scandal award

The singer announced that she was refusing the Russian Music Awards (RMA), the award ceremony of which took place on September 21 at Vasilyevsky Spusk (see Kommersant on September 23). The singer actually accused the company of fraud, telling the press that she knew the voting results before the ceremony. BORIS BARABANOV found out the reaction to the singer’s statement from her colleagues, the management of the company publishing her discs and MTV itself.

Kommersant learned that Zemfira would not be at Vasilyevsky Spusk on September 21 at the beginning of September, when an announcement of a concert in Haifa, scheduled for the same date as the RMA, appeared on her website (see Kommersant on September 7). We reported that the channel was exploring the idea of a teleconference with Israel, but ultimately limited itself to a pre-recorded greeting from the artist - a form that is practiced in such situations at many authoritative ceremonies. In principle, one decision by a singer nominated in five nominations to ignore a high-profile event would be enough for the audience to understand her attitude towards this music award. However, after the ceremony, when the artist received the prize only in the “Best Video” category, and Jasmine received the award among the top five performers, Zemfira decided to more clearly convey her position to the people - she said that even before the ceremony she asked MTV not to give her anything, and refused from the only prize she received.

General producer of RMA, editor-in-chief of MTV Russia Ilya Bachurin, in a conversation with Kommersant, put it briefly and clearly: “You need to be able to lose.” The channel’s position is that Zemfira’s songs, based on deeply personal experiences, sincere and more complex than the established pop standard, are difficult to compete with intelligible and mass-oriented pop music in the person of Jasmine or other award nominees - Glucose or Zhanna Friske. Nevertheless, in conversations with MTV management, Zemfira, according to Mr. Bachurin, made it clear that being in the same nomination with Jasmine was humiliating for her. The television manager believes that even the very fact of Zemfira’s refusal to attend the RMA, conveyed to the public in the midst of voting, did not play in her favor. As for further cooperation with Zemfira, the channel, despite direct accusations from the performer of fraud, is not preparing any sanctions; moreover, it is fundamentally important for MTV to have Ms. Ramazanova’s clips in its rotation, even to the detriment of the channel’s rating interests. In this regard, Mr. Bachurin recalled the scandal with the rapper Dolphin, who at last year’s RMA ceremony silently stomped around the microphone to his own soundtrack, and later spoke unflatteringly about the channel in an interview. Now all the problems with the artist have been resolved, his songs remain in rotation.

The head of Real Records, which publishes Zemfira’s albums, Andrei Lukinov told Kommersant that her relationship with MTV will not affect the cooperation between the label and the singer. Mr. Lukinov took neither the side of the ward nor the side of the broadcaster. Real Records still plans to release an album of Zemfira's b-sides; perhaps it will be released this year. Mr. Lukinov said that he understands the artist’s reaction, although he does not consider it right to withdraw his name from any nominations. According to the publisher, MTV has always met the label halfway - at least in the fact that it never took money for rotating clips, despite the fact that Zemfira, like a number of other Real Records clients, belongs to the category of so-called difficult artists. The record company considers the target audience for most of its releases to be young people, so a media resource like MTV is extremely important for the label.

Zemfira refused to give comments to Kommersant. However, the artist’s position unexpectedly found support from her old friends, the musicians of the group “Umaturman”, one of the most notable pop artists of 2004, at the end of which prizes were distributed. This year the team was nominated for the RMA in the main category “Best Artist”, and also claimed the title “Best Group”. “Umaturman” did not receive an award in either category. In a conversation with a Kommersant correspondent, the leader of the group, Vladimir Kristovsky, actually confirmed Zemfira’s words about the distribution of awards before the end of voting. “We knew that we wouldn’t get anything long before the ceremony,” he said. “We weren’t even in the collection of nominees’ songs that MTV released shortly before the RMA. I’m surprised we were still in the nominations.” New channel management this year took us off the air, citing the fact that our songs are too “bardish” for the MTV audience, but at the same time all radio stations play us without exception. Well, we’ll somehow cope without MTV, it’s difficult to do anything with us now. “Everything that happened around the MTV awards was internal politics that had nothing to do with the real popularity or unpopularity of the groups.”

Zemfira refused the MTV award