Vine Vide Vopli
The curious resonance of a punk artifact from 1989
Way back in 1989, a band from Kiev called Vopli Vidopliassova (“the wailings of Vidopliassova” or, mercifully, VV for short) spent a single evening recording its snarly, caustic punk rock commentaries on late Soviet life.
The songs were captured DIY-style, on cassette. Though they were intended as demos to be developed further, the music began to circulate among coolhunters in the Ukrainian capital. Demand forced the band to do a “semi-official” release, and pretty soon Tantsi (“Dances”) developed into an underground cultural force.
It’s easy to hear why: VV pursued a lusty, inclusive vision of punk. It situated elements of Ukrainian traditional music (dig that accordion!) into the common guitar-bass-drums instrumentation, and prized cathartic Ramones-style refrains that can become earworms even if you don’t understand a word. (According to Maria Sonevytsky’s new book in the 33 & 1/3 series, VV’s songs communicate explicitly and through veiled double entendre against Soviet repression, while envisioning a more open, free society.)
It was precisely the kind of Westernized pop-culture material Yuri Andropov, the General Secretary of the Communist party in the 1980s, had in mind when he talked about the “dangerous ideological pollution among Soviet youth.”
VV’s original tape was rediscovered in 2019. It was released on vinyl for the first time a few months ago, in connection with April’s Record Store Day, and has now reached the digital streaming platforms. It’s not the smoothest audio artifact, and that’s the charm: The coarseness of the sound evokes the upheaval punk brought wherever it landed. Though VV does embrace verse-chorus form and assorted mainstream rock devices, its music is rooted in cultural rebellion, and animated by the desire to lampoon if not smash the status quo. It’s an artifact of punk in its most visceral original form – before it became a set of fashion cues. Before it became (feel free to read this with as much hissing contempt as necessary) a “brand.”
The calendar says tomorrow, June 21, is the annual World Day of Music. This observance, which started in France, is intended to celebrate the act of creating music in public, and to affirm the power of music to bridge ideological differences.
My hunch is there might not be much activity in Kiev, and if there is, it won’t involve the members of VV, who have done fundraising tours in Ukraine and, as the Tantsi release suggests, are attempting to remain active as a band internationally. But that’s not saying much: Conditions there are awful day in and day out, in ways that are likely incomprehensible to those outside of Ukraine. To wit: The band’s current guitarist is serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The original bassist is building drones for the war effort. Putin’s brutal war of choice grinds on. The spirit of punk endures.
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