Sitting at the wheel of a clapped-out Lada and crooning verses of Borat-style English, Peter Nalitch seems an unlikely music star. But the 26-year-old Moscow music student has become Russia's first YouTube cult celebrity.
The explosion in popularity for "Gitar", Nalitch's joke-sleazy ballad, coincided with the launch this month of the Russian-language version of YouTube, and highlights the increasing use of the web among young Russians.
Nalitch's video opens with the whispered words "I've never been lonely, 'cause me is so cool" and features a heavily Russian-accented chorus of "Gitar, gitar, gitar, gitarrrr, come to my boudoir". The clip is overlaid with brightly coloured sketches of a naked woman and subtitles of the English-language lyrics, littered with grammatical and spelling mistakes. It was filmed on a shoestring budget with some friends at Nalitch's dacha in April and posted online shortly after. But it's only in the past month that it has gathered a cult following, receiving more than 350,000 hits on YouTube. "It just suddenly started becoming popular", Nalitch says.
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