Behind the Songs

Her face isn't plastered on posters around the city. She rarely features on the pages of tabloids. And most Russians wouldn't recognize her if they saw her on the street. Everyone has heard her music, though.

Sentimental pop songs by MakSim are on constant rotation on Russian radio, and according to unofficial estimates, over 1 million copies of her album "Difficult Age" have been sold, trouncing efforts by celebrity-circuit favorites Dima Bilan and Alla Pugachyova and making it the most popular release of recent years. She has also picked up a string of awards, notably MTV Russia's prizes for Best Female Performer and Best Pop Project earlier this month.

Her success, music critics say, is not thanks to an expensive promotional campaign -- she hasn't had one. Instead, in a rarer turn of events, they suggest it's down to her music: One album of songs about romance and growing up that are not remarkable, but simply well-crafted, catchy, and tuned to the tastes of the nation's teenagers. It remains to be seen whether the record was a fluke.

MakSim's rise is a curious coda in Russia's murky and idiosyncratic pop industry, where money, not talent, often determines who makes it big. It's regularly alleged that promotional spots on television, in newspapers and on the radio are paid for. And the meteoric ascent of Bilan, for example, was probably not hindered by multimillionaire businessman Viktor Baturin, who is said to have invested $5 million in his protege. Other pop stars also have benefactors or well-connected producers. MakSim apparently does not.

She has also been squeezed out of the lucrative private concert market, a key source of income for musicians in a country where pirated discs are so widespread. Stars who haven't had a hit in years can sometimes charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform at private concerts for oligarchs and oil companies, while MakSim only makes between $10,000 and $20,000, said Maxim Kononenko, a music reviewer at Gazeta newspaper.

"There's practically no music in Russia at all -- that's my opinion," MakSim said in a late night interview on Sunday at an elite Moscow club. She's pretty rather than beautiful, with large blue eyes, dyed red hair, and a tattoo of a cat on her shoulder. "It's very rare that someone is actually involved in making music. Mostly they're involved in PR, promotion of a personality, singing at corporate events. I'm afraid this will be the case for a long time."

It goes without saying that she sees herself differently. "In my case, my music became famous first, and then people started to see my face."

MakSim, whose real name is Marina Maksimova, would only say her age was between 18 and 28. She's likely 26, said Vadim Ponomaryov, a reviewer for Newsmusic.ru. She grew up in comfortable circumstances in the central Russian city of Kazan, her mother a teacher and her father the owner of a car repair shop. As a child she sang with the Tatarstan Philharmonic Orchestra, and as a teenager she began performing in bars and clubs.

MTV Russia MakSim performing this month at the MTV Russia Music Awards, where she won matryoshka-shaped prizes for best female performer and Best Pop Project.

"I reckoned I was such an adult. I used to do my homework in the dressing room," she recalled. "Now I question whether it was all necessary -- that fervor, that desire to be independent."

Moving to Moscow in 2003, she said she spent her first week sleeping on benches in Kazansky Station and near the All-Russia Exhibition Center. Family friends failed to meet her at the station, she claimed, adding, somewhat unbelievably, that she kept missing the train that would take her to relatives in the Moscow region. Eventually she bumped into a friend from Kazan and they rented an apartment together.

Farfetched as the story sounds, "of course I believe it," Ponomaryov said, noting that Roman Bilyk from the band Zveri did the same thing. "A lot of budding musicians who arrive in Moscow start like this. It's kind of a tradition."

For the next two years, MakSim sang frequently in bars and at concerts, sometimes as a backing singer, and once appearing as a dancer. Her popularity grew as her songs were distributed on the Internet.

"At a St. Petersburg dance music festival [in 2005], I was very struck by the artists' billing," she recalled. "There were Diskoteka Avariya and Zveri -- for me such mastodons, such famous people. And when I saw where they'd written MakSim, I thought they mixed something up. I went on after Diskoteka Avariya. I went out on the stage, and I heard an audience of 15,000 people singing "Difficult Age," even though I'd had nothing ?€“ no radio, no television, only the Internet."

In 2005, she signed to Gala Records, also home to Bilan. The record label heads hired her after seeing a video of the St. Petersburg concert, said Maria Yezhukova, Gala's marketing director. At first they tried to promote her as a skimpily clad vamp with her hair in Princess Leia-style buns, but she later reverted to her girl-next-door look and wore jeans and sneakers to this month's MTV awards.

Her first album, "Difficult Age," was released in March 2006. MakSim wrote all the songs, she said. "Do You Know," "Tenderness," "I Let Go" and "To Become the Wind" were all hits, and the album included such borderline risque tracks as "Lolita," which has the lyric: "Touch me, I'm innocent with a sinful soul." By June 2007, 1 million copies of the album had been sold, Yezhukova said.

"They're compassionate songs with good melodies and lyrics," Gazeta's Kononenko said. They're not works of art, however. "When you talk about pop music, you can't talk about creativity -- it doesn't make sense."

MakSim's new album, "My Paradise," will be released in November. She's looking to attract a different kind of listener. At midnight on Sunday she gave an interview to Ekho Moskvy radio, which has hosted prominent members of the opposition like Garry Kasparov and is hailed as one of the last bastions of media freedom in Russia.

Not unexpectedly, "we understood that the audience of Ekho Moskvy is not her audience," said Yezhukova of Gala Records, adding that they had a surprising number of enthusiastic responses from callers.

In a clue as to why she still has such a low profile, MakSim said she often turned down interviews if they weren't focused on her music. "I don't really want to simply hold forth about how wonderful and beautiful I am," she explained. That may change, though, as she recently completed a degree in music promotion at Kazan State University.

On the subject of her awards -- in addition to the recent MTV plaudits, the local music channel Muz-TV named her Breakthrough of the Year in June -- MakSim is a little touchy, however.

"I was very surprised that they gave me Breakthrough of the Year, and that it was in this year of all years," she said. "Because eight years have already passed since my career began. It's about time, of course."