Creative theft done wrong

This year’s most outrageous story of stealing

Note from Riri: Do you know any other outrageous stories of creative theft? Tell me in the comments:

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Guess who’s the evil one? (Photo by Aleksandr Plyushchev, 2005, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, modified to b/w)

How does the saying go? “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Right. In my mind, this is a testament to how everything we can possibly come up with is ultimately an amalgamation of things we’ve previously seen - sometimes subtle, sometimes beyond obvious.

We all do that. We call it inspiration, influence, homage - you name it.

But then, every once in a while, there comes along a “genius” with a “special” idea of creative stealing. One of them is the hero - or rather the villain? - of today’s story.

Preface

It was on one of those late August mornings. I woke up to go to work and reached for my phone for a customary round of pre-work procrastination. I would usually scroll through a couple of YouTube shorts and then crawl out of my bed to make breakfast.

This time, the video that came up first was posted by a music-related channel - one of those that cover random music history facts that you can then flaunt before your music nerd friends. The guy in the video was gushing over the solo work of Boris Burdaev - a Russian musician I’d known since my early teens.

In fact, there’s probably barely anyone among Russian-speaking people who was alive and conscious around the year 2005 and didn’t know the band he sang in - Братья Грим (Brothers Grim).

Those were still the times of a shared culture code - we were around a decade away from algorithm-fueled taste bubbles. Everyone was inevitably familiar with what was fed to the public on music channels like MTV and such.

Brothers Grim were distinguished by their general tendency to approximate the sound of the then-popular genre of Britpop, which was in no way typical of the mid-2000s Russian pop music landscape.

They were generally very memorable - two utterly ginger young guys - twin brothers, in fact - harmonizing beautifully with each other. There was Boris, who was the singer and (occasionally?) played guitar, and Konstantin, who sang back vocals and played the bass.

I never paid enough attention to be able to distinguish them. Yet I’m more than sure there was a substantial cohort of girls my age who had enormous crushes on one of those guys or the other, with the resulting eternal debates on who was more awesome.

Now, I wasn’t a particular fan of their music - I was just entering the age where it was officially uncool to be invested in local acts. Only western music, only pretentious snobbery, only the holier-than-thou attitude reserved exclusively for 13-year-olds!

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Naturally, I only knew the two songs that were inescapable: «Ресницы» (“Eyelashes”) and «Кустурица» (“Kusturica”, named after the Serbian film director Emir Kusturica). I found the first one awesome (in secret, of course) and the second one rather mediocre.

I still remember the music video for “Eyelashes” - the two brothers on the roof of an unidentified building with their band, surrounded by girls dressed in prime relics of 2000s fashion, strolling around aimlessly and finally taking off the roof floor and flying away, presumably by batting their eyelashes. Take a look for yourself:

A lot of time has passed since. I forgot all about this song. I grew up and shed the teenage snobbery in what concerns music tastes. And at some point, years after moving to Germany, I realized that this song had lived in my head as a prime example of great Russian pop music all these years.

I would wake up on a random day, maybe once in a year or two, and feel the yearning to refresh “Eyelashes” in my mind. I would then play the song on repeat for a couple of days and forget all about it until another year or two later, without giving much thought to whatever happened to Brothers Grim in all those years.

That is, until that one morning, until that one YouTube short.

What actually happened to the band?

The guy from that music channel was talking about the massive body of solo work the band’s vocalist Boris had written in the last ten or fifteen years - ranging from the aforementioned Britpop to dream-pop to psychedelic pop-rock. From the sound of it alone, I was ready to give it a listen, but then the author of the video dropped the bomb: soon after Brothers Grim disappeared from my personal radar, they also disbanded.

Except, no, they didn’t quite disband. Instead, the story goes as follows: Boris had been the prime songwriter of the band - he had written close to every song from the collective’s first three records - the ones that brought them to fame. His brother Konstantin had only made a songwriting contribution on two songs in total. Yet still, seeing as the two were family, Boris legally shared the songwriting credits 50/50 with Konstantin.

At the height of their fame, Boris got exhausted by the breakneck tempo of their music career - to the point of allegedly abusing drugs - and asked for a short break to be able to come to his senses and replenish his creative resources.

The very next today, he woke up to find his twin brother had changed the passwords to all their business accounts and kicked him out of the band. All that with the intention to keep the songs written by Boris in the band and to ban Boris from ever performing them solo. Konstantin then decided to replace Boris as the lead vocalist of Brothers Grim, but not as a vocalist in his own right. Instead, Konstantin is to this day trying extremely hard to emulate Boris’s manner of singing - to no avail.

Those who - like myself - never cared to distinguish the two - can probably be easily deceived, especially if they’re not very musically inclined. There’s a ginger guy - check! There’s this super exaggerated manner of singing - check! There’s the song they know - check!

And so Brothers Grim still exist as a band today - fronted by Konstantin, who is straining to sound even a fraction like his brother, whom he betrayed.

Comparison (spoiler: laughable!)

Check out this recent rendition of “Eyelashes” and try not to throw up:

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Overkill mannerisms aside, Konstantin managed to cheapen the arrangement of this song beyond recognition. The weird brass section, the quasi-90s synth sequence complete with that tired filter sweep - all of that sucks the soul right out of the song.

The counterfeit becomes all the more jarring as soon as you look at the YouTube search results for „Eyelashes“ and find another live version, performed by one of Boris’s post-band solo projects - Boris Grim and Brothers Grim.

I know, I know, confusing, but trust me - it’s a different band!

This version appears to be recorded at a New York venue called The Cutting Room. It is probably as vastly different from the original recording of the song as Konstantin’s version - but this time in a good way. While the original recording inadvertently bears a seal of 2000s commercial Russian pop, Boris turns the song into an indie-rock-bordering-on-shoegaze number.

Check it out:

And it’s not even the arrangement per se that makes the bulk of the difference, but the vocal performance. As soon as Boris starts singing, it becomes obvious that the soul of Brothers Grim left the day he was kicked out of the band.

His voice soars through the song; it sounds absolutely effortless and equally heartbreaking.

This live version is now over seven years old, and according to the rumors, Boris has since been banned from performing those songs - his own songs - live, even though the songs are supposed to be officially credited 50/50 between the two brothers.

The aftermath

With the story now viral on the Russian-speaking side of social media, the hopes are high that we are going to hear more new music from Boris.

Meanwhile, Konstantin is busy arguing with social media commenters, his responses remarkably ad hominem. According to him, anyone who’s scandalized by the story of his betrayal is just another lamb in a huge herd of gullible, stupid sheep, jealous of his wealth and greatness. After all, the songs are officially 50/50, so we should all just shut up.

Just imagine writing a comment on the internet and getting an actual direct response from the official account of a really famous band - except this comment is calling you a total idiot with shit for brains.

At this point, I imagine this guy waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and telling himself: I have as much rights to these songs as my brother and I see nothing wrong with this. It’s not my fault he’d been gullible enough to believe I would never betray him.

I imagine this over and over and feel nauseous, and feel sad, and thank my lucky stars I will probably never get to meet this guy.

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P.S. Here’s a couple more songs from that old Cutting Room show for your enjoyment:

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