Rolling Stone reports:

A blazing-yellow Bentley. Face tattoos. Booming bass lines in a parking garage. The burnt-out husk of a bullet-riddled car. As the rapper, who would look comfortably at home on a Tekashi 69 set, spits bars about Cartier and riches from behind the wheel, a woman and her son are held at gunpoint. Suddenly, blood spatters the car’s glossy yellow contour as the victims are dispatched offscreen.

This might look like just another hip-hop video. In fact, the surprise release of “12,” from Russian rapper Morgenshtern, is revolutionary.

As the song wraps, a woman’s voice rises above the fray, an angry mob surrounding the rapper, hands banging on the Bentley.

“My dear son, well yes, here, right here, in the morning the roof was almost blown away,” she says with a calm urgency. “Right now we are sitting in the cellar, we have prepared a bomb shelter.”

It’s the voice of a Ukrainian woman, the mother of rap producer and longtime Morgenshtern collaborator Palagin, who endured Russian strikes in Odesa. Putin’s media clampdown means she will not be heard on Russian airwaves any time soon — she may be the Ukrainian voice most widely encountered by Morgenshtern’s millions of die-hard Russian fans on YouTube.

“12,” named in honor of the rapper’s younger brother’s birthday, is the first serious missive from a normally apolitical Russian rapper against the war. For the Dubai-based Morgenshtern, who was Spotify’s top artist in Russia in 2021, it is a serious broadside in what has been a slow but steady increasing frustration with the Kremlin. It could suggest that others may soon follow suit, and a handful of luminaries have already begun. [Continue reading…]