The cult radio program Transilvania bespokoit (Transilvania is bothering you) creates an alternative musical canon and produces a new nationalist counterpublic.
Post-Soviet
1997
Transilvania bespokoit, advertised as “the only radio program whose host doesn’t have a shadow,” was aired weekly on Radio 101 FM, at night time, throughout the second half of the 1990s, and was the product of its host, Garik Osipov—a singer, musician, archivist, and “collector,” with an encyclopedic knowledge of both niche and mainstream music and film. Osipov, who introduced himself as, and played the part of, Count Khortitsa or Count Dracula—with a deep, hypnotic voice and a maleficent laughter and demeanor—had a unique style of presenting and almost deliriously digressing on a wide variety of themes related to pop music and alternative rock, politics, horror movies and spy stories, counterculture, Satanism, occultism, mysticism, and conspiracy theories. The musical selection of the show reflected the highly eclectic and idiosyncratic tastes of its host and creator, including alternative and hard rock, heavy metal, funk, and psychedelic music, as well as lesser known or forgotten genres and performers—primarily melodic and variety old time songs and lyrical-comical songs of the criminal underworld from Russia, Italy, France, various countries of the former Soviet bloc, and the former Yugoslavia. The result, through Osipov’s commentaries and explanations, was an alternative musical canon in which the songs of Osipov’s own Soviet youth were invariably better than their Western/American counterparts, while the (again, Western) countercultures of the 1960s had ended up confirming and reinforcing the neoliberal world order. In addition, Osipov celebrated and included in his selection the most extreme, violent, uncompromising, and anti-systemic musicians and performers (either form the perspective of ideology and lyrics or sound, or both)—from Charles Manson (!) to Motörhead and GG Allin. The result was a unique and somewhat dissonant mix of melodic/romantic (if not, at times, fairly sappy and commercial) songs with aggressive hard rock and heavy metal pieces about drugs, violence, sex, terrorism, death, and decay—which of course made sense only thanks to Count Khortitsa’s very unique and highly charismatic narrative style. In terms of politics, Osipov was decisively on the far right, with frequent invectives against the New World Order and the “Zionist Occupation Government,” political correctness, tolerance and egalitarianism, consumerism, and post-Soviet Russia’s material and cultural decline after the fall of its “Empire”—as well as barely veiled references to Nazism. Most importantly, through his program, he produced a counterpublic of listeners, or, as he addressed them throughout his show, “Children of Eurasia”: young marginals barely surviving the post-Soviet mayhem but largely defined by it, at various point described as perceiving the grey, bleak reality of post-Soviet life through heroine-induced dreams, buried underneath the sheets in their tiny rooms, surrounded by the squalor of the city slums. Interestingly, in Osipov’s nightmarish, apocalyptic descriptions of post-Soviet reality—intermingled with fantastic stories about vampires, werewolves, and the living dead—the recurring image of the “Empire of Evil”—as in, the United States and the neoliberal “World Order,” with its shapeless consuming masses—becomes superimposed with that of the “Empire of Evil”—as in, post-Soviet Russia itself, the locus where the ultimate late capitalist decadence is manifested at its worst.
Osipov, Garik (Graf Khortitsa) and Dugin, Aleksander (Aleksandr)
Russia, former Soviet Union, and United States
“Transilvania bespokoit.” Radio 101 FM, December 31, 1997. [New Year’s Episode.]