Milestones

Kino

Name: Kino – Zvezda po imeni Solntse
Item: Zvezda po imeni Solntse
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Zvezda po imeni Solntse

1989 (Self-released)

post-punk

by Federico Romagnoli

1989 is one of the key years of the twentieth century. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of nearly every European regime, the Beijing massacre: at the center of it all, always, communism, which was heading toward its final defeat, dissolving in Europe or slowly veering toward capitalism in Asia.

The Soviet Union would hold out against the shockwave for another couple of years, until the conflict between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, which passed through a restructuring of the state and a failed coup, would become irreconcilable.

All this is well known to anyone who lived through those years, or who later became fascinated by the history of the twentieth century. What is not well known is how those events were experienced by the people on the ground, because news reporting, by its nature, recounts facts but cannot dwell on giving them context.

The names of Chinese cultural figures caught up in the Tiananmen Square protests, such as the singer-songwriter Hou Dejian and the writer Liu Xiaobo, thus remain unknown to the general public, just as the films that brought a generation of young Russians to the cinema and injected them with the will to change things remain unknown. Or perhaps it was those very films that were fed by a broader climate pushing in that direction, in a kind of virtuous circle: the fact remains that every young person of that era knows "Assa" ("Асса", 1987) and "Igla" ("Игла", 1988).

Viktor Tsoi, leader of the rock band Kino, appears in both: in the first only as a cameo in the finale, memorable as it is, in the other as the lead in the role of Moro, a mysterious character (his occupation and past unknown) grappling with the drug dealers who turned his ex-girlfriend into a heroin addict. The desolation of the landscapes shown and the sense of decline, decay and inevitability that permeates the social system depicted in the film merged with Tsoi's figure, turning him into an icon. One of the themes the film pushes hardest is undoubtedly the absence of the State, whose collapsing organization leaves ever wider room for poverty and desperation, humus ideal for breeding crime: Tsoi thus becomes the hero who steps in to fill the void left by institutions.

As if overlapping with Moro, following the very same value system that made that character heroic, Tsoi was becoming a generational symbol beyond the world of cinema too. Under his leadership, Kino were reaching, precisely in that period, staggering heights of popularity, effectively forcing the State to lift its censorship of rock music (which had indeed been loosening since 1980, but still remained a tangible and oppressive enemy).

How Kino achieved that triumph with the public we have already recounted on OndaRock on the occasion of the related monograph, which we invite you to read, in order to better understand their journey and stylistic signature, as well as to properly place the album analyzed in this article within a discography that is brief but intense, packed with memorable songs.

"Zvezda po imeni Solntse" ("Звезда по имени Солнце", "A Star Called Sun") was released in that fateful year of 1989 as a cassette tape, self-distributed by the band itself. Kino refused, under any circumstances, to sign with the state label Melodiya, notoriously reluctant to pay contracted musicians beyond a set ceiling.

The opening of the tracklist, entrusted to "Pesnya bez slov" ("Песня без слов"), is breathtaking. Thedrum machine Yamaha RX-5, programmed by drummer Georgy Guryanov, shows off a killer beat (nothing this massive comes to mind except in Sisters Of Mercy), while guitarist Yuri Kasparyan keeps two guitar lines going, one all minimalist reiterations and reflections, the other distorted, repeatedly climbing into a superhumanriff, as if trying to set to music all the severity and harshness of centuries of Russian history.

"Pachka sigaret" ("Пачка сигарет") is the era's immortal song, a solemn ballad that's a crucible of sounds and sensations. Kasparyan perhaps reaches his peak here, with superb interplay of harmonics and reverbed arpeggios. As the sounds of his six strings overlap like the chiming of crystal, Tsoi digs into the listener with his emblematic baritone, chasing the backing vocals in canon, once again narrating the frustration of a generation: "And no one wanted to be guilty without guilt, and no one wanted to gather embers with their hands, but without music it's not even good to die in public, but without music you don't feel like losing yourself."

The title track stylistically ties back to the previous album, "Gruppa krovi" ("Группа крови", 1988), with a rigid post-punk gait, metronomic guitars and melancholy touches of piano. Its pacifist lyrics make it one of their manifestos: "War is a young man's business, a cure for wrinkles. Red, red blood, in an hour it'll be nothing but earth, in two years grass and flowers will grow there, in three it'll be alive again, warmed by the rays of a star named the sun."

The fourth big hit is "Stuk" ("Стук"), which in any Western country would at most have become a goth-club anthem, with its dark, relentless bassline, saturated guitars, and sinister metallic tolling accompanying Tsoi at the end of every verse. But in that context, with an audience starved for a guide to show them the light, it becomes a symbol of hope for a generation: "A strange beat invites me to leave, maybe it's my heart, or maybe someone's knocking at the door. And when I turn around on the threshold, I'll say just one word: believe it!"

The remaining tracks are less celebrated but all more or less revered. The mastery Kino had achieved by this point is fully spelled out in the sonic extremes touched on this album. On one hand, "Mesto dlya shaga vpered" ("Место для шага вперёд"), their first dance track, a little pop gem of synthetic programming, featuring one of the most intricate lines ever composed by bassist Igor Tikhomirov. On the other, the ancestral folk march "Aprel'" ("Апрель"), where choirs rooted in the depths of time frame some of Tsoi's most vivid lines: "And the snow falls like a wall, and the snow falls all day long, and behind that wall lies April. It will come and bring spring with it, and scatter the ranks of grey clouds, and when we all look into its eyes, melancholy will look back at us from its eyes."

Riding the success of the album, Kino took the stage on 24 June 1990 at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium, playing in front of sixty thousand people. It would be their last concert. On 15 August, while driving back from a day of fishing in Latvia, Tsoi died in a car accident. The nation suddenly lost the embodiment of a freedom that had seemed just within reach. For thousands of young people, their greatest point of reference vanished overnight; some even took their own lives. Guryanov, Kasparyan and Tikhomirov decided they could not carry on, disbanding the group in January 1991, just after releasing one final legendary album with a black, untitled cover, assembled from the last demos Tsoi had recorded.

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12/01/2020

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. Песня без слов (Pesnya bez slov)
2. Звезда по имени Солнце (Zvezda po imeni Solntse)
3. Невеселая песня (Neveselaya pesnya)
4. Сказка (Skazka)
5. Место для шага вперёд (Mesto dlya shaga vpered)
6. Пачка сигарет (Pachka sigaret)
7. Стук (Stuk)
8. Печаль (Pechal')
9. Апрель (Aprel')

KINO on the web

Russmus

Lyrics in Italian

Kino on OndaRock

Monograph

Kino

The post-punk of perestroika

Viktor Tsoi is perhaps the greatest icon of Russian rock. Dead at twenty-eight in a car accident, he still had time to produce a series of legendary albums and to defy the Soviet regime's censorship of rock music. We retrace the history of his band