Tina Karol: Hot Stuff

At 25, she is on the cover of many glamour magazines as one of the most beautiful and popular singers in Ukraine.

Tina Karol became the princess of Ukrainian pop in no time by recording three albums in less than three years, one of which sold more than 100,000 copies. Yet in person, she still comes through as a baby dreaming about a trip to Disneyland and eating the whole cake on her own.

Karol, whose real surname is Liberman, sang her way into show business when she was 21. At the “New Wave” competition in Latvia, the factory for aspiring starlets, she caught the eye of Russian diva Alla Pugacheva. Winning her special prize of $50,000, Karol recorded her first music video.

Next year, she was already in Athens, Greece, representing Ukraine at the Eurovision song contest with “Show me your love.” She finished seventh among 24 participants, but it was enough to become a celebrity in the Ukrainian pop market, which still has a lot of room for growth.

Since 2005, Tina Karol has been the soloist of the Ensemble of Song and dance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (Courtesy)

Karol was born in a small village in the Magadan region of Russia’s Far East, into a family of engineers. After seven winters with -50C temperatures, the family moved to Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine to live with Karol’s grandmother.

At school, she was singled out for her strong voice of three octaves, but said she was not popular among boys. “I have always been this ordinary chubby teenager with rosy cheeks and two pigtails tied in a big bow,” Karol remembered. “Boys have rarely expressed any gallantry towards their classmates. I was not the exception.”

Karol said she was a quiet and homely child. But it all changed when she received her first money from singing and spent it on makeup. “My father wanted me to study English, computers and marry a good man. But instead, I went to a musical college in Kyiv,” she said. She lived in a dormitory and sometimes traveled to the United States with the Jewish ensemble Shakhar. She said she could still speak Hebrew and remembered many Jewish songs. “They used to play very important role in my life,” Karol recalled.

Today, Karol wakes up at 7 a.m. and doesn’t know when exactly she may go to bed. Her morning routine starts with yoga practice and a “personal promise to never spend a day in vain.” She married her producer, Eugene Ogir in 2008. They are raising their two-year old son. Baby Benjamin is following Karol on the road since she went to promote her new album in 44 cities around Ukraine on Sept. 20.

She worked on her fourth album with producers Brian Rawlings and Yoad Nevo at London Metrophonic Studios, known for previous work with Britney Spears, Cher,Enrique Iglesias, and Celine Dion among others. She mainly sings in Russian because Ukrainian lyrics offered to her before “seemed to work best at drinking parties. And if a song was slow, it lacked character for me.”

But in the new album, which is a mixture of pop, r’n’b, hip-hop and rap styles, she has three songs in Ukrainian. “It was the first time that I had Ukrainian lyrics which made me cry when singing,” she explained.

Music critics admired Karol’s strong vocals and lyrics when she first broke the scene at 21. But many say the quality of her new works leaves much to be desired. Targeted at teenagers, they seem like playful chit-chat for an audience that cares little about its meaning, said Volodymyr Rozhok, chancellor of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy.

“Ukrainian youth are spiritually bankrupt. They cannot recognize true cultural values and, of course, they listen to and enjoy all these shameful, empty and absolutely dull songs,” said Rozhok about the modern pop-music market.

And yet it’s hard to ignore Karol’s mass appeal. With a voice as strong as Pink’s or Beyonce’s, she gets people dancing and humming her songs as soon as the volume goes up. Voted by Viva Ukraine magazine as the most beautiful woman two years in a row, she is among the most wanted guests at glam parties and political concerts. Her political affiliations are as varied as her music styles. She sang at presidential campaign rallies for former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, yet was spotted driving to President Viktor Yanukovych’s birthday party in July.

Tickets to her shows range from Hr 100 – 1,000 and it costs $20,000 to get her to perform at corporate parties.

Tina Karol’s Ukrainian tour starts Sept. 20. She will perform in Kyiv on Oct. 30 in Palats Ukrayina. More information can be found at