Ten' soseda

If I were to name a single good personal reason to love America, this would be Sparks. I mean, the two brothers from California, Ron and Russell Mael. It's hard to write about such strange musicians, who started in the '70s as glam-rockers, evolved as pioneers of new wave and synth-pop, experimented with disco and electronic dance and define themselves as a pop act, though their sophisticated and cerebral lyrics and complex sound are the farthest possible from what pop music usually accepts.

Like many people in continental Europe, I found out about them only because of their great album "Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins", from 1994, and rediscovered them thanks to "Lil Beethoven" (2002) and "Hello Young Lovers' (2006). The new Sparks were different and even better and much more refined after all these years. I like to see here the symbolic world of American pop culture facing the European one (the Maels themselves have always loved Europe) and the old world of American pop culture facing the new, darker America, with all the nostalgy, melancholy, detachment, grace, irony and mockery that these songs can incorporate.

And now they have a new album, "Exotic Creatures of the Deep" - again an album for repeated listenings, with many layers of sound and meaning. These definitely ageless people had the unusual idea of promoting this album by a series of 21 consecutive concerts in London - a gig for each of their 21 albums, ending on June 13 with the latest one. I hope that my capricious Internet connection will help me to watch at least a part of the live streaming of their latest three concerts here.

This "Good Morning" is the first single of "Exotic Creatures" (lyrics of the album are here, covers here and here). A review says that it's a cynical song about an old man who remembers a one night stand, another says that it's a hilarious song about a drunkard who can't remember what he did last night. But I guess that, like the other songs on the album, this one is about cultural cliches and their mechanics that "monkey" the reality. If you mock them too harshly, you'll end up by mocking and devaluing the very reality (love, loneliness, pleasure, art, beauty, humanity), as long as cliches are structuring the reality up to the point that without them it may seem unbearable or worthless. The forbidden, loved and idealized fruit may be only a banana in the hand of a monkey, but well, we all come from monkeys and end up by behaving accordingly, whatever this may mean.

Thanks to forum.rrock.ru, I listened to the new (and forgettable) album of Vyacheslav Butusov. Some forumists said that Butusov turned pop, because the album doesn't even remind the listener of any old albums of Nautilus, while others praised the album because of its technical excellence. Elsewhere, commenting the last album of Krematorii, another forumist says that nobody should expect anymore "hits" in the realm of Russian rock, but only quality and enough good songs, because the times have changed - "не та страна, не тот портвейн и драйв уже не тот".

In 2005, were it not for the generous site of Agata Kristi, I wouldn't have known anything about the world of Russian rock. Agata was indeed a good starting point for such a trip. I liked their desperate and nonchalant songs, drowned in dark electronic sounds, with those "so Russian" sound of synthesizers, sharp and melodic. Thanks to them I understood something about the Russian '90s and, somehow in a vicarious way, I also understood something about my own past - the foggy '90s of all Eastern Europe, with high hopes and painful dissapointments about the post-Communist events, with cheap clothes, cheap bars with ads for Coke or chewing gum, naive Westernization and cheerful craziness.
Indeed, in a curious way, Nautilus Pompilius, Kino, Aria, Tsentr, Akvarium (in this order) and many others also led me to recover this past - and to glimpse further into the '80s, an even more foggy epoch, a completely other life, almost like in a dream. Not that I would ever have had such an intention (on the contrary, I wanted only to listen something new and unknown), but, well, it happened. Again in a curious way, nothing in the Western rock, folk or new wave from these epochs can do this in such a way.

Now, the site of Agata Kristi is much less friendly, almost like the website of a corporation, and their previous craziness is gone. Instead of a new album, they issued anew their old albums, this time with fashionable covers made by the Lebedev crew; no doubt, the sound has all the required technical excellence. Maybe the forumists are right and maybe Butusov or Krematorii are right too in what they are doing now. Neither the '90s, nor the '80 are to be regretted. But is the present time so lackluster as to deserve only quality and enough good songs?

DDT is my latest discovery in the world of Russian rock; since December, this music is beginning to conquer my mind and to become a part of my life. I listened the album “Prekrasnaya lyubov” even on New Year’s Eve and I still can’t get enough of it or of any other DDT album. I saw videos, I read articles and interviews about their history, about the American tour in January, as well as endless controversies about rock vs. chanson in today’s music of Yuri Yulianovich. I got used to love his songs and lyrics that all this time FED me (how he would say here? “izvinite za pafos”).

And then came the famous Marsh Nesoglasnykh, with Shevchuk showing up there and saying what he thinks about the elections and about what is happening to Petersburg. Immediately, some people from the opposition started to jubilate and to talk about Shevchuk like he were already a politician, a living weapon, a precious trophy. Other people, close to the power, started to attack and insult him in every possibile way, accusing him - again - like he were already a politician. One of these attacks seemed to me especially abject, because it was aiming to insult the whole movement of Russian rock, not only Shevchuk – and being myself from a former Communist country, I figure pretty well what such crappy texts may suggest.

Now what is strange is that both sides seem to ignore his clear civic stance (“ya ne politik, ya grazhdanin”) and to use him for their own purposes, to the point where they see in Shevchuk only some uncertain symbol of perpetual fight. And here are people from both sides, saying (of course, with opposite sentiments) that he wants now to take the place left empty after Egor Letov’s death and to consolidate his public image of rebel by default, “vsegda protiv”. Therefore, with such PR, the popularity of his music would increase, and so on.

There’s a little detail here though – Shevchuk and DDT work on their new album and try to find the time and place to do this (and maybe even to find some calm, after so many have said that DDT may have lost their creative force and cannot write a rock album anymore). It’s obvious that for Shevchuk, the frequent interviews with the same political questions, the accusations and controversies around him are increasingly tiresome and annoying. Yesterday it was so painful for me to read his exasperated replies to Radio Svoboda, after the unconfirmed news that TV Kultura won’t broadcast DDT music anymore. And on top of it, there’s the weird interview from today’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, that may stir again discussions about “creative crises”, political fights, who’s right and who’s wrong among the founders of Russian rock.

But there’s no such thing as a model that should be imposed now to all Russian rockers, or anything that can measure their distance from a past or future ideal. After all, it seems that neither of them did esentially change his mind or behavior over the years – so why people are so surprised or angry now if Makarevich praises “stability”, if BG continues to show indifference to politics or if Mikhail Borzykhin says that rock music (well, new wave) is all about protest? And if Yuri Yulianovich, according to some, is enough stupid to go to MN without any “safety net”, or enough unrealistic to see the elections and the destruction of old Piter only as a particular case of “popsa”, let him be this way. Nobody should teach him how to live or to ask him to justify what he’s doing.