Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. Creating your favorite music
Speaker 1: these days is as easy as creating a playlist, But
Speaker 1: it wasn't always that simple. In the nineteen fifties, teenagers
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union had to go to backbreaking lengths
Speaker 1: to listen to popular music, literally cutting records upon images
Speaker 1: of a broken arm, leg or rib in the process.
Speaker 1: Let's unpack that. In the years after World War Two,
Speaker 1: the USSR took exception to music and art that seemed
Speaker 1: too flagrantly individualized for its communist sensibilities, and this meant
Speaker 1: that it was nearly impossible for Soviet teenagers to buy
Speaker 1: the same vinyl records of Elvis or Ella Fitzgerald as
Speaker 1: their counterparts in the United States and Western Europe. Aside
Speaker 1: from a few expensive copies on the black market, The
Speaker 1: music craved by the still Yaggi or style hunters in
Speaker 1: their teens and twenties was elusive, but as with other
Speaker 1: attempts at prohibition, a ban on music did not mean
Speaker 1: that there wasn't a demand for it. The still Yagi
Speaker 1: were particularly interested in rock and roll in jazz, though
Speaker 1: it wasn't just Western music that caught the eye of
Speaker 1: the sensors, music that people had grown up with. Anything
Speaker 1: considered subversive was subject to bands, and so when they
Speaker 1: wanted to share their beloved music with others, a few
Speaker 1: industrious teens pressed the records that they could access onto vinyl. However,
Speaker 1: vinyl was a scarcity, and that's when one of the
Speaker 1: ingenuities of a generation kicked in. The Still Yaggy scoured
Speaker 1: hospital dumpsters for scrapped X rays and used these thin
Speaker 1: vinyl sheets to create bootleg records. Using a disc cutter,
Speaker 1: they duplicate a recording onto the X ray, trim the
Speaker 1: disc by hand, and burn a hole in the center
Speaker 1: with a cigarette. The same process was illustrated in the
Speaker 1: opening credits of the two thousand eight Russian film Still Yaggy.
Speaker 1: The recordings, imposed over X ray images of skulls, arms, legs, ribs,
Speaker 1: and other bones quickly earned the nicknames bone records, bone music,
Speaker 1: and simply ribs, and spawned an entire cottage industry that
Speaker 1: included distributors known as the x ray press. Today, the
Speaker 1: records are so rare that they're curated into books and
Speaker 1: exhibits displayed in museums and the very few copies still
Speaker 1: being found are sold to private collectors for hundreds of dollars.
Speaker 1: During the height of bone recordings popularity, Soviet authorities attempted
Speaker 1: to squash their distribution, going so far as to dispatch
Speaker 1: informants posing as record buyers, and some bone records distributed
Speaker 1: were undercover bait and switches supposedly created by the authorities,
Speaker 1: containing only a few bars of music before stern voice
Speaker 1: would utter dire pro government warnings. By the nineteen sixties, however,
Speaker 1: the need for bone records waned because of loosened restrictions
Speaker 1: and the advent of other recording devices like real to
Speaker 1: real tape recorders. Today's episode was written by Laura L.
Speaker 1: Dove and produced by Tyler clang Or. More on this
Speaker 1: and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuffworks dot com.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
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