Restorer | Colta.ru

A few days ago, at a home concert in St. Petersburg, the Leningrad group gathered more than 65 thousand spectators, setting a Russian attendance record for stadium concerts. Immediately, in hot pursuit, Sergey Shnurov said in his millionth Instagram the tour of 2019 - 10 concerts from Kaliningrad to Volgograd through Moscow and Peter, all as one at the new international class stadiums built for the World Cup. Surely this will be another record - in any case, if not a cord, then who else will fill them. This is no other Russian and foreign artist. Folk love left Grigory Leps and Stas Mikhailov, which Sergei Shnurov once bored over, she is now given to the restorer by profession, the uninstabbed philosopher from the theological institution, a conceptual artist working in the self-supervised direction "Brendrealism".

Now there is no doubt: “Leningrad” is the main Russian pop form of the Putin rule. The point is not even the popularity of the Shnurovsky project, but in the songs and clips themselves, which are a slightly crooked mirror of Russian reality-according to them (and not according to the texts of the songwriter Mikhail Gutseriev ), our descendants will restore the signs of the life of a Russian of the early 21st century: crazy rage of consumption- bags , labuten , glasses like Sobchachka , Peugeot Medestes , selfies and bonds The rampant hedonism from despair , the circus in fire and the other “feast during the plague”, as it is deliberately formulated by the creative credo of Leningrad, his chronicler Maxim Semelak. ““ Leningrad ”is a group for states when everything is ridiculous and scary and disgusting” - an accurate observation from a person who wrote about a ten articles and two books about a group of and two books with Sergey Shnurov more than one liter of vodka and whiskey. Judging by the fact that Leningrad is going to the most grand Russian tour in its history, we have already got out to the peak of this state - in other words, we are almost at the very bottom.

It is funny that the history of Leningrad after its restart in 2010 and the transformation from the group of the RF-well-known symmetric of the latest political history of the Russian Federation, which is known into the indecent popularly popular, which gives the team an additional symbolic weight. Having controlled the iron hand with his team, Sergei Shnurov either reproduced, or parody Putin's plan, and he led Leningrad to victory in Russia. Having returned during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, the cord first brought to the forefront of his successor, or rather, the successor-singer Julia Kogan, who gave the Muzhitsky ensemble a powerful female voice and attracted a new audience to him, sparing most of the songs on the Hnna Cambek album and decorated with her portrait made under Alla Pugacheva. From the “henna”, the turn of “Leningrad” begins to the sound resembling a collage from the Soviet stage and hits of the “disco of the 80s”, in this way Sergey Shnurov mirrors in arrangements restoration in the country of “scoop” and a sense of stagnation in political life. And this worked for an increase in the box office-nevertheless, dancing at corporate parties for musical moves recorded on the subcortex still Soviet TV is much more careful than under the most abundant SKA Punk.

Six months later, with the advent of the album “Eternal Fire”, it turned out that the modernization of Leningrad is only a distracting maneuver similar to the one that Vladimir Putin played. In 2012, Putin again became president, and Sergei Shnurov returned to the microphone and began to scribble alpha male ditties and a dazed meme-pops, repeating in the plots and chords. Indeed, why invent new tricks if the old ones are non -failure? However, the songs for female voices, which were constantly changing in the group, did not stop writing, realizing that it was impossible to lose the conquered audience-and they were the most successful and became hits.

The main innovation of Sergei Shnurov, who went to a new term, was the refusal of Leningrad in 2013 from the format of the album as an obsolete medium in the era of smartphones, social networks and YouTube . Many bright heads thought about this, but only at the cord to find an equivalent replacement in Russia. It was a satirical musical short film, connecting the traditions of "Eralash" and the comedies of Eldar Ryazanov with the trolling of the realities of new Russian life. The first swallow of success was the clip “Bag” , shot by director Mikhail Mareskin.

Before the head of Leningrad felt for this form, the group took off low -budget live -video and experimented in every possible way (sometimes -successfully , sometimes not ). Then the brilliant series of mini-films (VIP-“Exhibit”-“In St. Petersburg-Drink”-“Ecstasy”) was made for Shnurova by the director and screenwriter Anna Parmas, who shot films with Avdotya Andreevna Smirnova. Comedy short plays about the latest life turned into a trademark of Leningrad and a new standard of Russian clipmaker culture. The video in this genre is now done by artists from whom you do not expect this, for example, the Romantic Hero Dima Bilan .

In recent years, the phenomenal growth of the popularity of Leningrad has been associated not only with the fact that the group has filled in YouTube a shortage of modern lyrical comedy, which has grown more than one generation of Russians, which celebrated every new year with the Irony of Fate. And certainly not with the fact that the cord, skillfully swearing, makes fun of the habits and customs of the Russian people. No matter how the leader of Leningrad vigilantly peers into modernity and fashionably dressed up on his Instagram, his heart belongs to our common Soviet-Russian past, the details of which he carefully restores and resurrects in his songs and clips-even the most futuristic.

The essence of Sergei Shnurov’s creative method, in fact, has not changed since the appearance of the “Leningrad” debut in 1999, the “bullet”-exercises in the courtyard and thieves romance. It is recorded in the very name of the group - "Leningrad". The cord does not renounce its and our past - not only from the songs of Arkady North, Vysotsky, Pugacheva and Tsoi, but also from two sausages to semolina and from bead beidon. He, like many in Labutenes and Saint-Lorans, sincerely loves “our shit” and pragmatically earns that he skillfully creates a rampant atmosphere in which it is not a shame to show his love. Therefore, at the concerts of Leningrad in London, according to eyewitnesses , an inconceivably dearly dressed audience is gathering, which destroys the entire bar.

Sergey Shnurov is a restorer of cultural memory, the present time is his time.