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Meet The Gopniks: An Exile Safari

By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine (editor at exile ru)

For months now, our foreign readers have been asking us, "What's a gopnik?" They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page: tough Russian dudes with bad skin and blank fuck-if-I-care expressions. They're the guys who look more comfortable squatting than standing. But more than anything else, they're the last males on planet earth who can get away with wearing those 20s-style leather gangster caps without looking like drama school fags rehearsing for a musical.
What makes the gopniki so fucking cool to behold is that they exist beyond irony. If the gopniki are anything, they are "authentic." In an era in which "authenticity" is the most valued and rarest attribute of all, the gopniki rank at the top of the white world's coolness hierarchy.
Proof of their authenticity lies in their incredibly bold tastes, a combination of cheese, menace, and Third World flash so brash that even the avant-est Western hipster couldn't possibly imagine it, because even if he or she did, it would inevitably come off as kitsch and harmless in their bourgeois hands. Even the fact that gopniki love blasting techno, singing shitty karaoke in cheap cafes with blinking disco lights, or wearing cheap pointy leather shoes to match their 20s Ragtime kepka-tabletka caps, can't diminish their status as the baddest-assed white guys on Planet Earth.

Ler mais em inglês:
http://www.exile.ru/2007-June-01/feature_story.html

Obrigado ao Olgerd Kubler