QUOTE : With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.