I've been thinking a lot about the Leningrad Cowboys recently. I've always loved their performance of Gimme All Your Lovin' with the Red Army Choir, and after l

I've been thinking a lot about the Leningrad Cowboys recently. I've always loved their performance of Gimme All Your Lovin' with the Red Army Choir, and after looking that up on YouTube last year, The algorithm eventually started feeding me more of their songs, some of which I vaguely recognized, others were totally new to me, but I learned a lot about them. Mostly that they've got no respect for genre boundaries. They play a lot of American rock and pop with Russian folk influences, but also the other way around, and later started mixing in even more genres. And they're always funny and irreverent. A personal favourite is their interpretation of Eloise, which includes the weird shout "Kozachok!", which is the name of a Ukrainian dance, but is also used (in exactly the same rhythm, though a lot more repetitive) in a French or Romanian cover of a Russian or Ukrainian song (I momentarily forgot which one or who the singer of that cover is). Anyway, complex references that are nearly impossible to get. Also, having the Red Army Choir perform parodies of American pop and rock songs seems like something that was only possible in the early 1990s, after east-west tensions had softened, the Cold War ended, and we got closer together. And the Leningrad Cowboys definitely did their part to bring us together. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we need them again.