DON'T FOOL AROUND, AMERICA.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: MUSIC VIDEO

A machine gun detaches Alaska from North America. A crowd marches beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin. A leering Uncle Sam peers down a girl's dress. Soldiers dance. Fragments of Soviet propaganda films flicker by. At one point, for some reason, a fish pops out of a wall. The whole sequence is rendered in that part-photographed, partanimated style that was the rage in the early '90s.

So goes the surreal video for "Don't Fool Around, America," a hit for the Russian band Lyube in 1992. The song-half rock, half Slavic folk musiccalls on the U.S. to give Alaska back to Moscow. "We have a lot of red fabric/We'll sew shirts for all of you, brothers," they sing. (Or something like that: I'm relying on a sketchy online translation here.)...