An interesting survey was conducted by experts from the Platforma Social Design Center . They tried to find out how Russian performers of our time or the recent past manage to express public sentiments or shape them?
During the survey, the respondents were asked an open question: “At different times, the work of famous performers was evaluated by part of Russian society as a manifestation of civic position, influenced people's opinion about the situation in the country. Can you name a piece of music or a performer, a group (modern or old) that best expresses what excites society, its problems?
According to the results of the survey, the positions in the top five were distributed as follows. Victor Tsoi is confidently in the first place (as a figure of civil action, he is significant for 19% of respondents). The top five also includes Igor Talkov, Yuri Shevchuk, Andrey Makarevich, Vladimir Vysotsky. None of the ultra-modern performers in the list of leaders was in any age stratum - first of all, the resource of the 1990s continues to work. But from the compositions of Tsoi, in the first place in terms of preferences, it’s still not “Changes”, but “Blood Type”.
In addition, the list of mentions included: Lyube (2%), Oleg Gazmanov, Iosif Kobzon, Alexander Gradsky, Dmitry Shostakovich (1% each).
Thus, we see that in the 2020s, Russian rock of the 1980s still dominates mass music as an expression of public sentiment. The listeners remain interested in the semantic content of the compositions, the aesthetic design of social trends; the role of the text for a significant group is fundamental.
Characteristically, Viktor Tsoi, leading by a significant margin, is most popular in the age range of 25-34 years (here he is noted by 29% of respondents), that is, in a group whose public positions were formed after the death of the performer.
For people of the older generation, interest in the leading performers on the list may be due to nostalgia, as well as the “imprinting” effect, in which an image associated with a strong emotional experience is firmly fixed in the mass memory and becomes the cultural code of the generation.
In younger generations, the effect of including a modern context into old compositions is more pronounced. In a situation where new performers do not solve the problem of formalizing social meanings in art, works from the past are borrowed and endowed with an actual sound. So, during the Belarusian protests, Viktor Tsoi's song "Change" was updated.
At the same time, among the Russian audience, the assessment of the popularity of the compositions of the KINO group brought to the forefront another work by Tsoi - the song "Blood Type", which is distinguished by a personalistic approach: it introduces the motive of breaking with everyday life, personal choice, pathos of struggle and following the existential "call".
Apparently, the demand for semantic art in a situation of uncertainty and the growth of the dynamics of social processes will increase. At the same time, classic rock shows greater versatility in expressing public sentiment than the compositions of new artists (for example, in the field of rap). However, it is difficult to say how great the potential of old songs is - among the youngest group of respondents, interest in them is noticeably falling.
There is not a single artist in the group of leaders whose personal brand was formed after the early 1990s.