‘I Can’t Breathe’

The premiere of Pussy Riot’s new music video against police brutality

Meduza presents the premiere of Pussy Riot’s new music video I Can’t Breathe, a song dedicated to New York City’s recent protests against police brutality. “I can’t breathe” was the last thing uttered by Eric Garner, the African American who died in July 2014, after a police officer put him in a chokehold. Garner’s dying words became the main slogan of protests in New York City in December 2014, following a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Garner.

I Can’t Breathe marks Pussy Riot’s first departure from punk rock and is the group’s first song in English. It came about when Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were in New York City to record a series of anti-war songs with musicians they met on the set of the American TV show House of Cards, where Pussy Riot has a cameo in the third season. When they realized protests against police brutality were breaking out across the city, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina joined the crowds and spoke to demonstrators.

“It was in these days that we met with the people who would later work on I Can’t Breathe: Richard Hell, one of punk rock’s founding fathers, Nick Zinner, the guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Andrew Wyatt, the vocalist for the electronic pop band Miike Snow, who wrote the beat for I Can’t Breathe.

“It’s a song about all of us,” Pussy Riot told Meduza's Pavel Borisov, pointing to the diverse group of musicians who collaborated to produce it. The switch to industrial music, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina say, is meant to convey the sound of protesters marching through the streets of New York and music video’s dark tone captures the group’s “response to the tragedy.”

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina say the protests in New York resonated with them as Russians. “We remembered the victims of the war in eastern Ukraine, the Russian paratroopers killed there and buried in Pskov, and the people tortured by police in Kazan. We made this song inspired by American protests, with hopes for protests in Russia.”

When asked what Pussy Riot is today, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina say it’s a “trinity of musical group, art project, and political statement.”

They say many Russian musicians have refused to collaborate with them, “not ready to have their names appear alongside Pussy Riot.” The garage-protopunk-blues bands Jack Wood and Scofferlane are the first Russian groups to work openly with Pussy Riot. In I Can’t Breathe, Sasha Klokova of Jack Wood and Matvei Kulakov of Scofferlane provide the vocals, with Richard Hell reading a monologue at the end of the song.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina say they don’t feel like strangers to American politics, having spent a great deal of time in the United States over the past year, meeting all kinds of Americans, ranging from Hillary Clinton to prison guards. “For us, it’s important to have independent information about events in the US. We refuse to be weighed down by the ghosts of the ‘Cold War.’ In Russia, the propaganda machine convinces us that the West and especially the United States are evil—that they’re our enemies. To counter this irrational mindset, we have to have independent views about the situation in America.”

They say the US government shares many of the problems of the Russian state, particularly when it comes to prisons, where inmate populations in both countries are enormous and living conditions are poor. Learning from other countries’ experiences, Pussy Riot says, is the best weapon against Vladimir Putin’s current plan to isolate Russians from the democratic world.