FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

This Reuters Piece On Pussy Riot Is Straight Out of the Onion

I'll say this much up front: Vladimir Putin is an asshole. Dude needs to ease up. To think he's so hot and bothered with Moscow-based femme punk outfit Pussy Riot "having staged a so-called Anti-Putin 'Punk Prayer'":http://www.vice.com/read/free-pussy...

I’ll say this much up front: Vladimir Putin is an asshole. Dude needs to ease up. To think he’s so hot and bothered with Moscow-based femme punk outfit Pussy Riot having staged a so-called Anti-Putin ‘Punk Prayer’ at the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral that he’s not only threatening three of the collective’s members with up to three years behind bars for hooliganism, but that Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, have been forced to stand trial from within a glass and metal cage, addressing the court through a small slit, is just really, really sad. What year is it, anyway? Are we in the Bronze Age? Christ. I mean, while I can’t say I’ve ever really had a firm handle on what “punk rock” and/or “being punk” is, I can say with a certain level of confidence that Putin is neither.

Advertisement

But, goddamn if the whole unconscionable saga isn’t writing itself in the mainstream press like something picked up off the Onion’s cutting-room floor. I’ll pick on Reuters. Here’s today’s headline: “Russia’s punk rock band say nobody can steal their freedom”. The piece continues:

Members of the Pussy Riot punk band likened themselves to Soviet-era dissidents on Wednesday, saying their trial for performing an anti-Kremlin stunt on a cathedral altar was unjust, but that nobody could take away their inner freedom.

“I’m not afraid of your poorly concealed fraud of verdict in this so-called court,” Alyokhina said. And as one might expect, she and the other two “looked pale and tired” while being grilled by the Moscow court, Reuters tells us.

In other news, Shilo Gold, frontman for short-lived, seminal proto-grind onslaught Orgy in the Vatican, says he will no longer entertain the idea of reuniting the group because “that shit just isn’t punk, you dicks.”

Top: A balaclava’d Pussy Riot (via)

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

Connections: