Friday, March 12, 2010

Back in the U.S.S.R.

Vladimir Sorokin has a charming piece in the International Herald Tribune about getting exposed to Western rock music in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
Having studied English through texts like “Lenin in London,” we had a hard time sorting out the words. ...

Thus Anglo-rock for many of my contemporaries became Angelic-rock. We believed in it, we forgave it everything. We imbued the relatively primitive lyrics with layers of meaning that their hirsute authors never dreamed of. A friend of mine seriously insisted that “Satisfaction” was about a free, complex and tragic love affair of two underground anarchists
I love it!

I also learned that Uriah Heep was the first Western band to play in the Soviet Union.

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