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When the Soviets Banned Rock Music, Teens Used X-rays to Bootleg Records
- will_pseudonym 11y agoSuch a neat story! I think the history of the underground market for music, movies, and games is fascinating. I'd love to work on a book about it.
- lucaspiller 11y agoAs soon as I open the page on iOS it redirects to an unrelated advert. This is why I use an adblocker on my PC.
- drglitch 11y agoThere is a surprisingly good movie called стиляги about this culture: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1239426/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1239426/ - highly recommended for anyone who thinks Brooklyn invented the hipster :)
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> highly recommended for anyone who thinks Brooklyn invented the hipster Heh, this reminds me of a few years ago, when my cousin was visiting us from Russia, and was absolutely ecstatic to meet my friend who looked very much like a hipster stereotype.
- delinka 11y agoThe title interested me in that I was curious how X-ray images of records could be re-rendered as audio or vinyl discs ... But no! They took old x-ray prints and pressed the records right into them! It's an excellent idea and one my just-awoken brain could not get to on its own.
- 4ad 11y agoI wonder if X-ray images of records could be decoded as audio. It's been done with regular pictures, there was a really good article about this that I can't find anymore. However it should be more complicated with x-ray images as they are a different mapping between the disc and the image.
- gruez 11y ago>They took old x-ray prints and pressed the records right into them! How can this even work? Surely the xray prints are not stiff enough to be used as records.
- delinka 11y agoAs a child, I recall several times receiving very flexible records as freebies. (Can't recall whether McDonald's ever did it with happy meals...) The flimsy records played just fine!
- Roboprog 11y agoI remember magazines in the 80s (e.g. - "Keyboard" magazine) putting in flippy little inserts that played.
- cdr 11y agoI think they're called flexi discs. http://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400369975/its-thin-its-plastic-its-back-flexi-discs-find-new-fans http://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400369975/its-thin-its-plastic...
- clacktronics 11y agoThey are not pressed they are lathed , pressing is a way to mass produce records from a lathed master. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate_disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate_disc
- beeswax 11y agoslightly OT but: 1) the whole article reminds me of A Clockwork Orange and 2) all those Eastern Europe Warez Collections that found their way to central/west Europe in the early nineties. If it wasn't for 3DStudio 3/4 on DOS, I think my visual/spatial thinking would be way worse, making it even harder to wrap my mind around view/projection matrices etc.. edit: typos
- a3n 11y agoInformation wants to be passed around.
- ommunist 11y agoWell, that was probably the case in Leningrad and maybe Moscow, but definitely not the rest of the USSR (1/6th of the world's land at that moment). And the situation was not that grave. There was even a magazine printed as blue plastic LPs called Krugozor, with rock bands. I owned a collection of many rock bands on tapes, and no one chased me for that. There was completely otherer problem - Soviet music was banned in the US, you could not buy LP of Pesnyary anywhere in the US.
- pvg 11y agoKrugozor/Kolobok are from the mid to late 60s, after these things were first invented and traded in the 50s. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грампластинка#.D0.9A.D1.83.D1.81.D1.82.D0.B0.D1.80.D0.BD.D1.8B.D0.B5_.D0.BF.D0.BB.D0.B0.D1.81.D1.82.D0.B8.D0.BD.D0.BA.D0.B8._.C2.AB.D0.9C.D1.83.D0.B7.D1.8B.D0.BA.D0.B0_.D0.BD.D0.B0_.D1.80.D1.91.D0.B1.D1.80.D0.B0.D1.85.C2.BB https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грампластинка#.D0.9A.D1.83.D1....
- ommunist 11y agoPink Floyd are the 70-ies, if memory serves. I had tape of the Dark Side of the Moon in 1977. That is a bit late, yes, but could any US resident claim ownership of the 1976 Belarusian single of the year in 1980? http://youtu.be/0rHjakawG8M http://youtu.be/0rHjakawG8M
- pvg 11y agoWhat does that have to do with the article? It sounds like a classic case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
- ommunist 11y agoThe article claims the hunger for American bands among the Soviet teenagers and describes the exotic method for satiating it. I only pointed that situation was more complicated. There were 'voices of freedom' and anticommunism from one side and propaganda from the other. And yes, thank you for the link. Just this week I suggested Mr Simmons - the black American cyber cop is better to leave the US if he wants to land a better professional future.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago> While the vinyl sheets used to print x-rays were much flimsier than records I doubt the Soviets were making X-rays on vinyl. They would be using acetate like the rest of the world. The record industry was also still using shellac based media in the 50's. Vinyl was not a "thing" back then.
- setpatchaddress 11y agoOff by one decade. Shellac compound -> LP changeover occurred in the 50's in most of the world.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoLate 50's. Vinyl wasn't common until the 60's.