Tatu are secretly Wobblies, aren’t they?
All About Us
hinges on a personalization of the great IWW slogan
An injury to one is an injury to all
,
transmuted into obsessive romance
:
If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. Me. Too
So we’ll rise up won’t stop
And it’s all about
It’s all about
It’s all about
us
It’s not just me feeling the solidarity. This group review returns to the theme time and time again, albeit with a point-missing tendency to link it to the USSR:
You can imagine those pounding war drums soundtracking the Bolshevik revolution – there’s certainly a similar sense of collective running through the lyrics, drawing strength from standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow revolutionaries. “If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. ME. TOO.”: spine-tinglingly magnificent pop moment of the year.
And more generally, you can make a case that the value of TATU is fitting their various high-pitched emotional states into a grand narrative of love and rebellion:
If you listen across their ‘Best Of’ album, you can see it unfold: forbidden love and ensuing confusion as the girls, through their transgression, are thrust beyond the bounds of the normative (“All The Things She Said”‘); the forging of a new revolutionary ethics (“All About Us”, “They’re Not Gonna Get Us”); yet more confusion as one of the girls falls for a boy (“Loves Me Not”); a Thermidorian inquest into the motives and consequences of the betrayal (“Friend Or Foe”); then finally, the realisation that the only place this utopian society can exist is in space (“Cosmos”)