Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow

NIB@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 794 points –
Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow | CNN
edition.cnn.com

Authorities in the Russian Republic of Chechnya have announced a ban on music that they consider too fast or slow.

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Music too fast? Straight to jail.

Music too slow? Believe it or not, straight to jail.

Just a little bit too perfect? Burned for witchcraft

and after the burning, whatever is left, straight to jail.

Sounds like a healthy form of governance. People can't be trusted to manage tempo on their own. They should do this for heart rates as well.

Checks out. If your heart rate is too slow or too fast you're probably doing a sin.

VladBit health health trackers now mandatory. Better keep yours charged up or gulag for you.

80 to 116 BPM. I actually chuckled audibly that the BPM was specified, I assumed it would be extremely vague.

They couldn’t even make it higher than the DAW defaults at 120bpm. So you have new musicians that have never recorded accidentally producing music at 120 and breaking the law. This is the dumbest shit I’ve seen since last week. I don’t typically put anything together that is below 120. Looks like I’m on my way to being a Chechen fugitive.

I'm sure that this will be blatantly enforced against "wrong" types of music that just so happen to be popular among groups the Chechen government, just like Disco Demolition Night was a thinly-veiled race riot.

Shocking.

No house, no techno?!

Suddenly a larger market for those sped up/slowed down ByteDance remixes, depending.

Phonk producers with normal, slowed and speedy versions of their songs were already prepared for this.

What if you are practicing? Can you start slow on the hard bits or do you have to get it right straight away?

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So, they just banned the Russian national anthem too, since that sits at 76 bpm?

Not even Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union had this arbitrary and stupid of a music ban.

Isis and taliban do tho. Chechnya is primarily muslim. But yea, another sign russia has become a dystopian nightmare

Doesn't the IS make music propaganda videos?

I think IS are not too much into music, on the whole.

It's not music they're nasheeds (nasheeds r banger asf)

A nasheed (Arabic: نَشِيد, romanized: nashīd, lit. 'chant', plural Arabic: أَنَاشِيد, romanized: anāshīd) is a work of vocal music, partially coincident with hymns, that is either sung a cappella or with instruments, according to a particular style or tradition within Sunni Islam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasheed

In Soviet Union, the rock genre was for a very long time existing underground due to the inability of artists to be properly published.

Only starting with the 1980s could the artists finally publish their songs officially. And even then Soviet government put a lot of measures to prohibit rock music in the country.

This resulted in the appearance of many beloved bands and artists, like

  • Kino (tl. Cinema),
  • DDT,
  • Aria,
  • Chaif,
  • Grazhdanskaya Oborona (tl. Civil Defense),
  • Mashina Vremeni (tl. Time machine),
  • Sektor Gaza (tl. Gas Sector)
  • Korol i Shut (tl. King and Jester)
  • And many others

The history of Russian rock is actually quite fascinating. It was inspired by bard songs and often touched darker subjects as well as being satirical and judgmental of Soviet government.

Due to that, some artists, like Yegor Letov from Grazhdanskaya Oborona and Yuri Shevchuk from DDT, had troubles with KGB (Soviet FBI).

Nowadays, rock artists are still being persecuted for their views. For example, DDT is de facto prohibited from performing in Russia.

Any excuse to post Aspid

Since we're sharing links now

Although for Grazhdanskaya Oborona, I prefer that song in Louna's version. It's so good, man.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Aspid

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I think you seriously over-estimate the level of tolerance of Nazi Germany. The Nazis persecuted Degenerate Music just like they persecuted Degenerate Art.

I'm not saying that Nazi Germany didn't ban music, they absolutely did ban entire genres of music as well as many composers. But they didn't ban music based on its basic qualities like tempo.

They're inching closer to the plot of Footloose.

There are so many movies that I've said, "that's stupid, it would never happen". I don't say that anymore.

At this rate, I fully expect an article about a community buying gatorade in bulk to water their plants with

Wait... Did The Onion buy out CNN?

My exact thoughts as well. Im like:

"Huhh wtf, this cant be true. Ahh it must be the Onion. Wait wat... This is not the onion..."

Read up a bit on the Chechnyans and their relationship with Russia.

Apparently, their leaders were responsible for atrocities on par with typical Russians.

I don't really have sympathy for them. They support people who assassinate journalists as a "birthday gift" to Putin.

I don't know what you've read, but clearly not deep enough. As a "typical Russian" I find such comparison quite offensive.

I knew what this would be without question. Felt it in my bones. The old ways are still strong.

I clicked it... on purpose. Never Gonna Give You Up is such a banger

Writes a song at 115 BPM. Makes it use double time. Occasionally changes tempo to 161 BPM half-time. Adds three layers of polyrhythms to it. Spices things up with metric modulation between 4/4, 13/8 and 17/7. Hides a sample of the "trolololo song" somewhere in there.

Trollface.jpg

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This is memeable, yes; but usually when news like this starts coming out a nation shit’s definitely gone sideways for it.

Eastern Europe is going though it right now. One of my old Polish colleagues fled to the UK becuase the Church is slowly taking over and becoming totalitarian. Even if you have a miscarriage you'd be investigated to see if "it was done on purpose" or not.

(From what I remember, this was just at the tail end of covid)

Interesting.

Putin's rule over Russia is vastly different from Soviet Russia for many reasons but a big one is his friendship with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

That plus the Republican tie to the church is so strange.

I really wouldn't be surprised if in the future they consider Christianity an organized crime syndicate of some sort. Overthrowing governments, definitely tied to human trafficking and I imagine they have hands in other shit too.

Fuck the church man, fuck all organized religions

Thankfully theocratical idjits are more tempered now by opposition but eh. Still shityy. Also, Poland is rather central europe, please do not group it with orks.

Seriously, music is as much free speech as any spoken or written word and can be incredibly powerful. Banning it shows an absurd amount of fear and hatred for any sense of individuality.

It just feels like a conservative one party government trying to fill in time before the next election with busy work.

Nothing pleases social conservatives more than cracking down on that weird music their kids listen to.

I guess next thing Kadyrov will make his horse a consul.

Or redesign the calendar naming a month after his horse, as the first post-Soviet dictator of Turkmenistan did.

Imma go blow some Chechnyan minds with my happy hardcore outfit that plays songs at 100bpm, but only plays 64th notes.

Was trying to figure out why this felt so familiar, then I remembered it's literally a plot point in the game Beholder 3, a game about an excessively oppressive surveillance government. Wild.

It's also similar, though not quite, to the plot of Footloose. In that a town banned dancing, but this seems to be an effort to limit it to traditional folk dances.

More than just that one game has this plot point, I'm sure. During the early 90s, when Joe Leiberman and Tipper Gore made "Violence in Music/Movies/Games" their cause celeb, we got a glut of artists producing dystopian prophecies of hyper censorship.

I'm saying the game has the exact plot of the government banning certain tempos of music, not just censorship in general, though that is also in it.

Reading through, I suspect that they are trying to restrict music to those forms similar to national/traditional/folk music. They just got rid of rock and roll here.

Doom metal and hardcore unite

I think these guys need to hear a few words from our lord and savior Mick Gordon.

I feel like asking why now is besides the point, irrelevant really.

  • Laughs in Dutch EDM * 🤣

(Hardcore/Gabber starts at ~160 BPM and goes all the way up to ~300 BPM). Definitely too fast.

Gabber/Gak. Man I haven't thought about these bands forever!

The shizit was my favorite band for a long time. And rotterdam terror corps.

Not sure if "bands" is necessarily the right word here. Most of the artists are solo producers, and them touching anything acoustic for their music is a rare sight these days.

There's definitely still a huge scene out there for the Early Hardcore stuff, with most of the crowd going into their 40's now. And a lot of the originals are still performing to this day. Most of the scene is concentrated around the Netherlands though, as loud, obnoxious music is definitely in our collective DNA. But we are seeing increasing amounts of tourists traveling from far away just to be part of the larger events like Thunderdome, Masters of Hardcore, Ground Zero, Defqon.1, Dominator and so on.

Fair enough. I do call even single hip-hop artists 'bands' in normal speech as well. Possibly just a linguistic quirk on my part.

wait... Air by Bach is too fast? (134 bpm)

If it's a waltz conducted in 1, do they require that the big beat is within the tempo constraints or that the 3 beats in the measure comply with the tempo restriction?

drummer distracted by falling stagelight

Chechen authorities 360noscope him for lowering the BPM

I guess Low is going to have to cancel their Chechnya tour.

Michael Jackson's "Just beat it" is to be used as neutral metronome. Bohemian Rhapsody will be in the musical fire pit asap first thing in the morning. Also with "oh Donna" and "la Bamba" as well as pretty much every single music piece not used for CPR training.

It has been said, now go on and make it happen!

Oh thank god, so I can still strut down the street to "Stayin' Alive" on my next Chechnyan holiday.

Another One Bites the Dust...........

Specially on holidays, vacation, and Christmas. Ask the happiest Jew or Muslim to sing it with you as you walk down the street. ....ha ha ha ha.. staying a liveeee! ....but you wanna be bad! So Beat it! Just beat it!

If I take a 2min Drum and Bass track with 170bpm, add 30s of silence at the beginning and the end it would result in ~113bpm for a track of 3 min. Would this be legal? Or did they also define how to measure the bpm?

Have they defined the planet for the length of the minute? How about a Venus minute? Or a Jupiter minute?

That's not how tempo works. The Music played is still at a tempo of 170 beats per minute.

You wouldn't win if you were pulled over going 50 mph on a 40 mph road by saying that you were stopped at lights for 10 minutes and thus your average speed for the last half hour or whatever is under 40 mph.

Huh. Guess they don't like extratone

There’s a strong chance you don’t have many extratone records in your collection. An electronic genre that operates at a tempo of 1,000 beats per minute, and can sometimes hit the startling realms of 10,000 BPM, extratone is an acquired taste to say the least—and possibly just a smidgen out of your standard tempo comfort zone

TIL my car has been making speedcore every day for the last decade.

The Skat Injector song in the article sounded like annoying noise. But I could actually vibe a little bit to the song by Gridbug.

But mostly it just sounds like noise and not actual music to me (Like my ears don't even seem to interpret it as music). Still interesting!

LPT: lower the volume before listening to anything on the link or risk losing your speakers.

At least it should do wonders for the singers' diction.

I think I know what happened. Russia's capital is in the Eastern Orthodox region of the country. They celebrate big Christian holidays such as Christmas using the Julian calendar; so about two weeks later than most. So, it makes sense that they celebrate the smaller holidays one week late. April Fools?

I wonder what bpm Moby's thousand starts at... Maybe it can reach both limits

If i have 30 seconds too fast followed by 30 seconds too slow then is that allowed?