X-Ray Folk Art

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Like Kolya Vasin's Beatles Bone (see below), many X-Ray records appear to have been carefully customised by their owners - elevating them at times to the level of folk or outsider art.

Here, the perennial favourite 'Rock Around the Clock' has been embellished with collaged decoration. To modern Western thinking it may seem odd that a song with lyrics as crashingly banal as 'one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock' etc could be held in such high regard, never mind banned.  

But apart from the fact that it was American (and therefore automatically suspect), the very beat and energy of such music was deemed a threat, encouraging people to gather to dance and indulge in uncontrolled behaviour and reckless passions.  The very superficiality of the words, whilst obviously not anti-Soviet in meaning could not possibly contribute to the aesthetic high ideals of socialist realism as all art should.