BEg2 chapter 13 Detsl, Yaponchik

[Allen Ruch]

I have often wondered if Grand Theft Auto IV had any influence on "Bleeding Edge." Set in a fictionalized New York City, the main character is a Serbian gangster who runs afoul the Russian mob. Besides being wildly popular—it's GTA, after all!—it also helped popularize Russian rap, as one of the channels featured Russian hip-hop. (Indeed, like most GTA games, the fictional radio was a master class in various genres, with real-life musicians playing the deejays; including Roy Ayers, Femi Kuti, and Iggy Pop.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_IV

https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Vladivostok_FM

And of course, while GTA isn't a first-person shooter, there's a spoof of GTA actually mentioned in BE...

—Quail

On 1/11/22, 11:55 PM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Michael Bailey" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

    Detsl - real Russian rapper
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detsl

    Party at Detsl's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzcD46kfgk4

    Ulitchnyi Boyets (Russian for street fighter) would have been a new album
    in 2001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7av-u7pO01k



    Rocky's take on Igor - "People he hangs with in Brighton Beach, some of
    them were in Yaponchik's circle before the li'l Jap got popped, definitely
    a old-school crowd."

    Yaponchik - big Russian mob dude, wasn't really Japanese at all. Shot in
    2009, took 72 days to die. Big funeral in Moscow, all the crime bosses sent
    wreaths.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Ivankov

    (there is another Yaponchik - which just means little Japanese dude - who
    lived from 1899 to 1919, famous in Russian mob lore, Jewish person who
    possibly got radicalized in the pogrom of 1905, became a robber, murdered
    the police chief of the Mikhailov district in Odessa, once was arrested and
    a cavalcade of gangsters drove by till they released him...joined the Red
    Army and was killed in a campaign against Ukrainian People's Army...badass
    guy to be named after)
    --
    Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l