The Russian Cake Switcheroo

A beloved American rock band’s Spotify page appears to have been taken over by Russian rappers. Is this a scam? A mistake? A strange third act from some beloved alt-rockers? Kelefa Sanneh investigates. Bye-Bye - Cake, PulyaNaVetru https://open.spotify.com/track/428758y1cq5E8wHL5V4fYC?si=abed325a86dc41fc Support the show! https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 2:34PJ Vogt?

  Check, check, check, check, check. All right.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Are we doing an intro?

• 2:38PJ Vogt?

  I don't have an intro. No, I'm just, I can say, "Hi, Kay."

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Do you want me to do a whole thing, or no?

• 2:44PJ Vogt?

  If you, if you have somehow prepared a thing, you can always do a thing. Do you have a thing? You don't even know why you're here. How can you have a thing?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Well, the thing about the podcast world, PJ, is it can be kind of competitive.

• 3:01PJ Vogt?

  It can be very competitive.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  And I don't know if you're aware of this, but that kind of competition can cause hurt feelings.

• 3:07PJ Vogt?

  Certainly.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  It can cause people to grow unhappy, resentful even.

• 3:11PJ Vogt?

  Are you feeling those feelings?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  No, but I appreciate the fact that although you have your own podcast-

• 3:16PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  -that you're working on, you don't feel so competitive that you're not willing to invite the host of a competing podcast-

• 3:22PJ Vogt?

  Are you referring to Search Engine Engine? The show that has been launched within my show and apparently is not competing with my show.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:33PJ Vogt?

  This podcast, Califa Host, a competitor to Search Engine called Search Engine Engine, does in fact exist. There's one episode so far, published behind our paywall, which means it's only available to our incognito mode listeners. But that was not why Kay was here today. Kay knows more about music than anybody I know. He has a book called Major Labels that somehow covers the entire evolution of pop music in a fun and breezy way. If I have a question about music that I can't answer, he's the person I always go to. Okay, we got a listener question that I wanted to ask you about. I'm gonna lead up to that question. First, to set a little bit of context, I think I know the answer to this question, but just in case there's a random lacuna in your musical knowledge, are you familiar

• 4:18PJ Vogt?

  with the band Cake?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I am.

• 4:24PJ Vogt?

  How do you describe their music?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Uh, sprightly indie rock with kind of talky vocals over the top.

• 4:31PJ Vogt?

  How do you, do you like them or not like them?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I like them a little bit. Sacramento, if I'm not mistaken.

• 4:36PJ Vogt?

  Is that where they're from?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. The big hit is, uh, short skirt, long jacket.

• 4:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Is that correct?

• 4:41PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I remember in the early 2000s, I think there was crossover with this Brooklyn band called Chick Chick Chick. A guy who played in Chick Chick Chick, I think, had played with Cake. And then actually later ended up playing with LCD Sound System.

• 5:00PJ Vogt?

  There is a saying before GPS was widespread where they used to study the brains of London cabbies. And there was like a part of their brain that either lit up more or maybe had grown more, I'm sure that's wrong. But it was just sort of a, a scientific marvel how the human mind could expand to, to contain knowledge. And when you talk about music in this way, I feel like I'm talking to a London cabbie in 1997.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Isn't it possible that brains don't actually expand and that it's zero sum?

• 5:26PJ Vogt?

  That you're deleting a lot of stuff?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that you'd be horrified by all the stuff that's not in my brain.

• 5:30PJ Vogt?

  Your kid's birthdays?

• 5:33PJ Vogt?

  Okay, are you familiar with the hip hop artist, and I may mispronounce this, Polya Ne Vetru?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 5:43PJ Vogt?

  Russian hip hop. I don't know how well you know Russian hip hop.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  No, you could be making this up just to trick me and get me to say like, oh yeah, first album's great. And then it turns out it's fake.

• 5:51PJ Vogt?

  No, no, no, real band, real band, real, um, not an entirely popular group, but a group that does perform music.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I have a certain linguistic prejudice when it comes to hip hop. So my knowledge of non-anglophone hip hop is almost nonexistent.

• 6:05PJ Vogt?

  Have you listened to any German hip hop?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Not voluntarily.

• 6:08PJ Vogt?

  Better than you'd think. Anyway, our listener is a Cake fan. And Cake, he knew, had not put out a new record in years. So he got excited when he saw this notification saying there's a new Cake song out. And also that it's a collaboration with this little known Russian hip hop artist. I just want to play you this song. It's called Bye Bye.

• 6:39PJ Vogt?

  What do you hear?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I hear a flow that reminds me a little bit of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  The 808 kicks and some production that, you know, sounds a little bit like Chronic Era, like West Coast hip-hop, right? It has those zap-derived synthesizers, maybe.

• 6:56PJ Vogt?

  Uh-huh. What else do you hear?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Like I said, I haven't really listened to much German hip-hop, so I don't know-

• 7:02PJ Vogt?

  Russian hip-hop.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Oh, Russian hip-hop, excuse me. So I don't know how it fits into the Russian hip-hop landscape.

• 7:10PJ Vogt?

  You have not pointed out that you hear a lot of Cake's influence in this collaboration.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  No, no. If you had not mentioned Cake and you had asked me to list 500 groups that might have influenced this, Cake would not be among them.

• 7:21PJ Vogt?

  So, our listener had been curious about why Cake was releasing such an un-Cake-like song. And our listener is not the only person wondering about this. Okay, there's this website called Reddit where fans of something, whether it's a band or a podcast, can gather to talk about how that thing used to be better in the past.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Reddit, you say?

• 7:39PJ Vogt?

  I try not to go. And on the Cake subreddit, people are losing their minds about this new song. Somebody says, I'm just gonna read this, quote, "Hi fellow fans, does anyone know the story of this song? Just released on Spotify, but definitely doesn't sound like the Cake I know. Does anybody have any information about it for me or about the other band, Polia Netvetru? I can't find anything with my meager Google skills. If only there was a podcast for this." Uh, he didn't say that. Someone else chimes in, "Just like to say one thing, what the actual fuck is this song? It's in a different language." And then the third person says, "I'm so confused. Is this a hack?"

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Is this a hack?

• 8:15PJ Vogt?

  Which basically, it seems like there's three possible theories for what has happened here. One, which I would like to be true, but I'm pretty sure is not true, is just that Cake was like, "We're pivoting."

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Musical makeover.

• 8:27PJ Vogt?

  Musical makeover. The other possibility is that the Spotify had been hacked. The third is just that Spotify had made some very strange filing error, which you would think they would be set up to not do. But we wanted to investigate, so we wanted to know if you could look into this.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  That sounds like exactly something I can do. It involves messing around on Spotify, you say?

• 8:48PJ Vogt?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I was built for this.

• 8:50PJ Vogt?

  Okay, great.

• 8:55PJ Vogt?

  After the break, Kay gets some answers.

• 9:07PJ Vogt?

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• 10:14PJ Vogt?

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• 11:29PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. So a few months after that first conversation with Kay, he texted me and told me he thought he had an answer. We went back to the studio to discuss. Okay, let's go to our story. Where are we?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Where are we, PJ?

• 11:45PJ Vogt?

  What I recall is that a listener sent in a question. They went to Cake's Spotify page, they hit play on what seemed like a surprising, surprising because Cake is a relatively quiet band, but there's a new Cake song. They hit play, doesn't really sound like a Cake song, sounds like Russian rap music. By this artist named...

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Pulyanovetru.

• 12:04PJ Vogt?

  Pulyanovetru. And, and the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here. Is it that Pulyanovetru has gamed the system and like hijacked Cake's page? Is it an error? Is it some third stranger option?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Is it a very unlikely collaboration?

• 12:24PJ Vogt?

  You never know.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Maybe a member of Cake is playing almost inaudible guitar on this track?

• 12:29PJ Vogt?

  That is the outcome I would most hope for.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Secret Cake?

• 12:32PJ Vogt?

  Secret Cake. So you looked into this?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:35PJ Vogt?

  What did you find?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so the first thing we did, we wrote to the American band Cake. We emailed their manager, who confirmed that, yeah, he had received some questions and complaints from American Cake fans. He said this was not a real collaboration.

• 12:50PJ Vogt?

  Which we expected.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So instead, we decided to look at the Spotify side of this. We talked to a guy who actually used to work at Spotify. Hi Glenn.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  How are you? Can I, can I start by just having you say your name and to level set, what's the last song you listened to on purpose?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  My name is Glenn McDonald, and the last song I listened to is a fantastic cover of the new model Army song, "Vengeance," by the Gothic metal band Crippled Black Phoenix. It's really good.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  This is one of many things I learned from your book is that you love goth metal covers of popular songs.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  I do indeed.

• 13:43PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And so Glenn, like me, is like a real music nerd. I would argue he's more of a music nerd than I am, and I don't say that lightly.

• 13:52PJ Vogt?

  I've never heard you say that about anybody. So like literally when you were like sort of the handshake that people that don't do sports do, which is like, what do you listen to? Where'd you find that? Oh, I like this. Like when you were doing that with him, he knew bands you didn't know?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  He knew like genres I didn't know.

• 14:10PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Glenn tried to build a map of all the music genres in the world, which involved coming up with new names for new genres based on clusters of listeners that he was finding. And he's analyzing the waveform of the song, but he's also building like a multi-dimensional social map to see like, oh, people who like this thing also like this thing. Here's how far this genre is from that genre.

• 14:34PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Glenn doesn't work at Spotify anymore, but he used to be one of the lead engineers there. And when he was there, he had access to all kinds of data and information. And he also had his hands on all the different levers trying to make Spotify better at recommending new music for its users.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  You know, most people, most of the time, want to hear the stuff they like. I think of listening in these three concentric circles. And the middle circle is my stuff. Most of the time I listen to my stuff. And then the second circle is I've become slightly bored with what I know of my stuff, and I want more of my stuff. Not radically different stuff, just like new albums by the same bands, new bands in the same genres, just like some new songs, but that they're the kind of songs that I already like. And then the third circle is I want to discover something new. I want to see what else there is in the world. The problem is, if you encounter unexpected things,

• 15:36Speaker 02

  when you think you're being given things that you already like, they sound like errors.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Right. And so, part of what Spotify does is it tries to show people new music that they might like, that's different from music they're listening to, but not too different. Otherwise, they're going to be unhappy and maybe turn off the app. And so, the search engine listener who wanted to hear Cake and ended up hearing Russian rap, had like the bad version of the Spotify experience. This is not, what's not supposed to happen on Spotify, is you hear something that sounds like it has no relationship to the thing you actually wanted to hear. So, I thought Glenn might be able to explain how this could possibly happen. So, I actually read him the question from our listener. So, we here at Search Engine International Corporate Headquarters

• 16:25Speaker 01

  got an email from a listener who understands that when we say, "No question too small," we really mean it. Can I read it to you?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Alright, so here's the email. "I went to listen to the band Cake, and they had a new song on Spotify, their first release in like 20 years or so, and it was actually maybe 13 years or something. And it was the least Cake-sounding song ever. It sounds like Russian rap and bad Russian rap." You know what they say, everyone's a critic, right?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  "The band they apparently collaborated with is Pulya Navetru. I think they, Cake, may have been hacked, but how can that happen? Wouldn't this be an easy fix? So confused."

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Ah, this is a great question.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And so, here's what Cake sounds like.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Reluctantly crouched at the starting line, engines pumping and thumping in time. The green light flashes, the flags go up. Churning and burning, they yearn for the cup. They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank. Fuel burning fast on an empty tank. Reckless and wild.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And then here is Pulya Navetru featuring Cake.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So there we have it, "Puljana Vetru" featuring Cake.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  That track has about 76,000 listeners, which is less than anything from the last Cake album, but more than anything else from "Puljana Vetru." Is this an honest mistake?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  So, the way you probably imagine the streaming music business works, if you are not in the streaming music business, but you have done other things online, is that artists upload things to Spotify, like you would upload your wedding video to YouTube. And thus, if something is on Cake's page that probably isn't Cake, they must have been hacked. And the amazing truth is, the system that the whole music business runs on is like orders of magnitude less sophisticated than that.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  So Glenn explained that Spotify doesn't work the way YouTube works. YouTube, you can put whatever you want on there, but Spotify, you, PJ, can't just record a song, or in your case, a rap, and upload it to Spotify. Generally, you need a middleman. You need what's called a distributor.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Everything gets to streaming services via distributors. And those distributors send giant bulk files, audio with XML metadata. And artists can be identified with unique IDs, but don't have to be. And thus, especially from indie distributors, are often just referred to by name. So Spotify probably gets 1,000 files a day that have names that just say the artist's name is Cake, or just like 1,000 short, common-word names, and then has to figure out,

• 19:48Speaker 02

  okay, of all the artists named Cake, of which there are probably 100, which one is this?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  But he said that even with this middleman system, which greatly limits the amount of content that's uploaded to Spotify, it still isn't feasible to like review every song before it gets uploaded. There's still like way too much stuff.

• 20:09PJ Vogt?

  Got it.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And so there's a giant trust system that controls all of this. And it is trivially abused or accidentally abused. And so when I was still at Spotify, I spent quite a bit of energy that I honestly didn't want to spend trying to guard against this, making tools that would look at the week's upcoming releases and look at patterns of, oh, that's funny. Cake has never had a release from that distributor before.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  He even had some tools, including some algorithmic tools, that he could check and be like, oh, the WAV file of this audio recording doesn't actually look like the way a WAV file of Cake would usually look like.

• 20:57PJ Vogt?

  So it's almost algorithmically or through machine learning or whatever, doing something similar to how your credit card company is like, oh, it's weird that all of a sudden you're trying to use your Chase card in North Dakota. You've never been there and you're buying 30 boxes of diapers. You've never bought any baby stuff. Like, we think something's going on. Like, they're doing a similar-

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Either you have a secret family or there's some sort of fraud.

• 21:16PJ Vogt?

  I love my family in North Dakota. But like, they're, they're doing this kind of like, like, it's a combination of you're hoping that the distributors do some of the moderation work for you and they're going to do a little bit of like, this looks fishy checking. But it's, it's not a Wild West, but it's like a under-regulated West?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  A semi-wild west.

• 21:36PJ Vogt?

  Semi-wild west. So, okay, just to recap, individuals are not uploading their own tracks. Tracks are uploaded by distributors. Spotify is doing some work to algorithmically prevent tracks from being attached to the wrong artist?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there end up being mistakes inevitably. And when there are mistakes, Spotify has to go in manually and correct them.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  These things are easy to fix individually. So as soon as it happens, people will begin complaining and those complaints will eventually irritate somebody enough to spend the 30 seconds it takes to move that supposed cake song on to cake number 93.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  So Glenn's saying that, yeah, inevitably there end up being mistakes, smaller artists get labeled as if they were bigger artists, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the smaller artist is trying to do something sneaky. However, it's also possible that it could be strategic. PJ, do you know what Taylor Swift's first ever single was?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  It was a country song called "Tim McGraw."

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yes. And it was about people who fell in love, and she's saying, "When you hear Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me."

• 22:59Speaker 02

  But also.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  But also.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  He's very popular at the time.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  He's very popular, she's a new artist.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  And so when people search Tim McGraw.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even, not even just in terms of searching, in terms of she's associating herself.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  With Tim McGraw. It goes back even before the digital era. In 1964, there was a group called The Carefree's who made it to number 39 on the pop chart with a song called "We Love You Beatles."

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Which was an attempt to cash in on Beatlemania.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's funny, when people do stuff like that, like when you say Taylor Swift's first single was a song called "Tim McGraw."

• 23:53PJ Vogt?

  The phrase that sort of sings into my mind unbidden is, oh, Taylor Swift's good at the internet. And a lot of people who are cultural workers, cultural artists, who make stuff that goes online, which is many different types of people. One of the things that I find myself noticing, admiring, or critiquing is just how good are they at the internet? But this point about the carefree is, no, it's really just being good about attention. It's understanding that there's something people are already paying attention to. And if you align with this, diss this, get near this, you may be able to refract some of that attention and use it yourself.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly right. But I think you're right, PJ, in that the modern era where people are listening to music by typing out the name online has actually led to more of this.

• 24:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  There's a Dutch producer, Sam Velt, and he had a big hit in 2019 called Post Malone.

• 24:57PJ Vogt?

  Do you think they got annoyed with Post Malone?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's a good question. One answer to that can be found. Last year, there was a singer called Jordan Attitunji, who had a huge record called Kalani, which is the name of an R&B singer.

• 25:10PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Apparently, she was not annoyed because she hopped on the remix.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  You can't be too proud to get some of the attention. One of my favorite examples of this was, you're familiar with the punk band Jawbreaker?

• 25:35PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  There was a short-lived band called Jawbreaker Reunion.

• 25:39PJ Vogt?

  That is so deep.

• 25:42PJ Vogt?

  Because Jawbreaker had broken up.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:44PJ Vogt?

  People were wondering if there'd be a Jawbreaker Reunion.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And if you put Jawbreaker Reunion on the flyer, maybe people look twice.

• 25:49PJ Vogt?

  They're really, I mean, you're really, it's like posting misleading photos of yourself on a dating site. Like, you will bring people in, but what happens next seems unenjoyable for you, the person who has catfished them.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Well, sure, although, as you see from actual dating sites, if people feel like the alternative is no one looking at their profile at all.

• 26:09PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Maybe, you know, maybe you try to get the foot in the door and you worry about the mix-up a little later.

• 26:14PJ Vogt?

  But back to our story about this Russian hip hop artist and whether this particular instance is musical catfishing. I mean, it sounds like there's at least a possibility this was a kind of attentional hijacking.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and this is a venerable tradition in music. When it comes to Puglia Novetru and the Russians, I think, PJ, you and I talk offline often.

• 26:36PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  And something that people should know is that when we talk offline, we usually pause our conversation every 30 minutes or so to check our privilege. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a privilege check.

• 26:48PJ Vogt?

  Please.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Right now. PJ, where were you born?

• 26:51PJ Vogt?

  Haverford, Pennsylvania.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Haverford, Pennsylvania, proud American. I was born in Birmingham, England, but at the age of five, I moved to this country and I became a naturalized citizen when I was, I think, 19, just in case anyone from the government is listening. And so we are both Americans.

• 27:08PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  We have some American privilege. And I think it's fair to say that sometimes people in America harbor prejudices about people in Russia.

• 27:18PJ Vogt?

  It's true. It's a very acceptable place to harbor prejudices against.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And I think part of what's happening with this story is that like, there's this track uploaded to the internet.

• 27:27PJ Vogt?

  By a Russian.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  By a Russian, eyebrows raised.

• 27:31PJ Vogt?

  You're totally...

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Maybe it's a scam.

• 27:33PJ Vogt?

  You're totally right. It's weird. I like hadn't noticed it in myself. But yes, I am more likely to assume in a situation in which the facts are unclear, that a Russian person may be interfering with American due process. A very specific kind of prejudice.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Check your privilege, PJ.

• 27:53PJ Vogt?

  Thank you, Ken. We're gonna take a short break. When we return, Kay is going to investigate some Russians.

• 28:29PJ Vogt?

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• 29:14PJ Vogt?

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• 30:35PJ Vogt?

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• 31:44PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. So Kalva and the Search Engine team had spent some time on Russian social media, including this website, Vkontakta, which is sort of like the Russian version of Facebook. I'm gonna let Kay take it from here.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  So we had to voyage into the Russian internet, into Vkontakta. And Garrett and a researcher found Pugya Nevetru, who turns out to be a Russian guy, and also found a friend of his that he sometimes works with, who seems to be known as Cake.

• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  I see.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Two guys in Russia that love hip-hop.

• 32:26PJ Vogt?

  Do they make music together?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yes, they do.

• 32:29PJ Vogt?

  Okay, this is starting to point in a different direction. And so when you say "found," like found social media profiles out?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, in fact, I have Cake's Instagram profile right here. Okay. Here, I just sent it to you.

• 32:40PJ Vogt?

  Okay. Cake Tortik.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  His real name is Sergey.

• 32:45PJ Vogt?

  Sergey Savalov. The first picture I see...

• 32:55PJ Vogt?

  Okay, the first picture I see, it's like a Russian dude. He's got like a thin mustache and a beard and what looks like long hair under a hoodie. And he's standing in this like peacolic scene outside of, are these rams or yaks?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I don't know. I was like, is that an alpaca?

• 33:14PJ Vogt?

  They're furry animals with big long horns on them. And then it's the music coming in is Kendrick Lamar Pride. And the caption is, I can't fake humble just because your ass is insecure.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Which is a Kendrick Lamar quote.

• 33:28PJ Vogt?

  I assume so. There's just something so funny about like, I don't know, American rap reaching someone kind of dressed in a slightly like American rap inflected style in a place that is so foreign. In my head, I might be wrong, but I'm like, it's a Russian yak farm. But the message is transmitting and being received. Like, there's something that brings me an adrenaline shot of happiness to my heart from that.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and it's like, it's partly what we've been talking about, which is our weird connectivity where like Kendrick Lamar doesn't know that his song is necessarily going to reach this guy Cake in Russia.

• 34:05PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And certainly Cake doesn't know that his song is going to reach us here in New York.

• 34:11PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, and it's the dream of everybody that they'll reach a lot of people, but they don't think about what a lot of people means.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:16PJ Vogt?

  Like, a lot of people means like the guy at the yak farm.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And the thing about this kind of connectivity is it's not just that we could see his Instagram page. We can maybe actually talk to him. Hi Cake, good to meet you.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Hi. Yeah, me too.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for talking with us. I asked Garrett if English was okay, but it sounds like English is great.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  I think, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I don't speak any Russian, so that's good. So yeah, we uh, we got him on a video call.

• 34:49PJ Vogt?

  What did the Russian Cake have to say for himself?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about music, of course. Tell me, when you were growing up, were you listening to a lot of Russian hip-hop? Were you listening to American hip-hop? What kind of music was influential to you?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  I, all my life, I listen American music because when I was, I don't know, six years old, maybe seven, my father said to me that, yo, Russian music is not so good, but you can listen to American music. And he gave me some CDs with Nirvana songs.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Nirvana?

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, and all my childhood, I listened to Kurt Cobain, so I love him very much. I love ACDC also, but when I grow up, like I'm 15 years old or something like that, I start listening to Kendrick, Travis, Kanye, so yeah, I listen a lot of American hip-hop.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Okay. I wondered probably what you're wondering, right? Which is like, the name Cake, does that come from the 2006 Lloyd Banks featuring 50 Cent track, Cake?

• 36:08PJ Vogt?

  And?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  No, no it doesn't.

• 36:10PJ Vogt?

  No, we're old.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  It comes more from him being a kid who liked cakes.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  It's a really strange story. In my childhood, a lot of people called me like, just brownie. I don't know why, but it's a fact. One day, I just eat in a restaurant in a small Russian town named Yulet's, the cafe named London, so in the menu, I see like Cake Brownie. Oh, it sounds cool, but it's too long.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Take just Cake and so that's how I become Cake.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So that is how Sergey got his nickname. And the members of the American Band Cake might be kind of heartbroken to discover

• 37:02PJ Vogt?

  Oh no.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  that the Russian rapper Cake had never heard of them.

• 37:06PJ Vogt?

  I feel like if I were them, it would like slightly wound me, like not even once, not even one time. But you know what? Having talked to teenagers about music, rock music does not exist to them. It's like trying to get them into disco. It's like totally, they're not interested in anything that has a guitar.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  So Sergey told us that he got a laptop from his parents for his 18th birthday and he started messing around on the computer, making hip hop tracks and decides to collaborate with this kid he met at school, who's also 18. And his name is Ivan, or as he's known on the internet, Pulja Navetru.

• 37:40PJ Vogt?

  Ah.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Can I show you a Pulja Navetru video on TikTok?

• 37:45PJ Vogt?

  Please.

• 37:47PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  How would you describe what you're seeing?

• 37:51PJ Vogt?

  Uh, a very, very young looking teenager. He looks, I don't know if he's gonna listen, but he looks like 15. He's got a black t-shirt and kind of Mark Zuckerberg, gold chain, um, clean cut. And then this, I think, I think they, they go to his collaborator, is that Cake?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  I think that's Cake.

• 38:11PJ Vogt?

  I recognize him from the Yak Farm. Um, but they're just like rapping in, uh, streets somewhere in Russia.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  But at this point in the story, PJ, it's easier for you to recognize Russian Cake than American Cake. Isn't that true? If I showed you a picture of a guy and tried to guess which one was the lead singer of American Cake, you would have no idea, right?

• 38:30PJ Vogt?

  I would have no idea.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  But when it comes to Russian Cake, you are one of America's leading experts.

• 38:35PJ Vogt?

  Is this what it feels like to be you?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Only on very good days, PJ. Anyway, Paulina Vetru and Cake upload their track. They give it to their distributor. The distributor puts it on Spotify.

• 38:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And they see some people are listening to it, which is good. Very good. And they're excited, but then they realize there's a problem.

• 38:57PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  It's linked to this band they've never heard of.

• 38:59PJ Vogt?

  And so were they like at first they're excited because it's doing numbers? And then they're disappointed because it's slightly a glitch?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it was like exploding with the numbers. But it was more like, yes, they like, they liked the idea that it was getting some exposure. But there was like, you know, we actually are trying to maybe have a career. We got to fix this issue.

• 39:17PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  And they reach out to the distributor. The distributor is kind of like, not our problem. You guys need to take it up with Spotify. And there's a problem at that point.

• 39:27PJ Vogt?

  Why?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Um, because I don't know if you recall this, in 2022, there was some international news involving Russia.

• 39:37PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  So in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Spotify closed its Russian office. And then shortly afterwards, Russia passes a law that makes it illegal to disparage the Russian military.

• 39:51PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And in the aftermath of that, Spotify blocks its service in Russia altogether.

• 39:57PJ Vogt?

  Wait, so when Russia made it illegal to disparage the Russian military, Spotify was like, we're standing up for free expression. No Russian can listen to music?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think maybe part of the idea was there might be legal liability.

• 40:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it's not a-

• 40:12Speaker 01

  If you're streaming content into a country that has that kind of a censorship law.

• 40:16PJ Vogt?

  I see. Their fear is like the same porous system that allows Cake, the rapper, to end up as Cake, the rocker, could mean that some Russian group could put up something called like, Fuck the Generals. And next thing you know. Some Spotify executive can't vacation in St. Peter's.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Well, actually, as you might, I don't know if you're aware of this, PJ. Spotify, it's not just music. They're actually involved in the podcast business, too.

• 40:39PJ Vogt?

  Oh, really?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if you, I don't know if you're familiar with that.

• 40:42PJ Vogt?

  Hadn't seen.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  So, yes, if you're Spotify, yes, the idea of are you going to monitor all your podcasts for anti-Russian military content? So for whatever reason.

• 40:54PJ Vogt?

  They jump out of the market.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  They're like, yeah, we're not operating in Russia. So Russian Cake is in this situation where he's trying to fix the mistake. It's proving pretty hard to do because Spotify doesn't officially exist in this country. And so eventually he tracks down a Spotify person in America and tells them, hey, there's this issue.

• 41:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  They have to contact someone like Glenn, like Glenn's successor, some of those people that are working there, whose job it is to get this all figured out.

• 41:20PJ Vogt?

  And so do they try?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they try, and eventually they do it. We actually reached out to Spotify, and a spokesperson told us that when the issue was brought to their attention, they, quote, "contacted the provider and got it fixed, making sure the song was correctly placed." So, right now, if you're a fan of the American band Cake and you go to their Spotify page, you will no longer see a collaboration track with Pulyana Vetru.

• 41:47PJ Vogt?

  But so it's so funny, I would assume that this was all, like, in my mentalization, the way I imagined this all going down, is the American rock band Cake was like, yo, you got to get this off our page. It was actually the people who were getting more attention than they normally would because it wasn't attention from the fans they were trying to reach, they proactively said like, hey, our music doesn't belong there.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  I believe it was actually both. So I communicated with Cake's manager, who said like, yeah, this was a big pain in the ass.

• 42:12PJ Vogt?

  I see. Okay, so both sides were like, please fix the giant, infinite library of music, Spotify.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Which is fixable. I think at this point, there are, there's a lot of cakes. I believe there are 15 cakes I found with a quick search on Spotify.

• 42:26PJ Vogt?

  Oh, interesting.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Who all have different artist accounts.

• 42:28PJ Vogt?

  That's going to be more and more of a problem.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Well, especially with a name like Cake.

• 42:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Nice four-letter word.

• 42:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Something, it's an appealing word, so it's not that shocking that there are a lot of them.

• 42:40PJ Vogt?

  You need to be like Cake182 at this point.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And so, yes, this guy known as Cake that I talked to, he was like, yeah, it was a kind of a pain. It's cool to him that some people heard this song.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think a lot of listeners find me by this groove because...

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Like, I'm not popular. I'm like, no name. But Bye Bye is, have a lot of streamings for me. It's, as far as I remember, 70,000, yeah? Or something like that. And it was very great for me that we posted on their page.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  So yes, this is their big hit. But it doesn't seem like it's a big hit that was part of a scam or that they were able to monetize.

• 43:30PJ Vogt?

  And has it gotten them any... Like, I imagine the overlap among listeners to the American alt-rock group Cake. Like, there's not that many people in the one circle who would Venn diagram into the next of people who are like, I want to start listening to rap from Russia.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:47PJ Vogt?

  But have they picked up some fans from this?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know what it really actually got them is a full episode on one of America's most beloved podcasts.

• 43:59PJ Vogt?

  God, if this is what blows them up.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Their plan has worked, PJ. Because you and I are sitting here.

• 44:05PJ Vogt?

  Just two pawns.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Talking about Russian Cake.

• 44:15PJ Vogt?

  Kal Vesanna, he's a writer for The New Yorker. You can check out the song "Bye Bye" by Polya Navetru and Cake, the Russian rapper, not the American rock band. We will have a link to the song in our show notes. You can also find it on Spotify where it is now properly filed.

• 44:42PJ Vogt?

  Kay, you want to read the credits?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  "Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by you, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Thanks, Mary." Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant. Kim Koopel, if you would like to support our show, their show, really, keep it alive and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, search engine engine, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey,

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent, their agent, is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. They'll see you next week.

• 46:16PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vistaprint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes Vistaprint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. Vistaprint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 47:00PJ Vogt?

  That's why over 17 million businesses trust them every day to bring their ideas to life. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint.com using code NEW20.