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Yesterday a three-track EP appeared from the ramshackle St Petersburg outfit known as Samoe Bol'shoe Prostoe Chislo (The Biggest Prime Number, aka СПБ4, aka Sbp4orchestra, etc...). Released under the name of "Zhivi khorosho!" (Live Well!), the EP's title would perhaps lead listeners to anticipate a life-affirming celebration of some sort. To a degree that's true, but with one vital difference. As the title rings out, delivered in SPB4's trademark rambling style, it includes an extra syllable: "Zhivi tam khorosho!" (Live Well There [i.e., not here!]). Life can indeed be a thing of marvel, just not here in Russia...
The track goes on to describe various forms of social abuse and/or how bad things are; the song's addressee is eventually told "never to come back [home], ever again!"
As if that weren't grim enough, we're then offered a remix of the same track by 4 Pozicii Bruno, of whom we've written before. As usual, 4 Pozicii surround their formless rap-rants with disconcerting details from Russian daily life. Of late, the band has been combining nasty nursery rhymes or children's horror stories with the white noise(s) of Russia's industrial periphery. The effect is not pleasant: the sounds of pre-adult anxiety and industrial collapse come together in songs of stunted growth.
Here the same musicians take our "Zhivi khorosho!" number - already an example of gallows humor - and give it their usual treatment. How, though, do 4 Pozicii make a sad song even sadder? They simply take it outside the studio; daily existence, bad enough at home, is even worse on the streets.
This 117 second(!) remix is nothing more than the sounds of SPB4 practicing "Zhivi khorosho!" at home; we hear all manner of domestic bumps and bawling in the background, plus the intrusion of an external buzz and/or drone from the sidewalk. Put differently, what makes Russian life bad is Russia. The last sounds we hear are the tinny strains of an operatic recording: normal life is apparently a tragedy worthy of much thespian pathos.
These conclusions offer little light at the end of a dead-end tunnel. Smiles are few and far between.
This same idea - that daily life is scary as hell - has also been developed in dramatic fashion over the last few days in the framework of Russian rock music. This comes as a result of editorial work by Vasilii Shumov, shown above with the members of Bi-2, and best known for his albums in the Soviet Union with the rock/electronica crossovers of Center (Центр). After more than a couple of decades living and working the US, Shumov has recently returned home - to a very different Russia. Already an extremely productive individual, he was quickly prompted in the direction of this new project by national song and dance shows offered the TV viewers of his homeland on January 1st. All he could see was mass entertainment operating as mass delusion.
More specifically, he said: "There was certainly a lot of music on display [last December 31st]. The biggest names in Russian show business seemed to be flitting back and forth between the TV stations, clinking their champagne glasses as they went. In fact the only thing more evident than the constant music was the number of smiles and laughs. Nonetheless, behind those same grins there lurked a cold, yawning abyss. The music on show was absolutely senseless. It bore no message whatsoever. It had absolutely no content..."
Shumov then reasoned that if it were somehow possible to push "real life" into the fabric of Russian popular music, perhaps it would seep its way into TV, also, and maybe even to social discourse as a whole.
In order to reflect the many - negative! - facets of quotidian nastiness in new songs of real-life content, Shumov turned to a large number of musical colleagues. These people came both from the world of late Soviet rock and from younger ensembles who continue to work in the same contrary spirit.
These colleagues are listed online by Shumov in the following "alphabetical" order, which results as a strange melange of Cyrillic and Latin characters. The musicians involved in the projected included Moscow's trash/glam exponents, Barto; respected Belarus/Australian rockers Bi-2; Naik Borzov; Mikhail Borzykin (of Soviet rock staples Televizor); gothic/jailhouse antiheroes The Vivisectors; Igor' Zhuravlev of Al'ians; Evgenii Il'nitskii from the "surf/lounge/rockabilly" outfit PapaJohn...
...Igor' Lapukhin from the kitsch-rock instrumentalists Los Kosmos; softly-spoken Oleg Nesterov - of legendary '90s rock romantics Megapolis; disheveled "rap conceptualist" Pahom; Soviet rock mastodon Vladimir Ratskevich; Vladimir Reshkan of legends Sankt-Peterburg; singer/actor Aleksandr F. Skliar (above) of Va-Bank; the web-project Radio Chipl'duk; Dmitrii Shagin of the famous Mit'ki art group... and others.
These figures have all converged to create a deliberately ugly, sluggish album: fashion, fun, and general appeal are all displaced in favor of serious social content, a noun that Shumov even uses to name this project as a whole: "Soderzhanie." The opening four tracks are offered here and act as a snapshot of the CD.
In brief terms, those four compositions begin with Shumov deriding the present day in Russia not as a modern "epoch," but a petty time in history: a mere eposhka. Next, in a purely verbal/narrated track, we're offered a darkly satirical price-list of various bribes for back-handed social services, such as bogus driving tests, draft-dodging and so on.
The third number, involving the members of Bi-2, follows in the same spirit, turning the listed costs of a pensioner's daily existence into a miserable, dirge-like litany of quotidian toil. Dmitrii Shagin's vocals in the fourth and final example decelerate further still to extend this funereal misery, declaring: "That's Just How Things Are Here" (Vot tak u nas).
What develops over 13 tracks and 46 minutes is a graveyard fatalism. That same outlook, to some degree, negates the satire and dark humor of the CD, for the following reason: why mock or condemn a state of affairs if they'll never change?
Shumov in a recent interview brought some clarity to bear. In doing so, he drew frequently upon a clear-cut opposition from the world of Soviet art criticism, the idea that cultural artifacts can be divided into two core elements: form and content. Referring tangentially to the empty spectacle of primetime television and/or pop music, he said: "Twentieth-century art took the idea of form to an absolute extreme. Things reached a point where everything could be 'reworked' in some fashion or other, all in order to invent something 'new.' More often than not, however, this was done in ways that allowed the content, so to speak, to disappear."
Twentieth-century art took the idea of form to an absolute extreme. Things reached a point where everything could be 'reworked' in some fashion or other, all in order to invent something 'new.' More often than not, however, this was done in ways that allowed the content, so to speak, to disappear.
Life had become a procession of bread and circuses.
Shumov's new project hoped to swing the balance back in an opposite direction: lots of (social) content, and virtually no (glossy, marketable) form. Who better to call upon than the bearded denizens of past decades?
And so rock music's elders went to work with time-honored answers to recent social conundrums. The resulting, morally insistent concepts were frequently developed against the backdrop of New Year's glitzy media, designed for financial and/or political benefit.
Shumov: "Watching all those shows [each and every New Year], I still don't know who a lot of those people are. There's just nothing there..." This claim leads us even more directly back into some key notions of late Soviet art and the rock music thereof, specifically the school of conceptualism. This, in the briefest terms possible, was a strain of avant-garde Russian art in the 1970s and '80s that looked at the way various "concepts" - such as political ideology - are applied to material existence, thus giving it some kind of "meaning."
Put differently, actuality has no meaning of its own: any significance is applied by beliefs, ideas, convictions, and so forth.
Shumov positions himself clearly in this cultural field: "People call me the main conceptualist of Soviet rock, I don't know why..." He credits this outlook and musical role to work he did in the late 1980s, when "my friends would sit around talking about poetry. And then, all of a sudden, fast-food outlets began to open. Those same friends started saying to me: 'We're so tired of this Soviet poverty...'" And thus the pattern of emigration began. Shumov's friends quit Russia - and he, too, would in time head for the United States.
People call me the main conceptualist of Soviet rock, I don't know why...
Depressed by the propagandist zeal of Soviet ideology, tired of its desperate wheezing, Shumov left for a radically different ideological system - ironically the one that was simultaneously "spoiling" his Russia of poetic debate. Once he had spent a significant number of years under socialist and capitalist governments, Shumov came to sense strongly the subjective or arbitrary nature of both; in Moscow and Washington, the "true" nature of actuality was declared loud and clear. Both cities, sharing no common ground, laid loud claim to a single sociopolitical truth.
The power of conceptualist art, developed in these same years of the Cold War, lay in its ability to reveal the absolute nothingness of existence, prior to any doctrine, either western or eastern. It was deeply imbued with a sense of Russian absurdist philosophy and was arguably close to core elements of Western existentialism, too.
It reduced existence to nothing more than human whimsy + black nothingness. The world looked dark, off-kilter, and torn from a larger, invisible canvas. (Shumov's colleagues, The Vivisectors, get the general idea.)
Conceptualism blew apart the assumed ties between form and content: form merely hides the fact that there is no content! This CD, however, takes a slightly less radical point of view. Whilst revealing the absurd nature of Russian social policy, it - in the time-honored traditions of Soviet rock music - declares that there is a decent, objective, and ethical path as yet untried. Sure, life per se may have no inherent meaning, yet we as moral, cognizant humans know how things should be. This CD puts faith in human culture.
Shumov's new project, therefore, does not reveal the true existential or godless horror that was implied by Russian conceptualism. Instead, by drawing upon a very Soviet distinction of artistic form and content, it assumes that a missing "substance" could (and should!) be brought to bear. Emptiness should be filled with ethical content.
In a word, therefore, this powerful yet saddening CD is less a rejection of politics per se than a platform for newer and allegedly "better" social norms. It is itself a political statement, not a fully-blown conceptualist declaration. "Soderzhanie" aims to rework the romance of socialist culture prior to the arrival of those fast-food joints - and prior to the arrival of various non-European manual laborers, who are lambasted in one of the later tracks. (The politics of that song are worthy of an entirely separate discussion...)
"Sozderzhanie" hopes that with decency and standardized forms of justice, life in Russia might allow people - in the words of SPB4 - to finally "Live Well!"
The difference is that our Petersburg youngsters have lost all hope; Mr. Shumov and his Moscow colleagues still have faith. It would seem that some concepts are worth holding onto. As the logo for the "Soderzhanie" project suggests below, those same concepts once belonged to a guitar-wielding generation. Once upon a time, long before PCs, online piracy, and Putin, there was an older generation, we're told, of better concepts and richer content...
Living happily ever after, though, proved to be much harder.
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