Navigation: Establishing a Mainstream

A couple of weeks ago, a CD with a slightly unfocused cover was released, bearing the title “Navigation” (Navigatsiia).  This designation comes from a series of club-based festivals that have been used to showcase several up-and-coming rock groups.  In a country like Russia, the first question that comes unavoidably to mind is:  Who’s paying for this and why bother?  After all, Russia is not an easy place to tour and somebody has to have a serious, vested interest before even starting.

Two presences are palpable behind the scenes.  One is Navigator Records, hence the compilation’s title.  The other close connection is with Nashe Radio (”Our Radio”), the nation’s largest radio station dedicated to domestic rock music.  And here the significance of profit margins starts to grow.  The constant need or desire for a broadly popular form of rock has meant the lines between this genre, its proud traditions, and pop are growing increasingly faint.  Stuff needs to sell.

A lot of people are unhappy, although we can seemingly exclude rock dinosaur Boris Grebenshchikov (below) and Siberian folk diva Pelageia (above) in their ads for Nashe Radio.  They don’t seem too bothered.

The Navigation festival(s) marked their first birthday this autumn, and many of its participants have enjoyed high rotation on the radio.  The number of compilations published, however, has been low.

Collecting bands such as Cheboza (above and below) on a single disc is a obviously a useful promotional device, especially if one is looking to brand disparate performers as somehow connected to a single label or town.

Cheboza

Given the problems of piracy, however, and the related unwillingness of many Russians to actually pay for anything, record labels, regions, and radio stations have invested little time or money in funding CD production.  Concerts guarantee (most of the time) cash in hand;  discs do not.

As a result, when compilations do actually appear, trumpeting a “new wave” of rock, pop, or any other style, they have an increasing importance.  Rarely do labels announce a summary of one genre – and so, when it does happen, people pay attention!

Indeed, the Russian press has given Navigatsiia a fair amount of coverage, especially because the CD includes a few tracks by well-known ensembles who have already traversed the tricky distances between rock and pop with success:  Mumiy Troll (above), Zveri, and Splin.

As one review had it recently:  “This CD has been met with a certain enthusiasm and hope.  That’s because the music here is supposed to be a little livelier than the pop stuff made by TV talent shows.  It’s also supposed to improve upon the kind of formless compilations that indie bands put out.”  These expectations have not necessarily been met, in the minds of several publications.

And here two additional issues are important.  The development of Nashe Radio has, as mentioned, been basically conducted in the realm of mainstream media.  It broadcasts to almost every city across Russia’s endless expanse and maintains a continuous web-stream, too.

Velvet

In order to find a commonly accepted and appealing format, Nashe radio is unable to dedicate much, if any time to the experimental fringes of contemporary music.  It may never have wanted to do so in the first place.

“Over the last decade many Russian bands have bust their humps in trying to master a pop-rock crossover in the style of Mumiy Troll,” like Velvet (above).  “But today’s kids have taken themselves and their guitars in a slightly different direction:  they’ve erased the distinctions between rock and pop completely.  We’ve reached the point where you’ll hear bigger, bolder riffs from [MOR pop star] Valeriia!”  Some of them have even been compared to the all-girl Belarusian ensemble, Kraski, put together for the basic purposes of profit.

Kressi

Some writers – suffering from an excess of spleen – have even referred to the occasional insertion of the “big” bands in between thesе newcomers as a blissful “tranquilizer” after the disappointment, upset, or irritation caused by an alleged lack of professionalism.  The rookies are said to lack both the high production levels of Mumiy Troll and the somewhat less challenging benchmark set by Zveri (below):  “a real sense of drive, but kinda dopey lyrics.”

The sense of warmed-over sameness that these new bands, raised on Nashe radio, supposedly invoke has been likened to the “homogeneous” social networking sites loved by so many young Russians.  Everybody’s interconnected in one big, invisible network.  We’re all doing the same thing.

Brener

“You go poking around those sites and start looking for your old girlfriend from school.  Turns out that she’s the fully-fledged spouse of that guy you play football with – your drinking buddy.  And there’ll be some other girl you studied with at university;  you discover that she was at school with your colleague from work.  And you never knew how close things were, even after all these years.”

This is not the severest criticism that has come to light in the last two weeks.  Things can be even tougher elsewhere:  “Half the tracks by new bands just fly past your ears with a whistling sound.  You don’t even catch yourself wanting to figure out who they’re copying.  What we’ve got here is a full assortment of the kind of MOR ballast that Nashe radio uses to fill its airtime.”

Ouch.  Why so much anger?

The answer can be found in quotes like this:  “All these new performers [like Katia Brener, above] are totally obsessed with their private lives.  There’s some kind of masochistic ecstasy in their shared desire to tell the world all the sad details.  They simply cannot sing about anything else.  World culture has just passed them by.  These rock-Narcissuses have no other reference points, no sense of self-irony – or allusions to anything.  There’s no cultural background whatsoever. ”

In other words, they lack the social commentary of Western rock and the intellectual striving of their late Soviet forefathers.  These are very severe, if not questionable assumptions.  Since Nashe Radio has close to half a million listeners daily, and we’ve offered you a handful of grumpy journalists, please give the bands above a second chance.  We happily accept donations for starving artists.

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