Vladimir Putin Promotes Hip-Hop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm-4_G0koxU&feature=player_embedded

what a disaster for Hip-Hop

"it is hard to imagine break dance being combined with alcohol or drugs"

...hard -- but so tempting

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27286742

Attempts to get Russians to stop swearing are doomed to failure but, of course, it's not really about that. Obscene language / mat has always been illegal in Russia and the law has been used in the past to restrict the activities of satirical newspapers and bands like Leningrad (who couldn't play in Moscow for years) but enforcement has always been extremely patchy. Although this is being sold as a family-values effort, and seems to be fairly popular on that count, what it really does is give another tool to the authorities to shut down websites / performances they don't like. I wouldn't expect it to be used that widely but the threat of being fined if some of your content (particularly user generated content) falls foul of the regulators is enough to ensure stricter compliance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46584554

There’s a possibility this was a joke, as that was a motto famously used against popular music in the eighties.

From the non-US rap thread:

There’s some interesting stuff going on with Russian rappers and the government at the moment. The rapper Husky got arrested last month for shooting a video in public without a permit and it seems like a couple of members of the government (potentially even Medvedev) intervened to get his sentence quashed. The extremely pro-government TV pundit Dmitry Kiselyov then devoted a segment of his show to defending the Russian rap scene as heirs to the poetic tradition of Mayakovsky.

https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/12/03/russian-state-tv-pundit-sticks-up-for-rappers-dropping-some-sick-mayakovsky-lyrics

There are strong rumours the government paid Slava KPSS to release the track Vladimir Putin ahead of the last election as well.

https://youtu.be/veFih7cxWSQ

The public briefing Putin attended highlighted the commonalities between rap and traditional Russian narrative shanson music and a strange outcome of the whole discussion is that Ic3peak videos have now been played almost in full on the news several times. There definitely seems to be a split between the enforcement mechanism of state morals (from the police interfering with concerts to staff at youth clubs banning all music with swearing) and sections of the government who see broader possibilities.