Face 3x
A whole portrait in a few headlines. Meet Russia’s most controversial rap star – Dazed (2018) introduces rapper Face (sometimes Фэйс). Another notable headline is ‘I Am the Enemy of the State’: Russian Rapper Compares Russia to Prison Camp – The Moscow Times (2018). Despite this, he was named (by the Financial Times) as one of The Russian rappers Vladimir Putin wants to befriend. That might be difficult.
About Face and Face Himself
An entertaining portrait can be found in a vlog (2017, 11 min) by the eccentric NFKRZ. Face as the Russian Lil Pump. In 2018, the Russian BBC conducted an interview (23 min). Я перестал бояться: I stopped being afraid.
From 2019, there’s 10 minutes with him on the Russian talk show Вечерний Ургант. Рэпер Face о себе = rapper Face about himself. He also performed there—see the video below.
Also from the same year is Рэпер Face: «Бездействие, когда у тебя многомиллионная аудитория, не заслуживает уважения» (Rapper Face: “Inaction when you have a multimillion audience doesn’t deserve respect”) (Телеканал Дождь, 8 min, at the protests on September 29, 2019, in Moscow).
For details about his tattoos, see Face о своих татуировках (Face about his tattoos) by GQ Russia (2019, 10 min). From the same channel is Face о первых деньгах и феминизме (about his first money and feminism, 2019, 4 min). More about Ivan Dryomin or Ivan Dremin (1997) on Wikipedia Russian or English.
Face on YouTube
Most clips can’t be embedded here but are available on YouTube:
- Мой калашников (My Kalashnikov, 2019), lyrics
- Подруга подруг (Girlfriend, 2019), lyrics
- Я роняю запад (I Drop the West, 2018), lyrics
- Салам (Salam, 2018), lyrics
Юморист (Humorist, 2019)
(Вечерний Ургант, March 27, 2019)
Lyrics and lyric video
FACE Performs George Orwell’s 1984 (2018)
Also featured on Dazed Digital.
More about 1984 and Russia (and Russian) in I Just Translated ‘1984’ Into Russian. I’m Gasping for Air (Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg 2019).
Rock Star (2016)
Lyrics on Genius.com. Explicit lyrics, but that’s probably no surprise anymore.
Для нас, for us.
More
- ТОП 5 лучших треков FACE (Top 5 Best Tracks of Face, 2017, 6 min)
- Как менялся Face (How Face Changed) (2017, 2 min)
- Face – почему от него фанатеет молодежь (Why the youth are fans of him, 2017, 51 min)
- Как Face ведет себя при людях? (How does Face behave around people, 2017, 3 min)
Read:
- Portrait (RU) on Vokrug.tv
- ‘Я идеальный человек-Россия’: рэпер Фейс от ‘Бургера’ до Мандельштама (‘I am the perfect person-Russia’: rapper Face from ‘Burger’ to Mandelstam, BBC Russia, 2018)
More on Instagram and VK, you can also listen on Spotify, and of course, there’s also a diss track.
Most of the music here is also in an
R1 playlist on YouTube (in order of release).
See also
Best Russian Music and
Russian Song Lyrics.
More
Music
Anyone who wants to present Russian music cannot ignore Zemfira. Popular and mainstream – millions of records sold – but also distinctly idiosyncratic. The music is usually accessible (we categorize it under Pop), but the attitude is rock.
Raw Anti-Putin punk from
Nizhny Novgorod /
Нижний Новгород. Loosely based on ‘Maggie’ by The Exploited.
From the green city of
Zelenograd /
Зеленоград. Dreamy indie-folk with a melancholic undertone. Created by
Mikhail Rodionov (1992).
The alarm blares (Ревёт тревога), the road awaits (ждёт дорога). They are many (Их немало), we are few (нас немного). We are in an unjust world (Мы в несправедливом мире) tin wolves in the shooting range (Жестяные волки в тире).
The word offret is Swedish and means ‘sacrifice’; the band Offret is Russian and makes heavy music. The link between the word and the band: a
1986 film in Swedish by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky.
A band from Saint Petersburg that makes a kind of post-punk/indie-pop. Not for long yet, so not much material yet. However, they already have a few very successful tracks with original music videos. До свиданья, дорогая is the
Russian title for the film
The Goodbye Girl (1977), but it has nothing to do with it.
