Masha and Her Bears

... Another Saturday night in Moscow, 11:15 p.m., and a mass of swaying bodies is crammed into Moscow’s hip night club, Svalka  (“trash dump”—one of the capital’s famous tusovkas, a club decorated with old cars and license plates). Masha i Medvedi is scheduled to perform at 11:00PM.

At 12:30 a.m., with the crowd’s energy close to bursting, the group slips onto the stage. No one seems to mind the wait, and as soon as Masha takes the mike and plunges into her latest hit Reykyavik, it is clear the group has got their sound together, with Masha’s dynamic vocals leading the way through song after song. A baseball cap covers a shaved head and a baggy worker’s outfit conceals a slender, 5’2” frame. But looks can be deceiving. The 21-year-old Masha belts out deep vocals that reverberate off club walls with aforce you can’t help but dance to.

Their mix of cheerful tunes (Lyubochka, whose lyrics were adapted from a kids’ poem written by Soviet poet Agniya Barto) with a little taste of melancholy (Bez tebya—“Without You”), makes Masha i Medvedi a fresh cross between the “Smashing Pumpkins” and “The Cranberries.” Add to that a love potion of Russian-style, on-stage enthusiasm and it is easy to see why this group is popular with the youth: there is a great range and variety in their music, and they put everything they’ve got into each song.

Masha i Medvedi (“Masha and Bears”) play their entire album, sounding twice as good in concert as on their CD. This may be easy to explain: Masha hates both singing in studio and lip-syncing.

In her apartment on Moscow’s Pyrieva street, recovering after a concert, Masha makes her view clear: “I am strongly against lip-syncing ... it is dishonest, I feel terrible about it ... Because performing is like drinking real beer. When you don’t sing live, it is like pretending you are drinking real beer.”

Surprisingly enough, Russian lawmakers, most of whom are old enough to be Masha’s parents, seem to share her disdain for lip-syncing. As the Moscow Times reported in late 1999, the State Duma passed an amendment to Article 10 of the Law on Consumer Rights, giving consumers the right to ask for a ticket refund “and fines to be paid by the producer and the agent,” if a concert advertised as live is in fact lip-synced. The law requires that concert posters and tickets indicate if performers will be lip-syncing.

Such legal innovations can’t but add value to devout “natural” singers like Makarova, a typical, self-made Russian pop star of the ‘90s. She began her rise by performing live at Russia’s Generation music festival three years ago. Back then, Masha was alone, without the Medvedi. She sang her song Dyen i Noch (Day and Night) to taped music. Stepan Stroyev, music director of Moscow’s Russkoye Radio station was a jury member. He said that, from the very moment he saw Masha on stage, he knew she would be a hit: “I listened to Masha’s music and liked her immediately. At that time, everyone in the music business had high hopes for show business in Russia, and we wanted to promote new talent and make money along with them.”

Today, especially after the August, 1998 crisis, these hopes must have vanished. Or at least been seriously undermined. If nothing else, the flourishing multimillion dollar trade in pirated CDs and cassettes means that even successful groups like Masha i Medvedi have to perform live concerts and at fashionable nightclubs to make a living.

“We have played in so many clubs,” Masha said, “I find it hard to remember the names. Once we even sang in a restaurant.” Actually, Masha said she doesn’t mind the numerous concerts; she said she likes “to give energy and take it back ... At all our concerts we have a lot of drive ... Actually, in the studio, we can’t achieve the sound we have in concert.” But what will Masha say about live, late night concerts when she is not as young and energetic as today?

Future financial security for popular groups like Masha i Medvedi depends on whether Russia can turn tough from its timid fight with piracy. On June 1, 1998 sales of video and audio products from tables and in underground passages adjacent to the metro were banned in Moscow. Special identification stamps are now affixed to CDs and cassettes, and a special squad of the Moscow Interior Ministry is charged with cracking down on the illegal CD and video-market. But the track record of similar anti-piracy measures in the alcohol business do not offer too much hope for success. As Sevodnya daily experts noted, the measures will not eliminate audio and video piracy, it will simply restrict it to five or six “traditional, specialized trading places.”

One such “traditional place” is the huge open air CD/cassette market at Moscow’s Bagrationovskaya Metro station: popularly known as the Gorbushka. The market is open only on weekends and sells all kinds of music, from pop to jazz and classic oldies. Most of the music is bootlegged—pirated after the first day of a new CD’s release. Which is why bands do not get any money from CD sales.

“No,” Masha confirms, “we don’t get anything from the CD sales, because we have the real disc sales only on the first day of the release—whatever is sold after that is just pirated stuff.” So, odds are that her new album, Kuda (“Where to?”), scheduled for release on December 15, will share the same fate. And yet, this successful artist confessed to buying pirated CDs—she cannot afford the real ones. “They cost ten times more than pirated discs ... It is a very tricky issue. We are a poor country, what can we do about it? ... The costs of producing a real disc are so high ...”

Last spring, at Saint Petersburg’s Yubileyny Sports Palace, the annual Fuzz Award (sponsored by the Russian music magazine of the same name) for Best New Group went to Masha i Medvedi.

But prior to receiving this prestigious prize, Masha passed through several “obligatory stages” of a young pop singer’s career in Russia.

There is the reluctantly remembered Playboy pictorial. Although the magazine published rather reserved erotica—Masha didn’t pose nude—she said she was ashamed, and did not do it consciously. “For some reason, they brought me to Playboy. I said I didn’t want to, and they kept convincing me that the photos would look stylish ... I would love to work with tasteful people to reach this sexy thing without stripping. It could be just a very serious pensive face that will excite you anyway; this is closer to me ... I don’t like what turned out of this. I don’t like it, it is not me. I am not happy with this work.”

But then Masha wouldn’t do just anything to make money on her pop fame. “We did have an opportunity to do a commercial. We were offered tons of money for one on sanitary towels or something like that. But it is terrible, because you have to know what you are doing ... When we talk about things like shampoos, I realize that I would have to say, “Look, I had dandruff and now I don’t have it ....” The performer cringes.

Masha was born and raised in the southern town of Krasnodar, not far from the breakaway republic of Chechnya. As a child, she dreamed of becoming everything from an ice cream seller to an actress.

“I had a lot of ideas in my head,” she said. “I thought: ‘If you have an interesting life, any job would be interesting.’” But music proved to be her vocation. She plays the flute and guitar and dreams of learning to play many musical instruments. She confessed having felt the musical gift inside her while working as DJ for a local radio station in her home town. “I began listening to so much music and then I met a friend, Yura Zaytsev, who began giving me cassettes of music he liked. This was when Masha developed a liking for modern Irish music. “I felt there was something close to us Russians in this music. Thus, in my very first songs there is a mixture of Russian and Irish influences, which is why many people compare my music to that of the “Cranberries.”

Masha’s first famous national hit, Lyubochka (“Little Lyuba”), was destined for success. The lyrics were based on a poem by the Soviet poet Agniya Barto. “This kind of retro approach works well in Russia,” Stroyev said. “We all remember these poems from our childhood, so it was a win-win trick.” Masha and her Bears struck a deep chord when they sang about “little Lyuba wearing a skirt and a ribbon in her braid—who doesn’t know Lyubochka? Everybody knows her.” There was also a little “foreign taste on Russian soil” in Lyubochka, with the addition of foreign phrases, like “amore-amor,” to the retro poem.

This “foreign taste” continued in Masha’s latest hit, Reykyavik. The title is not a reference to the famous Reagan-Gorbachev summit there. “I just like the word ‘Reykyavik,’” Masha said. “It sounds the same in all languages, but you can play on the accents which fall differently in all languages.” In fact, the song, which Masha wrote, was inspired by her trip to the Icelandic capital.

This new, homegrown star does not, of course, supplant the popularity of internationally known artists like Nirvana and R.E.M. and Madonna. But Masha i Medvedi (along with other popular groups, see sidebar) have given the Russian youth music they can identify with, in their own language.

What Russian youth won’t find (or look for) in Mashi i Medvedi’s music are songs reflecting social issues or the hardships of life in Russia. The mind set of the youth in Russia is the same as everywhere. They want to forget, for a little while, what is going on in the world around them, consider themselves invincible, have high hopes for the future and get from life more than they have. In short, they reflect the recent Pepsi advertising slogan in the Russian media: “Vozmi ot zhizni vsyo” (“Take everything from life”).

Masha’s music is welcome specifically because it is lighthearted and fun. “Masha sings about what any young girl would sing about—mainly love,” said Stroyev. “There are no unexpected themes in her songs.”

Or, as Sergei Chernov, music reporter for the Moscow Times, observed after this year’s Fuzz awards: “Old perestroika rock is out, the mainstream is in. Ideology in music is passé, and emphasis is on the quality pop product.” With her look of nonchalance, the Irish flavor in her music and the unpredictable temperament of a young Russian from the South, Masha Makarova (and her bears) seems to be just what the market ordered.