Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been an enduring obsession of popculture since its publication. Bowie had been fixated on staging a opera based upon the novel, which, after being aborted by Orwell’s estate, transformed into the album Diamond Dogs, full of the images from Orwellian catalogue: of urban decay, prophetism, fatalism. Big Brother harassed the wrecked up and paralyzed survivors of the year of scavenger and the season of the bitch, heroes felt hysterical detachment, stark robotic images from Metropolis. Bowie was also, afterall, a William S. Burroughs fan, to which referred the spoken opening piece.

  Bowie wanted a ‘sexy’, glamorized vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a totalitarian musical, a glorious authoritarianism, which occurred to him not via reading the book, but via an actual visit to Moscow (which was to be one of several) which he undertook in 1973, on the way to Japan - by taking a train, of course. He saw it with the perhaps clichéd eyes of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, by the 1970s a very different author’s future would join Orwell’s. It was the conservative Catholic modernist Anthony Burgess whose terrifying vision of modish city oiks turned Soviet was the one which kept stirring generations of youth and became a foundational text for the glam and punk generation. A Clockwork Orange, of which we speak, had its roots in a trip Burgess took to Russia in the 50s, when he got beaten by Western-dressed smart looking young delinquents in Leningrad. It was the era of arguably the first youth subculture in the UK, Teddy boys, the first who consciously used/appropriated the dress of the upper classes, to distort it and make it theirs. After the war British upper classes revived the pre-WWI style of the Edwardian era, the last one they were comfortable in, as a look for their anti-austerity, anti-socialist values. In the hands of working class boys, taking it straight from dandies, combining it with their violence, the idea “of clothes as a threat to society” was born. Burgess, seeing the similarities between the Soviet and British fashionistas, drew the conclusion (and in the era when the Soviets could still defeat the West) that after the inevitable Soviet invasion, the future subcultures will be speaking Russian and will be violent.

  2.10 Reconctruction Time. Depeche Mode gets a Soviet treatment from Melody Maker, 1983

  The legend wouldn’t have been born without the shock of the Kubrick film from 1971. Before it was banned, a few people, including Bowie and the future movement, saw it (it was cited as influence basically by the whole synthetic generation - in Sheffield only, there were groups called Heaven 17, Clock DVA and They Must Be Russians). At the time of the Ziggy Tour, Bowie used to inaugurate his gigs with Wendy Carlos’ brusque, startlingly futuristic synthetic soundtrack, which made a furore and a lasting impact. Kubrick himself used dazzling psychedelic designs but also Soviet murals in the vision of society, using the Soviet parable to take on the conformism of the British.

  Michael Radford’s film adaptation 1984, was shot in the same year in the dockland area of London, before it got redeveloped, which at the time looked exactly like a place where the war was going on. In its look though, the film is anything but futuristic – it rather takes the cue from the book, making everybody look as if it was 1948, or 1940s fascism, as if It Happened Here really took place. The only ‘futurist’ element in the film is the soundtrack made by Eurythmics, amplifying the mechanized (Sssex Crime!), yet with its postindustrial rubble and decay in the frame, it provided a feeling not far away from Jarman’s slightly later new romantic catastrophic The Last of England (1986).

  In 2013 after a 10-year hiatus, Bowie surprised everyone with a sudden comeback, with an album The Next Day, very consciously referring to his “Berlin” period, with a conceptual cover, in which the iconic leather-clad Bowie from “Heroes” is covered by a white superimposed square. Bowie at once wants to cut off from the burden of the legendary past and escape constant comparisons to his most legendary period, yet it makes a strongly nostalgic leap, with the lyrics of ‘Where Are We Now’ recalling his stay in Berlin, recalling his then-hang out, Dschungel bar, the department store on Ku’damm, KaDeWe. He’s “a man lost in time”.

  Stilyagi of the New Era

  Dissident faction/secret stylists/youth movement/rebel gang!/ bring your foreign radio! – shouts the vocal over the merciless synthetic rumbling in ‘Stilyagi’ (1979) by Vice Versa, an obscure, strictly post-punk/new wave Sheffield outfit which later became the super-successful ABC. We now may learn who beat up Anthony Burgess in Leningrad. It is interesting that by all means uncensored British youth would take the late Stalinist era youths as role models. They called themselves Stilyagi, from the dancing style, a la twist, which was called stil. In Stilyagi, a popular Russian film from 2005, Burgess’ fantasy of overtaking the West assumes quite spectacular, revanchist shapes. But with their anachronistic quiffs and neon-colorful clothes a few years before Elvis, they rather remind us of the newly emerged Russian hipsters, or worse, with their fabulous connections, being mostly well off - the ruling class. Amongst the grey 50s, grey as can be, with the streets full of identically dressed and coiffed folk, carrying their bags heavy with briukva, a group, fantastically colorfully dressed, somewhere between rockabilly and the Wizard of Oz - these laughing, beautiful young people, who call themselves Stilyagi. They were Soviet beatniks, who loved jazz and the early rock and roll. Their ethos comes partly from as early as the 1920s avant-garde – and the stylings from Popova and Stepanova’s designs were much revived by the later Stliyagi, especially in the 80s. In reality, mostly they were trying to emulate the style of their American counterparts, listened mostly to jazz, and treated style with dead seriousness. Completely harmless westernised petit-bourgeois, or the precursors of the whole youth rebellion in Russia? Opinions are divided.

  2.11 The cover of the famous ‘Red Wave’ Russian punk compilation released in America

  Yet Burgess’ idea of fab clothed youth gangs speaking Russian were fulfilled the most in another film. The most obvious clash between the East and the West occurred when the stream of Eastern, mostly Jewish migrants started rushing to the mythical Amerika – and this recurs in 1983, when Russian émigré directors invented their own Russkii Novy Jork. New Romantic cult classic Liquid Sky was the new wave/post punk fantasy of Slava Tsukerman, his own americanist interpretation of the charmed disco lives from the perspective of a Russian émigré in America. In Moscow, Tsukerman was a student of Lev Kuleshov, the tireless propagator of Americanism, Productivism and the abrupt juxtapositions-montage of the Russian film avant-garde. Tsukerman began his career with that typical genre of the 60 and 70s, the educational, scientific documentary, an element of the space age competition that provoked extraordinary decorations. This scientific sobriety didn’t get in the way when he went to the New York in the 70s, by then a city drowned in total bankruptcy and shrinking, and as if in the reaction to that, it was drugged out to the extreme and dancing on its own grave – these were the last days of disco. In amongst this degradation, all the same hordes of fabulously dressed beautiful people marched, which seduced Tsukerman, who dreamt visions of Amerika just like his famous predecessors, like Mayakovsky, who he had made a film about just before leaving the USSR. In Liquid Sky we mostly stare at that glittering sky, while standing on the gloomy skyscrapers – a position to behold a city proper for a Muscovite. If we’re to believe this vision, then Moscow becomes New York, or other way round, and the jelly sky produces monsters. Ten years earlier in Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese, Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, is most unhappy when taken away from his city on a mafia-forced exile. ‘I want to smell the dirty air and see the mountains! Mountains, skyscrapers, what difference!’

  Liquid Sky’s cameraman, Yuri Neyman, had been involved in making films with Sergei Yutkievich, a collaborator of early Soviet avant-garde directorial duo Kozintsev and Trauberg, the set designer for their American-influenced Eccentric Theatre. Together this team of Soviet émigrés, stranded in America, transposed their Eccentricism to New Wave New York, the place stigmatized by yuppie culture and its extreme consumerism, at the height of the Reagan era
, but also with a flourishing emerging art scene. In this drugs-driven phantasmagoric New York, various eccentric creatures potter about like failed Warholian Superstars, currently on health leave. The sound of New York music, as if feeling the decline of the real industry, was also shiny, metallic and new – embodying the Soviet idea of melding flesh and metal, industrialization and computing, a combination which was to finally overtake and bring down the Western world and to create a world in which mechanization, work, sex, pleasure and leisure would coexist in a perfect balance.

  Meanwhile, disco producer Giorgio Moroder with his uber-woman Donna Summer, had completed a perfect musical combination of electricity and a female orgasm in ‘I Feel Love’. Orgasm, pleasure or un-pleasure is also important in Liquid Sky. The non-structure of the film evolves around two identical-looking characters, male and especially female - a New Wave model, constantly pursued and exploited by her clients, a bitterly sulky, miserable Snow Queen literally killing, as we’ll learn, with her cunt. Played by one actress, Anna Carlisle, her cynicism, nihilism and hatred of humanity could fill the whole Siberian steppe. Trapped between non-jobs and exploitation by the fashion industry, bored to death, she’s persecuted by the evil aliens (Soviet, no doubt) who render her sexual powers lethal. Anyone, who comes “into” her, dies, as the aliens live on their orgonal energy. But the most mysterious part of Liquid Sky is its soundtrack, based again on imagining the disco music of New York rather than knowing it from experience. Working in isolation, Tsukerman and his collaborators created operatic synthpop resembling more Bach’s baroque oratorios than music to dance to, indeed based on the French baroque music of Marin Marais or the Nazi-era anachronistic neoromanticism of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and featuring the new wave gem ‘Me and My Rhythm Box’ by Anatole Gerasimov, sung by terrifying psychopathic dyke Adrian. And if they do dance, these drugged-out hateful New York bohemians, they turn it into an eccentric theatre, with angular body movements, that freeze like a tableau vivant of Egyptian statues.

  The band possibly most obsessed by the Soviet Bloc was the enigmatic Jersey post-punk supernova Xex, a band so obscure that upon the small re-release of their one album in 2004 some people thought that they were a contemporary spoof. They sounded just too knowing, too cool and too rich in their exact references to be real. Active around the year 1980, their ecstatic, minimal, homemade, charmingly amateurish disco sings of the perils of compulsive shopping conflated with the story of Stalin’s daughter, the Red Brigades and the possible attack of Soviet Nerve Gas, for them actually entirely deserved by the West. This strange sovietophilia they shared with the British or European acts, especially Sheffield synthpop; and because of this political fascination they were characteristically cut off from their American contemporaries in the CBGB scene such as Talking Heads. Formed in a Jersey art school, they must have been strongly influenced by the area’s Polish community, with the band’s leader called Wa(rsa)w Pierogi. With their motto “Be a good Bolshevik – don’t be a nogoodnik!”, they mixed hallucinatory Soviet patriotism and Cold War paranoia. On their only album Group:Xex one song is about Svetlana Alluliyeva, Stalin’s daughter who famously defected to the West to become ‘a revisionist nightmare/She’s a capitalist pig/If daddy were alive now/He’d depersonalize you/send you to Siberia/Cracks in the Kremlin Wall now!’ Appearing all over their songs were random primal shouts, screams and exclamations, standing for some unspeakable, unexpressable libidinal energy, something that is too rough, to visceral to be said. Eroticism is too easy for this rough world, instead you have :XeX:, something that is too sharp for the common ‘sex’. There’s a surplus of terrifying desire, desire which has no reference, no object, no language, no expression. Pioneered by the prototypical synth duo Suicide, this overtook the rest of no wave by several years. The paranoia of being attacked by the enemy block and the toxic diseases of the futuristic scientific experiments explodes in ‘SNGA’: ‘Soviet Nerve Gas Attack/in six seconds you’ll be twitching on your back/get a drop on your skin/and convulsions will set in’; the usual punk obsessions of decay recur in a bizarre new form: Soviet nerve gas is strange/in a missile with a thousand mile range/it spreads out a mile/to contaminate a while’, because ‘it’s genocide again!’: ‘there’s no color there’s no smell/but it works very well’. If the world is ending, what is left there, if not a post-apocalyptic perverse relishing in decay? Indeed: ‘Soviet nerve gas is fun/if your pleasure is killing everyone’ which makes one wonder if that was the mysterious weapon the aliens had in Liquid Sky. No doubt, because the third world is shrinking and the politics are stinking like a Soviet nerve gas attack’.

  They walked in line

  The West was immersed in crisis. The young people in Germany fought and lost with the ‘Auschwitz generation’. Berlin was still a combination of ruins and voids. Fashion creators experimented with the soldier look. War was in the air. Electronic music evoked a reality, that was gritty, grey and concrete, scary, an uncontrollable modernity that we couldn’t quite master – and geographically, that was Eastern Europe. The land of SF’s dystopian visions. In 1972 Tarkovsky premiered Solaris, his metaphysical meditation over modernity, with weary-looking Soviet people in cars driving through menacing cities full of flyovers, freeways and austere, concrete blocks. This was the reality of the post war Europe as such. Joy Division needed an estrangement factor to clarify their vision: the Holocaust, totalitarianism - but they grew up in a very similar reality to their Eastern peers. Both of them lived in industrial areas, which developed their own proletariat, attached to their machines until Thatcherism came. Some of the Sheffield groups, like Richard Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire had been fellow travellers of the CPGB. Membership was also a windup towards the conservatism of parents, as in the case of Green Gartside, who named his band after Gramsci’s Scritti Politici.

  British subcultures in the punk era, between mid-70s and 1989, were especially cast against the rest of the West, fascinated and stimulated by the totalitarian East. Much of that was prompted by a similar experience of the war. Born to a large degree in the 1950s, the main personnel of punk grew up in amongst ruins and rubble of the war and the post-war austerity. At this time traces of WWII were still everywhere, not only because now we had the Cold War. Ian Curtis collected books about the Third Reich and was obsessed with an idea of an underdog in the totalitarian society. They got their name after the pulp Nazi camp fiction, House of Dolls. Joy Division’s ‘They Walked in Line’ can evoke equally the broken citizens of any totalitarian state. Yet the fascination with the Soviet Bloc by the disillusioned 70s generation already had nostalgic undertones. Vic Godard of the Subway Sect got obsessed with the Bloc after a trip to the Soviet Union, covered his room in Soviet posters and colored everything in grey, The Human League made the punishing, machine music The Dignity of Labour (1979) about the Soviet space programme and put Yuri Gagarin on the sleeve – and of course Joy Division were originally called Warsaw.

  2.12 Wielkanoc 1988 photograped by Mirosław Stępniak

  The proto-Ostalgie in the untamed cultural expression of the 70s and 80s punk, post punk and new wave may be misleading, because just as much the bands were obsessed with the underdogs behind the Curtain, the East in their view was a land that overlapped with quite a lot of the West as well. A lot of this ‘Ossie’ sentiment was a Westalgie, commenting on the dream of the Welfare State that they were about to lose.

  “Everyone says Joy Division music is gloomy and heavy. For me it was because the whole neighbourhood I lived in was completely decimated in the mid-60s. At the end of our street there was a huge chemical factory” – says Bernie Sumner in a Jon Savage interview - “there was a huge sense of community where I lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid. What happened in the 60s is that someone in council decided that it wasn’t very healthy and something had to go and it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved to the tower block. At the time I thought it was fantastic: now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster.” Sumner
and Co had a real experience of “collapsing new buildings” (or, as they say in German, einstürzende neubauten). Via the obsessions of their leader, they started putting them into this extremely sombre music, which, with double irony, affected people incredibly in Eastern Europe. The so-called cold wave started to emerge across the Bloc, with similarly sinister vocals and nihilistic lyrics. Sumner: “By the age of 22 I had quite a loss in my life. I understood that I could never go back to that happiness. It’s about the death of a community and a childhood. The music was about the death of optimism, of youth.” Bands from the industrial areas – soon to be deindustrialized - seeing its deprivation, were becoming ‘engaged’. “We had so much aggro going on” – says Peter Hook. It wasn’t the metropolitan youth, but those from deprived areas, which made music that resonated. There was a general sense of nihilism – and in this sense, it was close to certain really dark right wing ideologies. Part of punk is to examine this dark side of humanity. Savage: “Punk is primarily libertarian, anarchistic – and as oppositional to the power of its day, the late social-democratic consensus, it marked the end of an era.” Curtis liked bohemian modernist writers like Ballard and shared Bowie’s fascination with Burroughs. The sleeve of the first Joy Division single ‘An Ideal for Living’ featured a Hitlerjugend boy drumming and a child from the Warsaw ghetto. Curtis even made his wife sing a hymn to the tune of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ on their wedding and was obsessed with the film Cabaret. “For me it was about World War Two, because I was brought up by my grandparents and they told me about all the sacrifices people had made (…) we had a room upstairs with gas masks, sand bags and English flags, tin helmets. The war left a big impression on me, and the sleeve was that impression. It wasn’t pro Nazi, quite contrary. I though what went on in the war shouldn’t be forgotten so that it didn’t happen again.”