Marcel Winatschek

Fuck War. God.

Clearing out my apartment, I found the first t.A.T.u. album buried somewhere it had no business being. 200 Km/H in the Wrong Lane. I had to import it into iTunes immediately, and before the second track hit, the memories were already coming apart at the seams.

You can argue about the band—the manufactured image, the way the whole project was engineered by their manager—but that record lived in my Discman for months five years ago, and a lot of that had to do with a Kazakh ex-girlfriend and the specific crowd I was running with at the time. The music was bound to something real, even if the product itself was a calculated fantasy.

I was in their corner at Eurovision when they bombed. I imported the DVD for maybe three minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. And when I first heard about Dangerous and Moving I was unreasonably happy about it. t.A.T.u. were my favorite band for a real stretch of time, and they still hold a corner of a heart otherwise wall-to-wall with indie rock and alternative. The "Fuck War" t-shirt from that era—I wore it constantly. God, I was proud of that thing.