When EDM Goes Orientalist

(Courtesy of WallpaperUse.com)

Go through enough Soundcloud rave mixes and you’ll likely come across a thick Slavic accent drooling stereotypical Russian buzzwords – “high track-speed, vodka no limit” – over a hard-bounce bassline. This is хардбас, or hardbass, a bizarre mutation in EDM’s contorted family tree that momentarily exploded the ears of Saint Petersburg’s perestroika-era youth at the end of the millennium, only to slink into obscurity and, more recently, back out.

Hardbass’s original incarnation was a late-Soviet reinterpretation of Dutch gabber, an aggressive, speed-fuelled form of hard techno whose name was taken from a slang word for “friend”. Infused too with the rubbery thwacks of north-west English donk and vocals inspired in delivery and content by American hip-hop, hardbass’s influences were multiple and, significantly, international, symptomatic of a globalising Soviet Union no longer able to maintain its state-controlled cultural insularity against the heady economic and social malaise of its late-90s lot.

However, hardbass’s ends were distinctly nationalistic, its lyrics often laden with misogynistic gesturing and alt-right dog-whistling. Its self-articulation was therefore something of a paradox, an internationally informed musical niche constructed as a reaction against Russian Westernisation and in assertion of a nationalist subcultural sound. Not that hardbass was the first movement to do this: in the early 1970s, an underground of musicians in a newly independent Zambia drew on the funk-psychedelia of American pioneers like Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple to curate an independent Zambian sound, dubbed “Zamrock”. However, the reactionary extremes to which hardbass took this notion were extraordinary, becoming synonymous with an emergent gopnik youth culture commonly associated with street crime, prison gangs, organised delinquency, and a red-faced neo-Nazism. This was a far cry from the leftist, ecstasy-flavoured spirituality of the Summer-of-Love rave culture from which the genre was now so distantly descended, its unconscionable enfant terrible.

The gopnik itself is too something of a weird footnote in Russian history, its street-style iconography of Adidas tracksuits, workers’ caps, and Slavic squats transforming from sources of genuine middle-class anxiety for early 2000s Russians into a Facebook-meme trope mocking the hardships of day-to-day life in the former Eastern bloc. This was cemented in popularity during the 2010s by the rise of YouTubers like Life of Boris, who claimed to embody authentic gopnik lifestyle and helped crystallise a virtual post-Soviet imaginary through parodic video guides on how to cook food or fix cars like a real working-class Russian.

Hardbass, as the gopnik’s musical weapon of choice, gained its own cult of sub-ironic appreciation as the gopnik legend grew, proliferating alongside other absurdist Internet micro-genres like nightcore and vaporwave which gained genuine club-world credence with the emergence of artists like SOPHIE, A.G. Cook, and 100gecs in the mid-2010s. This congealed with the wider 2010s meme-ification of Soviet history and culture, spearheaded by Life of Boris and his virtual companions, to birth a seemingly bottomless comedic pool at Russia’s expense: a bastardised second wave of hardbass which replaced the original incarnation’s grim politicism with intentionally idiotic lyrics drawing from the piecemeal constellation of Russian cultural symbols and icons that the early Internet had constructed, from Stalin to gopniki to vodka to borscht.

The half-natural result was songs like DJ Blyatman and dlb’s “Kamaz”, the offender cited at the start of this article for its nonsensical regurgitating of Russophone tropes in a Bond-villain Slavic accent which make it no wonder why Eastern Europeans are so quick to denounce the genre as wholly unrepresentative of their culture. And, while hardbass’s first iteration was at least the authentic – albeit politically reprehensible – invention of an imbittered working-class youth who turned to EDM’s sonic overstimulation as anaesthesia for the inertia of late-socialist life, this second wave, born of the Internet-era, feels a strangely orientalist means of representing the post-Soviet landscape, recalling historian Larry Wolff’s account of the “invention” of Eastern Europe as a bleak land of unsophisticated realities, lives, and people trapped behind its own intellectual iron curtain.

However, the tapestry’s more complex than that. Because although such songs may initially read as misplaced attempts to capitalise on Western rave culture’s Eastern European fetishism – the sustained mythology surrounding Berghain, an ex-Soviet heating plant turned tech-music mecca, representing the apotheosis of this tendency – the fact of the matter is that the majority of hardbass producers are native Eastern Europeans. The dilemma is then that, although there are plenty of contemporary hardbass musicians who choose not to appropriate orientalising imagery in producing their tracks, such artists remain completely side-lined in favour of the likes of DJ Blyatman, whose “Kamaz” boasts in excess of 44million YouTube views, or Estonia’s Tommy Cash, whose international collaborators include Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and Rick Owens. That the gopnik in its current, meme-saturated form was an early-Internet invention of the Russian middle class made to mock their working classes – comparable in essence to Vicky Pollard’s 2000s salience in imagining of the UK’s “Council-House-And-Violent” yout – to only afterwards be adopted by an international audience in making a visual lexicon for Russia at-large complicates this narrative further.

What we are left with is a double appropriation, first of Russian working-class culture by the Russian middle class, and then of their Eastern-bloc inside joke by a Western Internet market, its cultural micro-colonialism performed primarily through social media shitposting and farcically-named hardbass tracks such as “BASSPUTIN” or “Party Like Stalin”. And yet, in a rave-world music-scape defined so often by intentional artifice, self-fashioned immaturity, and a heavy dose of post-Internet irony – the age birthed from PC Music’s post-pop-star pop, of barnyard-themed raves and DJs of the Absolutely Shit or Fingerblast ilk – maybe such self-deprecating Slavic stereotyping is a natural fit, orientalising or not.