(Download File)

(Download File)

Source

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok1-XYV3k60

Description

Video and lyrics of Mumiy Troll’s 1997 breakthrough song “Utekai” (Beat it) displaying the combination of surrealism, dark humor, and provincial romanticism that comes to shape the band’s trademark style.

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1997

Annotation

In 1997, the band Mumiy Troll released its breakthrough album Morskaia--by far the best-selling album of the year in Russia and several former Soviet countries. The sound and style of Mumiy Troll was something entirely new in Russia, displaying a lightness and ambiguity far from the rougher and more straightforward depths of the bards and rockers of the 1970s-1980s. Mumiy Troll’s new genre— a combination of alternative rock and pop music for which Ilya Lagutenko, the band’s lead singer, coined the term “Rokapops”—was largely inspired by Britpop. The title of the band’s iconic song “Vladivostok 2000,” with which MTV Russia started its broadcasting in 1998, was an explicit tribute to Pulp’s “Disco 2000” and Morskaia was recorded in London—where Lagutenko lived and worked as a business consultant—with the involvement of musicians and producers who had previously worked with bands like The Cure and Tears for Fears. Drawing on these models, Mumiy Troll ended up creating something original, grounded in very uniquely Russian and post-Soviet experiences. The band’s lyrics were made up of free associations of ideas that defied both logic and grammar, with allusions to provincial “chicks” (devchonki), gangsters, and unfaithful sailors-boyfriends taking off for distant shores from the port of the band’s native Vladivostok. This, combined with Lagutenko's seductive voice and somewhat unsettling, gender-bending look and demeanor, encapsulated much of what 1990s youth culture in Russia was made of: glamor, danger, violence, sexual promiscuity, and queerness. “Utekai” (“flow away” or “beat it”), Mumiy Troll’s most famous song, contains many of these elements. Lagutenko, who studied Chinese in college and worked as a translator before definitively committing to music, claims to have written the song’s lyrics in Chinese and to have then translated them into Russian—which explains the numerous obscure and yet very catchy lines. The song, which was omnipresent on Russian radio and television, was equal parts sentimental provincialism, Dadaist sadomasochism, and sexual innuendos. In the first verse, the maniac waiting in the dark alley with likely bad intentions sounds surprisingly alluring—mostly because of Lagutenko’s soothing tone—and clashes with the quiet melancholy of the beauties who “have lost their charms” and the nocturnal landscape of the park (perhaps at dawn?) with the sleeping gangsters—and with the carefree “couple of simple and young kids” who are left, surprisingly calmly, to be torn apart. The second verse (“He will cut me in the furs// And the border will lose control”) portrays even more explicitly, and somewhat shockingly, the experience of being at the mercy of a killer as something weirdly exciting and arousing. The song’s video, which was equally ubiquitous and iconic, maintains primarily the playful approach to violence of the song—with Lagutenko playing the part of a cheerfully sadistic hairdresser who shaves the head (apparently, for real) of a terrified model. Mumiy Troll’s songs are so permanently etched in Russian collective memory that the 2,000 rubles bill, issued in 2017, displays the image of a bridge in Vladivostok as a nod to the band’s hit—which was also used in the TV ad promoting the banknote’s release. And the image of Lagutenko—who appeared otherwise very adolescent-like, gentle, and kind—remained so closely associated to that of the maniac in “Utekai” that the singer was asked to play the role of a bloodthirsty hairdresser-vampire in Timur Bekmambetov’s 2004 blockbuster Night Watch (see artifact illustration).

Geography: Place Of Origin

Vladivostok

Associated People

Mumiy Troll and Lagutenko, Ilya

Geography: Place Of Focus

Russia and former Soviet Union

Bibliographic Reference

“Mumii Troll - Utekai.” YouTube. [Music video, 1997. Director: Mikhail Khleborodov]: Мумий Тролль — Утекай