Timur “Timati” Yunusov
The Russian maisntream glamour seems to be passing through hard times.
Russia’s best-known mainstream rappers, Timati and GUF expirienced a backlash over their latest music video about ‘Moscow’. The pretentious, full of notorious kitsch video received over 1 million “dislikes,” handing the two artists the record of largest negative rating in the history of Russian YouTube. So, the rappers decided to remove the clip from the video-sharing platform after just two days after its release.
The controversy was caused by the fact that two representatives of the mainstream ‘creative community’ tried to exploit Moscow’s September 8 city-council vote, political protests and the image of Moscow and its mayor Sergei Sobyanin for their self-promotion.
A reuploaded version of the video:
In the first part of his “music career”, Timati became popular thanks to his positioning as a descendant from the Caucasus that contrasts himself with the rest of the population of the Russian Federation. This image allowed him to become a popular “musician” among a specific part of Caucasian ethnic groups living in the country. Later, when the Russian state started strengthening, the gangsta rapper decided to make a re-branding. Since about 2012, he has started attempts to exploit the trendy patriotic agenda to increase personal wealth and to get access by one way or another to government funds.
Despite the rebranding, the newly forged “patriotic figure” continued leaving a trace of scandals and shady business schemes. By these scandalous ‘partiotic’ activity, Timati and Timati-like representatives of the ‘creative community’ are attempting to make as much money as its possible. However, in many cases, they just damage the image of the Russian government.
Nonetheless, the recent ‘Moscow’ music video case demonstrated that their pseudo-patriotic style finds little support among the Russian population that clearly sees the different between the mainstream glamour and the real patriotism.
The only audience that ‘Timati-styled art’ is the ‘gilded youth’ and the so-called ‘new Russian aristocracy’ [a part of the bureaucracy and politicians that sees the Russian state as the source of the income and does not link own future with the future of the nation].
A screenshot from the video
Another fact is the reaction of these ‘artists’ to the faced backlash. They were scared by the negative reaction and a possible loss of money, and removed the video. They did not even try to defend their supposed point of view or explain it. Instead, they demonstrated that they have no principles and their only goal was to exploit the ‘patriotism’ to make money.
It remains unclear why such representatives of the ‘creative community’ still receive support and even funding (through contracts with state-linked entities) from the Russian government.
How the hell these thing got its way into SF?
By the backdoor ? or By the trapdoor?
Guess which one.