Bi-dva: “Luna Park.” Fun, Games, and Nostalgia at the Fairground

It seems fair to say that the most recent album by Mumii Troll, entitled “8,” will be remembered as a final hurrah for all the gloss and glamor of Russia’s pre-crisis economy: a double CD, the fruits of lengthy labor both richly produced and expensively packaged.  That same packaging was commented upon in a wide number of venues; today, however, many music fans in Russia no doubt expect a return to the cheap color xeroxes that adorned CDs after the collapse of the Russian economy in the late 1990s.

And yet there’s a reverse logic here. When we met recently in Moscow with the owner of independent label Rusty Pop, he was busy making handcrafted covers for small print-runs of his own music, maintaining that only by making discs physically attractive could “hard media” or CDs hope to stay alive in the face of cheap and convenient downloads. And this, perhaps, is what lies behind the logic of the new CD from Bi-2, “Lunapark.” Two discs, packaged separately in colored envelopes are nestled in a recessed box, which itself is covered by a bright cardboard envelope, bearing the image at the top of this post. To this we can add a small poster – and a series of concertinaed photographs, too.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an amazingly flashy website dedicated to the album.

A little context would help here. Bi-2 (pronounced “Bee-dva”) are originally from Belarus, where they formed just over twenty years ago.  Emigration, however, brought the band’s activities to an end in the early 90s, when the two front men – known to the public simply as Leva and Shura – left for Israel and Australia respectively. Their real names, we should add, are Egor Bortnik and Shura Uman.

Reunited among kangaroos within a few years, they eventually returned to Russia – together – in 1998. Helped in no small way by the soundtrack to Aleksei Balabanov’s gangster flick, “Brat” (Brother), they have since become a staple of the Russian music scene, well entrenched in the playlists of the nation’s biggest radio station dedicated to rock, “Nashe Radio.”

We’ve also written of them a few times.

Which brings us to “Luna Park,” not only a fairground in Moscow, but also the name of a famous (and very unsubtle) movie of the early 90s by Pavel Lungin.  The film tells of some Afghanistan veterans – shown above – who have adopted extreme right-wing views in the face of Russia’s post-Soviet troubles. Keen to see the world in clear-cut terms of racial or ethnic hierarchies, one of the veterans is horrified to learn that his father is actually an elderly Jewish intellectual. The fairground itself is used to evoke a sense of forced or profitable jollity that has appeared in Moscow together with capitalism, a bright and gaudy spectacle that is used to shout down other problems of the decade.

The current owners of the park are very keen to avoid those connotations today. “The amusement park is one of the most beautiful and agreeable areas in the centre of Moscow. There are no noisy young people; you can enjoy the pleasant atmosphere and admire the beautiful landscaping. Meanwhile your children can have fun moving from one brightly-colored ride to another.” This is where the band officially presented the CD to the public, as can be seen from the images in this post (and some online footage).

The title of the album, together with the bright packaging, plus the complex overtones of the park in popular culture all create a heady mix. It’s a combination of both positive and negative images, at least from an adult standpoint. The park’s website also includes a lot of attractions that are on sale (for thousands of dollars). Tough times are upon us. Somewhere behind the mask of merriment are some teardrops.

With eyes this big there could be some serious sobbing.

This dilemma brings us back to the issue of expensive presentations or CD-launches of any sort, be they in Moscow fairgrounds or in record stores. Maybe the sumptuous graphics of “Luna Park” are indeed the most logical way to fight your digital opposition, but a question surely begs itself: Where does all this much money come from?  Many people in Russia would mention a meeting that took place four years ago in the Kremlin between high-level administrators and a number of the nation’s better-known rock bands. Almost everybody involved refused to comment upon the discussions afterwards, but news channels reported that the musicians had been asked to adopt a responsible approach to their craft in the wake of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Rock music should be used to inspire, and not incite. The public’s additional guesswork led many to believe that the majority of musicians present were already in sympathy with this outlook before they even reached the Kremlin’s corridors. This was preaching to a well-behaved choir.

The event produced a certain level of interest in some quarters, and not all of it was positive – such as Iurii Shevchuk’s on-stage declaration that Bi-2 are nothing more than a collection of “singing cats.” Ridding oneself of similar baggage can be tricky when there is also a often-quoted rumor that Bi-2 are the favorite domestic rock band of President Medvedev. When asked in May about the issue, the band was somewhat exasperated by the question, having heard it so many times in other places. “Oh, no…! Let’s not bring that up again! We’re very glad that a lot of our politicians today are young people. There’s nothing scary about the fact that a lot of them like our work, either. And so what if the President listens to rock music? It’s very nice to know so!”

A couple of tracks on this CD help to map these shared sympathies. The first is “Banzai” (below).   The opening lines read: “Good morning, Soviet Union. I’m not at all angry at you. Just a sad, sentimental image.  Maps of battles, news from the front. All we inherited was a happy childhood.” The chorus speaks of freedom “sneaking away” through a back door, while other images, such as the space station MIR, merge as “a symbol of faith, up among the atmosphere’s strata… The sounds of a prayer, as if in emptiness.” It’s all defined as  ”requiem for a dream.”  A recent interview asked the band what exactly they meant by the song’s first line. Their response: “It speaks for itself. It says all it needs to about a ‘happy childhood that we inherited.’ Basically, we think the CD as a whole contains all the answers to your questions.”

The logical place to look for such answers, at least initially would be the programmatic title-track, “Luna Park” (below). Here the lyrics speak of going back to the same fairground in the middle of the night. With a poorly-written address in hand, moving unsurely towards a fog-covered Luna Park, the singer discovers that “I opened my eyes and time moved backwards.”

“I still believe,” he says. “But you look down on my silly optimism. My heart has suffered great losses since the time it sensed freedom. The moon has split in two, as if a devil possessed it. A door is torn from its hinges and the carousel starts spinning…”

We’ve returned to the demonic “happiness” of Lungin’s film, to the cruel marketplace ethics of the early 90s. The cover to this album looks less than welcoming – and the related cake (below) is more unnerving than appealing. It should scare us to walk in the opposite direction, back to a happy childhood, striding to the soundtrack of Bi-2 as we do so. Inspired but not incited.

There’s a second CD in this release, as we mentioned: Bi-2 have said explicitly in interviews that it was designed to reflect a more modern, “indie” aesthetic, but it has received less than stellar reviews. The main album, however, has – conversely – been praised in a large number of publications for returning the band to its roots.

That’s very true, in more ways than one.

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