Sorry, there is a post with five new songs a little further down the page. My technical ineptitude means i can't get them up here where they should be. Never mind.

Some of you may remember Min Net, the trashy Russian girl group with logo knickers. I've just found out that their manager / creator Alexei Mitrofanov has just made a rather bizarre new foray into the world of politics. He has directed a half-hour-long softcore porn film about a hypothetical meeting between the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko and current Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Rumour has it that it was funded by Vladimor Zhirinovsky's right-wing LDPD of which Mitrofanov is a member. Awesome.

It's not the first time pop culture and politics have collided in post-Soviet Russia - remember Poyushie Vmeste (Singing Together).



Legend has it that a Moscow radio station had a late-night knock at the door from a couple of burly men in suits who gave them a CD and informed them that they’d better give it heavy rotation if they knew what was good for them. Within days the song was enormous across Russia. Normally such tales would be written off as a marketing trick or low-level mafia intimidation, the nature of the song, however, has suggested a more sinister and, indeed, more hilarious course of events.

Takogo Kak Putin! (or, the English language version, You Must Be Like Putin!) is, as the name suggests, a hymn to the great leader, set to a thumping techno-pop backing. Our heroine laments “my boyfriend is dumb / he smokes and he’s drunk” so decides to replace him with a man more like the President. Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that it’s a Kremlin-backed plot to create a cult of personality around Vladimir Vladimirovich amongst the Russian youth as he aims to centralise power and restrict the freedom of the media. Others have suggested that it’s a Kremlin-backed plot to help Putin pick up chicks. Either way, it’s all extremely amusing and has left us with the legacy of a fairly decent LP and one of the finest album covers in history.


Poyushie Vmeste - You Must Be Like Putin