Oktubre

Let me tell you the story of what was sounding in Buenos Aires’ FM radios almost exactly 40 years ago. “Oktubre”, by “Patricio Rey y los Redonditos de Ricota” released in its entirety in October 1986, is widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of Argentine rock of all time. During that year they released various singles off the album, among them one called “Ji Ji Ji”, a song which has become the signature song of the band in the decades that followed. As you can see on the cover, the band took some inspiration from the history and culture (that’s Latin for “clichés”) of the USSR, in the process even performing a horizontal symmetric transformation on the wrong letter; yes, I guess the illustrator didn’t know (or gloriously ignored) that it should have been a “Я” (called “Ya”), appearing in a context where it actually doesn’t make any sense whatsoever… so we got an inverted “B”… that doesn’t exist in the Cyrillic alphabet. To my Russian readers, you can stop facepalming now.…