Why I should not be in control of my finances, #643.

I recently learned the most interesting piece of information: Bone Music.

The short version is after WWII Western music was banned in the USSR (no surprises there). But the cool kids desperately wanted to hear this music. One guy snuck in a bunch of records but there was no vinyl or petroleum or any material to copy the records. Then someone had a brilliant idea – use all the discarded X-rays from the hospitals. That’s how this got the name Bone Music. Here’s some additional information from Wikipedia:

Medical X-rays, purchased or picked out of the trash from hospitals and clinics, were used to create the recordings. The X-rays were cut into 7-inch discs and the center hole was burned into the disc with a cigarette. According to Russian music critic and rock journalist Artemy Troitsky, “grooves were cut [at 78rpm] with the help of special machines (made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands)”; he added that the “quality was awful, but the price was low, a ruble or a ruble and a half.” The disks could be played five to ten times…. The clandestine approach to circulating banned popular foreign music eventually led to a law being passed in 1958 that forbade the home-production of recordings of “a criminally hooligan trend”. The “hooligan trend” refers to the stilyagi (from the word stil’ meaning style in Russian), a Soviet youth subculture known for embracing Western styles of dress and dance.

Which is how I ended up on eBay and now own a bone record of “Beer Barrel Polka” on a pelvis.

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