Why is there no Russian hip hop?

i thought there WAS russian hip hop.

if i had the $$, i'd buy colin a ticket to NYC and i'd take him to brighton beach. which means that, yes, there is such a thing as russian hip-hop.

dj vadim? or is that too far removed from "real" hip hop?

Tad, amateurist, do give names. I'm not really thinking of Vadim-style hip hop, but wordier stuff. In Russian.

chego?!!!!!!!1

ok, for starters:

try detsl. i recommend 'pismo'
hes the son of muzTV in russia, which is like alterna-MTV, hence his fame. hes like a hip hop gareth gates, with really shit dreds. Pismo means letter, and is a straight rip off of 'stan'. the plot is, this girl from smallsville, volga region writes to him because she cant handle everyone at school n shit being wankers, they just dont understand. shes at her wits end, so she cuts all her hair off (!?); at this point in the video she is FINE. cute girls with shaved heads?! then it goes a bit wierd and starts going on about neo fascists. but it has go amazing backwards running string stabs in it!
you can download the video as a zip file from here

anything else, check bad balance alliance. sheff is alright.

actually, i cant think of any others, but there is loads.

nedd some help here, estonian/finnish ILMers!

I've heard some Russian hip hop (which sounded good), but I can't recall the names. Russian records are quite hard to get, even here, right next door to them. Because of the language barrier hip hop in Russian probably hasn't too much import appeal, just like hip hop in Finnish. Or have you ever heard Finnish hip hop either?

By the way, Colin, the Russian language sound very good when rapped, almost as good as French.

I'm surprised EVERY language doesn't sound better. Doesn't English have the least rhyming words of any language or something? I could be mistaken.

inflected languages (like russian and most of the other slavonic languages (not bulgarian or macedonian tho')) do have much richer rhyming resources than english because the endings of virtually all nouns and adjectives follow regular patterns, meaning that a noun of a given grammatical gender can rhyme with any other noun of that gender. (e.g. in russian all 'feminine' nouns end in -a, all 'neuter nouns end in -o or -e etc.) adjectives change their endings to compliment the nouns too.

Also, the fact that Russian grammar is not dependent upon word order means you can string a sentence together in almost any way you want to and it will still make the same sense. I imagine that if I wrote lyrics in Russian, I'd end every line with an adjective, just endless "aya"s, "oyo"s, "yeye"s, "om"s and "ovo"s...

word!

well, i dont think that russians a particularly good language for rap. the words are just too convoluted. if you listen to a track like 'piter ya tvoi' bad balance alliance, then it just doesnt quite flow right. maybe its the delivery rather than the language, but at the moment it doesnt seem to fit the thoeries that are being postulated here. i mean, a rhyme that just consisted of exactly the same adjectival endings sounds pretty boring to me.

also, not all feminine or neuter nouns end in -a or -o...

eh? where did my "< Pendant>" joke-tags go?

Not sure if Attwenger fits into this category. (not sure if they are speaking Russian or are from another Eastern Block country) But some songs of their's, "1,2,3" and another one beginning with an 'r' (sorry don't have the cd handy) sound almost like rap, except accompanied by an accordian... next...

ok, i forgot about feminine nouns that end in soft consonants etc. big deal. also, i personally wasn't postulating any theories about russian hip-hop (i haven't heard any), just pointing out why rhyme as a poetic device has potentially far greater scope in russian (for example) than in english, where it often runs the risk of sounding hackneyed.

I dunno, Ambrose. Maybe Russian rap is a bad example, esp. if we're going to use Detsl, because it's not that good (yet). But the Russian singer-songwriter (Vitsotsky) and lyrical poetry (Pushkin!) traditions seem to indicate that the limited rhyme "palette" and consonant heavy words can lend themselves to very beautiful verse. See also German. Also, keep in mind that to other peoples, English sounds hard, glottal, and cumbersome as well. (certainly you've had Russians tell you that your language and your accent in Russian is "hard" while theirs is "soft"? I got that all the time in the CIS...) If we want to talk about the limitations of language in rap, I'd say what English has going for it is the versatility of it's parts of speech - how a noun or verb can easily be transformed into an adjective, often without modifying it in any way - "swim suit" for example - but that's it, really.

erm, I didn't even try to include pedant tags. perhaps i should have.

I think there is lots of Russian hip hop. I remeber reading an article a ferw years ago about and its supposed to be a big scene, with lots of outdoor events in Moscow etc. The thing that sticks in my mind from the article was that it was cloesly associated with far right politcs.

i love this thread

??????? er i dont think this is true. in moscow there have been wvaes of violence on the part of 'skinhedi', basically neo-nazi 17 yr olds, whoi rush chechen and armenian market holders and beat the shit out of them/stab them. there was a period where the skinhedi and the 'rapperi' (no translation necessary - the 'i' is a plural ending), ie the russian equivalent of skate kids, had massive gang warfarew type shit going on. but the rapper kids always got fucked over cos theres hardly any of them.

there is a lot of hiphop in russia though. its a fairly nation-wide phenomenon, in that even in the provinces there are crews and people starting up. to be honest, i really think this is part due to detsl, anfd the rapid spread of MUZtv round russia.

a potential russian beyonce - alcy, and try slivki for some misteeq style stuff. except they dont have the producers yet. they both need the neps' number! maybe that guy who did the lisa maffia tune would be cheaper...

sorry x-post. i think its true that am loves this threa, i was referring to the far-right link thing

Hey bro`s I`m from Bulgaria and I wanna so much to sing a song on Russian.I have songs on Bulgarian,english,german, but I want to sing on Russian.If there someone to write me a text I`d be very greatfull.Write me on my e-mail Da_Saint@abv.bg
Re$p3c7

You're from Bulgaria and you don't know Russian? That's a first.

Yawn. Lots of Russian rap and hip-hop:

1. http://www.rap.su
Click once to enter, wait out the short flash, and then click on the fourth button from the left to watch the video. Self-explanatory.

2. http://www.badb.ru
Site of Bad Balance, who claim the title of Russia's oldest rap collective. (Going back to the 80s). A few mp3s available for download in section 5 (audio).

And all kinds of (free, legal) mp3s to downlad from the Russian Rap portal at http://detsl-rap.nm.ru/music.htm

3.