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AI Covers: Classic Songs Re-sung by AI

30 songs, mostly from Soviet films, cartoons and cassette-era pop, each paired with an AI-generated cover in another language and a short history of where the song comes from.

Постой, паровоз (Hold on, train, 1965)

A prison-yard ballad with no certain author. Nikolai Ivanovsky, who served time in a Leningrad camp, claimed to have written it in 1946, but older variants circulate in pre-war songbooks. Everyone knows it from Leonid Gaidai's 1965 comedy, where Yuri Nikulin's lovable crook Balbes strums it on a guitar while a visibly fed-up Shurik tries to study. The film turned a thieves' lament into a national sing-along.

  • Original performed by Yuri Nikulin, from “Operation Y and Shurik's Other Adventures”
  • AI cover, sung in English

Песня про зайцев (And we couldn't care less, 1969)

The "Song About Hares" is sung by a very drunk Semyon Gorbunkov in a restaurant scene of the most-watched Soviet comedy ever made (nearly 77 million tickets in 1969). Hares mow magic grass at midnight and could not care less about the wolf or the owl; audiences heard a sly wink at living without fear under a watchful state. The censors nearly cut it. Nikulin, a circus clown by trade, delivered it half-sober on purpose.

Миллион алых роз (Million scarlet roses, 1982)

Raimonds Pauls first wrote the melody as a Latvian lullaby, "Dāvāja Māriņa". Poet Andrei Voznesensky gave it new words based on a legend about Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, who supposedly sold everything he owned to fill a square in Tbilisi with roses for a French actress. Alla Pugacheva made it the defining Soviet ballad of the 1980s, and it later became a huge hit in Japan and Korea.

Песенка Красной Шапочки (Little Red Riding Hood, 1977)

The walking song from Leonid Nechayev's musical sequel to the fairy tale, a TV film every Soviet child saw over the New Year holidays. Yuli Kim's lyrics are a mock-geography lesson: if you walk long enough you reach Africa, where hippos and crocodiles live. Alexei Rybnikov, who later wrote the rock opera "Juno and Avos", composed it; ten-year-old Olga Rozhdestvenskaya sang it for the screen.

Какое небо голубое (What a blue sky, 1975)

The duet of Alice the fox and Basilio the cat, two con artists from the Soviet retelling of Pinocchio. Bard Bulat Okudzhava wrote a cheerful anthem about how easy it is to fleece a fool who believes a kind word. "We are not supporters of robbery, a fool needs no knife" became a proverb used about pyramid schemes and politicians alike. Rolan Bykov and Elena Sanaeva, married in real life, played the pair.

Спят усталые игрушки (Rock a bye, 1964)

The closing lullaby of "Spokoynoy nochi, malyshi!", the bedtime TV show that has aired every evening since 1964. "Tired toys are sleeping, books are sleeping" told generations it was time for bed, right after the puppets Khryusha and Stepashka said goodnight. Valentina Tolkunova's velvet version is the one most people hear in their heads. The show is in the Guinness book as the longest-running children's programme.

Позвони мне, позвони (Call me, call me, 1981)

A provincial girl comes to Moscow to become an actress and ends up rollerskating around a phone booth begging a man to ring. Irina Muravyova mimed it on screen; the voice belongs to Zhanna Rozhdestvenskaya, the uncredited singer behind many Soviet film hits. Maksim Dunayevsky, son of the Stalin-era songwriter Isaak Dunayevsky, wrote the music; the lyrics are by poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, no relation to the singer.

Прекрасное далёко (Beautiful Far Distance, 1985)

The theme of the five-part TV series about Alisa Selezneva, a girl from the year 2084 who gets stranded in a 1984 Moscow school. The song is a plea to the future: "beautiful far-off, do not be cruel to me". Written when the Soviet Union still promised a bright tomorrow, it now plays like a lament for a future that never arrived, which is exactly why it is covered so often. Yuri Entin wrote lyrics for half the cartoons on this page.

Эй, вы там, наверху! (You People Upstairs, 1985)

Alla Pugacheva shouting at noisy upstairs neighbours who stomp like elephants and dance till dawn. It came out of her 1985 cycle "Prishla i govoryu" with lyricist Ilya Reznik, and audiences immediately heard a second meaning: "you up there" was anyone in authority. Pugacheva composed it herself under the pseudonym Boris Gorbonos years earlier. Here paired with its companion piece "Delu vremya" from the same concert film.

Позови меня с собой (Call My Name, 1997)

Tatyana Snezhina was a 23-year-old Novosibirsk singer-songwriter who died in a car crash in 1995, two months before her first album. Her family brought her tapes to Alla Pugacheva, who recorded "Take me with you" and made it a hit in 1997. The song, written by a woman who would never be famous, became one of the most performed Russian ballads of the decade. A monument to Snezhina now stands in Novosibirsk.

Чёрный кот (Black Cat, 1963)

A twist number from the Khrushchev thaw about a black cat that everyone blames for bad luck, though "only the cat is unlucky". Mikhail Tanich wrote it after six years in a Gulag camp, and the cat that gets kicked by every neighbour was partly him. Tamara Miansarova's 1963 recording made the twist legal in the USSR. In 1991 the rockabilly band Bravo with Valery Syutkin turned it into a dance-floor staple all over again.

А я вовсе не колдунья (Not A Witch, 1994)

Nadezhda Kadysheva and her ensemble Zolotoe Koltso ("Golden Ring") dressed folk-style pop in sequins and kokoshniks and sold out stadiums in the 1990s. "I am no sorceress at all, I just took a liking to you" is a village girl's denial that she bewitched a man. The accordion-and-balalaika arrangement made it a wedding staple and a stereotype of Russian pop abroad. It still plays at every restaurant with a dance floor.

Дельтаплан (My Glider Plane, 1983)

Eduard Artemyev, the composer behind Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and "Stalker", wrote one pop song and it was this. "Flight on a Hang-glider" gave Valery Leontiev, with his perm and sequined jumpsuits, his signature hit: a man soaring over the earth and seeing his love far below. The synth textures came straight out of Artemyev's film work, which is why it sounds a decade ahead of everything else on Soviet radio in 1983.

Улыбка (From a smile, 1974)

A raccoon is afraid of his own reflection in the pond until he smiles at it. The moral, "a smile makes a gloomy day brighter", became the first song most Soviet kids learned at kindergarten. Vladimir Shainsky wrote dozens of these cartoon hits, including the Cheburashka songs; Klara Rumyanova, the voice of half of Soyuzmultfilm, sang it. The story is adapted from an American picture book by Lilian Moore.

Во поле берёза стояла (A birch tree stood in the open field, 1790)

A round-dance song first printed in 1790 in the Lvov-Prach collection of Russian folk songs, and probably far older. A girl promises to break the birch, make pipes from it and wake her old husband; the "lyuli, lyuli" refrain is a pre-Christian ritual chant. Tchaikovsky built the finale of his Fourth Symphony around it, Glinka quoted it, and it is still the first folk tune taught in Russian music schools.

Экспонат (Exhibit, 2016)

Sergei Shnurov's band Leningrad released "Exhibit" with a video about a woman getting ready for a date at an art show in borrowed Louboutins and "fantastic trousers". It passed 100 million views within months, the first Russian clip to do so, and "na labutenakh" entered the language. The version here is Mia Boyka's 2023 pop remake; the AI cover re-sings that remake again, so it is a copy of a copy of a meme.

American Boy (American Boy, 1990)

Saratov girl group Kombinaciya sang about leaving for America with a rich foreign boyfriend at the exact moment the Iron Curtain cracked. "American boy, take me away with you, bye-bye Moscow" was half joke, half the actual dream of a generation, and it sold on every market cassette stall in 1990. Producer Alexander Shishinin was murdered in 1993, one of several deaths that shadowed the early Russian pop business.

Седая ночь (Silver night, 1988)

Laskovy Mai ("Tender May") was formed in an Orenburg orphanage by Sergey Kuznetsov around a 13-year-old singer, Yuri Shatunov. Cheap synth ballads recorded on a home tape deck spread via pirate cassettes to every town in the USSR, and by 1989 several fake Laskovy Mai line-ups toured at once because demand was that big. "Grey-haired night" is the one about waiting for a girl who never comes. Shatunov died in 2022 at 48 and the song filled every radio station for a week.

Ничего на свете лучше нету (The Bremen Town Musicians, 1969)

A 20-minute Soyuzmultfilm cartoon that smuggled rock and roll past the censors by dressing it as a Brothers Grimm tale. The Troubadour has a Beatles haircut, the Princess wears a miniskirt, and Oleg Anofriyev sang every part, animals and robbers included, in one night-time session. "Nothing in the world is better than wandering with friends" is its opening anthem. The animated musical has been staged, remade and quoted for 55 years.

Городок (My town, 1993)

Anzhelika Varum's wistful ballad about a small town "where everything is simple and familiar" was written by her father Yuri Varum and became the theme of the sketch show "Gorodok", which ran on Russian TV for twenty years. The song itself is a 1990s hit about nostalgia for a childhood that may never have been that cosy. It is one of the few songs from that decade that both grandmothers and teenagers can sing.

Розовый вечер (Pink Evening, 1988)

Another Laskovy Mai cassette hit from the Orenburg orphanage years: a boy watches a pink sunset and says goodbye to a summer love. Kuznetsov wrote the songs in a single burst over a winter of 1987–88, Shatunov sang them at fourteen, and the tape sold millions of bootleg copies before any official release existed. The 2019 video here was recorded for Shatunov's solo comeback shortly before his death.

А лето цвета (And Summer Is the Color Of, 2002)

From Shatunov's solo years, when he lived in Germany and released an album roughly once a decade. Summer "is the colour of" a girl's eyes, her hair, the sea; it is a lighter, almost reggae-tinged cousin of the Laskovy Mai sound. The song had a second life after the 2019 video and a third one in 2022, when a whole country replayed his catalogue after his death. It shows how one teenage voice stayed in rotation for thirty-five years.

  • Original performed by Yuri Shatunov
  • AI cover in the voice of Kanye West, sung in English

Et si tu n'existais pas (If You Never Came to Be, 1975)

Joe Dassin, an American-born son of a blacklisted Hollywood director, became France's best-loved crooner. The melody came from Italian hitmaker Toto Cutugno; Pierre Delanoë turned it into a man imagining a world without the woman he loves. In the USSR Dassin was one of the few Western stars sold on the state label Melodiya, so this song is as much part of a Soviet childhood as any on this page. Dassin died in 1980 at 41.

הפרח בגני (The Flower in My Garden, 1982)

Zohar Argov, the "king" of Mizrahi music, won the 1982 Oriental Song Festival with this song and finally forced Israeli radio to play music it had kept off the air for decades. Avihu Medina wrote both words and melody: a man mourning the flower that bloomed in his garden and was picked by someone else. Argov died in 1987 at 32; the song is still sung at every Mizrahi wedding and was the spark of a whole genre going mainstream.

רונה (Rona, 1984)

Samir Shukry, an Arab-Israeli singer and violinist from Acre, wrote "Rona" for his daughter and it became one of the first Mizrahi-pop songs with a crossover hit on Hebrew radio. The violin hook and the shouted name made it a dance-floor fixture from Tel Aviv weddings to Brighton Beach. Shukry later performed with Zohar Argov and remains a bridge figure between Arabic and Israeli popular music.

Песня царевны Забавы (Song of the Princess, 1979)

Princess Zabava refuses to marry the rich boyar her father has picked and sings "Ah, if only my dream came true" from a tower window in Garri Bardin's cartoon "The Flying Ship". The film is a string of hits, from the water-sprite's lament to the Babki-Yozhki rap, all by Maksim Dunayevsky and Yuri Entin. The AI version imagines Polina Gagarina in the princess's part, which is roughly whom every Russian casting director would pick too.

Чёрный бумер (Lada Niva, 2004)

Belarusian rapper Seryoga's "Black Beemer" was the first Russian-language hip-hop track to top the charts, an ode to the BMW every 2000s hustler wanted. It won MTV Russia awards and got him a spot at the MTV Europe Music Awards. The AI cover swaps the BMW for a Lada Niva, the boxy Soviet 4x4, and the voice for 50 Cent, which is the whole joke and a good one.

  • Original performed by Seryoga
  • AI cover in the voice of 50 Cent, sung in English

Не плачь, Алиса (Don't cry, Alisa, 1991)

Andrey Derzhavin and his band Stalker came out of Ukhta in the far north with a synth-pop sound they learned from Italo-disco tapes. "Don't cry, Alisa" is a boy consoling a girl who has grown up too fast; released in 1991 as the country fell apart, it became the anthem of the last Soviet school proms. Derzhavin later spent fifteen years as keyboard player of Mashina Vremeni, Russia's longest-running rock band.

Ветер с моря дул (Wind blew off the sea, 1997)

Natali's "The wind blew from the sea" is a 1990s Russian pop mystery: the words are an old courtyard song, the melody is close to a folk tune, and the arrangement is pure Europop. It topped every chart in 1998 and has refused to leave weddings since. Natali later had a second career with "O Bozhe, kakoy muzhchina" in 2013, becoming one of very few Russian pop singers with a hit in two different decades.

В синем море, в белой пене (In the blue sea, in the white foam, 1984)

A boy falls into the sea and the Sea King's daughter tries to keep him with a seductive song: "stay with us, boy, you will be our king". The cartoon came out of Armenfilm in Yerevan, with jazzy music by Robert Amirkhanyan and the inevitable Yuri Entin lyrics. The psychedelic underwater animation and the mermaid's siren hook made it a cult favourite; the AI cover gives it to a duet of modern Russian pop voices.

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