Pirate Gallery
Roentgenizdat - Magnitizdat - Samizdat
There was a lot of those bones.
Everywhere: dropped, spread, scattered, smashed…
Skulls, spins, ribs, joints … intact or simply broken …
Back then,
a new fight against the sleepless minds started.
Those bones
covered many different ideas.
One of them was rock-n-roll.
A forbidden dream of freedom.
Those bones were glittering by millions on medical X-ray films, spreading forbidden music.
Smart young created some secret machine to copy records on this floppy material.
It was called the ‘Rock on Bones’
In USSR, music from the West was officially forbidden.
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But still, some free minded people were dealing music as drug dealers with the threat of the prison.
From this prohibition the vinyl black market was born.
The western vinyl would arrive in the country as Contreband.
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But nobody could afford the price…
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So some clever guys had the bright idea of inventing an illegal machine, which could copy those vinyls on pieces of medical X Rays. Dealing them, In their sleeves,
Not to be caught.
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And the time of Rock on Bones started...
We roam through the sparkling St Petersburg
up to the street where the huge poet Joseph Brodsky used to live.
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I understand how much the language,
as the spirit are a resistance.
Brodsky never wanted to obey the system.
He endured many stays in psychiatric hospitals, brainwashed, tortured…
“ I don’t like those whose actions are half hearted,
or who interrupt a cordial extchange
I do not like, those who shoot you in the back,
Or pull a gun on you at point-blank range."
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For all Russians, Vissotsky is a model,
he knows how to talk to each of them.
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His songs echo silently through every flat
on illegal tapes copied, re-recorded on the sly
the « Magizdats »
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One of the rare official ways of hearing Vissotsky,
is through films, thanks to some crafty filmmakers.
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He inspired most of the Rockers…
Samizdat : self publishing
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Individuals were copying by hand, forbidden literature
And pass the documents, from reader to reader
Risking prison.
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Some samizdat were hidden in officially authorized books as a way to spread.
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Ironically, Joseph Brodsky’s trial became a Samizdat.