November 1, 2000

Anti-American Song 'Kill the Yankees'
Develops a Strong Following in Russia

By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MOSCOW -- After a concert in the basement of a museum dedicated to a dead Russian poet, a group of earnest young music fans parse the lyrics of their favorite song, which rails against U.S. power and Russian poverty.

"It reflects our true reality, the burning issues of the day," says Konstantin Kudryachev, the event's organizer and an aficionado of Russia's underground music scene. "This is music for the intellect."

But this brain food is served very raw.

It's called "Kill the Yankees" and exercises the mind with verses like this: "Burn the shop with the Americans! Advertise the hard-currency store with a brick. Blow up with a grenade their pretty Chevrolet. Scrawl the word p on their sales logo! Kill the Yankees! Kill the Yankees and all who love the Yankees!"

The song hasn't made pop-music charts -- some radio stations have banned it -- but it has struck a chord among an eclectic bunch of devotees: bookish but bitter students, rebels in leather, and shaggy-haired dropouts. United by their youth, they are a new market for anti-Americanism.

Such sentiments are hardly mainstream: Opinion polls show scant ill will toward Americans among most Russians. But the hostility is breaking out of a ghetto of old-timers wistful for Soviet power and for the stirring strains of the Red Army chorus.

"I think it's perfectly clear what the song means," says Alexander Shalimov, a student at the Moscow State Academy of Information Technology, who attended the recent concert at the Mayakovsky Museum, just across the road from the Lubyanka, headquarters of Russia's secret police.

He takes the words literally. Others, including the songwriter, offer more figurative interpretations. "I'm not sure it's necessary to go out and physically kill Americans," says Dmitri Nechayev, an undergraduate at the Moscow State Institute of Economics. "First of all, one has to kill the Yankee inside oneself."

The debate has left the man who wrote the song, a soft-spoken veteran of Russia's musical underground, feeling a little uneasy. "No one should get killed at my concerts," says the singer-songwriter and self-styled philosopher Alexander Nepomnyashchy. "I've got lots of other songs, but they always want 'Kill the Yankees.' "

When he declined to perform his anti-American anthem at a recent concert, he was jeered by foot-stomping fans. They calmed down after he agreed to play a different, marginally less incendiary ditty from his repertoire. "Buy Tampax tampons, chew Spearmint gum, eat Snickers bars, drink Hershey's," he wailed. "No matter what, a bullet will be found for you. No matter what, a bullet will be found for you." The audience loved it and joined him in a lusty chorus.

For some young Russians, killing Americans is boffo at the box office. "Brat-2," a movie hit this year, features a baby-faced Russian hit man called Danila who goes from New York to Chicago blowing people's brains out. The film has spawned a Web site -- and a counter Web site was launched by appalled critics. Internet chat rooms froth with polemics on the pros and cons of xenophobic homicide.

"It's so cool the way Danila ices blacks, Ukrainians and dumb Americans. We need more movies like this," writes a Brat-2 enthusiast from Ulyanovsk, Lenin's home town. That draws an angry online response from Moscow: "You clowns are overwhelmed with pride for scum who kill Americans. You are all imbeciles. If it weren't for Americans, we'd have been under Hitler's rule." Another Muscovite jumps in to root for revenge: "I like this film because it shows Americans as they really are -- freaks ... Missiles must be sent to the U.S. free of charge!"

Boris Barabanov, a director of Nashe Radio, a popular Moscow music station, calls it the "pendulum effect." As recently as the early 1990s, he says, American popular culture and icons of success reigned supreme. "Today, young people see ordinary Americans as dolts chewing gum and hamburgers. This stereotype has replaced the old stereotype of the successful young businessman."

The shift has been a big boost to Mr. Nepomnyashchy's career, and it has also helped his rage-filled rivals -- groups with names like Mental Depression, AK-47 and Spleen. Mr. Kudryachev, the underground music aficionado, says Mr. Nepomnyashchy has a firm lock on the market: "He's found his niche in this type of art."

Impetus for Inspiration

The artistic seeds that blossomed into "Kill the Yankees" were first planted during the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq. Mr. Nepomnyashchy has been tinkering with the lyrics ever since. The song crystallized into its current feverish form during last year's U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

A series of demonstrations were held outside the U.S. embassy after air strikes began in March. Protesters hurled paint, threw rocks and screamed Mr. Nepomnyashchy's lyrics and other anti-American abuse through bullhorns. Police shut down the protests after a man in fatigues drove up and tried to blast the embassy with a rocket-propelled grenade. When the weapon jammed, he opened fire with a Kalashnikov rifle. (Nobody was hurt, but the embassy facade was peppered with bullets.) Mr. Nepomnyashchy says that he attended some of the embassy rallies but missed the gunfire.

The songwriter says he has nothing against Americans personally and cites Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain as heroes. But he has trouble naming a living American he likes. The lyricist himself is a partisan of the kill-the-inner-Yankee school of musical interpretation. "It's necessary ... to kill the values of liberal, postindustrial society," he says.

But subtlety is lost on wilder concertgoers with a taste for skull-motif jewelry. During intermission in a club near Moscow State University, Mr. Nepomnyashchy tries to explain what he refers to delicately as his "problematic relations with America." Nearby, an angry youth howls: "I loathe all you Americans." Another babbles obscenities and shakes his fist between gulps of beer. Mr. Nepomnyashchy tells them to shut up.

Truly Uncommercial

The musician hasn't made much money from his underground celebrity. Mainstream music shops don't stock his crudely recorded tapes, and his mostly cash-strapped fans tend to make their own bootleg copies. On tour, he sleeps with friends, often on the floor. His favorite hangout in Moscow is the Metro.

Contemptuous of what he calls "supermarket mass culture," he says he wants to stay true to an unsullied tradition of artistic protest dating back to the Soviet Union, when dissidents wrote samizdat books and alternative musicians recorded homemade tapes known as magnitizdat. All that has changed, he says, is the target.

In the Soviet Union the enemy was the suffocating conformity of communism. Today, says Mr. Nepomnyashchy, it's the shallow orthodoxy of American-style capitalism. "You call it the 'American dream.' I call it the values of a big supermarket. You enter it and select whatever you want: the Gospel, the Bhagavad-Gita, Russian dumplings or the collected works of Faulkner."

He warms to his theme. "The more we consume, the more we depend on what we consume. I think asceticism is the main perquisite for human freedom," he says, and lights up a Marlboro Light.

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com