Alexei Pavlov first heard rap music back in 1984, when he was an 18-year-old student at the Moscow Institute for Radio and Technical Electronics. A classmate from Cuba brought pirated tapes of US radio that he had made while on vacation at home, and Pavlov got a tantalizing taste of the new musical genre when he heard an early rap effort by "Melle Mel Furious Five." He was hooked.

"It wasn't even called rap back then," he says. "But that's what it was. From then on, I tried to get as much rap music as I could, but it was almost impossible in those days. It was really hard to keep up with where the music was going."