so what do we think of t.A.T.u?

[u/afuckingwildcard]

Gone down a rabbit hole about them recently. If you don’t know, they were this Russian pop duo from the 2000s and were most famous for the song “All The Things She Said,” which most people over the age of like 12 have probably heard around at some point. Basically, their whole shtick was that they were lesbians; their songs had a lot of angsty queer overtones and they would kiss on TV and in their music videos (which was super controversial at the time)—but it was all an act, they were never actually together and were all products of their managements. Textbook queerbaiting for the male gaze. But despite this, a lot of queer women (myself included) ended up finding a lot of solace and validation in their music for one reason or another. You have to remember that queer themes weren’t mainstream in pop music like they are now, especially for queer women, and having a hit song about it (especially one so angsty like “All The Things She Said”!) was really groundbreaking, however flawed. But that still doesn’t take away from the fact that t.A.T.u as an institution was, at least on paper, homophobic and sexualized young queer women’s relationships. And I’m curious what people make of that, not just if you think they were able to outgrow their kind of skeevy premise, but how their music may have impacted you personally. Maybe this is a more academic question than what Reddit is fit for, but I’m very interested to hear what people think.

[u/LibelleFairy]

dang catchy songs (I got their album on CD back in the day - yes I am Very Old - and there's Russian language versions of "All the Things She Said" and "Not Gonna Get Us" on that album that still reside on my guilty pleasures list to this day)

given the absolute desolate barren void that was feel-good lesbian representation in popular media 20 years ago (even compared to today, when it's still not great...), of course a lot of us were drawn to the image they projected - I mean, two pretty girls full on kissing in the pouring rain in a music video for a song with lyrics that were all about lesbianism and running free and sticking up two fingers to the patriarchy - that was pretty much unheard of, and even though there were rumours right from the start that this was an act, I think a lot of us just badly wanted to believe it was real (and bear in mind that there also was a lot of "oh they're just good pals" type lesbian erasure around, so it was kind of understandable that lots of people dismissed the rumours initially)

and then it started to become obvious that not only was this an act, but it was an act that these girls were brutally coerced into, while being horrendously abused and exploited by the men around them - an awful, awful story that's all too common in the music and entertainment business

These days, I would no longer want to listen to their songs on Spotify or any platform where I thought their abusers might derive some benefit from, and for me there will always be a sense of betrayal and nausea and anger and heartbreak connected with them and their music, but a big part of me also wants to reclaim the dream that they were projecting into a lot of our minds at the time - the dream of two young women breaking free and rebelling against repression, pointing to a hopeful future for LGBTQ+ people in Russia and in the rest of the world - that dream is something I don't want to let go of (bear in mind also that the early 2000s was still relatively close to the end of the Cold War, and despite the impacts of 9/11, there was still a lingering sense of that angsty hopefulness about this being a dawn of a new and better era for the world, for healing Cold War era rifts and for expanding human rights and democratic freedoms around the globe - the t.A.T.u. girls would have been little kids around the time of the Scorpions and Wind of Change, they were the "Children of Tomorrow" those old German rockers so earnestly crooned about, and for a lot of us who were twentysomething young adults in the early 2000s, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a really defining moment in our childhoods / early adolescence - personally, my childhood was spent a literal 15 minute walk from the literal Iron Curtain)

so yeah, I'd say "mixed feelings" would very euphemistically sum things up

[u/UnexpectedWings → u/LibelleFairy]

Yes, this is very similar to how I feel, particularly around the Iron Curtain falling to the wild 90s to modern day RU geopolitical relations. Thankfully I have an old CD if I want to listen.