Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

Pavlov was Russia’s most famous rapper, though that wasn’t saying much. Rap music was a curiosity then, a thing black Americans did that bore little relation to Russians’ lives, and when the first rappers popped up here, they were met with skepticism. “You know, this has no roots at all in our culture,” one Moscow artist told the New York Times Magazine in 1993. “To see these young people trying to imitate American rappers—it’s as incredible to me as it would be to you if you went up to Harlem one day and found everyone there dressed as Ukrainian dancers and strumming on balalaikas.”

But Pavlov was determined to bring rap to Russia, and he had the pedigree to do it. In the late 1980s, he was the drummer for the Russian cult band Zvuki Mu (Sounds of Moo), an art-rock ensemble that caught the ear of Brian Eno, the superproducer known for his work with bands such as U2 and Talking Heads. Eno liked Zvuki Mu’s funky, jazzy sound, so he arranged for the band to come to the United States. And that’s how, in 1989, 23-year-old Alexei Pavlov found himself in New York City, the capital of Western decadence, the city that never sleeps, the Center of Rap on Earth (at least, the East Coast variant).

Pavlov had first heard rap music back in 1984, as an 18-year-old student at the Moscow State Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation. A classmate from Cuba had made cassette tapes of pirated U.S. radio while home on vacation, and Pavlov got hooked on the proto-rap stylings of Melle Mel and the Furious Five. “It wasn’t even called rap back then,” Pavlov told me. “But that’s what it was. From then on, I tried to get as much rap music as I could, but it was almost impossible in those days.” When he made it to New York with Zvuki Mu, he soaked up as much music as possible, bought himself a pair of black silver-studded shoes, and returned to Russia ready to launch his own rap career. MC Pavlov was born.

His initial efforts to put together a stage show resembled a Saturday Night Live skit. “At first, when we were trying to find dancers for the group, we made the mistake of thinking that all black people have good rhythm,” he told me. “So we would ask black girls to join our group, but a lot of them couldn’t dance at all. I think about 99 percent of the black people here are really white inside.” [2] At the time, there were an estimated 40,000 “Afro-Russians” in all of Russia, just 0.02 percent of the population. Eventually, he managed to find three girls (as he called them) who could dance—or at least, be taught to dance.

Pavlov rapped in a mix of English, Russian, and a smattering of nonsense words thrown in for rhythmic value. “Who cares what the words say? The important thing is, do they sound good together? Words for me are just a phonetic instrument.” He initially didn’t want to rap in Russian, because “it sounds stupid,” he said. “But nobody here understands if I rap only in English. For them, it’s like I’m from the moon or something.”

Pavlov wasn’t from the moon, but he was arguably on a different spiritual plane, because not long before MC Pavlov was born, Alexei Pavlov was reborn—as a Hare Krishna devotee. He told me about his conversion, which happened on a Moscow street corner in 1985.

He’d been the first among his friends to start smoking and drinking, at age 14, and by the time he was 20, he decided to quit. Soon after that, while walking in the city one day, he encountered a man distributing photocopies of the Bhagavad Gita, the 5,000-year-old scripture of Krishna faith. Intrigued, he struck up a conversation, telling the man about his recent conversion to sober living. “So, you’ve given up smoking and drinking,” the man replied. “Now it’s time to give up eating meat.” When Pavlov asked why, the man said, “Because it’s nothing but dead flesh.”

“It’s dead flesh!” Pavlov exclaimed to me, throwing his hands in the air. “Oh, man, it’s so simple! Who wants to put dead, rotting flesh in their mouth? As soon as he said that, I couldn’t even imagine eating meat anymore.” Pavlov is not a man who does things halfway, so from that moment, he never had another bite of meat, fish, or eggs.

Pavlov invited Gary and me to join him at Moscow’s Hare Krishna temple, where devotees could eat vegetarian meals, chant mantras, and pay their obeisances. With a pale robe hanging off his lanky frame, the sides of his head shaved and a skinny braid down his neck, Pavlov looked like a Krishna devotee from central casting. And eight years after joining, he still had the fire of the converted; when we walked into the temple, he immediately prostrated himself in front of a statue of His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the spiritual master whose image graces Krishna temples worldwide.

Pavlov had even included snippets of Sanskrit on a recent song, “Dance in Extazy”—a catchy, propulsive tune with rapid-fire lyrics set against a wah-wah guitar backdrop. At the end of the song came his crowning touch, the ultimate Pavlovian marriage of East and West: a recording of the Swami chanting the Krishna mantra, set to a rap beat. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare …

“Rap is rhythmic chanting, and the mantra is rhythmic chanting,” Pavlov told me. “The only difference is that hearing the name of Krishna purifies you. It purifies everything around it, the animals, the trees, the people. So, just by listening to MD&C Pavlov, you’re getting some purification!” he concluded, beaming as if he’d just won the lottery—or, more accurately, given me the winning celestial numbers.

I’m not particularly a fan of either rap or Hare Krishna, but I really liked hanging out with Pavlov. The guy exuded happy energy, and on top of that he was making music nobody had ever heard before. His new record, called “Ze Best,” was getting airplay, and he spent his nights bouncing all over the city, playing gigs with his “girls.” In the artistic hothouse of post-Soviet Moscow, Pavlov was a rare and quirky bloom, and when the 2005 trip rolled around, I wondered just how famous he might have become by now.

Pavlov and I spoke on the phone soon after David and I arrived in Moscow. He seemed surprised (and characteristically excited) to hear from me, and we made a plan to meet the next afternoon at the Dinamo metro station.

When David and I arrived, Pavlov wasn’t there. We waited, and then waited some more, and after a while I started getting anxious. Where was he? Had I misunderstood the plan? The platform was empty, save for a heavyset guy standing a few yards away. At last, it dawned on me: Was that Pavlov? We peered at each other, and when I uncertainly said, “Heyyyyyyy,” his face creased into a smile.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.” We hugged, and as we pulled apart I noticed that he had a lazy eye, which I didn’t remember from before. As we started walking, I noticed his gait had changed too—less spry, more deliberate. He was giving off a very different physical vibe, one that didn’t seem totally attributable to being ten years older.

We walked to a nearby studio, and Pavlov took off his coat to reveal bright green overalls, an orange T-shirt, and a neon-orange checkered button-down. He wore tinted glasses, as well as a lanyard around his neck with his cell phone attached, giving him the look of an exceptionally colorful tech nerd. I asked him how things had been going since we saw each other last.