People is an American weekly magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Time Inc. With a readership of 46.6 million adults, People has the largest audience of any American magazine. People had $997 million in advertising revenue in 2011, the highest advertising revenue of any American magazine. In 2006, it had a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion. It was named “Magazine of the Year” by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising. The magazine runs a roughly 50/50 mix of celebrity and human-interest articles. People’s editors claim to refrain from printing pure celebrity gossip, enough to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, and evidence of what one staffer calls a “publicist-friendly strategy”. (More from Wikipedia)
As quoted in the blog What Fresh Hell is This (overall the best source on information on Black Russian that I was able to find on the Internet), People magazine said of the group in their October 16, 1980 issue: “The Kapustins were members of Sovremennik, a state-run pop orchestra, with Natasha [Kapustin] on vocals and piano and Serge [Kapustin] on guitar and percussion. Vladimir [Shneider] produced and played piano for the Singing Hearts, which was one of Russia’s hottest groups in the mid-’70s. But, as Vladimir notes, they were pumping out more agitprop than pop. ‘We’d sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end — if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like ‘Killing Me Softly’ or ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’. But never rock.’”
The People magazine article ends with a proposal by Serge Kapustin of Black Russian: “Just put 100 rock ’n’ roll radio stations along the Soviet border. You’d kill off Russian Communism — snap — just like that.”
As I am sure I have said before in these posts, IMHO the growing prominence of rock music in the Soviet Union, and the sense of freedom that kind of music engenders is a big part of why the Iron Curtain fell. Maybe something like that can happen in the Middle East also, if the younger generation tires of the way everyone is living over there now.
Serge Kapustin, Natasha Kapustin and Vladimir Shneider of Black Russian were dissident Russian Jews who defected in May 1976 and came to New York City. They eventually saved enough to go to Hollywood where they auditioned for Berry Gordy at Motown Records. People magazine notes that this delay in their success in this country was just as well: “The group couldn’t go public with its fascinating story until six additional family members arrived safely in the U.S.”
(April 2015/1)
