Mumiy Troll's Breakthrough “Utekai (Take Off)" Becomes the 1997 Song of the Year

In 1997, the band Mumiy Troll released its breakthrough album Morskaia—by far the best-selling album of the year in Russia and in several former Soviet countries. The sound and style of Mumiy Troll was entirely new, displaying a lightness and ambiguity that contrasted with the rougher and more straightforward tendencies of bards and rockers of the 1970s and 1980s. Mumiy Troll’s new genre, a combination of alternative rock and pop music for which lead singer Ilya Lagutenko (1968-) coined the term “Rokapops,” was inspired by Britpop. The title of the band’s iconic song, “Vladivostok 2000,” with which MTV Russia began broadcasting in 1998, was an explicit tribute to Pulp’s “Disco 2000.”

Morskaia was recorded in London, where Lagutenko lived and worked as a business consultant, in a collaboration with musicians and producers who had previously worked with bands like The Cure and Tears for Fears. While drawing on these models, Mumiy Troll created something original and grounded in uniquely Russian and post-Soviet experiences. The band’s lyrics were free associations of ideas that defied both logic and grammar, with allusions to provincial “chicks” (devchonki), gangsters, and unfaithful sailor-boyfriends taking off for distant shores from the port of the band’s native Vladivostok. This lyrical lightness, combined with Lagutenko's seductive voice and unsettling, gender-bending look and demeanor, encapsulated 1990s-era Russian youth culture, with its glamor, danger, violence, sexual promiscuity, and queerness.

“Utekai” (“flow away” or “beat it”), Mumiy Troll’s most famous song, contains many of these elements. Lagutenko, who studied Chinese in college and worked as a translator before dedicating himself to music, claims to have written the song’s lyrics in Chinese and then to have translated them into Russian—which, if true, explains the numerous obscure yet catchy lines. The song, which was omnipresent on Russian radio and television, was equal parts sentimental provincialism, Dadaist sadomasochism, and sexual innuendo. In the first verse, the maniac waiting in the dark alley sounds surprisingly alluring—mostly because of Lagutenko’s soothing tone—and clashes with the quiet melancholy of the beauties who “have lost their charms” and the nocturnal landscape of the park with its sleeping gangsters. The end of the verse leaves a carefree “couple of simple young kids” to be torn apart—again, with surprising calm. The second verse (“He will cut me at the seams/ And the border will lose control”) explicitly portrays the experience of being at the mercy of a killer as paradoxically exciting and even arousing.

The music video, which was equally ubiquitous and iconic, maintains the song’s playful approach to violence—with Lagutenko playing the part of a cheerfully sadistic hairdresser who shaves the head of a seemingly nonchalant model (in reality, the young woman had not been warned about the shaving, did not explicitly consent to it, and was terrified on set). Mumiy Troll’s songs are so permanently etched in Russian collective memory that the 2000-ruble bill, issued in 2017, displays the image of a bridge in Vladivostok as a nod to the band’s hit, which was also used in the TV ad promoting the banknote’s release. The image of Lagutenko, who otherwise presented as adolescent, gentle, and kind, remained so closely associated with that of the maniac in “Utekai” that the singer was asked to play the role of a bloodthirsty hairdresser-vampire in Timur Bekmambetov’s 2004 blockbuster Night Watch.