Grozny Live; Sick of war and ruin, young Chechens create dark music.

Byline: Anna Nemtsova

As hoods go, Grozny definitely qualifies as one of the meanest. Growing up during the Chechen war, young rappers like 27-year-old Yusup Nakhmudov, have seen friends blown apart by bombs. Others disappeared into Russian detention camps, never to return. Nakhmudov's music is like his life--uncompromising, angry and full of the imagery of war and destruction.

Listen: "I come out onto a balcony which doesn't exist, I look at the playground in my courtyard, There's nothing left of it," Nakhmudov sings in staccato, rough-edged Chechen. Another song, "Train to Hell," evokes Stalin's mass deportation of the entire Chechen nation during World War II. "The message in my music is my tiredness, my total disappointment. We are fed up with war, with poverty, with our everyday routine in the ruins," says a friend and fellow rapper, Anzor Bisayev, 28, who taught himself to play a broken guitar his parents gave him at 18. "No new day brings us anything new."

And yet, the tiny club where Grozny's rockers gather is itself a symbol of hope. It's a dim, tiny room in one of the few buildings still standing on its street, where young people gather to play and listen to rap, rock and reggae. The walls are papered with Metallica posters; its sound system is a pair of battered amps and patched-up mikes.

The five young musicians who make up the house band spent much of ...