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Red Wave : An American in the Soviet Music Underground - Joanna Stingray

Red Wave

An American in the Soviet Music Underground

By: Joanna Stingray, Madison Stingray

Paperback | 22 September 2020 | Edition Number 2

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  • This is an exotic view of a world Americans could not imagine, an insider/outsider perspective on the Leningrad underground music scene, which American Joanna Stingray witnessed, documented through photos, videos, and interviews, and in which she was also a protagonist.
  • Red Wave presents the power of youth culture to unite people across the world in the quest for freedom and rights. Rock is a universal music of liberation that carries the winds of change.
  • Red Wave documents the "Golden Age" of Russian rock, which is a critical part of the history of art triumphing over repressive state control in the 1980s.
  • In the first part of the book, the author tells of her adventures relating to the conception, realization, and consequences of the historic split double album "Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR," which she produced with the Big Time label in Los Angeles after smuggling the "unofficial" music out of the country in nine successive trips over 1985-1986.
  • The album and scandal it provoked spurred the process of rock music's recognition and legitimization in the USSR, expanded the boundaries of glasnost and heralded the downfall of communism.
  • The book is an easy, captivating and fascinating read; a page-turner full of seamless dialog, filmic scenes, and powerful imagery that reveals a neophyte's curious, passionate, inquisitive glance into a hitherto unknown magic world. Stingray writes in a genuine way about being star-struck, about falling in love (with the lead guitarist of the band Kino), about the amazing cast of characters with whom she spent her life in Russia, and about her own development as a musician.
  • Coauthor and daughter Madison Stingray, a songwriter and musician in her own right, captures her mother's admirable and enthralling adventures and conveys them in a language that is accessible but full of genuine passion and genuine poetry. Joanna's archive has dozens of interviews with musicians, artists, producers, journalists -- all leading figures in the underground movement -- and the authors have used these to round out Joanna's recollections and give authentic voice to the characters in the book.
  • The second part of the book details how the Red Wave album not only revealed Russian rock to the world, but how it was a powerful catalyst for rock's evolution within Russia as a flood of black market dubs made their way around the country after the album's release, launching the four bands to instant stardom, and complicating Joanna's life, her marriage, her friendships, but also boosting her own career and notoriety.
  • Enlightening observations are made about attitudes toward money, work, and art in Soviet society as well as how Russia's transition in the 1990s to a capitalist system forever changed a society long insulated from money's corrupting influence.
  • Through the profound, exhaustive, thoughtful answers of musicians to Joanna's simplest questions comes an elaboration of deeply hidden truths about Soviet life, not only about music.
  • Cultivating her power among the male rockers, Stingray accumulates a fan base of young women and becomes an important female role model, launching her public career in Russia by standing up for the environment and working with Greenpeace. A funny episode is how she becomes famous overnight for her humorous anti-littering campaign/music video.
  • The book is full of inspiration for young rebels but is moderated by Stingray's heartbreak: after many of her closest companions die from substances, suicide, a tragic accident (Victor Tsoi), and AIDS, she realizes she carries their mantle in her memories and extensive archives, and it is for their legacy that she must write the book. It's a real rock 'n' roll ride, ful
  • Industry Reviews

    Business and cultural pioneers don't set out to light the world on fire but end up doing so through ingenuity and determination. While we often think of globalization as factories and container ships, the exchange of goods and ideas between nations starts with one person finding something people in another nation would value. Joanna Stingray was that one person who brought Soviet rock music to America and did so in remarkable fashion.
    -Forbes

    Thanks to a resourceful Los Angeles singer and songwriter who heard—and liked—their brand of Russian rock, the bands are now playing to a faraway audience. [...] The album is the brainchild of Joanna Stingray a.k.a. Joanna Fields, 25, who has been exploring the Soviet Union’s unofficial and unheralded rock world since 1984.
    —Newsweek

    Eight trips later she had ‘smuggled’ enough tapes of Kino and other groups out of the Soviet Union to produce an album, Red Wave-a kind of Greatest Hits of Socialist Rock. At first the Soviet press denigrated Stingray’s tales of the "brave little American miss helping the oppressed Soviet musicians" as a self-serving fantasy. Now, though, inspired by glasnost if not by greed, Soviet officialdom has cut a deal with her to produce 10 albums of “unofficial music” for consumption in the U.S.
    —People Magazine

    The music on Red Wave – which ranges from the ska-tinged pop of Kino to the brooding, introspective songwriting of Grebenshchikov – was recorded mostly in cramped living rooms transformed into home studios with borrowed two-track and eight-track equipment. The lyrics, sung in Russian (a translated lyric sheet is provided), are not overtly political. But veiled reference to politics shine through, as does a keen awareness of progressive Western rock.
    —Rolling Stone

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