the_dunk_tank

the soviets were afraid to be caught dancing

One of the most popular music genres in the 70s and 80s USSR was disco. People will believe anything about kooky foreigners.

in soviet russia, the only dance you were allowed to do is that russian squat-kick dance, and the first one to stop is executed and sent to a gulag

Little do people know, Footloose was a documentary about the USSR

Redditors are the dumbest people alive.

whoa that's crazy

whats also crazy is that I can look up kino, a huge rock band from the USSR, and watch people dancing to their music in the USSR with lights on them

crazy

here's Billy Joel's actual account, not just what's on Wikipedia

In a Weekly Wire preview of last week's Billy Joel show at KeyArena, Erika Hobart recounted a well-trod story, first reported in The New York Times, of the piano man throwing a total hissy fit onstage in the Soviet Union in 1987, overturning his instrument after bright lights flooded the auditorium, and declaring: "It's my show!" Our write-up implied that Mr. Joel was upset with audience members and had likened them to characters in an oil painting.

Well, Mr. Joel—lounging, apparently, in his hotel suite with a bowl of green-only M&M's and a fresh copy of the Weekly, as per his hospitality rider—called our editorial offices last week to contest that version of events. Seriously, he did. Here is his rejoinder, as transcribed by an awe-struck Mike Seely:

"Remember, this was the Soviet Union in 1987, and they'd never had a major rock concert before. There was a film crew filming a documentary, and they turned very bright lights on the audience. The audience was having a good time—until they turned the lights on. They froze; they turned paranoid. There was a lot of anxiety—why are we being looked at? And whenever they turned the lights on, anyone who was overreacting was being pulled out of the audience by a security guard. I wasn't yelling at the audience—I was yelling at the film crew. So I threw the piano, and that got their attention. Then they stopped lighting the audience, and everybody started rocking out. That was the reason for that action—not because they looked like an oil painting. That was something I said to a reporter after the big shots in the Communist Party, despite our best efforts, sat in the front row at one of the shows. They looked like an oil painting. The regular people in the back were rocking out. Hey, I hate the camera being on me. If you looked like me, you wouldn't want the camera on you either."

https://web.archive.org/web/20080117165213/http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-11-14/news/letters-to-the-editor.php?page=full

anyone who believes this was unusual or would only happen in soviet russia, has never been to a certified rock conert

Lights off, dancing. Lights on, frozen stiff.

That's some looney tunes shit, redditors really will believe anything.

Bruce, it’s your cousin Mikhail, Mikhail Springsteen, you have to see this. They are “Dancing in the Dark”

Any country that's more closed off through a language barriet gets this. It's not only Communist countries. They do the same thing with Japan and Middle Eastern countries with how frequently they seem to think gay men get thrown off of buildings because of that ISIS video from like 2015.

There's some serious brain damage to clicking that link fucking hell. These are the kinds of idiots that would think The Lives Of Others had any value as a film

Also

Never a bad time to link this

“TIL that Bruce Springsteen’s dancing in the dark was an ode to all of the people slaughtered for dancing under the bright lights at concerts in Soviet Russia. This was due to the KGB only allowing citizens to show their joy at certain, government-mandated times”

A Reddit link was detected in your post. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.

• teddit.zaggy.nl
• teddit.hostux.net
• r.darklab.sh
• reddit.smnz.de

Actual footage of live concert in Moscow, 1988 with KINO, the most famous rock band of the USSR