I spend a nontrivial amount of time scouring YouTube for music playlists that are pretty long for me to play in the background while I’m doing some kind of work. And during one of these scouring sessions, I found this.
Which I found really interesting. This is not the only playlist out here of this… aesthetic, by the way.
I found it interesting because it sounded like an alternate version of the 80s. And I’m also just broadly interested in all things Soviet and American, especially during the chill days so I thought I could talk about that.
Sovietwave is what Electro/Synthwave is to the ‘Western’ bloc1. It is the Soviet variant of the 80s nostalgia, where rappers and musicians, especially from Russia, look to and sample from old Russian cultural products. This is not entirely new or unique, since this is something hiphop artists frequently do over in the States, sampling American blues music from the 50s and 60s.
The key element here appears to be that it is a sibling of the Synthewave genre of music, except it now has the added nostalgia for the Soviet Union, instead of… I dunno, Stranger Things?
The music feels like aspirations for a certain kind of futurism, especially futurism revolving space. A hope for a world where all problems could be solved with science and technology.
Added to this, there’s also a sense of subtle sense of “Look where we could have been, but look where we are now.” Especially considering that the Information Age and the Digital Age started roughly in the 90s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, where most technology we see were served up by the United States and other US-friendly nations, such as Japan.
In short, Sovietwave is a nostalgia for a future that never arrived.
I can keep going on, but there is an even more interesting aspect, I want to throw out real quick - the community surrounding these videos. Reading the comments is a wild ride.
Mostly, we see Russians and other ex-Eastern bloc people commenting about their own nostalgia for the Soviet cartoons and movies they used to watch as a child that the music obviously samples a lot from. This much is obvious - after all, mostly, the language in these songs are Russian.
What’s more intriguing is seeing Americans empathize with this music.
I have seen a lot of comments where people talk about “The Rust Belt”, where entire towns have been abandoned, with houses and factories left to rot and rust. But they remain, and serve as a reminder of a time when people had “something to achieve, something to be proud of, something to look forward to”.
Some comments say something along the lines of, “We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters”, and how “The best minds of our time are wasting their talent trying to discover new ways of getting us to click ads.”
And that’s when you realize that the feeling you get while listening to the music is mourning. Unlike the weird dystopian optimism of Synthwave, Sovietwave is more directly mournful.
They are mourning a dead country.
A lot of comments even talk about the decline of the Soviet Union. About how if things were a little different, humanity could have been in a different place. That when they visit old Soviet cities and look at the architecture, they were reminded that the people who built and lived in these buildings dreamed of flying in space.
The music reminded them of a future that they could only imagine.
The most fascinating takeaway from this is that a nostalgia for the Soviet Union exists, irrespective of political affiliation. It’s still nostalgia, no doubt, and all of these comments oversimplify or ignore the absolute terrible things that also happened in the Soviet Union2.
Of course, this is not dissimilar to why American Synthwave is also popular these days (and the aspirations it also conveys), but that’s a story for another time.
It’s really weird, and interesting, to know that in these divided times, people have somehow collectively empathize and feel nostalgic for a culture that is dead and is politically contentious even today.
In any case, I’d like to leave you with one album that I enjoyed listening to, for no apparent reason except that it sounds really cool.
This is a smaller part of a much larger project that I’m working on to make into a video, so hopefully you enjoyed it.
I’m using ‘Western’ here as shorthand for countries that liked to affiliate themselves to the United States rather than the Soviet Union.
But absolute terrible things also happened in the 80s in the US of A, but we often don’t see people criticizing the 80s nostalgia cycle in American Pop Culture for its rampant McCarthyism.
I let it play as I read. Hope! It brings positivity even while mourning.