Yo, Putin

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/editorials/putin-russia-rappers.html

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It was somewhat curious when Vladimir Putin came out, sort of, in defense of Russian rappers whose concerts have been canceled in cities across Russia in recent weeks. Curious, because Mr. Putin’s image in the West is not of someone who would be sympathetic to angry, obscene, uncensored rap viewed by tens of millions of youths and despised by parents and local authorities.

Yet when the canceled concerts were raised at a meeting of his Council for Culture and Art, Mr. Putin — who has himself borrowed on occasion from Russia’s rich lexicon of deletable expletives — argued that obscenity was part of the culture, and that, in any case, it would be counterproductive to try to block a form of poetry and music that was all over the internet.

The “sort of” interjected above was from the president’s argument that of the three pillars on which, he said, rap rests — sex, drugs and protest — drugs are indeed worrisome. “That is a path to degrading the nation,” he declared. “If it is impossible to stop, then we need to lead, and in an appropriate way, direct.”

Mr. Putin did not elaborate on what forms that might take, which is unfortunate, since it would be interesting to hear some authoritarian rap cooked up in the Kremlin. Actually, there is existing material he could use — one macho hit by the rapper Slava KPSS (“Glory to the CPSU,” the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) has as its refrain “Vladimir Putin.”

Russian rap is enormously popular with the new generation of Russians. In August 2017, Slava KPSS (Vyacheslav Mashnov) beat the veteran rapper Oxxxymiron (Miron Fyodorov) in a keenly awaited rap battle that got more than 10 million views on YouTube within 24 hours. Last month, the arrest of the rapper Husky in the southern city of Krasnodar prompted mass protests. After his concert was canceled because the authorities deemed his lyrics offensive, he climbed onto the roof of a car and tried to do his show there. He was arrested and sentenced to 12 days for hooliganism, but the public outcry was so big that he was quickly released.

These are not forces the Kremlin wants to take on, at least so long as Mr. Putin himself remains relatively unscathed by the rappers, even if they are anti-establishment and raw. His response to the council smacked more of letting a sleeping dog lie than any appreciation of hip-hop.

Though older generations everywhere get worked up over radical developments in art, music and cultural forms — recall how American parents reacted to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, hippies and beat poets — the arts have a powerful history as a political force in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Artists, writers and musicians outside the official culture canons were a powerful opposition to the Communist Party, and the less official the more potent. Mr. Putin has to be aware of the power, for example, of the folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, who became an underground icon in the 1970s with his songs about the hard plight of ordinary people. And Leningrad, where he grew up, was home to some of the most popular Russian rock bands that arose in the wake of Beatlemania.

But it is also a venerable Russian tradition for the state to try to shape and control culture. Lenin taught that every artist has the right to be free, followed by the usual Soviet qualification. “However, we are Communists and we must not stand with folded hands and let chaos develop as it pleases,” Lenin wrote. “We must systemically guide this process and form its result.”

Mr. Putin’s “lead and direct” suggested that authoritarian delusions die hard. It didn’t work then, and it would be far more futile in the age of the internet and social media. And as Russia’s rappers have argued, the country’s grave drug problem is not their doing, and censoring it out of their work won’t solve it.

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