Lena Katina Was Never Just the Image

t.A.T.u. was scandal first—two teenage girls in school uniforms kissing on MTV, the easiest way to make people nervous in 2002. But Lena was never just the image. Even when Julia was the pretty safe one, Lena had something harder to look at, a real voice underneath all the careful artifice they’d built around her. She could’ve stayed a pop puppet forever, reading scripts and showing up to performances, but somewhere around the third album she got tired of it, or angry. Then the solo work came, and the band dissolved in that messy way nobody really discussed after. She’s still around, still making things, and I think about her sometimes when I see young artists trying to be shocking in exactly the same way, not understanding that shock without something real underneath it just becomes sad.