Filed Under: Topic > Nationalism > The Hit Song “Ubyli Negra” (1999): Dark Humor or Racism?

The Hit Song “Ubyli Negra” (1999): Dark Humor or Racism?

The lyrics and video to the surreal song “Ubily negra [They Killed a Black Man],” one of the hits of 1999, reflect important tendencies and transformations in Russian media at the turn of the millennium. Around this time, discursive strategies traditionally belonging to the cultural and artistic underground, like stiob—a form of parody based on overidentification with its own object—were increasingly absorbed into mainstream media. In Russia, dark, “politically incorrect” humor emerged partly as a reaction to official late-Soviet discourse on “friendship of the peoples,” race and gender equality, world peace, and respect for the environment. Another contributing factor to the rise of “anti-PC” culture was the flood of “Western values” and concepts attending early post-Soviet economic measures like the “shock therapy” and the immiseration and deep social injustice they produced. Starting in the early 2000s, these stiob-inflected strategies grew so widespread that they became defining features of Russian identity at the level of official culture, foreign diplomacy, and state apparatuses—in the sense that Russia and its leaders would themselves become associated with forms of trolling and resistance to Western or American values and norms.

The reception, popularity, and controversies surrounding “Ubili negra” reflect these broader processes within Russian public culture. Written and performed by the relatively unknown alternative rock band Zapreshchennye barabanshchiki (Forbidden Drummers), the song became popular thanks to the radio station Nashe radio (Our Radio), MTV, and the support of music critic Artemy Troitsky (1955-). The song’s lyrics and video contain vile racial stereotypes, but, arguably, the primary targets of this surreal parody were not racial minorities themselves, either in Russia or elsewhere. Instead, at issue was the new hegemony of Western or American popular culture in Russia, complete with aggressive materialism and mandatory “political correctness.”

At best, the song evoked the stereotypical representations of African-Americans ubiquitous in Western and Russian TV commercials of the time. Yet the shock value and political ambiguity of the song’s lyrics left it open to far less forgiving interpretations. In response to public accusations of racism, and in order to discourage right-wingers and skinheads from showing up at their concerts, the band added a disclaimer to the video, in which they explained that they categorically opposed any form of racism, and that the song was not meant to advocate for it. Leaving aside the musicians’ personal convictions—for instance, Ivan Trofimov, who wrote some of the band’s lyrics and called himself its “ideologist,” was a former member of the National Bolshevik Party—the song demonstrates the volatility of stiob. Indeed, the rejection of “political correctness” at the level of mainstream culture often loses its subversiveness and becomes indistinguishable from bona fide prejudice—a tendency with long-term impacts on Russian public culture under Putin.