Filed Under: Video > Artistic > Lyube’s “Stop Fooling Around, America!” (1992)

Lyube’s “Stop Fooling Around, America!” (1992)

“Stop Fooling Around, America!” (Ne valiai duraka, Amerika!) is the fourth track on Lyube’s defensively titled second studio album, Who Said We Lived Poorly? (Kto skazal, chto my plokho zhili?, 1992). Written from the perspective of the Russo-Soviet “common man” and using folk vernacular, the song explores the issue of Alaska’s historical and territorial integrity, lamenting its 1867 sale to the United States and demanding its return. The accompanying music video is highly conceptual, with a retro-inspired aesthetic that is impressive for its time—the year following the collapse of Soviet rule, when the music video genre was still in its infancy in Russia. 
 
The video’s stylized Soviet-era newsreel footage, with superimposed animation special effects, was intended for Western as much as for domestic consumption. Its relatively high production values and innovative visuals earned it a prize for the use of “humor and visual effects” at the MIDEM musical recording fair in Cannes. While some critics read “Stop Fooling Around, America!” as pure nationalistic propaganda, others deem it a humorous parody of Soviet-era state militarism. Taking into account producer Igor Matvienko’s (1960-) vision of Lyube as “patriotic rock,” however, it seems clear that the video is a carefully constructed post-Soviet mass entertainment aimed at building a pro-Russian nationalist cultural narrative—in this case, with decidedly threatening geopolitical overtones. 
 
The video’s visual plotline bespeaks Russian military aggression and a longing for territorial expansion into the United States. In one frame, lead singer Nikolai Rastorguyev (1957-), dressed in his trademark military uniform, sizes up the Manhattan skyline with a pair of binoculars as if planning a tactical offensive. The song’s language, meanwhile, mimics the Russian colloquial provincial register. This folksy “everyman” voice creates the illusion of mass support for the rhetoric found in the lyrics, which essentializes Russian folk culture as “banya, vodka, the accordion, and salmon” (bania, vodka, garmon’ i losos’). Other lines assert that “Alaska and Siberia” are two halves of the same whole and demand that the US “Return our sweet Alaska-land, / Return our dear one to us” (Otdavai-ka zemlitsu Aliasochku / Otdavai-ka rodimuiu vzad).
 
In Lyube’s interpretation, the return of “inherently Russian” Alaska to Russia is part of a “natural” historical trajectory dating 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. The song’s seemingly lighthearted geopolitical threats, delivered with a folksy familiarity, create a semantic dissonance with the underlying ideology, which can readily be perceived as humorous. By maintaining plausible deniability in this way, Matvienko and his songwriters are deploying the late-Soviet aesthetic of stiob, which wraps the song’s aggressive position in layers of irony and stereotyped mass entertainment. From our vantage point post-February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—an effort bolstered by colossal propaganda efforts and pervasive media control—“Stop Fooling Around, America!” can be read as a bona fide warning.