The song "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" became one of the major phenomena of Russian pop music in the second half of the 1990s. Written by composer Igor Matvienko to lyrics by poet Mikhail Andreyev in 1997, it was first performed by the band "Bely Oryol" ("White Eagle"), with vocalist Vladimir Zhechkov.
How it was written
The song is based on a real love story of poet Mikhail Andreyev, who lived in Tomsk. In his own words, he was so infatuated that every detail of his beloved's image was etched in his memory forever. Andreyev put a page with the poem "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" into an envelope, sealed it, and mailed it to Moscow, to composer Igor Matvienko.
Matvienko, upon receiving the letter, was captivated by the sincerity of the lines and immediately wrote the music. The composer later admitted the song was born during a particular period of his life: "Around that time I got married about twice and divorced about three times. This song, it seems, was both the beginning and the continuation of that state of affairs." So it was that a Tomsk love poem and a string of Moscow divorces gave birth to a hit that, within a few months, would be playing on every radio station in the country.
The music video and the "Tarzan" phenomenon
The music video for the song was filmed in 1997 by director Yuri Grymov and became a genuine event on Russian music television. By the time the novel is set, this fashionable video was regarded as the pinnacle of music-video craft and was in heavy rotation on every TV channel in the country.
The lead role in the video was played by a young stripper and model, Sergei Glushko, performing under the stage name "Tarzan." He would later marry pop singer Natasha Koroleva and become a well-known figure in Russian show business. In the video, Tarzan and the extras lip-synced to a prerecorded track, imitating the act of singing. Notably, the fakery of Tarzan's "vocals" was deliberately underscored: the female extras lip-synced to the very same male vocal track by Vladimir Zhechkov.
This game of substitution created a real mystery: for a long time, the public speculated over who had actually sung the romantic hit. The real vocalist, Vladimir Zhechkov, did not appear in public until 1999, and was absent from the video itself. Tarzan, who later became an actor and singer in his own right, never once performed the song.
Yuri Grymov: a plagiarist director
By the time this video was filmed, Yuri Grymov was already a notable figure in Russian advertising and music-video production. He had worked in advertising since 1988, directing around 600 commercials that won more than 70 awards at various festivals. In 1991 he founded the production company "Studio YuG," and in 1996 he took part in producing Boris Yeltsin's reelection campaign, "Vote or Lose!"
Grymov's career, however, was built not only on talent but on skillful borrowing of other people's ideas. The video for "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" became a vivid example of this practice.
Copying David Fincher
Grymov meticulously copied the style and visual choices of David Fincher's early work — one of the best-known parts of Fincher's pre-film career, when the American director made music videos. Fincher made his name with groundbreaking videos for Madonna ("Vogue," "Express Yourself"), Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, and other stars, creating a recognizable style marked by dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles, and a cinematic aesthetic.
The video for "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" was shot shortly before MTV Russia began broadcasting in 1998. Unsophisticated domestic viewers, unfamiliar with foreign music videos, were far from quick to notice the deception. To the mid-1990s Russian public, it looked like a breakthrough, the pinnacle of music-video craft.
How Grymov worked
Accusations of plagiarism dogged Grymov throughout his career. His method was to adapt Western visual solutions for the Russian market, which, due to its informational isolation, had no access to the original sources. Before the internet became widespread and MTV Russia launched, most viewers simply had no way to compare Grymov's work to its prototypes.
Even so, this did not stop the director from building a successful career. After his music videos, Grymov made the feature film "Mu-Mu" (1998) and the TV series "The Kukotsky Enigma" (2005), worked as creative producer at MTS, served as general producer of the TV channel "Dozhd," and since 2016 has headed the Moscow Modern Drama Theatre.
Cultural significance
Despite the plagiarized nature of the video, the song "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" became a cultural phenomenon. Music critic Mikhail Margolis, in 2010, called it "a masterpiece of form" and "the hysterics of a drunk, lonely man on a business trip, sitting in some restaurant in the evening, gradually working himself into this ecstasy."
The song hit precisely the nerve of its era — a time of turbulent passions, quick marriages and divorces, restaurant get-togethers, and sudden romances. It became the soundtrack to the life of the new Russian middle class, which was only just taking shape in the late 1990s.
Legacy
In 2010, at Igor Matvienko's anniversary concert, the song was performed by Alexander Marshal, and in an episode of the TV program "Dostoyanie Respubliki" ("National Treasure") on Channel One, by Sergei Mazayev. The track remains "Bely Oryol"'s calling card and a recognizable hit of Russian pop music.
The story of "Because You Can't Be This Beautiful" is the story of how a Tomsk poem, Moscow music, and stolen Western visuals combined into a perfect formula for success in late-1990s Russia — a time when anything was possible, everything was forgiven, and nobody much cared where anything came from, so long as it worked.