Rock - eto on
  (photo)

DDT is my latest discovery in the world of Russian rock; since December, this music is beginning to conquer my mind and to become a part of my life. I listened the album “Prekrasnaya lyubov” even on New Year’s Eve and I still can’t get enough of it or of any other DDT album. I saw videos, I read articles and interviews about their history, about the American tour in January, as well as endless controversies about rock vs. chanson in today’s music of Yuri Yulianovich. I got used to love his songs and lyrics that all this time FED me (how he would say here? “izvinite za pafos”).

And then came the famous Marsh Nesoglasnykh, with Shevchuk showing up there and saying what he thinks about the elections and about what is happening to Petersburg. Immediately, some people from the opposition started to jubilate and to talk about Shevchuk like he were already a politician, a living weapon, a precious trophy. Other people, close to the power, started to attack and insult him in every possibile way, accusing him - again - like he were already a politician. One of these attacks seemed to me especially abject, because it was aiming to insult the whole movement of Russian rock, not only Shevchuk – and being myself from a former Communist country, I figure pretty well what such crappy texts may suggest.

Now what is strange is that both sides seem to ignore his clear civic stance (“ya ne politik, ya grazhdanin”) and to use him for their own purposes, to the point where they see in Shevchuk only some uncertain symbol of perpetual fight. And here are people from both sides, saying (of course, with opposite sentiments) that he wants now to take the place left empty after Egor Letov’s death and to consolidate his public image of rebel by default, “vsegda protiv”. Therefore, with such PR, the popularity of his music would increase, and so on.

There’s a little detail here though – Shevchuk and DDT work on their new album and try to find the time and place to do this (and maybe even to find some calm, after so many have said that DDT may have lost their creative force and cannot write a rock album anymore). It’s obvious that for Shevchuk, the frequent interviews with the same political questions, the accusations and controversies around him are increasingly tiresome and annoying. Yesterday it was so painful for me to read his exasperated replies to Radio Svoboda, after the unconfirmed news that TV Kultura won’t broadcast DDT music anymore. And on top of it, there’s the weird interview from today’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, that may stir again discussions about “creative crises”, political fights, who’s right and who’s wrong among the founders of Russian rock.

But there’s no such thing as a model that should be imposed now to all Russian rockers, or anything that can measure their distance from a past or future ideal. After all, it seems that neither of them did esentially change his mind or behavior over the years – so why people are so surprised or angry now if Makarevich praises “stability”, if BG continues to show indifference to politics or if Mikhail Borzykhin says that rock music (well, new wave) is all about protest? And if Yuri Yulianovich, according to some, is enough stupid to go to MN without any “safety net”, or enough unrealistic to see the elections and the destruction of old Piter only as a particular case of “popsa”, let him be this way. Nobody should teach him how to live or to ask him to justify what he’s doing.