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      How the Trump Era Broke the Sunday-Morning News Show

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow the Trump Era Broke the Sunday-Morning News ShowAny number of hallowed political and media institutions fell apart. So why should the most hallowed political-media institution of them all escape unscathed? Credit…Photo illustration by Mike McQuadeFeb. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETOn the Sunday after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Rand Paul appeared on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” to make baseless claims of election fraud and to lecture the host on how to do his job. “Hey, George, George, George!” the Republican senator from Kentucky sputtered at Stephanopoulos, who had repeatedly tried — and failed — to get Paul to acknowledge that Biden had not “stolen” November’s election. “Where you make a mistake,” Paul continued, “is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if I said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute fact is that everything that I’m saying is a lie.”Paul was not necessarily wrong in his criticism. Ever since Tim Russert became the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 1991 and began subjecting Democrats and Republicans to his “tough but fair” questions, the contemporary Sunday-​morning public-affairs show anchors have cast themselves as facilitators of a point-counterpoint format. “It’s not my job to express my opinions,” Stephanopoulos told The Hartford Courant upon being handed the reins of “This Week” in 2002. “It’s my job to ask the right questions, to make sure that people learn something from the program, to present all sides of the story and let people make up their own minds.”But nearly two decades later, Stephanopoulos’s approach was untenable. “Senator Paul, let me begin with a threshold question for you,” he said at the interview’s outset. “This election was not stolen, do you accept that fact?” Paul dodged the question to claim that there were “people who voted twice” and “dead people who voted” and “illegal aliens who voted.” Stephanopoulos repeated, “Can’t you just say the words ‘The election was not stolen’?” Paul could not; instead he gave Stephanopoulos his history lesson about Sunday shows. “You’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side,” Paul taunted.The interview was barely an hour old before Paul posted a link on Twitter. “Partisan Democrats in the media think they can get away with just calling Republicans liars because they don’t agree with us,” he wrote. “Watch me stand up to one here.” Three days later, The Federalist ran a story headlined: “Rand Paul’s Cage Match With George Stephanopoulos Is a Pattern Everyone on the Right Should Follow.”The Donald Trump years have broken any number of hallowed political and media institutions, so why should the most hallowed political-media institution of them all, the Sunday show, escape unscathed? Yes, those self-important shows with their self-important anchors have never been as crucial to our constitutional system as they like to imagine. But they have at least provided a refuge from the soft-focused fecklessness of the networks’ evening news and the shrieking of the prime-time carnival barkers on cable. That changed during Trump’s presidency. In some instances, the shows were less about educating the viewing audience than flattering an audience of one. “The reality is that the president is a political genius,” Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” during a contentious interview in 2018. “I’m sure he’s watching and is happy you said that,” Tapper told Miller. (Trump soon tweeted a link to the segment, praising Miller.)Even worse, the shows became platforms for disinformation. In October 2019, Chuck Todd invited Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, on “Meet the Press” to discuss the revelation that Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine unless the country’s president agreed to investigate the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Johnson previously told The Wall Street Journal that he “winced” when he learned those two issues were connected. But when Todd asked about that report — “What made you wince?” — Johnson launched into a conspiracy theory about the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “I have no idea why we’re going here,” Todd complained. Two months later, Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, reached out to “Meet the Press” to discuss the Ukraine scandal. As Todd later told Rolling Stone, he assumed that Cruz, an avowed Russia hawk, wanted to push back against a Russian disinformation campaign. But when Todd asked Cruz whether he thought Ukraine tried to sway the 2016 elections, Cruz replied, “I do.” “You do?” Todd asked in disbelief. “Here’s the game the media is playing,” Cruz said. “Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did.” Looking back on the interview, Todd told Rolling Stone: “He wants to use this for some sort of appeasement of the right. I didn’t know what else to think.”Todd appears to have done a good deal of thinking about the plight of the Sunday show. In 2018, he wrote a cri de coeur for The Atlantic about “a nearly 50-year campaign to delegitimize the press,” imploring his colleagues to fight back: “It means not allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them.” A few months later, Todd hosted an episode of “Meet the Press” dedicated to climate change and made a point of not inviting any climate-change deniers. But should climate denialism be the only verboten point of view on Sunday shows? Last month, more than three dozen progressive groups wrote an open letter to members of the media calling on them to interview only those elected officials who “publicly concede that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair, and that claims to the contrary are false.” In other words, the groups wanted journalists to give Republicans who lie about election fraud the same treatment Twitter and Facebook gave Trump: deplatforming them. It’s hard to imagine, however, the Sunday shows ever taking such a step. There are, of course, the financial incentives: The trade associations and defense contractors that sponsor the Sunday shows presumably expect bipartisan bang for their advertising bucks. But the bigger impediment is the shows’ self-conception. If “This Week” and “Meet the Press” were to deplatform Republicans who won’t acknowledge, without caveats, that Biden won, then their guests would consist almost entirely of Democrats — and the Sunday shows would resemble prime-time programs on MSNBC and CNN. No self-respecting Sunday show wants that. In January, Todd beseeched what he called “sober-minded” Republicans to appear on his show. “Stop helping to reinforce the incorrect notion that the mainstream news media isn’t interested in your side of the debate,” he wrote in Politico.In the meantime, the Sunday shows are making do with those Republicans who will show up. Earlier that same month, Todd again hosted Ron Johnson, who again used the opportunity to spew nonsense, boasting about a recent hearing he had held to look into allegations of voter fraud. “The fact of the matter is that we have an unsustainable state of affairs in this country where we have tens of millions of people that do not view this election result as legitimate,” Johnson said at one point.“Then why don’t you hold hearings about the 9/11 truthers?” Todd asked. “How about the moon landing? Are you going to hold hearings on that?” It was a good line, and Todd seemed pleased with himself. It did not occur to Todd, however, that the same question could be asked of him. If “Meet the Press” is going to have guests like Johnson, why doesn’t it host 9/11 truthers and moon-landing conspiracists as well?Source photographs by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images; Andrew Toth/FilmMagic, via Getty Images. AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and Song

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and SongThe 93-year-old musician and co-founder of the political label Paredon Records looks back on a history of resistance.Barbara Dane’s Paredon Records turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021Barbara Dane keeps a copy of her four-inch-thick F.B.I. file in a binder in the living room of her Oakland home. One night in late December, the 93-year-old singer and activist’s daughter, Nina Menendez, was leafing through it and noticed a page she hadn’t spotted before: a Los Angeles Times clipping from a 1972 concert at the Ash Grove. Dane was the headliner that evening, where she first encountered the soulful folk band Yellow Pearl, whose music she would go on to release through her then-nascent record label, Paredon Records.The file doubles as a testament to Dane’s work as an opposition artist for the better part of a century. The earliest entries are from when she was 18, spearheading a chapter of Pete Seeger’s labor-music organization People’s Songs in her native Detroit, and singing on picket lines to protest racial inequality and to support unions.“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Speaking with the eloquent conviction and blunt resolve of a woman who never compromised, Dane called the F.B.I. file a waste of tax dollars. Bundled in a winter coat and beret during a recent video interview, she was more eager to show off the wood-carved Cubadisco statuette (the Cuban equivalent of a Grammy) she was awarded in 2017 to honor her early efforts disseminating the political music known as nueva trova in the United States through her label.A supercut of Dane’s audacious career as a musician — which, since the late 1950s and 1960s has encompassed jazz, folk and the blues — would include the mother of three appearing on a televised bandstand alongside Louis Armstrong and singing “Solidarity Forever,” her favorite song, onstage with Seeger supporting striking coal miners. Her ethos was anticapitalist and adaptable: She wove progressive politics into her sole album for Capitol, “On My Way” from 1961, and later brought raw rock ’n’ roll verve to the protest doo-wop of her 1966 Folkways album with the Chambers Brothers. She performed in Mississippi church basements during Freedom Summer and with antiwar G. I.s in coffee houses.Dane learned early on that her outspokenness and politics meant commercial success would evade her. (Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman told her to call him when she “got her priorities straight.”) She started Paredon for the explicit purpose of providing a platform to music born of freedom struggles around the world that wasn’t beholden to the whims of the marketplace.Paredon has often been considered an aside in Dane’s story, but is receiving more attention now: The label turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, where it has been housed for three decades. Co-founded by Dane and her husband Irwin Silber, a founder and longtime editor of Sing Out! magazine who died in 2010, Paredon was a people’s label through and through, releasing music produced by liberation movements in Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States and beyond.“I saw that whenever the movement in a particular country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane said. “It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.”Taken together, the 50 albums that Paredon released from 1970 to 1985 form a staggering archive of art and dissent, of resilience and sung histories within histories. The music reflects civil rights, women’s rights and anticolonial movements, and illustrates the interconnectedness of these revolutions. Dane had been a venue owner, concert booker, radio D.J., television host and writer. With Paredon, she became a folklorist of resistance.“Paredon didn’t put out music about politics. They put out music of politics,” said Josh MacPhee, the author of “An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels” and a founder of the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive, which chronicles the cultural production of social movements. “These are not artists commenting on political issues. These were sounds that were produced by people in motion trying to transform their lives.”Dane, center, at an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco in 1964.Credit…Erik WeberWith leftist politics at their core and deep roots in activism, Dane and Silber built trust among like-minded artists. “Anything I was going to issue was from somebody who had been on the front lines somewhere,” Dane said. Each Paredon release included an extensive booklet with contextualizing essays, photographs, translations of lyrics, and information about how to connect with or help the movement.The catalog included musicians steeped in social movements at home, like Bernice Johnson Reagon — a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers, and later of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock — whose solo album, “Give Your Hands to Struggle” from 1975, was filled with rhapsodic self-harmonizing. It also included the Covered Wagon Musicians, a group of subversive active-duty Air Force men who sang out from their Idaho base, “We say no to your war!”“I was nervous — I had no experience recording,” said the Argentine musician and educator Suni Paz, who had been living in the U.S. for about eight years when Dane asked her to record for Paredon. “Brotando del Silencio — Breaking Out of the Silence,” in 1973, became Paz’s first album, before which, “I was not heard at all. Barbara Dane gave me complete and total freedom. She said, sing whatever you want. I was going to sing anything political that I had in my brain, in my heart, in my soul.”Nobuko Miyamoto of Yellow Pearl, the group of Asian-American activists Dane discovered when they shared a bill in 1972, said her band was unlikely to have recorded for another label. “Barbara had just done an album called ‘I Hate the Capitalist System,’ and that convinced us this was the right record company,” Miyamoto said, referring to Dane’s 1973 collection with bold cover art.The album Yellow Pearl released on Paredon was the poetic and groundbreaking “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” which included anthems like “We Are the Children” and “Free the Land,” featuring backing vocals from Mutulu Shakur (his stepson, Tupac Shakur, sang along to “A Grain of Sand” as a child, according to Smithsonian Folkways Magazine). It was recorded in two and a half days at a small New York studio and that no-frills spontaneity brings the music alive still.“Barbara was a pretty brave soul to offer to do this,” Miyamoto said. “And because of that, our music was preserved. So I was very grateful. If it weren’t for her, that music really would have been lost.”“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said of her early days performing alongside Pete Seeger for workers’ rights. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDANE GREW UP in Detroit during the Great Depression, the daughter of Arkansas natives. Her father owned a drugstore, where she and her mother worked, and as a child she bore witness to racism and poverty that she immediately identified as wrong. “You saw it all around you: how bad the system was treating its citizens,” she said. At 11, sitting under a tree, a neighborhood friend explained to her that there were three ways of organizing society: capitalism, socialism and communism. “From then on, I started looking around for the socialists — anyone who could tell me more,” she said, noting, too, her teenage affiliation with communism. “That search went on and on.” (And led to that F.B.I. file.)It wasn’t long before she was leading protests with songs like “Roll the Union On” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” using techniques she had learned from an opera teacher. An early lesson in the power of saying “no” occurred when she was offered a tour with the bandleader Alvino Rey and turned it down: “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?,” she said. “It didn’t seem like a good bargain to me.”Dane with the Chambers Brothers at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.Credit…Mark RothDefying a government ban, Dane’s travels in Cuba initially inspired her to found Paredon. In 1966, she was one of the first artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, and she returned to Havana a year later as part of an international meeting of artists called Encuentro Internacional de la Canción Protesta, where she met musicians from around the globe who were writing social-justice songs, like Cuba’s Carlos Puebla and Uruguay’s Daniel Viglietti.Back home, Dane told everyone, “I’m going to start a record label,’” she recalled. “I just kept saying that and saying that. ‘But I’m looking for the funding.’” A friend came through, connecting Dane with a “wayward millionaire” who sent her one check for $17,000 and said to not report back.The first release was “Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America,” which opened with a field recording of Fidel Castro invoking the power of art to “win people over” and “awaken emotions” recorded by Dane herself. Paredon also released spoken word albums featuring speeches and statements of Huey Newton, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Mostly, Dane continued to discover music “on the fly,” she said, as she traveled the world singing out against the Vietnam War. Material from Chile and Northern Ireland came to her in a clandestine fashion, by some artists who remained anonymous.The history of vernacular music in America is filled with mythic men — the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the eccentric Folkways founder Moe Asch, the folk hero Seeger — and Dane evokes each of their restless, visionary spirits to some degree. “They’re all puzzle pieces to this very large story,” said Jeff Place, curator and senior archivist at Smithsonian Folkways, noting that Paredon’s releases were “mostly too political” for Asch at Folkways.“One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” Dane said.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDane certainly never held her tongue. If you see your country “making horrible mistakes, you have to speak up,” she said. “You’re colluding with it if you don’t speak up.”Dane and Silber didn’t profit off Paredon. They ran the label out of their apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood and had no interest in turning it into a business. Silber had previously worked for Folkways, equipping him with the knowledge of how to keep the operation small, pressing a few hundred records at a time, and often using the same graphic designer, Ronald Clyne, known for his earthy minimalism.When Paredon became too unwieldy to remain an at-home endeavor, Dane and Silber soon ended it and moved back to California, where Dane refocused on her singing. “When I was 89, I made the record that I would liked to have made years earlier,” she said of her 2016 LP “Throw It Away,” a collaboration with the jazz pianist Tammy Hall. Dane is currently writing her memoir, and a film about her life, with the working title “The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane,” is in production.Place recalled his 1991 trip to Oakland to interview Dane and Silber and physically acquire the Paredon collection: “I got a rented van, put the entire Paredon collection in the back of it, and drove communist records across the whole country to D.C. and put them in the Smithsonian.”Reflecting on the label’s legacy now, Dane is hopeful it holds lessons for the era of Black Lives Matter and surging conversation about democratic socialism. “One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” she said.“If you’re an artist, you’ve already got tools. If you don’t know what to write about, remember that truth and reality is what we’re after. You have to know reality to tell the truth about it. You got to get out and be a part of it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Reunited States’ Review: Hopeful Moments in a Political War

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Reunited States’ Review: Hopeful Moments in a Political WarDirected by Ben Rekhi, this documentary profiles people who have made a mission of listening to the other side.Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, in a scene from “The Reunited States.”Credit…Dark Star PicturesJan. 28, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe Reunited StatesDirected by Ben RekhiDocumentaryFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The quelling of political warfare in the United States has to start somewhere. Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars, the well-meaning documentary “The Reunited States,” directed by Ben Rekhi and inspired by Mark Gerzon’s early-2016 book, “The Reunited States of America,” profiles people who have made a mission of listening to the other side.David Leaverton, a former Republican strategist, regrets that he contributed to a toxic political climate; with his wife, Erin Leaverton, and children, he embarks on an RV trip to meet strangers and learn about their lives. Susan Bro, who says she didn’t pay attention to politics until her daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, carries on Heyer’s civil rights message.[embedded content]Rekhi shows Greg Orman, who ran for governor of Kansas as an independent in 2018, trying to convince voters that choosing a third-party option isn’t a waste. Steven Olikara, who promotes cooperation among millennial politicians — and is also a drummer — compares democracy, at its best, to “a boisterous jazz ensemble.”The movie is filled with hopeful moments. The Leavertons deepen their understanding of racism and xenophobia. Near the end, Bro, sitting with the Leavertons, acknowledges that it’s hard for her to meet them.Still, the film focuses on the admittedly tough work of bread-breaking, avoiding substantive policy debates that might interfere with the spirit of cordiality. Orman may be an independent, but he had stances, and the film largely keeps his platform offscreen. Furthermore, the camera’s potential role in mediating (or exacerbating) tensions goes unacknowledged.The Reunited StatesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Acasa, My Home’ Review: Civilization and Its Malcontents

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Acasa, My Home’ Review: Civilization and Its MalcontentsA family’s dispossession to make way for a nature park is the subject of this Romanian documentary.A marshy field of dreams: A scene from Radu Ciorniciuc’s documentary, “Acasa, My Home.”Credit…Mircea Topoleanu/Zeitgeist FilmsJan. 14, 2021, 2:33 p.m. ETAcasa, My HomeNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Radu CiorniciucDocumentary1h 26mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The home in “Acasa, My Home” is a wild, marshy expanse on the outskirts of Bucharest, an abandoned reservoir populated mainly by birds, fish and insects. At the beginning of this documentary, directed by Radu Ciorniciuc, the only human residents are Gica Enache, his wife, Niculina, and their nine children. Surrounded by chickens, hogs, pigeons and dogs, they live in proud, occasionally belligerent defiance of “civilization,” a word Gica utters with disdain.The children run through the reeds, catch fish with their bare hands, wrestle with swans and perform household chores. The scene isn’t entirely pastoral, though, and Gica isn’t exactly Henry David Thoreau. He’s a moody patriarch, part anarchist and part autocrat, shielding his family from the power of the state with his own sometimes tyrannical authority. When he’s confronted by social workers, the police and other officials, he’s not always diplomatic. At one point, he threatens to set himself on fire. “These are my children, and I can kill them if I want” might not be the best thing to say to child welfare officers.[embedded content]Filmed over four years, “Acasa” tells the complicated, bittersweet story of Gica’s defeat. When the Romanian government designates the area as a protected nature park — reportedly the largest in a major European city — the Enaches are forced out. They dismantle their house, a sprawling structure made of blankets and plastic sheeting draped over a makeshift wooden frame, and move into an apartment. The children, provided with haircuts, shoes and new clothes, attend school regularly for the first time. The oldest son, Vali, finds a girlfriend and asserts a measure of independence from his father.Does this represent progress or catastrophe? For Gica, the answer is clear: Everything he values has been taken away. But while Ciorniciuc views him with evident sympathy and respect, “Acasa” isn’t an uncritical or romantic tale of paradise lost. You can see the park administrators, government ministers and municipal bureaucrats through Gica’s eyes — as smiling, condescending agents of a force that disturbs his peace and threatens his identity. You can also see him from their perspective, as a man subjecting his family to dangerous and unsanitary conditions who needs to be protected from his own impulses.The film is not static. It’s dialectical — constructing its narrative as an argument between two opposed positions, neither of which is fully embraced. There is a nobility to Niculina and Gica as they try to resist the power of a state convinced of its own benevolence. And the actions of the state are not entirely unreasonable. It’s not as simple as taking the side of individualism against government, or for that matter of being in favor of parks, schools and a decent social order.That’s all fairly abstract, but “Acasa” is full of ideas because it contains so much life. It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.Acasa, My HomeNot rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and on Kino Marquee. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Molchat Doma Is Fun on TikTok. In Belarus, It's Serious.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThis Band Is Fun on TikTok. In Belarus, It’s Serious.Molchat Doma, a synth-pop trio, has become an unlikely social media star. Back home, its music was the soundtrack to a traumatic year.Members of the band Molchat Doma in Minsk, Belarus, on Dec. 5. From left: Pavel Kozlov, Egor Shkutko and Roman Komogortsev.Credit…Yahuen Yerchak for The New York TimesJulia Vauchok, Alex Marshall and Dec. 23, 2020Updated 10:20 a.m. ETMINSK, Belarus — On a recent Saturday night, Hide, a trendy nightclub in Belarus’s capital, was packed. More than 600 clubgoers were jostling for a view of the stage in the tiny venue, hidden in an inner-city courtyard.Social distancing was impossible, but none of the crowd seemed worried about the coronavirus. Instead, they just looked happy to have gotten in to see Molchat Doma, a moody local synth-pop trio that this year became a lightning rod for younger people in Belarus, and an unlikely internet phenomenon abroad.Since August, when President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who has been called Europe’s last dictator, claimed an implausible election victory, mass street protests and a brutal police crackdown have put a spotlight on the former Soviet country.But even before that, Molchat Doma was bringing Belarus some international attention. In February, one of the band’s tracks, “Sudno” (“Vessel”), started appearing in clips on TikTok, the social media app. A TikTok spokesman said that he believed the first use was by a man promoting his tattooing business; that video got a few hundred likes. But the gloomy yet danceable song’s popularity grew, and, within a few months, it had been used in more than 150,000 clips.In one, the music plays while a woman dyes her armpit hair blue; in another, someone tries on dozens of outfits. One short video, in which a dog wearing sunglasses runs around to the frenzied tune, has been liked more than 1.4 million times.Most of the app’s users seem unconcerned — or unaware — that the song’s lyrics, in Russian, are about a poet contemplating suicide: “Living is hard and uncomfortable, but it’s comfortable to die” goes one line.Word of Molchat Doma soon spread beyond TikTok, and now more than two million people stream the band’s music each month on Spotify, many of those in the United States. In November, the band released its latest album, “Monument.”At Hide, few were talking about Molchat Doma’s social media success. Instead, fans spoke about how important the band had been to young Belarusians through this turbulent year. Some chanted slogans associated with the protests while they waited for the band to come onstage, such as “Long live Belarus!” and “We believe! We can! We will win!”“If Belarus were music, it would sound like Molchat Doma,” said Polina Besedina, 20, waiting to get a drink at the bar. Another clubgoer, Aleksandra Shepelevich, 20, said, “These guys feel what we live in right now.”Other fans agreed that Molchat Doma’s music had captured the atmosphere in Belarus. It may sound depressing, but it was also upbeat, said Yegor Skuratovich, 32, adding that it reflected young people’s “hope that everything will turn great.”In a Skype interview, the band’s members — the singer Egor Shkutko, 25, and the instrumentalists Roman Komogortsev, 26, and Pavel Kozlov, 27 — said they did not make a conscious effort to address Belarus’s political situation in their music, but, naturally, the circumstances in which they live were reflected.Molchat Doma performing in Warsaw in October 2019. “These guys feel what we live in right now,” one fan in Belarus said.Credit…Michal Najdzik“Monument,” the new album, was finished before the disputed presidential election in August, and the band said that its songs were about failed relationships, rather than current affairs. In fact, they preferred not to talk about the protests at all.“Any hasty word that was said too loud can result in a loss of freedom,” Kozlov said of daily life in Belarus. “In a good situation, that would mean 15, 30 days of arrest; in a worst case, two to three years behind bars,” he added. “So, as a band, we don’t talk about politics and our music doesn’t touch upon it.”“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t concern us,” said Komogortsev. “It does.”The band’s success on TikTok has taken them by surprise, they said: They only found out that “Sudno” had become a hit on the app when friends started sending them clips. It was odd to see people “doing silly things to such existential lyrics,” Kozlov said, but the band quickly saw the upside, given that the pandemic had stopped them playing shows.“I was worried that we could wither away,” Shkutko said, “but this thing kept us afloat.”Kozlov said that he thought an idealized view of the post-Soviet world had contributed to the band’s international appeal. Its album covers and music videos feature some striking examples of communist architecture, including heroic monuments and huge concrete housing blocks.“We make it look romantic,” Kozlov said, adding that the reality was quite different. “Just send an American to live in our apartment,” he said. “They would be shocked.”Not everyone using the band’s music on TikTok seemed interested in Brutalist aesthetics. Kaya Turner, a psychology student at the University of Central Florida, got more than 1.2 million likes for the clip in which she dyed her armpit hair blue to “Sudno.” She said she had used the song because she had heard it in other clips on the app, and “just thought it was cool,” she said in a telephone interview. She hasn’t listened to the band since, she added.Kaya Turner, a psychology student at the University of Central Florida, posted a clip on TikTok in which she dyed her armpit hair blue to the soundtrack of a Molchat Doma song. The video was liked more than 1.2 million times.Credit…via TikTokBut others have been converted into fans. Liana Gareeva, 29, a Russian customer service representative who lives in the Netherlands, said in a telephone interview that she had listened to everything Molchat Doma had released since coming across them on TikTok.“It is really nice poetry,” she said, “and a really nice old vibe, like vintage music.”In August, she decided to use the band’s popularity on the app to raise awareness of the situation in Belarus. She posted a clip of protesters being beaten, with “Sudno” playing as a soundtrack, overlaid with the message “Belarus we are with u!” It got about 4,000 likes.“Young people don’t read the news, so they look at TikTok,” Gareeva said. “I know a lot of people think this app is stupid, but I’ve learned so much from it.”Back at Hide, the crowd clapped and whistled for Molchat Doma to come onstage. When the musicians finally arrived, dressed all in black, everyone surged forward for a better view.For nearly two hours, the band played and the audience danced to songs that might be about heartbreak, or maybe protest.“I don’t give a damn about what will happen to me later,” Shkutko sang toward the end of the show, his voice booming over a bouncy, ’80s-inspired beat. “I dance like a God, because tomorrow will not be the same,” he sang.A few days after the show, Molchat Doma posted a clip from the show on TikTok. The video showed Shkutko bathed in blue light, writhing to the beat, his eyes closed as he sang. The song was “Sudno” and the clip soon amassed 5,600 likes. It was a respectable number — but a lot less than the blue armpit hair got.Julia Vauchok reported from Minsk, Belarus; Alex Marshall from London; and Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More