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