The Velvet

Must-See Cinema

I generally don’t like musicals. But I just saw one that I highly recommend for anyone who cares about pop culture and pop music (and, perhaps, US-Soviet relations since the advent of the Cold War).

It’s called “Hipsters,” and for some reason it took three years to make it to U.S. shores after it won the 2009 award for best movie in Russia. The hipsters in question are young men and women living in the grey, lifeless repression of 1955 Moscow. They are mostly cut off from Western influences, but able to commandeer precious black-market jazz recordings (mostly from Eastern Europe) and—get this—copy them onto old, discarded, plastic X-ray plates for purposes of disseminating the music and feeding a lively but dangerous underground scene.

After seeing the movie, I did a bit of research and found a fascinating online paper called “The Historical Development of Soviet Rock Music,” by Trey Drake of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who offered a bit of historical perspective on this street use of technology.

“(E)nterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would ‘press’ a record using a very unusual material for this purpose: discarded x-ray plates,” Drake wrote. “This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press, which is akin to the samizdat that was the notorious tradition of self-publication among banned writers in the USSR. According to rock historian Troitsky, the one-sided x-ray disks cost about one to one and a half rubles each on the black market, and lasted only a few months, as opposed to around five rubles for a two-sided vinyl disk. By the late ‘50s, the officials knew about the roentgenizdat, and made it illegal in 1958. Officials took action to break up the largest ring in 1959, sending the leaders to prison, beginning an organization by the Komsomol of ‘music patrols’ that later undertook to curtail illegal music activity all over the country.”

I don’t want to leave the impression that this is a movie about the ‘roentgenizdat,’ which is only portrayed as a component of the larger underground music scene in mid-1950s Moscow. It’s really a movie about brave young men and women who were willing to risk prison time to assert their independence and individuality in a repressive culture.

They wore loud, colorful clothing to stand apart from the monochrome masses and they were bold and magnificently cool. But they didn’t really know. They were basically guessing at the nature of the Western culture to which they imagined they were linked. Not to give anything away, but toward the end one of their numbers who has an opportunity to spend time in the U.S. returns to report that in fact there were no hipsters in the U.S.—which is received as crushing news.

But which, in the end, reveals how hip—and how courageous--these kids really were.

(Moby Tenenbaum spins 7-9 Fridays at The Velvet.)