Pussy Riot Released Their New Video, Complete with Footage of Them Getting Beat Up
Pussy Riot's controversial music video for "Putin will teach you how to love the motherland" is up on YouTube, and it features footage of the band getting beat up while attempting to film the video yesterday. It's also surprisingly professional and kind of perfect.
.Pussy Riot's controversial music video/new protest song "Putin will teach you how to love the motherland" is up on YouTube, and it features footage of the band getting beat up while attempting to film the video yesterday. It's also surprisingly professional and kind of perfect.
Collective members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have said that their activism takes precedence over art, but that may be underselling their work. The video starts out with fake-out soft music as the band members emerge from the ocean, before launching into more traditional punk rock. The band, dressed in trademark balaclava, stomps and sings in Sochi, before being stopped on occasion by thugs dressed as Russian cossacks. They also dance with a Sochi mascot.
The beating/arrest scenes would seem kind of cheesy if it wasn't real — and if we didn't watch footage of it happen, yesterday. The fact that the officers, dressed as cossacks, are so stereotypically brutal in their treatment of the band members makes Pussy Riot's point even more resonant. They couldn't have scripted better if Putin was actually the director.
The collective posted English lyrics to the song on their blog. The song makes references to controversial events during the Olympics, like the selection of racist tweeter Irina Rodnina to light the Olympic torch, increased surveillance during the event, the detention of environmentalist Yevgeny Vitishko, the prevalence of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) — which arrested them days ago — and more. Here are the lyrics in full:
50 billion and a gay-driven rainbow,
Rodnina and Kabaeva will pass you those flames
In prison they will teach you how to obey
Salut to all bosses, hail, duce!
Putin will teach you how to love the motherland
Sochi is blocked - Olympic surveillance
Special forces, weapons, crowds of cops
FSB is an argument, the police is an argument State tv will run your applause.
Putin will teach you how to love the motherland
Spring to Russia comes suddenly
Hello to the messiah as a shot from Avrora
The prosecutor will put you down
Give him some reaction and not those pretty eyes
A cage for the protests, vodka, matrioshka
Prison for May 6, more vodka and caviar
The Constitution is lynched, Vitishko's in prison
Stability, the prison meal, the fence and the watchtower
For TV Rain they've shut down the airwaves
They took gay pride down the washroom
A two-ass toilet - a priority
Sentence to Russia, medium security, 6 years
Putin will teach you how to love the motherland
The motherland
The motherland
The motherland
The pair, who spent nearly two years in Russian prisons for a similar video shot in a Russian church, condemned President Vladimir Putin for releasing them as part of a publicity stunt ahead of the Winter Olympics. During a press conference today, Tolonnikova said "The Olympics have turned ... an authoritarian regime into a totalitarian regime with preventative arrests." She added, "the Olympics creates a space for the complete destruction of human rights in Russia. Here we are banned from speaking out. Here everyone's rights are banned, including political activist, LGBT representatives, ecologists."
Last year, the band released a video of the performance that got three members (including Tolonnikova and Alyokhina) thrown into jail on "hooliganism" charges. It's pretty catchy.