The Last Subculture: Ghost Dance on the Ruins of Capitalist Realism

Imagine for a moment that a ghost might have a voice. Not the pitiful moan that comes from the attics of Victorian mansions, but a deafening, furious roar born somewhere at the junction of a filthy basement, a cluttered garage and the last circle of hell. This voice is not a metaphor. This is psychobilly. And the film “The Last Subculture” by Kirill Ermichev is not a documentary, in fact it is a ghost cartography, an audiovisual session to summon spirits that we, in our conformist blindness, have long buried under a pile of simulacra.

“Russian rock”? Fire me. This drunken child, who grew up in the USSR, pulled on a jacket and began to read moralizing about “spirituality” while his original punk anger dissolved in a sea of quasi-intellectual posturing. This is the “money-oriented” subject of our early capitalism, voluntarily integrated into the cultural spectacle.

Footage from the film courtesy of Kirill Ermichev.

Psychobilly is its antithesis, its sonic anti-mainland. This is not a genre of music. This is a behavioral script of existential rebellion, written not with ink, but with saliva, and possibly someone’s blood. A mixture of punk, rockabilly and horror aesthetics is not a stylistic hybrid. This is a dialectical triple vinegar, corroding the very possibility of a smooth, marketed identity. One of my friends, the “fucking padonks in leather jackets,” once barked: “We don’t give a shit about your charts. We play because we can’t help but yell.” And in his painting Ermichev archives an act of symbolic creative suicide in a world where even protest has become a commodity. His camera catches not musicians, but cynics of the system, whose gesture — aggressive quarter-laptop, text-spell, image-ugliness — is the final and irrevocable “no”. “No” to political performances. “No” is a market logic that requires “digestible formats”. “No” is the very principle of meaningfulness in a world that has long lost its plot.

Psychobilly in Russia is an anomaly, a living corpse dancing at the disco of the end of history. In an era when, as Mark Fisher aptly remarked, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” these guys are the ghosts of a future that never came. They are a reminder of that fork in the road where culture could have turned towards raw energy, but preferred the path of comfortable alienation.

Ermichev catches them in half-life mode: alive enough to frighten the layman, but already dead for the mainstream, which has long learned to digest and sell even the most radical gesture. Music market analytics is powerless here. These people don’t produce content. They produce noise — in the very information-theoretical sense, as a hindrance in the well-established signal of capitalist communication.

The very form of the film — 2 hours 15 minutes — is an act of resistance. This is not a “digestible format”. This is a marathon immersion into the zone of the impossible, a deliberate torture for the clip consciousness, which requires short rills and influencer smiles. This is zen self-torture, where the viewer, locked in the cinema, is forced to go through catharsis, even if he came “just to watch a movie about music.”

Let’s deconstruct this gesture. The quintessence of psychobilly, its symbolic order, is not a song, but a spit. A spit in the face of the system, taste, decency, understanding. But in a world where even spitting can be sold as an “action of radical art” or embedded in the rhetoric of “sincerity”, it is impossible to preserve the purity of this gesture. The genius of Yermichev’s film is that he does not even try to clean it up. He captures it in all its dirty, contradictory beauty. He does not show us heroes, but a symptom. A symptom of our collective longing for something real, even if this “real” smells of fumes, sulfur and a mental hospital. These musicians are not romantic rebels. They are pathologized clowns at the carnival of universal simulation, and their ugliness is the only remaining form of truth.

Punk conclusion and wish in the finale

So, what does Ermichev leave us? Not a movie. Not a story. He leaves us with an affective resonance, a sound funnel at the site of the exploded bomb called “marginal freedom”. Maybe tomorrow these last maniacs will be washed away by a wave of commerce, moralizers will strangle them, or they will simply die in oblivion, as befits living corpses. But while they’re dancing, we have to watch. To watch until the same pre-ontological primordial cry breaks loose in our own souls, polished to a shine by conformity.

Therefore, my intellectually sophisticated reader, after watching this movie you have only two ways:

Or you go home, put The Meteors on vinyl and enjoy smashing a bottle against the wall of your own cozy, well-appointed prison, feeling how for the first time in many years, not socially approved lemonade flows through your veins, but real, thick, vigorous-mother-her blood.

Or you stay sitting in a chair, dead inside, finally becoming part of the very machine that they hate with such sweet frenzy.

The choice, as always, is yours.

In the emotional battlefield
He’s fighting wars in his head…