When the Soviets Banned Rock Music, Teens Used X-rays to Bootleg Records

The title interested me in that I was curious how X-ray images of records could be re-rendered as audio or vinyl discs ...<p>But no! They took old x-ray prints and pressed the records right into them! It&#x27;s an excellent idea and one my just-awoken brain could not get to on its own.

There is a surprisingly good movie called стиляги about this culture: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt1239426&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt1239426&#x2F;</a> - highly recommended for anyone who thinks Brooklyn invented the hipster :)

Well, that was probably the case in Leningrad and maybe Moscow, but definitely not the rest of the USSR (1&#x2F;6th of the world&#x27;s land at that moment). And the situation was not that grave. There was even a magazine printed as blue plastic LPs called Krugozor, with rock bands. I owned a collection of many rock bands on tapes, and no one chased me for that. There was completely otherer problem - Soviet music was banned in the US, you could not buy LP of Pesnyary anywhere in the US.

Such a neat story! I think the history of the underground market for music, movies, and games is fascinating. I&#x27;d love to work on a book about it.

&gt; While the vinyl sheets used to print x-rays were much flimsier than records<p>I doubt the Soviets were making X-rays on vinyl. They would be using acetate like the rest of the world. The record industry was also still using shellac based media in the 50&#x27;s. Vinyl was not a &quot;thing&quot; back then.

Information wants to be passed around.

slightly OT but: 1) the whole article reminds me of A Clockwork Orange and 2) all those Eastern Europe Warez Collections that found their way to central&#x2F;west Europe in the early nineties. If it wasn&#x27;t for 3DStudio 3&#x2F;4 on DOS, I think my visual&#x2F;spatial thinking would be way worse, making it even harder to wrap my mind around view&#x2F;projection matrices etc.. edit: typos

As soon as I open the page on iOS it redirects to an unrelated advert. This is why I use an adblocker on my PC.