When I met my second brother last month, he said he had more than 30,000 vinyl records and wanted to have a solo exhibition. I suddenly thought of bone disc music, so I talked to him excitedly.

The second brother pays more attention to the musical quality of vinyl itself and the fun brought by collecting and playing with it. In my opinion, these two carrying media have a romance engraved in their bones.

The reason why bone disc records appeared is actually because in the 1950s, the Soviet Union banned everyone from accessing Western music, banned jazz, banned rock, and even banned people from making their own records.

It was an era when "the Soviet star could only be Stalin, and all literary and artistic works must serve politics." Western rock music and jazz were all considered anti-Soviet, and some domestic music was also defined as illegal propaganda of low culture.

"In general, music that encourages young people to get together to dance and indulge in reckless passion is prohibited.

However, people who regard music as a necessity of life are prohibited , how could they resist, they would naturally use various methods to obtain music.

The first voice of resistance came from St. Petersburg. Music lover Ruslan Bugaslovsky independently developed a recorder imitating Telefunken. A crude machine for pirated discs, he gave the carved discs to his friends and secretly sold them on the street, calling himself the Golden Dog Gang of the underground music label.

It is impossible to verify who was the first person to invent the bone disc. But what is certain is that it has a close relationship with the early hippie (officially called Stilyagi) activities in the Soviet Union at that time. Under the influence of the hippie movement, new wave music fans, underground radio stations and intellectual elites reached an agreement. There is a vague tacit understanding.

Since any plastic material can be used as the raw material for engraving, many young people focus on the X-ray films in the hospital in order to make their wallets richer. , the hospital must incinerate X-rays that are one year past due. They are therefore very cheap and can be obtained in large quantities with candy and vodka.

The X-ray films of various bones will naturally not attract the attention of the government. People can print music on X-ray films like vinyl, and they can also roll them up and hide them in their sleeves, which is also very convenient for trading.

"Just like the current drug trade, record sellers usually deal in alleys and abandoned buildings. They take out a pile of records from their ribs and sleeves. This is Elvis Presley. This is Bill Harley. Which one do you want? ”

This kind of vinyl record can only be played at a speed of 78 rpm, has music on only one side, and the sound quality is extremely poor.

The way to distinguish each song is what businessmen use When writing song names with markers, the music often did not correspond to the names, but for Soviet people who could hardly hear music, these were negligible.

In the Soviet era. , Bone Disc is a flash in the pan, it is just one of the many underground publications, and it is fashionable to say that this is a rapidly consumed Soviet underground self-media, parasitic in the unofficial communication network.

< p> It is the undisputed king of underground listening. The cheap and easily accessible disc resources and unlimited copying possibilities have contributed to the crazy popularity of bone discs. Therefore, in 1958, bone discs were officially classified as illegal publishing. Many people who spread bone discs were sent to prisons and labor camps on various charges.

Imagine a scene like this:

In the middle of the night, a group of premeditated adults climbed over the wall and entered the hospital, stealing dozens of X-ray films, which alluded to various human body structures... …

Ah Fei quietly came to the person who had the master disk, brought the recorder, and then waited anxiously for the finished products to be processed...

The dark corner of the Moscow subway Here, at a secluded corner of Leningrad Street, a group of people used secret signs and then traded in the alley...

People smoking cigarettes and wearing windbreakers looked around to avoid being followed by the police...

They took out a bone disc and inspected it for the buyer...

The songs of Beatles, John Coltrane, Rolling Stones, and David Bowie were in the basement, in the tube building with the doors and windows locked, It sounded slowly...

Cigarette butts were all over the ground, smoke was lingering, vodka bottles were rotating in everyone's hands, and from time to time, people who were looking for news rushed in...

This is 50 In Soviet Eastern Europe at the end of the 1990s, bone dishes were at their peak.

This is the Soviet pirate radio station.

The influence of the bone disc lasted for about twenty years. Even if they faced jail time, there were no shortage of young people who devoted themselves to this cause. Even for people who are released from prison, the first thing they do when they come out is to go back to their old jobs, even if they enter the palace for the second time.

These young people have little interest in changing the social system, and they do not want to listen to the simple and grand music approved by the government. They just want to give themselves the right to choose music.

"My cousin and I once went to the street to sell CDs. A group of people came over and wanted to see the goods. We went to an abandoned building to prepare for the transaction. The other party suddenly took out a knife and said to us. : Either give us the plate hidden in the ribs, or we will insert the knife into your ribs."

"I still have some high-quality bone plates that I found back then, and I protected them very well. , it can be played on a record player. Although it can’t compare with today’s records, the faint melody reminds me of my youth, when people paid a lot of money to listen to music.”

For jazz and music. The strong demand for pop and rock music will never stop. Although the punishment for spreading the bone discs is very political, the spreading of the bone discs itself may not even be a rebellion against authority, but simply motivated by purely hormonal needs.

Ordinary, universal, and simple sense of enjoyment is not mixed with any political elements: people just need music and release. People copy and spread it massively, not for gatherings, but for dance parties. Most of the time, a party is far more exciting than a speech.

To go even further: People want to listen to American rock music, not because they love the United States and support capitalism, but because they really want to catch up with the trend and become the most fashionable young people. Stay cool and stay away from politics.

Today, the bone disc has long withdrawn from the stage of history, but people still use it as a punctuation point of society and history, as a punctuation point of personal memory, to restore and appreciate the time. Pain and pleasure.

The transparent presentation of human body structure and the multimedia reconstruction of music are perfectly unified on a soft disc. The beating beats in the poor sound quality are like the Soviet citizens in the shadow of that era, twisting and unyielding.

The bone disc is essentially just a music product, but what it records is not just jazz and rock that have been criticized as decadent music, but also a microcosm of a social form.

After political life has become a normal state, some people will naturally ignore the existence of political context under high pressure and live life more like life, which is quite a kind of "super life" , realistic-surreal feeling.

Without official high-pressure, the avant-garde music, musicians and fans of Soviet Eastern Europe might not have become a historic cultural symbol. But it is precisely the extra stimulation that makes music suddenly become a first-rate fashionable "cultural drug", and bone discs are a native injection.

Until 1984, the Soviet Union’s censorship of music outside the wall continued. The Soviet Ministry of Culture published a list of banned bands: Depeche Mode was suspected of being apolitical, Madonna was suspected of being erotic, Michael Jackson was suspected of being terrorist, and Motor head is suspected of moral corruption, Pink Floyd is suspected of opposing Soviet foreign policy, and the list also includes Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Prince...

Maybe this is just a "prehistoric era" listening experience, maybe it is just the Cold War period A repressed and passive product. But obviously, at that time, you had to pay a lot for the music you chose, more than you could imagine.

To a certain extent, this can be regarded as a story about "giving" and "exchange", with a kind of passion and impulse, uninhibitedness and indulgence that we have never experienced.

And this is not a kind of alternative romance.

I hope that when the exhibition is over, I can carve out a small area and have the opportunity to return to that passionate and unruly era and experience the Soviet pirate radio station. So if you have any bone disc music, or a story about it, tell me.

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