Russia Cracks Down On Rap Music

 

But Russian rap is less about girls and guns and more about social conscience.

Songs also tackle drug addiction and social unrest but, despite having a growing following, it is hard for performers to find a platform on state-run media.

Noize MC is a rap artist whose recent performance of a song about the police put him in jail for 10 days.

He wrote and recorded from his cell a track about his experience, with a video showing violent images highlighting police brutality.

So far, it's had over a million hits on YouTube.

While the rapper is reluctant to label himself as a pioneering "voice of opposition" that, for many, is exactly what he and his fellow rappers are fast becoming.

"Young people they listen to music and they believe you. They are the people who will build this country later," he says.

 Songs about police corruption get a very strong reaction of the audience, with a sense of letting off steam, of voicing some anger of what people see as an increasingly stifling and corrupt authority.

One rap star - Basta - is as close to being a superstar as you can get on the hip hop scene here.

"When we go abroad we feel free, social systems are just. But here we feel tense, like being in a prison. Rap is the music of people who love honesty and freedom of thought and action."

Stifling rappers will only fuel their lyrics. In a state increasingly intent on crushing dissent - handling these performers in the right way will be a tricky issue.

Recently, even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has acknowledged rap's social importance.

But the issues it targets may not be the ones he had in mind.