Stalin Surf

Surfing and surf music both owe a lot of their respective images and cultural identity to each other. But what happens when a completely polar-opposite outside influence tampers with that identity? One of the most powerful and murderous dictators in human history, Stalin was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for quarter of a century. His notorious gulag prison camps left a bloody legacy that would seem unlikely to be associated with the carefree, simple and seemingly innocent sounds of traditional Hawaiian surf music, but the combination of influences is proving to be a surprise hit.
 
Stalin-era Hawaiian-styled surf songs, mixed by a Russian DJ are taking over the airways in Eastern Europe, with thousands of copies flying off the store shelves and even starting to make their way to the West, via a slow trickle of unscrupulous sellers on ebay and MySpace.

Gulag Tunes, created by Mikhail Antipov, is a collection of authentic Stalin-era prison songs mixed with traditional ukulele-laden surf music, with the cover album showing Stalin draped in a Hawaiian-style lei garland made of skulls instead of flowers.

Antipov says of his runaway success: "We call this classic rebellious prison music 'blatniye pesni' and I have added luau-style percussion and keyboards. "It is so popular because the topic is very rich, and no one has ever done this before."

According to Ananova.com, songs include a take on the classic Vaninsky Port which refers to a network of Stalin-era prison camps. Sounds pretty far removed from Waikiki, but it kinda works in a real darkly-quirky kind of way. And while most surf music purists might recoil at the thought of their craft being associated with one of man's darkest eras - even Gulag Song's MySpace profile states; "These songs are made for drinking and weeping" - it's done in such a ( hopefully) tongue-in-cheek kinda way that it simply becomes a stylised oddity, like a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. But music to amp up for a surf to? We think not. Maybe just give it a spin next time you wanna break out the vodka and pull out your fingernail with rusty pliers.

Links:
MySpace
Buy Gulag