t.A.T.u.

In the winter of 2002 and 2003, a song got onto radios all over the planet with an urgency that cut across any language: accelerated synthesisers, a desperate chorus and a raw emotion about loving someone the world around you rejects. It was called "All the Things She Said" and it was sung by two Russian girls, t.A.T.u. For a lot of people — above all for young people who felt their way of loving had no place — it was an anthem, and it still is. This is the story of how that song came to mean that, which is quite different from what its creators had in their heads.

What was behind it

It is worth saying it plainly, because everything else depends on it. t.A.T.u. was not a band that formed: it was a project that an adult put together. Ivan Shapovalov, who before becoming a producer had been a child psychiatrist, signed Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova at the end of 1999, when they were fourteen, and took them out of a children's musical group. He himself directed the video for "Ya soshla s uma", the original Russian version, which was shot in September 2000: two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls in uniform, in the rain, on the other side of a fence, kissing.

It is documented that the duo's image was deliberately formulated to exploit the lesbian schoolgirl fantasy, and there was contemporary criticism pointing out who that material was aimed at. Neither of them was a lesbian; the romance was script. It became publicly known in December 2003, with the documentary Anatomy of t.A.T.u., although by then the suspicions went back further.

None of this is an awkward nuance that can be left for the end. It is the starting point.

And even so, the song

Because beyond the strategy, the song was terrific. The music is by Sergio Galoyan, the Russian lyrics by Elena Kiper and Valery Polienko, and the English version was rewritten by Trevor Horn, who also produced the album. It speaks of a forbidden love, of the weight of other people's stares, of the anguish of feeling something that is rejected all around you. And that emotion worked, no matter how it had been packaged.

The result was that a huge number of people found in it a meaning its manufacturers had not put there. It was number one in the United Kingdom for four weeks and across much of Europe, with an enormous impact in Latin America; in the United States, where the video met more resistance, it reached number twenty. In 2003 they represented Russia at Eurovision and came third, three points behind the winner. It is worth being precise about the primacy, because it circulates in exaggerated form: it was not the first song about love between two women to play on the radio — "I Kissed a Girl", by Jill Sobule, is from 1995 — but probably it was the first global pop number one with an explicitly lesbian narrative.

What they did with the project, and what they said afterwards

At the beginning of 2004, Katina and Volkova legally broke the contract with Shapovalov and carried on for seven years on their own, until they dissolved the duo in 2011. It is a fact that almost never gets told and that says quite a lot: the two teenagers of the manoeuvre took the project away from the adult who had designed it.

And there is another thing that does not get told either, and that changes how all of the above reads. In September 2014, on a Russian television programme, Yulia Volkova was asked whether she would condemn a gay son. She answered that she would, that she would condemn him, because she believed that a real man must be a real man; she said that she had no problem with lesbians, but that a man has no right to be one, and she used the slur. Afterwards she published a partial apology. Lena Katina distanced herself in public: she wrote that everybody should be free to love whoever they love.

There is no elegant way to accommodate that, and there is no need to either. It is simply part of the story, and leaving it out of a text that celebrates the song as an anthem would be writing the reader a version that does not survive a search.

What to remember

t.A.T.u. is the clearest case I know of a work slipping out of the hands of whoever manufactures it. It was born of a commercial strategy designed by an adult around two girls of fourteen and fifteen, and that has to be said first, not at the end. What came afterwards was not in the script: millions of people took that song, found in it a truth that was useful to them and made it their own. That one of the two performers attacked part of that same audience years later is a bitter ending, and it takes nothing away from anyone about what the song meant.

Perhaps that is the lesson, and it is not as luminous as it is usually told: a song can end up belonging to those who need it, even when neither those who manufactured it nor those who sang it were on its side. What made "All the Things She Said" great was not given to it by its writers. It was given to it by the people who listened to it.

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Sources

t.A.T.u. was a Russian pop duo made up of Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova, created by the producer Ivan Shapovalov, who recruited them at the end of 1999, when both were fourteen, from the children's group Neposedy. The original Russian single, "Ya soshla s uma", was released in December 2000; its video, directed by Shapovalov himself, was shot in September 2000, when the performers were fifteen. It is documented that the duo's image was deliberately built around the suggestion of a romantic relationship between the two as a commercial strategy, which generated controversy and contemporary criticism about the audience it was aimed at. The documentary "Anatomy of t.A.T.u.", broadcast on 12 December 2003, publicly revealed that they were not in a romantic relationship. The English version, "All the Things She Said" (2002), has music by Sergio Galoyan, Russian lyrics by Elena Kiper and Valery Polienko, English lyrics by Trevor Horn — who also produced the album — and reached number one in the United Kingdom for four weeks, as well as in numerous countries in Europe and Latin America; in the United States it reached number twenty on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2003 they represented Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest, where they took third place with 164 points. At the beginning of 2004 the performers terminated their contract with Shapovalov and continued without him until the duo dissolved in 2011. In September 2014, on a Russian television programme, Yulia Volkova stated that she would condemn a gay son and used a derogatory term to refer to homosexual men; she subsequently published a partial apology. Lena Katina publicly distanced herself from those statements. The song "I Kissed a Girl", by Jill Sobule (1995), is recognised as an earlier precedent of explicitly lesbian content on the American charts. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, NME, PinkNews, Rolling Stone and other coverage.

If you are under 18 and someone is pressuring you or using you, in Chile you can call 147, the Carabineros' Fono Niños, free of charge, or Línea Libre, 1515, free and confidential psychological support for children and adolescents.