When Rock was Banned in the Soviet Union, ...

mardi 15 décembre 2015

When Rock was Banned in the Soviet Union, Teens Took to Bootlegged Recordings on X-Rays - by Danny Lewis/ Smart News: Keeping You Current/ SmithsonianMag.com

"Teens snuck jazz and rock into the U.S.S.R. on records made of old x-rays.

Forget making mixtapes or burning CDs: if you were a teenager in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and you wanted to get your hands on the latest hot tunes coming out of the West, you probably picked up a "bone record."

As the Cold War picked up in the years after World War II, the Soviet Union clamped down on any music or art coming out of the West that officials deemed decadent or culturally corruptive. But despite the lockdown, a subculture of Soviet teens called the stilyagi were able to smuggle and share banned records by making their own out of old x-rays. Because the homemade records often still had old images of bones burned into them, they were called “music on the ribs,” or “bone records,” Eric Grundhauser writes for Atlas Obscura.

The stilyagi, or "style hunters" were basically the 1950s Soviet version of today’s hipsters: mostly in their teens and 20s, the stilyagi, stood out with their trendy, often loud clothing. And of course, like their contemporaries in Western Europe and the United States, they wanted to listen and dance to rock 'n' roll and jazz. But while sharing music these days is as easy as hitting share on Spotify, the stilyagi either had to brave the black markets to get their fix of Ella Fitzgerald or Elvis or press their own copies on whatever vinyl they could scrounge up, John Brownlee wrote for Fast Company..."



(Dmitry Rozhkov via Wikimedia Commons)


Richard


When Rock was Banned in the Soviet Union, ...

0 commentaires:

Enregistrer un commentaire

 

Lorem

Ipsum

Dolor