Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Start with the happy ending. Like a song escaping from jaws long wired shut, the political voice of Soviet films is suddenly loud and clear. Did we say loud? Listen to the rock music that carpets the sound tracks. It drowns out everything but the angry shouts of the teen heroes, who sleep around and do drugs while aiming to be an amalgam of Elvis and Che. The revealing documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? portrays a generation given to graffiti and hooliganism. "I don't think about what will happen to me," says one young man, spiked hair...
Nonetheless, Fillipova and Mikhulskaya sell their designs (from 100 rubles for a simple jacket to 1,000 rubles for a full suit) to a small group of relatively prosperous rock musicians, artists and filmmakers. With the aid of newly relaxed travel restrictions, the two are hoping to take their creations to New York City this fall. Who knows? If the hammer-and-sickle designs become popular enough in the West, they may wind up as eagerly sought after items in a place that already covets such Western garb as T-shirts and dungarees: the Soviet Union...
...nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet Union became a world power...
...hottest, hippest band in Gorbachev's Soviet Union. After a history of often bitter confrontations with police and schoolteachers, Brigada S (or the S Brigade, christened by lead singer Igor Sukachev because he liked the letter S) has become one of the most popular of the new generation of rock bands. Although the four-year-old group has yet to produce an album, the self-described "Proletarian Jazz Orchestra" enjoys a tremendous following. Teens from Tallinn to Vladivostok spray-paint the band's name, with the Russian equivalent of S drawn like a Communist hammer and sickle, on walls...
During the Brezhnev era, rock music was carefully controlled through the State Concert Agency, a government bureaucracy that reserved the right to determine which bands could legally perform in public places. Only bands that were officially registered by the agency could receive money for their shows, a ploy that allowed bureaucrats to weed out undesirable groups by choking off their income...