What do Pink Floyd, the Stooges and the Village People have in common? They’re all propagators of punk, violence and distortion of Soviet foreign policy – at least according to a list of ‘foreign musical groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions’ released in the USSR in 1985.

Check out this hilarious list of 38 Western bands that were flagged in the in the USSR because their repertoires contained “ideologically harmful compositions”.

As The Scotsman note, the list – which was meant to clamp down on playlists in clubs, discotheques and radio – was distributed to party officials in January 1985, two months before Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as the leader of the USSR.

It was drawn up by Komsomol, the Communist Party’s Youth Wing, and was written in the obscure Soviet bureaucratic jargon and riddled with Cold War paranoia.

The ‘blacklist’, as it’s come to be called, was titled The approximate list of foreign musical groups and artists, whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions.

It flagged 38 Western bands as potentially dangerous, citing a broad range of reasons like ‘punk’ (Sex Pistols, duhh), ‘violence’ (The B-52s?), ‘religious obstructionism’ (Black Sabbath, fair enough) and distortion of Soviet foreign policy (Pink Floyd….right).

Its existence was uncovered by author Alexei Yurchak in his book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which translated the original document (see below).

Check out the while hilarious list below via Open Culture:

Sex Pistols: punk, violence

B-52s: punk, violence

Madness: punk, violence

Clash: punk, violence

Stranglers: punk, violence

Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence

Crocus: violence, cult of strong personality

Styx: violence, vandalism

Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism

Judas Priest: anticommunism, racism

AC/DC: neofascism, violence

Sparks: neofascism, racism

Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism

Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism

Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism

Scorpions: violence

Gengis Khan: anticommunism, nationalism

UFO: violence

Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet agression in Afghanistan”)***

Talking Heads: myth of the Soviet military threat

Perron: eroticism

Bohannon: eroticism

Originals: sex

Donna Summer: eroticism

Tina Turner: sex

Junior English: sex

Canned Heat: homosexuality

Munich Machine: eroticism

Ramones: punk

Van Halen: anti-soviet propaganda

Julio Iglesias: neofascism

Yazoo: punk, violence

Depeche Mode: punk, violence

Village People: violence

Ten CC: neofascism

Stooges: violence

Boys: punk, violence

Blondie: punk, violence

[via The Scotsman / Boing Boing]