Men Sen Emes (Face the Music, 2019): a movie about Ninety One

Men Sen Emes (lit. “I’m not you; English title Face the Music) 

(Made available in full with English subtitles by Juz Entertainment)

Men Sen Emes from documentarian Katerina Suvorova (a Kazakhstan-based filmmaker whose previous films include the incredible Sea Tomorrow about life in the area around the now-dry Aral Sea) captures the 2016 backlash around Kazakhstani boy group Ninety One and its aftermath.

The film is a question: Who is Ninety One and why were they the targets of such hatred? Suvorova gives us a complex and complicated answer, mixing social media footage and news coverage with interviews with group members and company boss Yerbolat Bedelkhan, Ninety One fans and anti-fans, academics, and cultural commentators. 

As I said in the episode I recorded on Ninety One, I vaguely remembered hearing about the backlash when it happened. The controversy was presented in extremely simplified terms almost exclusively focusing on gender and sexuality, something that remains true of their western coverage. The truth, as Suvorova compellingly lays out in her film, is far more complicated.

(Ninety One fans, known as “Eaglez”)

She opens the film with footage of young men violently rumbling in a darkened alley. As the film progresses it becomes clear that this fight was actually on a film set. The men are actors; the men are the members of Ninety One. It’s an extremely clever visualization of the way she weaves together the narratives being told in the interviews. She starts with the focus on hair and earrings. The anti-fans find them disgusting and un-manly. But by the end we come to understand that the hair and earrings are a red herring, displaced anger and frustration with no other outlet. They can’t protest the government but they can protest Ninety One.

Juz Entertainment founder Yerbolat Bedelkhan certainly had to know he was courting danger by naming his brand new idol group Ninety One and calling their fans “Eaglez”. These are words full of patriotic symbolism for Kazakhs and the initial impact of a group of tattooed, crazy-haired young men using these symbols is akin to the Sex Pistols singing “God Save the Queen” back in 1977. The big difference is the Sex Pistols were inherently a cynical and nihilistic project and “God Save the Queen” was a desacralization; Ninety One are trying to remake the Kazakh identity into something more cosmopolitan.

Ninety One member “ZaQ” (real name Dýlat Muhametqalı) is known to fans for being the group’s philosopher and myth maker and Suvorova gives him space to really get into what it is he’s doing with Ninety One. ZaQ explains that he wanted to make cool music in Kazakh. It made him feel bad that he had to learn other languages to understand the music that connected with him. He wanted to make something that kids in Kazakhstan could relate to in Kazakh. That they’re doing this using the form of “idol group” borrowed from Kpop is thanks to Yerbolat Bedelkhan. 

(Ninety One member Bala getting his stage make-up done.)

Bedelkhan, who was in a (fantastic) vocal group called Orda with his brother Yesbolat, sensed that the future of pop music was coming from East Asia and wanted to bring the success of Korean “K-Pop” to Kazakhstan, to make their own “Q-Pop.” But where K-Pop famously has the support and backing of the Korean government, Q-Pop… does not. In one of the most shocking sequences in the documentary, Suvorova and Bedelkhan discuss the threats Bedelkhan and the group received. It wasn’t reactionary groups of alienated young men leaving threatening messages; it was people with real power.

Why powerful men would care about “hair and earrings” isn’t immediately clear. As one of the commentators says in the film, half the young people in Astana and Almaty dress like this already. But when you see the footage of Eaglez the stakes become a little more clear. Passionate fans are volatile. Young people caught up in something--whether it’s soccer/football or idol groups--can be dangerous. There’s no reason to believe that Eaglez are on the level of, for example, Menudo fans, but the fans and their haters must have seemed too dangerous to allow to continue in year where there had been mass riots over land reform.  

Towards the end of the film Suvorova inserts a video that appears to be taken from a cell phone. It shows Ninety One fans and anti-fans fighting outside of a concert hall. The anti-fans, a group of young men dressed in dour shirts and trousers, yell at the Ninety One fans about Ninety One’s nonsense lyrics. “What does this even mean?!” The fans yell back, “Well what does ‘chip chip chip’ mean?!” referencing a popular song, “Maria” by the Kazaksh singer Askhat Tagdyrov (Асхат Таргынов). The men kind of sputter and say something like, “Well… you just don’t understand.” It highlights the absurdity of the pushback. In truth, there’s nothing more or less meaningful about “chip chip chip” than “e.Yeah” and the Ninety One fans know it. Music is music, right?

(An Eaglez rapping some of her favorite lyrics.)

What you come away with at the end of the film is a sense that Ninety One was an unfortunate flashpoint for politics happening in the country at the moment. It had nothing really to do with them and they seemed to understand that and find it incredibly frustrating. Since that time, the fuss has more or less died down although considering the current political turmoil in the country things may once again become difficult. 

While Men Sen Emes is not a traditional boy band documentary I highly recommend it for anybody with an interest in the genre. Suvorova has a real eye for faces and she captures both the group and their fans with real humanity. (The opposite of, for example, Morgan Spurlock with One Direction: This Is Us.) You don't get a great sense for the group’s music in the film but, despite the visuals, it is not particularly K-Poppy, and does have a more Central Asian feel to it. Listeners coming from export-focused K-Pop may have a tough time adjusting their ears to the different sounds at first but it’s worth it. Here’s a couple of their more recent songs: “Oinamaqo” and “Bope”.

(ZaQ (L) and Ace (R) laying out their group philosophy)