The Putin administration reportedly paid Russian pop star Alisa Vox 2 million rubles ($35,000) to appear in a music video featuring a song that would “take to task the anti-Kremlin opposition,” a source close to the singer told the website Meduza. The same source said Vox and her collaborators are also counting on further work orders from the Kremlin. Vox’s new song, “Baby Boy,” landed on YouTube this Monday, where it’s attracted 1.3 million views and an impressive 160,000 “down votes” against just 11,000 “up votes.” In a recent Web feature story, The Moscow Times translated Vox’s lyrics into English, including such memorable lines as “Freedom, money, girls — you’ll get it all, even power. So, kid, stay out of politics, and give your brain a shower.”

Vox, a former singer in the rock band Leningrad, told Meduza that she wrote “Baby Boy” herself, and said she’s been “driven nuts” by questions about the Kremlin’s supposed role in creating the song. In an interview with RBC-TV on Tuesday, Vox said she wrote “Baby Boy” out of concern “for the fate of those who are being deceived and misled,” referring to the thousands of young people who joined Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption rallies across the country on March 26. “At the very least, climbing up lampposts is dangerous, because what if you fall from there,” Vox added, referring to a widely shared photograph from Pushkin Square during Navalny’s rally showing a police officer trying to pull down two protesters from atop a streetlight.