Jazz and rock’n’roll make up the majority of Western music on Bone records. Both were proscribed by the Soviet censors for various given reasons apart from the fact that they were Western and it was the Cold War: they were individualistic, they were inherently immoral, and they encouraged unhealthy passions and wild dancing in the young.
I’ve written before how these attitudes were not restricted to the USSR - they were actually predated and shared in the West. Below is an excerpt from 1930’s HELL BOUND TRAIN, a curious American film about how if you engage in sin (including gambling, dancing, alcohol, murder, animal cruelty, and listening to jazz), you will go to Hell, where the scorching fires of torment are mighty and endless.
The film was the work of husband-and-wife self-taught filmmakers Eloyce Gist and James Gist. The two were devoted Christian African-American evangelists who employed cinema as a tool for their travelling ministry. Their films had stories of immorality and divine judgment that were designed to scare their audience into adopting a morally righteous and devoutly Christian way of life. Rather than having a linear story, this movie is instead a catalogue of iniquity, a carriage-by-carriage dramatisation of the sins of the Jazz Age, presided over by the devil, culminating in a colossal derailment. It’s pretty heavy-handed and seemingly aimed at the filmmakers’ own black community. Black music, ie jazz, was often the target of white moralists.
Of course, in the USSR, these attitudes were much longer lasting, were not couched in terms of religion and were enforced, often brutally, by an all-powerful state. Other interesting contradictions are that black Americans were actually looked on sympathetically by the Soviet ideologues (at least superficially) as being oppressed under the capitalist system, and jazz itself was introduced to the USSR by the touring so-called ‘Negro Revues’.