We had a real Soviet celebration last night, complete with listening to Putin’s New Year’s address on TV to the music of the USSR anthem. I wish I could have been having some drinks in the process because that would have intensified the fun. But I was the designated driver, so there was no alcohol for me.
After the celebratory dinner, we went to this new fashionable bar in town for a masquerade party and countdown. N and I danced the tango, and everybody gaped at us. One if us is very good while the other one can’t do any dance where she has to be led by a man. (This isn’t the riddle yet, so please keep reading.)
After the countdown, I drove us back home where we watched the Russian New Year’s show on my computer, danced, and discussed our research. N explained Newton’s binomial equation for me. Everybody invariably asks “Gosh, how drunk were you?” when they hear this part. Nobody wants to believe there was barely a glass of champagne involved. Like there is something wrong with binomial equations as a subject of conversation.
And now for the riddle. The concert we watched was the most important New Year’s show on the most popular Russian channel that everybody in the country watches. All of the songs in the show that lasted from midnight to past 6 am were the ones we associate with the late eighties-early nineties. Crowds of foreign stars of that era were shipped in to perform. They all looked befuddled when they saw the enormous (and quite young) audience that filled Moscow’s Olympic stadium.
So here’s the question: why were all the songs at that massively popular show so dated? Why would so many people in Russia want to hear the music that the rest of the world is totally over?
Mind you, the Russians could have had any number of today’s world stars performing for them. They’ve got the money.
Clarissa's Blog 
Technically, you do not know the answer yourself. 🙂 🙂 Because nobody can possibly know that with 100% certainty. So the “correct” answer involves whichever socio/politico/psychological analysis you will like the best. 🙂
Happy New Year! And long live the binomial equation! 🙂
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Of course, I do. Because I was one of the people who enjoyed the show. 🙂
Next time, I will drink more to understand the binomials better. 🙂
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The children are nostalgic for a time just before they were born when things seemed like they would be new and exciting rather than the same politicians under different parties. I remember people being super super excited about the Berlin Wall falling.
It’s like being stoked about the ’60s in America when you didn’t live through it. The music was pretty cool and you didn’t live through the chaos. :p
Or they simply heard these songs as kids and have warm fuzzy feelings about them.
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I think the reason is much simpler than Newton’s equation. It is because the music was not bad, simple as that. 🙂
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Hmm, and this comes from the same man who back in 1990 was horrified that I liked Modern Talking and Co. 🙂 🙂
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Clarissa, a woman of learning and intelligence… likes synthpop.
Nope, I can’t correlate it either. 😛
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Could you give the names of the bands and musicians? Thanks
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Modern Talking, Boney M, F.R. David, Ottawan, Eddy Huntington, and a group of Russian singers who were super popular around 1990. The singers who are popular today didn’t sing their own songs but performed things like Scorpio’s I’m Still Loving You, things like that.
The whole concert was exactly like this mixed tape I played five times a day every day back in 1991-2. 🙂
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For some reason there is a very strong Boney M cult in the former USSR. But, in Kyrgyzstan they are about the only old foreign music still listened to. Viktor Tsoi is still very popular from the Soviet era. But, other than that it is mostly modern Kyrgyz pop and foreign hip hop, especially Jay Z that is popular. Or at least was last time I checked.
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I’m guessing that there might have been a modicum of hope/optimism in the late 80s and early 90s? Maybe the old music was an attempt to reassert (passive-aggressively) that hope and optimism in preparation for the Olympics.
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Hmm, and this comes from the same man who back in 1990 was horrified that I liked Modern Talking and Co. 🙂 🙂
Exactly. It was MUCH better than what people are forced to hear these days. I have no nostalgia of course, simply because both kinds of music are alien to me. ‘My’ music is The Beatles or Cat Stevens, but not disco or, God save me, modern Russian girl and boy bands. Compared with the latter, Modern Talking is almost Bach or Mozart. 🙂
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I got nothing beyond what anyone else has said, I’ll just say it a little differently.
These acts date to back before the bandit wars (Boney M back the heyday of the USSR)
Is this a way of dealing with collective trauma? Pretending the past didn’t happen (or recreating a past that was significantly less cruddy than reality and remembering that instead?)
And I completely agree that popular music today is far more insipid and vacuous than pop music from the late 80’s and earlier.
It’s all dismissive avoidance and attention whoring now, at least in the west. I do think Russian pop is a lot better than western stuff at the moment (though at present I’m more into Italian anthemic pop and Turkish dance and arabesk stuff).
In Boney M. news, IME europeans are surprised to learn that they basically had no hits in the US. I remember a late 80’s party at the house of a friend who’d lived in Germany and I found a Boney M greatest hits record and tortured everybody with repeated playings of Daddy Cool, Rasputin and (my favorite) Ma Baker none of which anyone had heard before, fun times.
But Modern Talking? Only the recollection that I enjoy some pretty awful stuff keeps me from saying more…
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“Is this a way of dealing with collective trauma? ”
– I knew you’d guess the answer immediately. 🙂 🙂
Yes, our people are fixated on the nineties. Every TV show is about the nineties. Tons of movies and programs are either about the nineties or are a recreation of the nineties in today’s reality. This is absolutely a collective trauma of enormous proportions.
N and I mention “the nineties” in our conversations about 10-15 times a day. So it’s obviously our trauma, too.
“But Modern Talking? Only the recollection that I enjoy some pretty awful stuff keeps me from saying more…”
– It was super cool when I was growing up. Horrible taste is an important attribute of youth. 🙂
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That’s interesting about the 90’s, does that mean that grunge and alternative music are popular with Russians as well? That stuff was huge in the early 90’s and that’s what I listened to when I was in middle school
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I don’t even know if there is any (noticeable) Russian grunge. I’m not sure what grunge is. 🙂 But that might be my personal limitation.
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It’s bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Seattle bands from the early 90’s. That’s the stuff I listened to in middle school and it was quite popular in Europe, maybe it’s not to Russian people’s taste?
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