Hipsters aren’t anything new. Under Stalin, even the U.S.S.R. had them. They were called stilyagi. Whereas today’s hipsters are obsessed with skinny jeans and fixed-gear bicycles, the stilyagi were obsessed with Western culture–in particular, with jazz, boogie woogie, and rock ‘n’ roll.

But in the 1950s, unless you had a radio near the border, there was no way to actually hear rock ‘n’ roll. Without CDs, flash drives, the Internet, or even analog tape recorders to distribute the rare bootleg recordings of the slim supply of Chuck Berry albums that did come into the country, the stilyagi had to get clever.

The solution was homemade records ingeniously pressed on exposed X-Rays–called bone music.

Because vinyl was scarce in the Soviet Union, the stilyagi would dig through hospital waste bins to find discarded X-Rays, which were both plentiful and cheap. Using a standard wax disk cutter, the stilyagi would copy Western records that managed to make it into the Soviet Union through satellite countries such as Hungary.

They would then etch a copy of an album into the X-Ray, cut it into a crude circle with manicure scissors, and use a cigarette to burn a hole in the middle, allowing the record to be played on any turntable.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Joseph Stalin’s successor as the U.S.S.R.’s General Secretary explained to NPR. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.”

This process was famously captured in the opening credits of the 2008 Russian cult film, also called Stilyagi.