Lyube "Stop Fooling Around, America!" (Ne Valiai Duraka, Amerika!) music video

“Stop Fooling Around, America!” (“Ne valiai duraka, Amerika!”) is the fourth track on Lyube’s second studio album Who Said We Lived Poorly? (Kto skazal, chto my plokho zhili?), which was released in 1992. Written from the perspective of the Russo-Soviet “common man,” while using folk vernacular, the song explores questions of Alaska’s historical and territorial integrity – lamenting its sale to the United States and demanding its return while celebrating Russia’s national character. The accompanying music video is highly conceptual and contains a retro-inspired aesthetic quality that is impressive for its time, which spans the year following the collapse of Soviet rule, when the music video genre was still very much in its infancy in Russia. Utilizing stylized Soviet-era newsreel footage with superimposed animation special effects, the music video’s high production value was intended for western consumption, as much as for domestic, earning it a prize for the use of “humor and visual effects” at the MIDEM musical recording fair in Cannes. One of the more notable western reactions to “Stop Fooling Around, America!” has to do with the video’s ideological ambiguity – some critics have read it as nationalistic propaganda, while others deemed it a humorous parody of Soviet-era state militarism. Given producer Igor Matvienko’s vision of Lyube as “patriotic rock,” the video is an early manifestation of carefully constructed post-Soviet mass entertainment aimed at building a pro-Russian nationalist cultural narrative, in this case, with decidedly threatening geopolitical undertones. The visual plotline of the video overtly hints at Russia’s military aggression and territorial expansion directed at the United States. In one frame, lead singer Nikolai Rastorguev, dressed in his trademark military uniform, sizes up the Manhattan skyline with a pair of binoculars, as if planning a tactical offensive. The language used in the song mimics the Russian colloquial provincial register, creating the illusion of mass support of the rhetoric advanced by the lyrics, which essentializes Russian folk culture as “banya, vodka, the accordion, and salmon” (“bania, vodka, garmon’ i losos’”), while demanding of the US to “Return our Alaska land, / Return the dear one to us” (“Otdavai ka zemlitsu Aliasochku / Otdavai ka rodimuiu vzad”). The video also interprets the fictional return of “historically Russian” Alaska as part of a natural historical trajectory from the dawn of the Russian empire, through Communism, and to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, which the music video illustrates in its last frame. Moreover, the song’s seemingly lighthearted geopolitical threats delivered with a folksy familiarity create a semantic dissonance, which can readily be perceived as humorous. Matvienko and his songwriters are utilizing the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob, which effectively hides the song’s aggressive ideological position under the guise of irony and mass entertainment. Within the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is bolstered by Russia’s colossal propaganda efforts and media control that spanned decades, “Stop Fooling Around, America!” can be confidently read as a bona fide warning.