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TATU would fail entirely as a piece of concept art if their music was anything but limp. As much as one can derive pleasure from repetitive beats (except in England after dark, or something), everything TATU does musically is done better by pretty much everybody else who tries. My girlfriend, who likes them and got her hair cut to look like Julia (the dark one), only listens to their music in Russian and hasn't actually sent money to anyone other than her ISP and the Maxell CD-R company. If the music was good, people would buy the albums, the girls would get respect, and they would be just another pop group with an effective gimmick, like the aforementioned White Stripes. As it is, they subvert the concept of pop artists qua artists by marketing little other than an ideology that comes straight from a middle-aged white man who gets nearly as much press as the braless wonders he thrust onto the world's stages.
Any attempt to place TATU into some kind of queer or feminist metanarrative is going to encounter the paradox of publicity-through-exploitation. Lesbians are a symbol of the collapse of society (bear with me): they invalidate males and the premodern sexual dialectic, they attack American frontier puritanism with dystopian hedonistic freedom (think Brave New World), and they marginalize gay men (the force behind postmodernism) as unappealing (read: unmarketable) anachronisms. That's what the Spice Girls meant by "girl power," right? And we all wished they would get as physical as TATU, didn't we? How long can it be before "underage snuff fetish orgies" is the ironic concept for a pop group? The exploitationist ideology is a direct result of feminism (not that women were not exploited before feminism, but it wasn't prime time entertainment). For men, it's a grab for lost power, and for women, it's an inability to redefine the arena of sexual warfare outside the masculine consumer economy. (There are plenty more issues at work here, but this is supposed to be about TATU.) Shapovalov positions a pair of brainless whores as models of ironic rebellion, and it is made clear that the so-called "artists" are not the source of any "art" other than, perhaps, their female bodies. Shapovalov not only co-opts postmodern youth-worship to reinstate the power of the patriarch (himself), but also gets to fuck hot teenage girls--possibly more than one at a time. These two things are linked, of course--which seems almost Marxist--and that makes me aware that my own quasi-paedophilian desire (can lusting after a well-developed 14-year-old be called paedophilia?--this could probably get its own thread) is really the desire for the sexual patriarchy modeled in the Bible, or even better, the Koran. If TATU exists, the terrorists have already won. But seriously, this post would fail entirely as a piece of concept art if I had the vaguest idea of what I was talking about. |
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