The phenomenon of the group “Korol i Shut”: punk storytellers, St. How did he make the leap from St. Petersburg parades to the history of Russian music? PEOPLETALK editorial column

I’m 12 years old, I’m in the garden in 2001 and I’m standing by the tent with the burned audio tapes. Once a week, my grandmother gives 30 rubles for a new one, and I choose it for a long time, mostly based on covers that are printed on terrible paper, but still exactly copy the original. I already have “Night Snipers”, Zemfira, Britney Spears, “Dances Minus” and the group “Kino” in my collection.

Gazes fall on the tapestry, which is decorated in the medieval style and stands out from the rest. I buy it and put the “A” side on the recorder. After the second song, I hang up in horror. Some dead grandfathers, jesters – a disappointment.

But believe me, you don’t have many options for learning new music in the suburbs in 2001, so I set up and put the “A” side back on, then switch to the “B” side. In complete shock, I listen to the tape and download it. In a week I’ll be begging my grandma to get me all the tapes, sweatshirt, bracelet, backpack, and the “King and the Jester” pendant, I’ll start putting pins in my pants and garden pipes. I’ll change my name to Anarchist Kira. In the most prominent place of the room will appear a folder where I will collect all the clippings from all the magazines that have been talking about “KiSh” for several years.

20 years after these fateful events, I am writing a column on Airpods for you readers who are listening to the old albums of the St. Petersburg group, and a quote from the song “Daredevil and the Wind” is stuffed on my shoulder. Therefore, the column turned out to be personal.

Pioneers of mass punk in Russia

To understand how King and the Jester became a stadium band, it’s worth understanding what happened to their audience in the early 2000s. We were greedy for music, for knowledge, and we went through a period of growth where we had to join one of the bands. With minor differences, in general, teenagers had the following points of view: punks, skinheads, metalheads, rappers. By that time, “Korol i Shut” had already recorded his most hit albums and songs, which were included in the rotation of “Our Radio”, performed in the small arena of “Yubileiny”, “Invasion” and “Luzhniki”. 10th anniversary. Here’s an important clarification: since the Internet was just beginning to expand in Russia, and radio and television remained the main sources of information, the group had to spend more than a year to become famous. Gorshk and company took less time because their amazing talent has become so unique to the Russian stage that they wanted to talk about the group.

Another highlight here was Mikhail Gorshenev, who we Russian punks knew nothing about Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols group, popularizing punk culture for us, singing about a gardener and a dead man on stage. , did this on T-shirts with logos of cult groups Rancid or Misfits, and leather jackets with a huge symbol of the anarchists or “We’ll drink anything but not humiliate the punk”.

“It is shameful to listen to “Kish”

However, it is customary for vagrants, like any revolutionary, to devour their leaders. Because of this, listening to The King and the Jester very quickly became obsolete and even embarrassing in our teenage environment. They opened up to us another world of rock, and not just with the prefix “punk”. Starting from Russian (“Cockroaches” and “Pure”), ending with growing nu-metal (Korn and Slipknot). Groups broke up, the first emos popped up, Limp Bizkit rap started making it into fashion, and MTV reached even the oldest apartments in residential neighborhoods.

It became embarrassing to wear the sign of anarchy, pin leather jackets and black crooked eyeliner faded into oblivion, as if the King and Jester group that had crossed the top had sunk – Olimpiysky was taken, the group toured all over Russia, the Baltic states, Israel and CIS countries and much after a noisy album “Unfortunately no guns” began to lose gold squad members. And we fans began to grow inappropriately, keeping silently listening to “The Cursed Old House” and “The Sorcerer’s Doll” from everyone else.

Troubled times

After the release of Mutiny on the Ship in 2004, even I stopped following the band as a fan. He was strongly influenced by Gorshk, who wanted to weigh the music and began to move away from the branded fairy tales that made the group famous. Over the next seven years the band is releasing both good and bad albums, it continues to lose members who have been in it since its inception, and it no longer does anything close to the hits of the golden age, but instead becomes a plus or a minus. The face of Russian rock with a very unpleasant connotation. The exception is the newly received Olimpiysky in honor of its 15th anniversary. And here comes the point of the final fall – leaving the group of Andrei Knyazev, who wrote most of the lyrics and with whom the second soloist Mikhail Gorshenev has an indescribable symbiosis on the stage and in his work.

King without a clown, jester without a king

Andrei began to work on his project (unfortunately, far from being so successful), and Pot already began to lead alone in the “King and the Jester”. Witnesses said it strangely gave him strength. The group releases TODD duology, a zong opera based on the musical thriller Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and began performing in theaters with it in 2012. I was at the premiere of the Moscow show and at the end I cried, it seemed to me that the band was finding itself again, and Mikhail Gorshenev, incredibly convincing in the role of a murderous hairdresser, found his way again on the verge of terrible fairy tales and the guitar. riffs.

king and death

On July 13, 2013, my sister called me and said in a serious voice, “The pot is dead.”

An hour later, this news was all over the media. Just 19 days before his 40th birthday, Mikhail Gorshenev succumbed to years of heroin addiction and broke my heart and the hearts of millions in Russia.

The following days showed how important it was for those in their twenties when the band’s lead singer died. Iroquois and people crying in leather jackets, more than 10 thousand fans at the breakup, and then a commemorative concert with me of course. A huge list of all the stars who came to perform the hits “The King and the Jester” covered number one – a soundtrack when the lights went out and a single spotlight came on above the stage and a soundtrack of Misha was played through the speakers. Hall stood up and cried, and now I admit, I’m crying. The King is dead, long live the King.

A new start

A 40-year-old friend of mine recently said: “The joke with the King and the Jester seems to have gone on” and he was very wrong. For his generation who grew up on AC/DC and Motley Crue, the heavily edited fairy tales may sound like a joke, but for us, the 30s who raid entertainment venues near Moscow before the King and Jester concerts. The group has become a symbol of generation, freedom, maturity, self-identification, and even escapism. And we have a legion, for example, on Yandex.Music, which is confirmed by the ratings of the most listened songs.

There, hits “Forester” and “The Sorcerer’s Doll” coexist with Anna Asti and are almost never among the top hits.

After the first year of Spotify’s operation in Russia, the band Korol i Shut entered the top ratings in the Russian Federation. And this despite the fact that it officially ceased to exist in 2013. TikTok also added heat – a quote from The Wizard’s Baby went viral in it, and here’s how teens started listening to KiSh. Again. My friends are surprised to say that their already quite high school kid has discovered a band for them and is much more interested in them than Rihanna or young Russian rappers.

Why? Why? I don’t have an answer to this question, but I have an idea. It’s just that no one else has ever made music like this and never will. For years “Korol i Shut” was considered a guilty pleasure, something personal and somewhat embarrassing, but its songs in karaoke are sung by journalists, businessmen and youth, and a series of films about the formation and disintegration of “Kinopoisk” has been filmed. group and making it the main bet in 2023.

Looks like I’ve caught the moment when my favorite band officially deserves a legend status. Mikhail Gorshenev would probably have laughed at that.