The case of the young

Dmitry Spirin-about the just released album “cockroaches!”, Punk liberalism and police officers who paint the lips

Dmitry Spirin

The leader of the group "Cockroaches!"

- The album is called "Internet and warheads." It has four songs that we laid out on YouTube every Friday all of September. The most sensational is the "work of the young." Many believe that it is inspired by the protest summer of 2019, this is not so. The clip is indeed compiled mainly from photographs of Moscow actions, but there is Peter, there is Yekaterinburg, and not only 2019. And the text was written by me back in January.

By and large, it is not about protests, but about the fate of the generation, which turned out to be more decisive, more bold, but something more honest than many of my peers.

I am 44, and the guys who go out on the streets today, and then go to prison - mainly 20–25 years old. Political prisoners are almost exclusively young people.

The song, if you listen, is sad. Her chorus is like this: "Democratic freedoms and liberal values, it seems, went out of fashion, whatever one may say." People who are now over forty, personally abandoned these values ​​and freedoms. They exchanged them for comfort and household well -being. There is also in the song about this: "These dreams were exchanged for personal comfort." And these are children of the nineties, children of freedom, it would seem. Now in the comments they prove to us that the nineties were gang time, that then it was difficult to live. I do not argue, just in our system of values ​​freedom is more important than satiety. And in general this is a strange logic:

Say, in the nineties it was poorly lived, so the current government should be irremovable and people need to be put in prison on far -fetched accusations.

As one follows from the other, it is not clear to me.

Young people have the exact opposite opinion. When you are young, you can eat cheap street food, walk in jeans for a year and sleep on a look at friends, just to feel independent. You still do not have the dependence on comfort, career and money that we begin to acquire with age.

In the first minutes after the release, the resources of Alexei Navalny in the first minutes after the release. And where Navalny is, there are Kremlinboats. Where are the Kremlinboats, there are anticremelbots. And so they seized in the comments on our channel.

The song has a word-trigger “liberal”, for which we immediately flew to us. This vocabulary itself - democratic freedoms and liberal values ​​- seems to many not Pankovskaya, which does not correspond to the image of "cockroaches!".

People are sincerely perplexed, like us, being a punk group, we can drown for liberals and regret the loss of their values. As we can, you just listened to us badly.

A variety of forces participate in protests. Not only those who call themselves liberals. But in my understanding, they all protect the inviolability of human rights and freedoms. And this is liberal value, strictly in Wikipedia. We do not sing about the market economy, about specific parties and politicians. I, as the author of the text, used this word in its original meaning. I guess I lagged behind life. They already wrote to me that in today's Russian context, liberal values ​​are considered discredited by themselves and causing negative connotations. Soryan, guys, I was not in the know. I said exactly what he said.

Our other clip, which caused hot disputes from the public, is “Life is too short” , not so much because of the song as because of the video. There, according to the scenario, the policeman after service goes to the gym, and then dresses in women's clothes and paints lips, becomes some kind of crossdresser. This move is in line with the text of the song. She is that you should not succumb to the pressure that society has on us since childhood, and maintain your inner essence, no matter how contradictory and strange for others.

There is a reference to the famous photo of the “blue noses” with kissing police officers, which I really like. Both they and we are actually talking about gender problems, but about freedom of choice. There is no hint of homosexual relations. But I was amazed at how viceously we realized what a surge of homophobia in people caused this. People unsubscribed in packs from our account, cursed, and one wrote a comment that shook me:

“For twenty -five years I have been listening to your group, and now this clip has done me so painfully, as if the best friend took out his dick and pokes my mouth in my mouth.”

Incredible disappointment among people, and I, frankly, is surprised. All these twenty-five years we drowned for freedom of expression, including gender. They opposed discrimination and phobias, including such. But the listener did not hear. Or maybe I heard, but did not attach importance. And then they saw a man who paints his lips in the video, and everyone had a roof from this.

This is a very interesting experiment. It turned out in fact that the protest audience could be homophobic at the same time. Or not so protest. Protest - to a certain border. They are ready to like the clip “The case of the young”, but are not ready to accept what destroys stereotypes. So, they are not free, which means they do not understand the main message of the song: not only you, but all the people around are free to choose a lifestyle they like. Do not let your dream stomp, one life, and it is short. But everyone has different dreams, this is the charm of life.

“Military anxiety” is open an anti -war, pacifist thing. We had songs on this topic before. Our “what I can change” became a hit, but there is still a little about another. About the aggressive policy of Russia, about the Crimea, about the Donbass, about the rattle of the continuous weapon. And “military anxiety” is about wild stress in which all this plunges us.

I read in the news about the cancellation of the contracts that Raigan with Gorbachev signed, and the atmosphere of the eighties pops up in my memory. Everyone, including me, had a powerful neurosis on the theme of nuclear war: it seemed that it would begin about that the world is on the verge already.

I remember how I asked my parents to turn off the “Time” program and make the radio quieter because I was afraid, it was really scary. I even dreamed of American missiles flying to the Soviet Union.

At school, all this was aggravated: we were shown asylum, explained which way to go to our feet when a nuclear attack begins.

In the second half of the 1980s, the voltage began to fall. The people of my generation sighed more freely, and I was sure that this hell would not happen again, that everyone understood how valuable the world is between the countries. But no, they did not understand, everything returned again. The same neuroses, the same paranoia.

The song “Deserter from the Army of Evil” is about the same thing that the BG sang about at one time: “I can’t take the side, I don’t know anyone who is wrong.” This does not mean that it is necessary, not interfering with anything, to be over the fight. It’s just tired of the endless pushing of their innocence, endless swar, endless division into good and bad ones that change places periodically. Do not exchange for trifles, do not start trifles. Good and evil exist, it is worth fighting, but it is worth distinguishing the subsidiary from the really important. I see how people lose their heads from any news read on the Internet. And you can do otherwise: calmly, with dignity and in business.