Russian chanson is a musical genre covering a range of Russian songs, including city romance songs, author song performed by singer-songwriters, and blatnaya pesnya or "criminals' songs" that are based on the themes of the urban underclass and the criminal underworld.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_chanson
The songs in the above described genre deal with themes very close to western gangster rap or outlow country, but their sound is more melodic and jazzy closer to the roaring 20s than the tecnologic 80s. I cannot imagine Russian chanson sang in any language than Russian. There are a lot of slang words that are hard to translate and sometimes to pronounce.
We did two versions of a song by Alexandr Rosenbaum, a prominent Russian singer-songwriter who is best known as an interpreter of the blatnaya pesnya (criminal song) genre..
So we did "Я Сзмен в законе вор" which means "I am Simon, an owtlaw"
In the first we tryed to add some blues to the track and recordrd it with an electric and an acoustic guitar.
The second version is more energetic recorded with two acoustic guitars and more jazzy.
Check it out and let me know if we did it justice.
