There was a boy named Cui who overturned the Soviet Union with rock
On December 25, 1991, the sickle and hammer red flag that had been flying over the Kremlin for nearly 70 years quietly lowered, and a behemoth that had existed for 69 years collapsed.
In 1981, in a small auditorium in Leningrad, young people gathered together, sitting dreadfully under the stage, listening to a rock concert.
[Midsummer] From the beginning of this concert, two girls sneaked over the wall and sneaked into the theater. The security guards in suits and leather shoes patrolled nearby. The movement range of gently swaying on the chairs was corrected and showed to the rock stars on the stage. The cheer banner was stopped.
Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s [Summer Summer] was a summer experience of Viktor Tsoi, the unfamiliar "Godfather of Soviet Rock and Roll" in the early 1980s. .
Victor Choi, who died at the age of 28, is still one of the most important rock musicians in the Russian-speaking world.
He was once a hero of the Soviet youth and a weapon to express the voice of protest. His singing voice is still agitated by those exciting protests.
But in [Shengxia], these are not important. At that time, he was just a young man who just started to write songs. He met the musicians he admired and his wife, the love and musical relationship between the three, and the relationship between them . The focus of the movie.
Director Kirill has always said that [Shengxia] is not about politics, just as Victor Choi has always emphasized that his famous "Change" has nothing to do with politics.
But the 80s background of "sit down and listen to rock and roll" is the atmosphere in the movie that young people can't escape from the midsummer, depressed and restless.
This is also the background of the time when Victor Chuilai became famous, survived, pondered, became a spiritual leader, and died prematurely.
In 1987, in director Sergey Solovyov's [Asa] , Cui had a little cameo full of surprises at the end of the movie.
He wore a black jacket, took his Kino band (also translated as a film band), and sang "Change" as the end of the film.
The red sun burns out / goes out with it during the day / darkness falls in a brightly lit city / our heart is eager for change / our eyes seek change / into our pain and joy / into our beating blood / change / we are waiting for change !
In the true sense, Choi and his band went from underground to the ground for the first time. This year, they also released their sixth album "Gruppa Krovi".
Together with the enthusiasm of the movie and the new album, Choi's name and his "Change" were sung throughout the country, triggering the so-called "Kinomania" (Kino mania, imitating the Beatles mania of the year).
Ten years ago, 15-year-old Cui was swept out by the Serov Academy of Art on the grounds that "rock and roll is harmful to normal studies."
From then on, he moved to the underground orchestra and began to try to write songs by himself. This year, he met Mike who led him to grow up in the movie.
This was 1981, and Mike Naumenko was already well-known in the circle as the lead singer of the band Zoopark. The performance at the beginning of the movie was Mike's band.
Like a little fan, Cui ran to Mike: "I hope you listen to my song".
So, with the midsummer seaside trip of a few people in the movie, he held the guitar, sat in the sand, and began to sing.
Cui is a Korean born in Kazakhstan. He moved to Leningrad with his parents when he was 5 years old. That year happened to be the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in the Soviet Union.
If this thin man with yellow skin and long hair had been born in another era, he might have lived a stable life as a carpenter.
But that was the 80s.
The early 1980s was the last year of Brezhnev’s rule, and it was also one of the most conservative periods in the Soviet Union.
In 1979, the Soviet Union launched a war against Afghanistan that lasted for decades. Tens of thousands of young people in the country put on military uniforms and stepped onto the battlefield again;
In the 1980s, the decline in foreign oil prices directly caused the Soviet government's foreign exchange income to decrease. The shortcomings of the country's efforts to develop heavy industry and ignoring light industry for many years finally caused a serious domestic shortage of materials.
The Soviet economy is entering a dead end, and the culture is not much better.
Rock music was still an underground activity in the Soviet Union at the time, and it was not exposed by the media and did not have any funding from the government.
Even the Leningrad Rock Club, which is one of the few places where public performances can be performed, has many restrictions such as lyric review and personnel control .
From the beginning, Cui started his acting career in the Leningrad Rock Club with Mike's help.
Later, he sang "Why fight at all costs/I don't want to put my boots on someone's chest" and he sang "Change/We are waiting for change!"
His "Blood Type" and "Change", along with his "rebellious" attitude and energy, swept the country in an instant, and became the spiritual sustenance of all Soviet youths.
In the 1960s, the Beatles formed a "British Invasion" force in the United States, and a far-reaching "Beatles craze" broke out across the European and American world .
At that time, the two major camps of the East and the West were still in the Cold War confrontation, and the Soviet official directly regarded rock music as a "dangerous American cultural weapon."
Previously, they were anti-jazz, and even the word "jazz" was banned in Russian.
After the appearance of rock music, Khrushchev bluntly said that "the electric guitar is the enemy of the Soviet people" and rock music is "the music of the apes" .
Since then, the attitudes of successive leaders of the CPSU towards rock music have been similar.
However, this did not stop the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and later the "Voice of Freedom" from Velvet Underground, Bowie, sex pistols, etc., from reaching the ears of young Soviets.
Of course, it must have flowed in secretly through some underground channels.
For example, Makarevich, the lead singer of the Time Machine Band, was founded because his father, who often went abroad, brought him tapes of the Beatles.
Then, the group of people who first came into contact with Western rock music used another magical prop to spread the sound——
This is the record burned on the X-ray film, the bone disc .
Western rock music and jazz are all "anti-Soviet", censorship must be censored, but the object of official censorship is generally genuine music.
Those pirated discs that were secretly recorded and spread within a small area have become a life-saving straw for music fans.
X-ray disc is used because it is convenient and easy to get, mainly because it is cheap, but the sound quality is really rough.
It was under such difficult conditions that the young people in the Soviet Union began to form their own bands and played their own rock and roll.
The early Alexander Gradsky, Time Machine... They started with covers of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and they made their own if they couldn't buy an electric guitar; if they couldn't release an album, they spread it on bone discs.
Secretly performing on a small stage and a small venue, often turned into a cat and mouse game with the police, was suddenly interrupted and then fled.
On the other hand, the government established an official voice called "VIA (Vocal Instrument Assembly)" to counter the influence of rock music.
A non-rock music similar to rock music.
The government controls the hairstyles, clothes, guitar styles, tuning sounds, and drum beats of these performers, and they sing and dance on the stage without anger.
So, in the 1980s, Cui from the underground, with his Keno band, thundered, "We want to change!"
The rock music that really changed the Soviet Union appeared.
In 1985, Gorbachev, the last leader in Soviet history, came to power and brought his reforms to the Soviet Union.
Cui's "We want to change!" voice is echoing each other.
In the song of Cui's "Blood Type", the war in Afghanistan finally came to an end. Later, Gorbachev, who pushed for the end of the war, personally met Cui and said to him:
Comrades, reform and the people need your strength. Let's work hard together.
But in fact, even Choi himself and his rock music may not be able to earn the title of political revolution or movement leader.
He just sang the rebellious consciousness of young people in this country under Gorbachev's relatively loose political environment.
In the movie [Summer Summer], Cui and Mike often listen to a band called Velvet Underground. If you ask whether rock music has really changed the world, it always reminds you of the "Velvet Revolution".
In 1968, just as the Soviet army used tanks to crush the beautiful and old Czech Prague, the later Czech president and the initiator of the Velvet Revolution, Havel heard of the Velvet Underground in New York.
He brought the Underground Velvet back to the Czech Republic, which triggered the rise of the entire "second culture" later represented by the Universal Plastic Man Band.
When the Cosmic Plastic Man was later arrested by the government, Havel and others launched their support, and the support activities quickly evolved into the "Velvet Revolution" for these dissidents to promote the democratization of the Czech Republic.
Havel was elected president after he was released from prison. He recalled saying this when he first heard rock music:
This kind of music has a shocking and disturbing magical power. It is a kind of vigilant and sincere life experience from the depths of the heart. Anyone can understand as long as the spirit is not completely numb... I suddenly I realized that no matter how thick the language of these people, how long their hair, but the truth is on their side.
When the rain is about to come, Cui's rock and roll may not directly change the Soviet Union, but it also changed the young people of the Soviet Union in a certain sense.
Just like one of his failed campus performances, Cui was put under house arrest by the police before the performance started, triggering a vigorous demonstration by fans on campus;
Just like the last performance in his life, more than 60,000 young people gathered in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, singing loudly:
"My hand is clenched into a fist, if there is gunpowder, give me fire"..."Our hearts are eager for change/Our eyes are looking for change"..."The people who were silent will no longer be silent.. .
Just like after his death, thousands of people still go to Moscow's Arbat Street to find his "wall of mourning" every year, and write their thoughts and gratitudes all over the wall.
Choi died in a car accident at the age of 28, although there are conspiracy theories that he died in a car accident caused by conservatives.
One year later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Although he could not wait for the change to come in the end, his "Change" still resounded in the subsequent protests in Russia.
"Cui is not dead. He just went out to smoke a cigarette.",,
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Author/curl
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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