So what if he used to look like Billy Idol, and now he looks like... who even knows what. I haven’t listened to his new songs in ages. And they seem to suck anyway. Some kind of crazy Orthodox shamanism. But those old songs—oooh, they were wonderful. I still remember every word by heart. Back in school, I was a hardcore Alisa fan.
Now I can only remember it with Homeric laughter, but back in about ninth grade, when Alisa was playing at Krylya Sovetov (a stadium/venue name, literally “Wings of the Soviets”), my friends and I went to the concert and, for some reason, drew blood on ourselves with a red ballpoint pen—running from the corner of the mouth down to the chin. (I should remind myself of this more often when I laugh at today’s emos.) Cringe. Half the stadium looked like that. Kooostyaaaa!!! Kinchev always seemed to me the most socially conscious and political of them all. He didn’t have stuff like "Eighth-Grader Girls," the way Tsoi did. Now Kinchev says about the St. Petersburg Dissenters’ Marches: enough of this marching already—what are they even dissenting from? But that doesn’t matter. Kostya Kinchev was awesome!
People