Beat Music Goes East
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From Amateur VIAs to National Stars
Subject essay: Leora Eisenberg
In the late 1960s, Central Asia was swept up in the all-Union craze for VIAs (vocal-instrumental ensembles), itself inspired by the globally popular phenomenon of beat music (and, more specifically, the Beatles). Central Asian youth had their own route to the records: as the "center of the Soviet East," Tashkent drew students from across the formerly colonized world to its higher education institutions, who arrived with albums from home or from layovers in European cities. Individual cities often hosted dozens of such amateur groups, generally based at local universities, schools, and workplaces. Despite their antipathy toward “bourgeois” western music, state bodies co-opted the population’s love of beat music by pushing these potentially ideologically subversive amateur groups to participate in regular state-sponsored song festivals, whether at the district, city, republic, or all-Union level. This is where many of the region’s most famous groups got their start: Dos-Mukasan, Kazakhstan’s best-known VIA, came from the Alma-Ata Lenin Polytechnic Institute, while Yalla, its Uzbek counterpart, came from the Tashkent Theater-Arts Institute. Both worked their way up their respective republics’ series of VIA competitions.
Though republics could have hundreds of VIAs, each tended to have one that was particularly prominent. This VIA generally belonged to the state organization managing popular music in their home republic, making the group eligible for considerable perks: tours abroad (and not just to the Soviet bloc), access to hard-to-get musical equipment, and paid rehearsals. Nevertheless, these groups needed to conform to certain ideological norms, such as the inclusion of “proper” content in their songs and adherence to the particular “national image” promoted by state nationality policy. That is, performers generally wore clothing with national designs, sang songs with national elements (e.g., instruments or melodies), and performed in their own national language, even if their repertoire frequently included a handful of songs in Russian. It is perhaps for this reason that VIAs tended to be most popular in their respective home republics, as with the songs “Ey Sanam” by the Tajik VIA Gulshan and “Saghyndym Seni” by Dos-Mukasan. The national essence of certain VIAs could even be harnessed to curry cross-border political favor: with Tajik and Dari mutually intelligible, Gulshan was regularly sent to perform in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War.
Occasionally, however, Central Asian VIAs’ songs made it to the all-Union stage. For instance, Yalla’s hit song “Uchquduq” about the closed Uzbek town of the same name (Soviet-era Uchquduq) was immensely popular in the early 1980s – so much so that central authorities allegedly blocked it from going on the air for about a year, lest the song bring attention to the town’s uranium mining industry. Once the song was finally cleared for broadcast, however, it drew tremendous acclaim. While one can attribute much of this popularity to its catchy beat and rhymes, these attributes were likely amplified by the song’s Russian-language lyrics, which made the song accessible across the USSR. Both in and beyond Central Asia, it was exceptionally difficult for a national VIA to gain acclaim without making songs in Russian, broadly understood by most of the USSR’s population.
There were, however, exceptions to the rule. Some VIAs sang in other languages, whether because they were going on tour to a specific country, wanted to impress foreign delegations, or simply found that a particular song – or image – resonated with their national compatriots. As of the early 1980s, Yalla had been working to change its image from that of a “simply” national group to more of an “eastern” one. They frequently referred to an orientalized “East” in their song lyrics and wore heavily bejeweled tunics and turbans in order to appeal to audiences, many of whom had previously adored the Arabic, Hindi, and Persian-language songs of Uzbek singer Botir Zokirov (who, coincidentally, is the older brother of Yalla’s lead singer, Farrukh Zokirov). In order to prepare for a late-1980s tour to Morocco, for instance, the group arranged the local folk song “Djinouni,” which remains in their regular repertoire to this day, beloved by foreign and Uzbek audiences alike.
The end of the Soviet period saw Central Asian VIAs take on more commercial concerns. Yalla went on khozraschet, i.e., cost accounting, in the late 1980s, launching a series of commercial ventures and performances abroad. Not long before, Kazakhstan had seen the rise of the VIA Arai: originally famed for accompanying the exceptionally popular Kazakh singer Roza Rymbaeva, it eventually became a “solo” group of tremendous all-Union renown. It performed for some time with Alla Pugacheva in the late 1980s and early 1990s, undergoing a series of name changes to eventually become the still-popular group A’Studio, which, like Yalla, sang in Russian, boosting its all-Union popularity.
Some of these VIAs are still widely beloved in their respective home countries. The lead singer of Yalla, Farrukh Zokirov, serves as the judge on Uzbekistan’s version of the X-Factor, and Dos-Mukasan’s “Wedding Song” is still commonly sung at Kazakh weddings. Reunion concerts fill concert halls. VIAs may have sprung up in the 1960s, but they are still very visible today.
17 Moments in Soviet History - From Amateur VIAs to National Stars by Leora Eisenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.