The Soviet Union creates a list of 38 dangerous rock groups: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, People & More village (1985)

Image of Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons

Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intention, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the United States throughout the Cold War. I remember bringing books before the Berlin Wall fell, through family friends fearing the ills of popular music, especially punk rock and metal, but also almost everything else. The descriptions of these paranoid zones of the groups that I knew and loved seemed so ridiculous and hyperbolic that I could not help suspect that everyone was in fact a work of satire. They were at least anachronistic, but ideal, POE law.

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This can be your reaction to a list published in 1985 by the Komsomol, the Soviet Youth Organization has formed as the young Leninist communist league All-Union In 1918. (Find it below.) Composed of thirty-eight punk groups, Rock, Metal, Disco and New Wave, the list is not at all different from the printed materials at the same time by certain young organizations with which I came into contact.

State repression mechanisms in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika Ossumené relatively light attempts of musical censorship made by the American government, but the propaganda mechanisms were similar. As in the alarmed brochures and the books which were given to me in the churches and the summer camps, the Komsomol list describes each group in obtuse and absurd terms, each a category of the propaganda propaganda.

Black Sabbath, a legitimately frightening – and politically clever – band is fixed with Iron Maiden for “violence” and “religious obscurantism”. (Nazareth is also guilty of “violence” and “religious mysticism”.) A large number of artists are accused of “violence” or “sex”, which, in some cases, was in a way their whole job. A handful of punk groups – Sex pistols, shock, strangers – are cited for violence, and also simply accused of “punk”, a crime given as an offense of ramons. There are a few strangely specific accusations: Pink Floyd is guilty of a “distortion of Soviet foreign policy (” Soviet aggression in Afghanistan “)” and the heads who speak approve the “myth of the Soviet military threat”. A couple of incongruous hilarious hilarious tags offer lols: Yazoo and Depeche in mode, two of the softest bands of the time, are called for “punk, violence”. Kiss and the villagers (above), two of the most stupid bands on the list, were spread, “neofascism” and “violence”.

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1. Sex pistols: punk, violence
2. B-52S: Punk, violence
3. Madness: punk, violence
4. Clash: Punk, violence
5. Stranglers: punk, violence
6. Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence
7. Crocus: violence, cult of the strong personality
8. Styx: violence, vandalism
9. Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism
10. Judas priest: anti -communism, racism
11. AC / DC: neofascism, violence
12. Sparks: neofascism, racism
13. Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism
14. Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism
15. Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism
16. Scorpions: violence
17. Gengis Khan: anti -communism, nationalism
18. UFO: violence
19. Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet aggression in Afghanistan”) ***
20. Speaking heads: myth of the Soviet military threat
21. Perron: eroticism
22. Bohannon: eroticism
23. Original: Sex
24. Donna Summer: Eroticism
25. Tina Turner: Sex
26. English Junior: Sex
27. Canned heat: homosexuality
28. Munich machine: eroticism
29. Ramones: punk
30. Van Halen: anti-Soviet propaganda
31. Julio Iglesias: Neofascism
32. Yazoo: punk, violence
33. Depeche mode: punk, violence
34. Village people: violence
35. Ten CC: neofascisism
36. Stooges: violence
37. Boys: Punk, violence
38. Blondie: punk, violence

The list circulated in “the aim of intensifying the control of disco activities”. It comes from Alexei Yurchak Everything was forever, until it was no longer: the latest Soviet generationwho quotes him as an example, writes a reader, of “the contradictory nature of Soviet life, where as citizens have participated in the Ritualise, pro formed Ideological discourse, this very discourse allowed them to cut themselves what they called the “normal significant life” which exceeded the ideology of the state. A large part of this “normal” life involved circulating bootlegs of ideological suspect music on improvised materials like X -row thrown and stolen. Komsomol ends up going. While Yurchak documents in his book, they have co-opted local amateur rock groups and promoted their own events as a counterattack on the influence of bourgeois culture. You can probably guess how successful they had with this strategy.

See the complete list of thirty-eight bands and their “type of propaganda” above.

Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2015.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness