“Russian rap: the real ‘old’ school”

GUF

  Someone with whom fame and addiction walked side by side for many years.

  The grandson who wrote to his grandmother, and the rapper who later wrote about her  

  Tamara Konstantinovna found herself inside Russian rap, and remains an important part of it even after her death.  

Alexei Dolmatov was born in Moscow in 1979. His father left the family when he was three, and after that his upbringing fell to his mother, his stepfather, and his grandmother, who became the person closest to him.

Even as a teenager, Alexei developed problems with drugs. His grandmother, on whose shoulders his childhood had essentially rested, couldn’t cope with it, and she herself asked his parents — who by that point had settled in China — to take their son in for his own good. So at twelve, Guf ended up in a foreign country: first a local school, then a foreign-language institute in Shenyang. He’d been taken away from trouble to a foreign land with zero knowledge of the language, where the very people tutoring him in Chinese turned out to be the ones who got him further hooked.

And in that setting — the institute, an addiction that only kept growing — one channel of pure, almost childlike tenderness remained intact. He wrote letters to his grandmother listing the names of rap groups he wanted to hear, but there was no way to get hold of them while in China. For an elderly woman who had nothing to do with hip-hop, this must have sounded like a string of random words. According to his own account in a song dedicated to her, his grandmother tried to sound out the unfamiliar English names because it mattered to her grandson.

I remember, a long time ago, when I lived in China.

Помню давно, когда я жил в Китае

I used to send her letters, writing the names of rap groups in them.

Я отправлял ей письма, в них названия рэп групп писал ей

Just imagine: it’s 1995, Gorbushka.  

Представьте, девяносто пятый год, Горбушка

Me and Gangsta World, an old lady tries to pronounce.  

Me and Gangsta World, пытается произнести старушка  

“Original Ба”  — GUF, 2007

In 1995 she traveled to China herself to visit him and brought exactly what he’d asked for: discs and cassettes bought at the very market through which nearly all of the country’s pirated music passed at the time. For an elderly woman who didn’t understand a word of what was recorded on those tapes, it was a trip made for her grandson’s sake, not for the music’s. It was during this period, by Guf’s own admission, that he wrote his first verses and songs — his grandmother, without ever planning to, ended up standing right beside his budding passion for rap long before the Guf we know today ever emerged.

Then came 1998. Alexei Dolmatov fled China, literally. By that point he’d gotten mixed up with local criminal circles, was dealing weed on the side — the whole floor of his dormitory knew which door to knock on — and the administration started asking questions that, in China, could have cost him his life: drug trafficking there carries the death penalty. His father saved him, putting him on the first available flight back to Moscow and out of the country.

Next came enrollment in an economics program, which seemingly promised a break from his past choices, along with student life. It was there that he put together his first group, Rolexx, and released his first track, “The Great Wall of China” — the song that made Alexei known as Guf, a name that gradually began spreading beyond his circle of friends and homemade recordings. But the demons of his past caught up with him. In 2000 came an arrest and several months under investigation — another chapter of that life Guf would later write about in his songs. By then, the original lineup of Rolexx had already broken up.

In the early 2000s he began working with Slim, and later Centr came together with Nikolai “Printsip.” By the middle of the decade, Guf was gradually becoming a notable figure in Moscow rap, and real fame was finally within reach.

In 2007, his solo debut album “Gorod Dorog” (“City of Roads”) came out. Among its tracks is “Original Ба, ” a song in which Guf looks back on 1995 and his grandmother. For listeners, it was an unexpected moment of sincerity in the discography of someone whose other lyrics more often dealt with the street, drugs, and conflict. Ask any Guf fan today who “Ба” is, and they’ll answer without hesitation: she’s the person who stood at the very origins of Guf’s love for rap. Later, his grandmother did in fact appear alongside Guf at concerts — most notably at his major solo show at Moscow’s MILK club on December 13, 2009, a now-legendary appearance. The crowd greeted her with thunderous applause, and Tamara Konstantinovna, in turn, thanked the fans for their presence and their support of her beloved grandson and his creative path.

In 2013, Tamara Konstantinovna passed away. By that point she was already woven into his creative journey — not just as a memory from the nineties, but as a name inscribed in his discography. Her death was one of the few blows that led Guf to cancel concerts and disappear from public life. Nearly a decade later, “Original Ба” remains one of the rare tracks in his catalog where, beneath the whole reputation of “the country’s foremost drug-rap artist, ” you can simply see a grandson for whom it once mattered deeply that his grandmother bring him the cassettes he needed.сеты.