This letter submitted to the contest of the Zvuki.Ru website became the best in 2003. Thanks to the editors for understanding.
We live in an era of change. There's probably no need to even mention the ancient Chinese saying that has long turned into either a cliché, or a Russian national idea, or even fully materialized into our modern reality: "May you live in an era of change!". Whether this is a curse or a wish for happiness, everyone in the post-Soviet space decides for themselves. While the "golden billion" enjoys the meaningless and thoughtless lightness of their existence, we are trying to build our lives on the ruins of a great empire, using the conveniently rolled-up wheel of progress and the friendly hand of the West, even if sometimes it's unclear what that hand is doing in our pocket. Along with the desired prosperity, Western philosophy and culture are pouring into us in a wide river, sadly killing our own achievements, and blocking the path for the "rational, good, eternal" made in ex-USSR. The tendency to replace reason and feelings with technology and information, respectively, has reached absurdity in its modern incarnation, when pedophile (Michael Jackson) or lesbian (t.A.T.u.) motifs are used for the PR of new albums, and no one is interested anymore in the fresh rumor that Britney Spears got married for 2 hours, and immediately divorced. Teenagers with brains washed by music TV have long ago swept the albums of all the aforementioned "heroes of our time" from peer-to-peer networks or pirate stalls and underpasses. You're still boiling? Then we're coming to you! - has become more of a mass media motto than a laundry detergent slogan. Beliefs instilled overnight by ubiquitous overt and covert advertising have become a cheap commodity, and freedom has turned into degradation. Why have your own opinion when there's a ready-made one?
By analogy with Zvuki's "Disappointment of the Year" nomination, one could award the "Disappointment of the Century" prize, and it would go to technology. Humans time after time pin their hopes on technical means, and we always end up with a bummer. Yes, now anyone has the opportunity to compose and record their own music, but recording and communication equipment found much greater use in the conveyor-belt riveting of semi-finished "stars" for raking in the dough, and, as has often happened in Russian history, here this idea took on particularly ugly and degenerate forms. If the products of the English pop-culture incubator "Girls Aloud" don't evoke any special negative emotions, but are simply well-molded fast food with ketchup in the form of little guitars and passable voices, then the domestic "Fabrikas" and "Kornis", created exclusively by the grace of producers for the further brainwashing of the population, sometimes induce a gag reflex even in this very population. And while technocrats talk about the possibility of posthumanist evolution, techno-pessimists in the form of the cold and gloomy Swedes Covenant warn us of the danger of enslavement by our own creation.
"We are slaves of our servants
In the shadow of our ambitions"
Covenant - Hardware Requiem
It is telling that when I quoted just this line to my friend Vladimir Kotov, and asked what it was about, the answer was instantaneous:
"Hard drives!".
Fortunately, not everything is so bad. A tool can indeed be useful in skilled hands, and there will always be enthusiasts who are not stopped by such trifles as a lack of money, rampant piracy and the lack of taste in the majority of the population of our vast homeland. (By the way, someone should invent a good term, because I'm sick of saying the CIS and Baltic countries). Punks, non-conformists and alternative rockers, talents from the outskirts and the forges of Russian rock, even rappers nowadays express the rebellious spirit of freedom. Psychea, AnimalДжаzz, 5'NIZZA, Kirpichi. We have them, these names. Yes, there are few of them (Or rather, we just don't know about the others?), yes, it is difficult for them to record and get published, but they cannot be stopped so easily as long as they are in demand, and I believe that real, live, in every sense, music, will always be in demand. In the past year, the rock-mainstream old-new "supergroup" U-Piter easily "beat" pop music in the charts. The classics of Russian rock, even though they have already turned into a cross between a giraffe and a hippo that gets awarded medals, also do not wish to rest on their laurels. They continue to do what they love, and although they are sometimes subjected to harsh criticism for commercialization and selling out, let's leave the truthfulness of all this dirt on the conscience of amateur "music journalists" , whose place is in the yellow press, and those comrades about whom Kirpichi sing: "Smarter people don't write in guestbooks". And besides, is it worth our while to play a game with no winners on someone else's turf? It's just a pity that, playing Don Quixote, the rockers jointly cobbled together a tasteless cookie-cutter piece in the spirit of the very pop music they hate so much, and even named it accordingly. (The song by "Rock-gruppa" - "Popsa"). Truly, the greatest irony - when as a result of a prank you yourself end up looking like a fool.
As for electronic musicians, although they cannot yet release several albums a year, like Klaus Shulze, thanks to the efforts of the "Exotica" label, we, at least, have an idea of such music. We have a capital of the electronic scene - Izhevsk, just as Sverdlovsk was and remains a source of distinctive music and St. Petersburg a source of garage (or rather, basement ) underground. In Russia there is the pop-ethnic Ivan Kupala and the rock-ethnic Iva Nova. Even the unfortunate pop-rock, soiled to the state of crap-rock, is capable of throwing incredible curveballs in the form of Torba-Na-Krutche or even Polyusa. (I agree, I'm cheating, these are last year's heroes, but it's still awesome!).
Perhaps people will argue with me, but we even get glimpses of pop music with a human face in the form of Glukoza. Yes, she's no Dido , but as a competitor to Gorillaz - why not? For Dido with her expectedly superb album Life For Rent, which is inherently close to the mysterious Russian soul, we have an equally sincere and seemingly open girl Zemfira. Despite their different styles, there is an elusive similarity in their music - perhaps it's all about the performer's honesty with the audience and the absence of a desire to show off unnecessary tricks where innate elegance and simplicity will yield a much more impressive result?
Western pop music proved a long, long time ago - one can and should make fun, light and even carefree music, if this fun is not feigned and not vulgar, and this music is subtle and beautiful. You don't have to look far for examples - here are similar albums from 2003, featured on Zvuki:
- Texas - Careful What You Wish For
- April March - Triggers
- Ursula 1000 - Kinda' kinky
- Blondie - Curse Of Blondie
For the sake of completeness I'll mention Sophie Ellis Bextor - Shoot From The Hip, Rockets - Don't Stop and Paul Van Dyk - Reflections, although this is not my choice.
In the West, which will now become our role model for many years, whether we want it or not, the market seemed to have settled down long ago under the influence of musical gravity. Artists were crammed into genre and stylistic frameworks, turned into commodities, slapped with tags (which in bourgeois are called labels - doesn't it ring a bell?), and sold without any problems on supermarket shelves for 9.99 conventional tugriks. Everyone seems to be happy, except for the musicians themselves, who in no way want to fit into this Procrustean bed. One of such bands is the Scottish Mogwai, who get terribly pissed off when they are called post-rock. Their album "Happy Songs For Happy People" and this style itself probably became my discovery of the year. Therefore I will not frantically deny the usefulness of classifications - otherwise how would I have learned about the wonderful post-rock bands Dirty Three and Sigur Ros? (Dreamily - And ahead still lies the introduction to Godspeed You Black Emperor!).
As for heavy music, alternative rock is in a weird state, where it's seemingly neither alternative nor rock anymore, and its latest child, nu-metal, with rare exceptions, turned out slightly stillborn. It was ruined by the very same showbiz, which standardly spawned strains with a juicy sound, the listing of which seems redundant. I'll only mention Linkin Park, who failed to live up to expectations with the release of their second album (and I did have them), and Evanescence, trendy due to their lightness and format-friendliness, with the album Fallen. Listen to it, if you still want to. That leaves only System Of A Down, but they didn't delight us this year. The heavier Metallica with the record St.Anger is not that bad, at least it retained the conceptualism characteristic of rock music and some vaguely perceptible zest. Fortunately, there is still something to rejoice the tormented heart of an alternative lover - if you know/have heard/love the virtuosos Guano Apes, urgently download the 2003 live album Guano Apes Live. You won't be disappointed. Regarding classic hard rock I will modestly remain silent - not my domain, but the story about the Japanese guitarist hide his appearance and music make a strong impression. Do you still consider the use of cosmetics and makeup by men to be reprehensible or overly extravagant? And are rigidity of views, conservatism and intolerance highly esteemed by you? Beauty does not depend on conventions.
Trip-hop, which has now grown to incredible proportions, has become trendy. Now everything sad and electronic is included in it, and sometimes even not entirely sad things, like the pretty good new album from the exquisite Lamb - Darkness And Wonder, or not really electronic things, for example some songs from the album "Svoboda" by the St. Petersburg alternative band Jan Ku - whom, to my shame, I heard quite recently. In connection with fashionable trends, the following should be said - it is important not to fall into the opposite extreme and become a musical snob who recognizes only the most underground of the underground, and refinements recorded in the well of a transcontinental missile silo in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Yes, you can make very interesting music even living in a village, like the cult Pyotr Mamonov and his one-man band Zvuki Mu, but this is by no means an end in itself. You won't become smarter, taller or better than others, just because you avoid mass culture. To think so is self-deception and an evil, greater than this culture itself. It is not without reason that pride, the personification of which is Lucifer, is according to the apocrypha - the most terrible sin. I hope you won't scold the new album of the modern shaman Tricky, just because it has become accessible to broader masses of music lovers? Honestly, you shouldn't, better listen to it one more time. And if heavy and slightly gloomy rhythms still aren't to your liking, try Spacek with the album Vintage Hi-Tech - what if this kind eccentric from the transcendental soul-trip-hop heights touches the strings in your soul, thirsting for the strange?
All these are the sounds of a new era, when man is already becoming something more. What awaits us? Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence? It seems like sci-fi, but didn't personal computers in every home, connected by a planet-wide network for communication and access to information, mobile phones (soon with video transmission), and portable music players with memory for a thousand albums, seem like the same kind of sci-fi?
Despite the pessimistic beginning of my thoughts, there is a way out. "There is no silver bullet", no royal road, but basically - there is a road, says Frederick Brooks in his bestseller "The Mythical Man-Month", on a completely different issue, but very fittingly in our case. They say there's no accounting for taste. Maybe that's true, but for that taste must exist. At least some kind of taste! Hobbies, interests. Your own. Not imposed on you. Let it even be the chanson that I hate, but if it is your personal conscious choice - and you had something to choose from - so be it! Strength is not in money, as the Brother's Brother from Brother used to say, and not even in truth, as the Brother from Brother believed. Strength - is in diversity. Evolution is only possible with a huge number of species - and this applies to everything, from the progress of civilization to the progress in music. Music should be good - this is subjective, music should be diverse - this is objective. The lack of diversity, of change in ideas and generations - is stagnation and extinction. Create, compose, listen!
May you live in an era of change!