Clit in his mouth all day! Clit in his mouth all day! Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokno and I are sitting in the Manhattan office of her music publisher, singing Run the Jewels’ sly, Gangsta Boo-featuring banger from 2014, “Love Again.” In advance of Tolokno’s first EP under the Pussy Riot name, and its clever single “Straight Outta Vagina,” we are discussing the sad reality of how there are historically so many songs about sucking dick, and yet nary a whisper, in pop, of sucking clit. This is but one of many reasons that Tolokno—clad in a T-shirt proclaiming “matriarchy or die”—is not particularly captivated by modern mainstream music. But when I ask about her favorite album of recent years, and she mentions Run the Jewels, we remember “Love Again” and sing.
When Pussy Riot garnered global attention in 2012—first as a feminist guerilla art collective, then as prisoners after the church performance of their song “A Punk Prayer”—it would have been hard to predict how their identity would shapeshift. This week, Tolokno will release the three-song xxx EP, produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. The nature of Pussy Riot is—as it has ever been—in flux; xxx is a Tolokno solo effort. For someone whose public identity has consistently aligned with the word “punk,” her definition of what that means is broad: xxx is a pop experiment, while Pussy Riot’s last song, “Chaika,” was inspired by ’80s hip-hop.
“Punk is about asking yourself questions every day, changing every day, challenging yourself every day,” Tolokno tells me. “That’s why punk for me could sound like a Marilyn Monroe song. When we released ‘Chaika,’ people said, ‘it’s not punk—you sold out.’ But I will feel like I’m selling out if I do the same thing over and over. If I’m doing what people expect me to do, that’s selling out. If I am able to shock people with every new song, that means I remain a real punk.”
The buoyant, disco-inflected “Straight Outta Vagina” is released alongside the airy ballad “Make America Great Again” (produced by Ricky Reed). But the Sitek-produced “Organs,” a brooding industrial track about Russia’s authoritarian state sang in Tolokno’s native tongue, is the best song here; its lyrics contain echoes of Tolokno’s already iconic court statements from 2012. (Tolokno tells me that “organs” has many definitions in Russian—police, government officials, internal organs, dick—but translates closest to “law enforcement bodies.”) She is continuing to collaborate with Sitek: “We will write until the Earth blows up,” she says. “America” and “Organs” both have haunting videos released this week. In the former, Tolokno sits in a tub of blood; in the latter, she is a prisoner grotesquely abused by guards.
Tolokno is full of laughter. She is extremely inquisitive and fiercely intelligent. She has only recently begun to conduct interviews in English, though you wouldn’t guess it; she articulates as though she is reading from the pages of her memoir.
Turning the tables as soon as she arrives, Tolokno asks me a string of questions before we really chop it up, explaining that she once harbored dreams of being a journalist herself. Naturally shy, she thought journalism would teach her how to speak with all kinds of people, but an experience with censorship at a local paper left her disillusioned. “They looked at me with this phrase: Oh, you understand,” Tolokno says. “It’s the best description of the political situation in Russia. I decided, fuck journalism.” She studied philosophy instead. “Politics doesn’t work in Russia,” she continues. “If you want to be an activist, you’re pushed into the territory of art or extreme radical actions. You push the boundaries.” Tolokno does all three on xxx—and, delightfully, she’ll make the word “vagina” knock around your brain, too.
Pitchfork: How has your perspective on music changed in the past five years—in terms of what music can actually do?
Nadya Tolokno: My history in music is kind of wild. As a kid I would go to classical music school. I played piano—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. I studied for eight years and that’s why I didn’t like music for a while, because they really force you to play. And it doesn’t work for a human being like that. You reject it naturally. I came back to music later, when I started to realize that music actually could be not just oppressive as it was in my childhood. It could be empowering.
I learned about oi punk and riot grrrl, which was one of my main inspirations, and I started to think about feminism. I was involved with another political art group, Voina, but we had never been focused on female riots. We were extremely political, but it was general policy, which wasn’t about women, which implies that women were always in shadows, a shadow in our art group.
Was there a riot grrrl song that you found especially inspiring then?
“Rebel Girl.” It was so raw. I didn’t know how I could connect my political art and music. I had this classical music background—but how could you use it in a punk song? I didn’t know how to play any modern music. Punk helped me to realize that actually nobody cares. Just take some spoons and do [bum bum bum] and write some political lyrics, just do whatever you want. This idea hit us when Putin was about to become president in his third term. We were desperate. Usually, in religion, a revelation comes to people when they are in desperate state of mind. So it was our revelation.
We wanted to just rage and tell everybody how bad it will be when Putin will become president. Nobody understood that at that time. I don’t know why we understood that—we were kids. But I felt it with each cell of my body. All the people who I was trying to scream at, now Putin is stealing their businesses because he doesn’t care about small business or middle business, he cares just about his friends’ oligarchs and gas and oil. Now all of these people are losing their cafes and restaurants. And they’re like, “Oh, yeah. [laughs] Maybe those girls were right.”
How else did punk change the way you thought about art?
Primarily I describe myself as a conceptual artist. So that’s why, I think, I feel more free about music than most musicians. For some reason, musicians feel that they have to stick with some particular genre of music. I don’t feel like I have to do it. So now I am recording music all the time—and when I meet new people, with whom I am about to record a song, they ask me, “What do you want to do?” And I always tell them that I want to do something which I’ve never done before. Today we could do a Chordettes-influenced song, like barber shop style. Tomorrow we could do hard rock, and then the next day we could do a classical piano ballad. That’s my idea. And if I will ever release a record, every song should be so different that people will not believe that it is the same artist. That’s the kind of freedom that conceptual art gives to you, when you don’t really care about craft side—“could I do it or not,” this question just doesn’t exist for you. If you want to do it, you can do it. As long as you have this idea.
Years ago Pussy Riot said, “We’ll never release recorded music, we will never commodify our art.” Do you still feel that way? Would you ever release an album?
I don’t think about an album at all. It’s not just about being anarchist—I mean, yes, that too—but I just feel that it’s not modern anymore. Major labels and big companies are slow; I don’t want to be involved in these structures. We’re living in a different age. Who cares about albums?
Making music over the past couple years, did you ever consider starting a band?
What do you mean starting a band? [laughs]
Like a punk band. Because your music is punk in spirit, but now it’s also pop.
I’ve never been in a punk band. We called ourselves that, but we were just a collective of likeminded people, and we still have this collective. Some of the people are doing theater shows right now, some of the people are working on the media outlet we started in Russia. We still have the same spirit, the same goals, and whoever wants to share the name of Pussy Riot, they do it. But we’ve never been a traditional punk band, so this idea is pretty far from my head.
I would describe what I am doing right now as “music contemporary art.” It’s just one of the mediums. It’s not like I decided to identify myself as a musician. It makes it more free. You don’t think, “oh how many albums will I sell.” Or all these kind of questions, which stop a lot of musicians from doing experiments. They want to be successful in a mainstream, understandable way. I just have completely another definition of success. If I can do something which never existed before, or which can blow people’s minds, that will be success for me.
How did “Straight Outta Vagina” come to you?
I wrote five pages of lyrics, which weren’t just about vagina—they were about everything on earth. I came to Dave Sitek and he looked at these pages and he was like: “that’s a lot.” [laughs] He printed it and we cut it with scissors, like David Bowie. We started to try to put some words together and this phrase “does your vagina have a brand?” attacked Dave. He was like, “I was physically attacked by it.” So we spent a night writing about this vagina/brand thing and the next day we recorded it.
This phrase “does your vagina have a brand” says a lot about capitalism and feminism and maybe the ways that consumerism destroys people. What does it mean to you?
This phrase could mean a lot. Some people—like a lot of models coming from Russia and Ukraine—they would like to have a brand for their vagina. Some females would like to sell their vaginas. They would love the song, too. It doesn’t say, “stop selling your vagina.” It’s a question, you’re free to decide if you want your vagina to have a brand or not. It could work in both ways.
The sheer number of times you say “vagina” is really wonderful to me. It’s a word people are still so uncomfortable with.
You hear all these songs where they say “suck my dick,” but you very rarely hear something about vagina, or “suck my clit.” In Paris this popular group of feminists—they’re part of Femen—wrote a song called “Suck My Clit.” French YouTube deleted it because of sexual content. But they were totally fine with all songs that had “suck my dick.” “Amy Schumer” has a scene where she goes to a gynecologist, and the doctor is like, “I’m going to check your pussy.” And Amy is like, “Just say vagina! What’s so difficult about that? Just say vagina!” I love it.
It’s the same thing as with the name Pussy Riot. It’s just fucking fun. When somebody like Hillary Clinton writes the word “pussy” in her tweet just because she met us, that’s hilarious. It’s the same here. You couldn’t even imagine how much fun I had working on this song. When I gave the song to the person mixing it, I told him, “you are the only one I could trust to work on my vagina.” [laughs] My vagina requires a lot of work. A lot of hands worked on my vagina.
How did you meet Dave Sitek?
I was in Los Angeles looking for people to do music with. It’s hard to do it in Russia because people get in real big trouble after they start working with me. At some point, I was like, “I can’t.” I feel bad when people are being fired from their jobs just because they worked with me.
Did that really happen to people?
After “Chaika,” one girl who took part in this video was fired from the theater where she was a director. Another girl had a really terrible conversation with her bosses, and she wasn’t fired, but for three weeks she didn’t know what would happen. A cameraman I worked with asked me not to reveal his name because he is still studying and it would be a disaster for him.
That’s why I ended up in Los Angeles. I was really scared to go. I heard a lot of things in Russia about Trump, and I was like, “I don’t want to go to country who are about to vote for this douchebag!” I was in a really bad mood on the plane. [laughs] I also had trouble before with producers who are so deep into successful mainstream music. I was trying to protect myself from that as much as I can. I don’t want to be a part of pop culture, but I want to use some techniques of pop culture in my own political way.
There must be so many producers who want to make songs with you that sound like—
Skrillex. [laughs]
But you felt a sense of camaraderie with Dave Sitek?
Yeah. Because of his dogs. He has three dogs and two cats. When I came to his house, I spent half an hour just petting dogs and I am not that type of person. Another artist who Dave worked with told him: “Dave, I can trust you because your dogs have kindness in their eyes.” The same thing happened with me. You can see a lot of a person just looking in the eyes of his dogs.
You don’t want to be a part of pop culture, but the songs obviously have a pop sensibility to them. How do you negotiate that?
To mention Andy Warhol in New York is kind of cheesy, but I have to. I share his approach to pop culture. You could make it work in your own artistic ways. He wasn’t a political artist, but you could apply the Andy Warhol method in doing political art. Sometimes the problem of political communities is they speak just with each other, which is pretty comfortable, to speak with like-minded people. Naturally, as a person who studied philosophy for five years and has been part of leftwing movements—we like to phrase our thoughts so that just the five people around us can understand. What pop culture could teach you, as a political activist, is how to be understood by people outside of your community. Now I’m learning how to phrase everything in more accessible ways, which is exciting. It doesn’t make me stupid. It’s about empathy.
This thought, strangely, came to me when I was in prison. Because I was surrounded by people from all different economic classes and political views. Before, I lived in an art/political ghetto. Basically, when we created Pussy Riot, we created it for people who already hate Putin. We just wanted them to be more active about politics. It’s good to know how to be extremely radical, but at the same time, you want to speak with people who are not ready for this radical language.
That’s why, when we got out of prison, we started a media outlet. It is for left activists around the world and looks pretty normal because we use normal language—we report on what’s going on in our country. And people are like, “How could you call yourself punk if you create an institution?” My answer is: To create an institution which helps people to understand their reality, in a Russian country like where I lived—where I belong, I belong to Russia—it is punk, it is radical. With “Make America Great Again,” our goal was, “How could we speak with people who do not necessarily agree with us 100 percent that Trump is a douchebag?”
It’s interesting you would have this revelation in prison, physically surrounded by all types of people. Needless to say, most artists probably never have that experience.
You could have this experience not just through prison. But prison put me in the position where I couldn’t avoid it. I started to love people more in prison. I started to try to find common ground with people, rather than fight with them. There are some things that you couldn’t accept; you wouldn’t speak with some people. But with most of them, I tried to find common ground.
The music of “Make America Great Again” is light, but the video is so hard and grotesque. It’s horrifying to see you get branded. Was it inspired by your time in prison?
Yeah. We had that rape scene in the prison, and it was really hard. Some people told me, “we will be accused of calling Trump a rapist, but we don’t have any evidence.” It’s not about Trump being a rapist. It’s about Trump’s anti-feminist views. It’s my prediction of what will happen in prisons if Trump will be elected as president. Right now, the American prison system is fucked up—it’s as fucked up as the Russian prison system. It looked like Obama started to pay attention to the prison system, but for sure if Trump is elected, he will not give a flying fuck about the prison system. So rapes, and all kinds of violence, will increase in prisons. It’s about that.
How did the song “Organs” come to you?
I wrote the words for “Organs” at the time we were shooting “Chaika.” We had to find fishnet stockings for the music video, and we couldn’t. We started to look in sex shops, and all the sex shops were closed for some reason. So it started as a joke: They want to not just take all our civil rights from us, but they want to take our fishnet stockings, our orgasms, our sex shops. What about dildos? It’s a joke, but it’s true. Right now, we have an initiative against abortions—our government wants to do the same thing as in Poland.
I mention Mizulina in this song, who is a pretty funny character. But funny in a sad way. She’s a member of Russian parliament and it was her suggestion in parliament—like a real suggestion in real parliament—to ban oral and anal sex. Of course they didn’t pass this law. Yet it shows you the level of our conversation about sex, reproductive rights, and feminism.
The imagery of the “Organs” video is so unsettling. What did the blood represent to you?
Actually, it didn’t represent anything. It was just blood. I was on the verge of cutting my own veins when I came up with this idea. Because the worst thing on Earth happens in Russia every day, when you get all this news that your friend was arrested, your friend was beaten, this guy you knew for five years was killed. And you’re like, “I want to just commit suicide.” But that’s the way artists work with their own problems: we try to convert it into art. I thought, if I just cut my veins, that’s exactly what the Russian government wants me to do. So I made it into a video.
When you are in Russian activism, you are really covered in blood. I was in prison with a neo-Nazi woman who killed two of my friends. I was on the anti-fascist side all of my life. Maybe they wanted us to kill each other. This politician [Boris Nemtsov] who was killed last year on the bridge, I knew him, too. I met him and he said, “It’s becoming more and more dangerous here in Russia, you need hire bodyguards.” And I was like, “Bodyguards?! Haha!” Then he was killed.
There’s a line about how freedom and bondage are the same thing; it reminded me of your court statements, about how you were more free even though you were in jail.
It was partly about the process against Petr Pavlensky, a Russian artist who was inspired by Pussy Riot. When we were in prison, he sewed his mouth in support of Pussy Riot, in front of a church in St. Petersburg. And then he made other actions—he burned the door of this federal building. It was insane. Everyone was like, “They will kill you,” but he was so brave.
After going to prison over it, do you still think people can experience freedom through music?
Of course. Music is a prayer. It started as a prayer, and it is still a prayer. I recently told everybody that I was working in the studio and couldn’t go out—I hate to go out. But, in fact, I didn’t work in the studio. I was just sitting in my flat, reading about quantum mechanics. The theory of superstrings is so powerful. If we all consist of strings, it explains why music could touch us so deeply. Because we do not consist of solid things, as we used to think. If we are just strings of energy—and quantum physics says that—it could resonate. If you could feel it, you could project ideas and feelings and perceptions of reality. Unfortunately, I don’t agree with most of the things that are projecting right now in music. [laughs] So we are doing prayers still.