The music industry may be shakier than a drunkard walking a balance beam, but at least one new act is rocking steady. That would be T.A.T.U., aka Russian exports Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, whose tinny electro-pop is winning over fans faster than you can say Milli Vanilli.
So irresistible is their sound that their first American single, All the Things She Said, has risen to No. 8 on Top 40 radio and landed them a slew of high-profile TV gigs.
Oh. Did we mention that they’re 18-year-old lesbians who like to make out in public?
Well, sort of. “We love each other, and we don’t give a (expletive) what people think about our private lives,” says Katina, who met Volkova when both performed in a children’s group and was later paired with her by the child psychologist-turned-showbiz-Svengali Ivan Shapovalov.
When pressed to define that love, though, Katina becomes coy. “Maybe we are having sex every night, but maybe not,” she says. “We’re still trying to figure things out, and we’re not telling anyone about it. There are different kinds of love. You can love your mom, dad, girls, boys, friends, nature. I can’t understand why everyone thinks we’re lesbians.”
Perhaps it has something to do with the video for All the Things, which shows the young women in naughty-schoolgirl outfits that become wet as they kiss and cavort in the rain.
T.A.T.U. got more flak last week for improvising another smooch-fest while performing on The Tonight Show. When the live-to-tape program aired, the camera cut away from the scene.
“That was just stupid,” Katina says. “I don’t know why they were afraid. America should be open, especially about love.”
She was less surprised, she acknowledges, by shocked reaction to the Russian messages emblazoned on T.A.T.U.’s T-shirts, which denounced the prospect of war against Iraq in terms far more colorful than Vladimir Putin has used. “People are afraid of truth,” Katina says. “People were like, ‘You’re not afraid that people will cancel your visas, and you’ll never go to America again?’ But we are provocative. That’s our nature.”
Katina, who reads Dostoyevsky and Chekhov when not mugging for the camera, is more articulate and less defensive about T.A.T.U.’s flagrant provocateurism than her, um, partner.
Both women grew up relatively privileged in middle-class Moscow, are the daughters of musicians and are touted as classically trained pianists.
But self-styled good-time-girl Volkova speaks English through a translator and gives only short, curt answers. Describing the group’s music, she says, “It sounds like T.A.T.U.” (Which is even less enlightening given that the name appears to be a meaningless acronym.)
Katina elaborates: “There are other teenagers, some who are not straight, and they have lots of problems with parents and other people. We’re helping them not to be afraid. That’s what people like about us, I think. We’re not afraid of anything. We just do what we want to do.”
“USA Today”, Wednesday, March 5, 2003. By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
