This has nothing to do with Norwich but I found it so interesting I just had to share it. Pirating of music has a long history and I had no idea about this chapter. In the Soviet Union from the 1940’s through the 1960’s there were very strict rules about what music was acceptable and what music was not.
Per the Andrei Ahdanov Doctrine of 1946 just about anything from the United States was bad. There was a special hatred for American jazz music as well as modern and Western and so the stilyagi were born.
Stilyagi were rebellious young people in their early twenties who dressed as if they were characters in the movie Grease and could be found lounging on the street corners but were really more interested in being uber-cool than destroying Khrushchev’s regime. They enjoyed the fun of the music and the Western culture, but the movement was largely apolitical in its attitude.
Loosely translated stilyagi is style hunter and that was supposed to embarrass the style forward young. It didn’t and the fashionistas went about getting their stylish clothes and their Western music.
Records or vinyl was hard to obtain but where there is a will, there is a way and soon the stilyagi were rummaging hospital dumpsters and even buying the used x-ray sheets to have someone copy a record onto the vinyl and then cut the sheet into a disc and burn a hold in its center so it could fit on a spindle and be played like a record. It became a black market industry.
The discs were far from perfect and only one side could be used but it was better than no jazz or rock and roll at all. The images on the x-ray could still be seen so they became known as “bone records.” The making and selling of the “bone records” was a thriving industry until 1958 when the discs officially became illegal and making them could result in a prison term.
In the 1960’s Russia began to ease access to Western culture and the stilyagi culture declined.
In 2014, The X-Ray Audio Project was founded to create a database of information on the unique records including images and recordings of many original x-ray tunes. There is even a book about the history of the records. While the stilyagi may no longer be loitering around the streets of Russia, their brand of musical rebellion is still active and the music of the Russian youth is always cutting edge.
Learn more about Bone Music at https://x-rayaudio.squarespace.com/about/
Thanks to Atlas Obscura and Eric Grundhauser .
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