A closer look
When the Soviet Union banned Western music, desperate teenagers turned hospital waste into a thriving black market. Because vinyl was heavily controlled and expensive, bootleggers figured out they could use record lathes to etch the grooves of Elvis and Beatles tracks directly onto discarded medical X-rays. Buyers would casually pass around horrifying skeletal images of ribcages and fractured skulls that doubled as the only way to illegally listen to rock and roll behind the Iron Curtain.
