capital to sink into the game, to the point that their capital basically lets them play with a different rulebook to everyone else.

It’s not that dissimilar to so many real wars, the monied aggressor and the suffering defender. But where Tanks was a glory-free slog, dominated by those players with the time and cash to tool their tanks up and learn the ins and outs of the game, Warplanes is more accessible and more dramatic. I end each match on a high. I kill a shitload of people.

For our last match before Tim has to go, we return to the Old Fortress to chase around a bunch of pilots with regular-ass names like Tyler and Michael. The game goes down to the wire, but we snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, 400 to 378. Tim ranks first in our team. I rank second.

“That was pretty good!” Tim says. “That was quite fun! A lot better than Tanks.”

“Yeah,” I concede. “I loved that.”

“Then you’re gonna love Ships,” Tim says, almost like a dare. “Ships is much better.”