ГрОб

I have just learned that Russia's underground punk legend, Yegor Letov, vocallist and lyricist of Grazhdanskaja Oborona, has died.

A great inspiration; RIP. See you in Belovodzia!

Funeral

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXN7xd_-SLE&feature=related

http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=25210

Words for a virtual tombstone (in English)

Thou shalt not kill
Except for the state
And even that
Just within thyself

Obituary

Letov, Foul-Mouthed Rock Legend, Dead at 43
By Alexander Osipovich

Punk rock icon Yegor Letov, who was once committed to a mental hospital by Soviet authorities angered by his profane and fiercely anti-Communist lyrics, has died of heart failure at age 43.

Letov died in his sleep Tuesday morning at his home in the Siberian city of Omsk, according to a brief statement on the official web site of his band, Grazhdanskaya Oborona.

Investigators from the Omsk Regional Prosecutor's Office are seeking to establish the exact cause of Letov's death, RIA-Novosti reported Wednesday. By law, the investigators have one month to issue their findings, though preliminary results could be released by the end of this week.

Citing anonymous sources, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Wednesday that Letov's death was drawn-out and painful. The report contradicted the band's statement, which said Letov died suddenly.

The musician's funeral and a public memorial service will take place Thursday in Omsk, said Sergei Popkov, the manager of Grazhdanskaya Oborona, RIA-Novosti reported.

Letov's death marks the end of a turbulent career for one of the only Russian rock stars from the 1980s who kept his outsider status in the post-Soviet era.

He earned his controversial reputation by singing obscene songs at often rowdy concerts, by openly admitting his use of illegal drugs and by signing up with the radical, now-banned National Bolshevik Party -- a move that alienated many in the rock music community.


Letov was a "rebel without a cause," said Mikhail Kozyrev, co-founder of rock station Nashe Radio.

"He was one of those artists that was blessed with enormous talent, but this talent came with a bunch of demons that tortured him throughout his whole life, and I think he couldn't manage them," Kozyrev, who now hosts a talk show on the Silver Rain radio station, said by telephone Wednesday.

Writer Eduard Limonov, founder of the National Bolsheviks and a close friend of the late musician, described Letov as a "comrade in arms" and an "ardent revolutionary."

"He was the musical component of the party. He will not be forgotten," Limonov said, RIA-Novosti reported.

In a column he penned last year for the English-language biweekly The eXile, Limonov said the National Bolshevik flag was first unfurled at a Grazhdanskaya Oborona concert in 1993.

Letov was born in Omsk in 1964, the son of an army officer and a nurse. His name was listed as Igor in his passport, but he became known as Yegor. He never obtained a higher education.

He discovered rock as a child when his brother introduced him to the records of Shocking Blue, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, he said in a 1989 interview posted on the Grazhdanskaya Oborona web site.

"When I heard them, they had such an effect on me that everything got going at once," he said. "I started recording rock, and I lived on this music for 10 years."

In 1982, Letov founded a band called Posev at a time when Soviet authorities were highly suspicious of the country's nascent underground rock scene. Two years later, he started Grazhdanskaya Oborona, or "Civil Defense."

Letov's lyrics were initially absurdist and apolitical, but everything changed in 1985 when authorities committed him to a mental hospital, a tactic used against especially vocal dissidents. He was kept in the hospital for three months and forced to take anti-psychotic drugs.

After he emerged in early 1986, Grazhdanskaya Oborona began to produce sharply political songs such as "Everything Is Going According to Plan," a mockery of communist optimism that became an anti-Soviet anthem and Letov's best-known song.

It contained the lyrics: "Everything will be fine under communism / It will come soon, you just have to wait / Everything will be free ... and nobody will have to die."

Forced to record in Letov's own apartment, the band eventually gained popularity in the late 1980s, and Letov became known as a Russian version of Sid Vicious, rebelling against everyone and everything.

"During the very end of Soviet rule, [our work was] an extreme provocation, full of the kind of anti-Soviet content even dissidents couldn't allow themselves," Letov recalled in an interview with The Moscow Times in 2000.

Letov remained a rebel even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He underwent a number of political transformations and ended up as an early supporter of Limonov's National Bolsheviks, a radical group that mixed communist and nationalist ideology.

It was a combination well-suited for Letov, whose interviews with journalists were often reminiscent of his confusing, stream-of-consciousness song lyrics.

"Everybody asks me, 'Who am I? Am I a communist or not?'" Letov told The Moscow Times in 2000. "And I tell them 'I'm a communist and I'm not a communist.' When the political situation changed, I had to find a new answer."

A prolific musician, Letov recorded more than 40 albums in his two-decade career, sometimes solo but usually playing with Grazhdanskaya Oborona.

The band's recordings and live shows were full of "wild, raw, smashing energy," Kozyrev said.

"It was never a mass-audience group," he said. "It was always so raw that you would never put it on the air."

The band released its last album, "Why Do We Dream?", in May 2007. Last month, Letov said the album had sapped all his energy and that he would stop recording, news agencies reported.

At the time of his death, Letov was married to Natalya Chumakova, the bass player for Grazhdanskaya Oborona. He had no children.

*********
Other obituaries:

http://www.russia-ic.com/culture_art/music/693/

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3418998.ece

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/20/arts/EU-A-E-MUS-Russia-Obit-Letov.php

http://soveticus.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/yegor-letov-had-died/

http://exile.ru/blog/detail.php?BLOG_ID=17090&AUTHOR_ID=

“I have been involved in the most extreme political camps, so I know the inner workings of that all. And I can report that all of it is very stupid and disgusting. All of it. It has to be experienced so as not to get involved in such stuff consciously, which is what I do.”

“I think that in order to live and be creative, which is the same thing, one has to be FREE. In my understanding, freedom means refusal from all the traps of this world. If I can use pompous language, I think that our civilization is a certain type of world order that is fed by certain energies - fear, pain, envy, destruction, the list could be endless. If all the NORMAL people would just get out of it, like out of a zoo, and live on a principle of self-sufficiency, self-freedom - not fighting them, not even contacting, creating our own squats, systems, labels, music, creative stuff etc. on a “do it yourself” principle - all the rest of the world will just DIE by itself. And it does, very visibly.”

“Just like we’ve been, we’ve remained a rebellious, superrebellious band. But the frontline is moving ever deeper and deeper, now it is beyond politics, ideology, religion.”
(from 2004-2006 fan-conducted interviews via the band’s official website).

In a 2007 Rolling Stone interview he claimed that he remains an anarchist, but is more interested in the environmental aspects of anarchism.

AMEN, BROTHER!

*********

Some YouGoggle links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJuyi4iZ6uc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhaekTgbI6M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mDLLQNqWGg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTMGTtAlAJQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yysW_O-ylWw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9iWTY0Bzg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNd7LwbOv54&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGTo8jzElrw&feature=related


*********

Everything is Going According to Plan

The key to our borders has been broken in two
And Our Father Lenin has withered away--
He's decayed into mold and wild honey.
And the Perestroika is still going and going according to plan.
And the mud has turned into bare ice.

And everything is going according to plan.
And everything is going according to plan.

Well, my destiny wants some rest.
I've promised it not to join the game of war.
But on my army cap, there is a hammer and a sickle and a star
How touching-a hammer, a sickle and a star.
The wild lantern of anticipation is flailing

But everything is going according to plan.
Everything is going according to plan.

Well, they fed my wife to the crowds.
With the fist of the world they pounded in her chest.
With worldwide liberty they tore her flesh.
So bury her in Christ!

But everything is going according to plan.
Everything is going according to plan.

Only our grandfather Lenin was a good leader.
All the other ones are such shit.
All the others are enemies and such fucking assholes.
Over the homeland, the land of our fathers, an insane snow was falling.
I bought a "Korea" magazine--they have it good too.
They have Comrade Kim Il-sung, they have the same as we do.
I am sure that they have the same thing and everything is going according to plan.

And everything is going according to plan.
Everything is going according to plan.

Well, when we get communism it'll all be fucking great.
It will come soon, we just have to wait.
Everything will be free there, everything will be an upper.
We'll probably not even have to die.
I woke up in the middle of the night and realized

That everything is going according to plan.
Everything is going according to plan.

*********

Many of the band's albums are available for download here, some even in flac lossless format:

http://www.gr-oborona.info/audio/index.html

Here is his solo album Егор и Опизденевшие - Прыг-Скок (Yegor and the Fuck-ups - Hop-Jump). If you don't read cyrillic, you'll probably need to take a look at this tutorial for using the filehosting site. Edit: After going to all that trouble, I found that the sound quality on this rip is very poor. Have now changed the link to another upload, which may or may not be better; let me know in the comments.

Some more uploads to be found here, here and here.