Suggestions for music?

Здравствуйте

I've recently decided to learn Russian without the aid of classes (since none are offered in my area), so I'm getting together everything I think I'll need to accomplish this successfully. I have the first set of Pimsleur CDs to help jumpstart my pronunciation skills, a good grammar book, dictionary, '501 Russian Verbs,' and even a book of short stories that has English on one side and Russian on the other. This site looks very helpful, too!

I'm currently a German major at college and have gotten quite good at that. What helped me a great deal was having a variety of German songs to listen to over and over again, which improved my ear for the language. I'm confident that having some Russian songs would help me in the same way.

The only problem is that I have no idea which songs or even which groups are worth investigating. In my time here in the States I've only heard the names 'Ленинград' and 'Тату.' All in all I have about 6 Russian songs - a decent start, but not enough.

So my question: Could anyone give me a few names of groups that they would highly recommend?

I vote for "КИНО" and "ДДТ". These are legendary Soviet/Russian rock bands.

"КИНО" is great for beginners. Nice lyrics, clearly pronounced and concise. Plenty of info and mp3 all over the web.

The leader of "КИНО" (Виктор Цой) died 15 years ago at the age of 28, but retains his great popularity. "ДДТ" (Юрий Шевчук) is still very alive and kicking. :)

Use forum search and you'll find plenty of info here about these bands, including lyrics and links to mp3's.

Wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Tsoy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_(band)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT_(band)

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll look into these right away :)

Русский Размер. На следующем сайте можно скачивать песни:
Russkiy Razmer. You can download songs on the following site:

http://www.russki-razmer.spb.ru/discography.html

Your question has been asked here for many times already. If you search through this forum for such keywords like "Russian music" you'll find tons of links. I think that'll be enough for the start.

Thanks.

http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/alphabet.php?letter=J

This is an amazing resource if you want old recordings, lyrics etc including standards like Katyusha, Kalinka, Polushka polya etc.