Pop scene

Very chilly and rainy August so far out here, and I’ve come down with something ugly and haven’t been outside or much help around the house this week. I’ve been keeping pretty far from Mila because of it – I only get close to her when wearing a mask of sorts tied around my face: an old Young Pioneers kerchief that reads “Always Ready.” Among the things I’ve been wanting to write about for awhile is a certain crisis in the Russian pop scene I’ve noticed this trip here. We got here just as the Eurovision Song Contest was heating up, and the most popular CIS entries have become stuck in my family’s consciousness in very unpleasant ways. The Russian entry was a prefab girl-group called Serebro, upon which all the hopes and dreams of a resurgent Russia rode. Indeed they planned that these three cute, virtually talentless girls would somehow prove to Europe Russia’s long-neglected awesomeness. Their big single was a rather insipid effort called “Song #1.” The songs chorus begins with what sounds like one of them having something dropped on her foot, includes various rhymes of “honey” “money” and “funny.” It includes the line “Put a cherry on my cake and taste my cherry pie.” Such lyrics have been completely unacceptable to Western ears since Warrant. This is unbecoming of Russia’s glorious pop-crap tradition, and the market penetration of this song is depressing though luckily, now in August, it is fading away at last. The other entries have been similarly ubiquitous. The Belarussian entry was by a chap named Dima Koldun, whose song “Work Your Magic” is so funny that the first few times I heard it I thought it was a lost Saturday Night Live sketch. It is like Balki from “Perfect Strangers” jabbering on about “your loving potion.” (Getting much less attention here at any rate was Verka Serduchka’s “Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” a song that I remember was described on the Internets as almost certainly the song they play on the escalator to hell. It is our clear and far ahead favorite, and we were strongly pulling for it to win the competition. It is also a big favorite with Mila.) Russia’s pop tradition is long and noble. It doesn’t take very long here to realize that Russians truly love singing – unfortunately that usually manifests itself in a group of young men wandering through your neighborhood in the middle of the night bellowing to their drunken hearts’ delight. That impulse was carefully channeled in the Soviet era variety shows, in which lip-synching singers would croon mild songs in front of various glittering backgrounds, as a theaterful of respectable citizens would look on and occasionally clap in unison. These types of show remain a staple for the older folks on the weekend line-ups on the state-run channels. That led to today’s pop culture, in which actual talent or ability was not nearly as important as the right look and connections. Morbidly catchy tunes would be crafted by professionals, and played by professionals, and all the artists had to do was get the lip-synching down correctly. Which is fine in its place. The appeal of pop music is that it is light, not supposed to take itself too seriously, and fun. Perhaps what has soured me on Serebro is that it got mixed up in various Russian complexes of the moment, and they played along like good troopers. Also, the singing in English is a huge mistake. But at its heart, pop music can be appreciated because it is engineered to appeal to as many people as possible, and that in itself is some sort of art. And I admire that the Russian music industry is so thoroughly shameless and unapologetic about that fact. The phoniness is not deep, not like when the American music business tried to convince people that Avril Lavigne was a “punk.” On my first extended stay in Russia in summer 2003, the song that was everywhere was by girl-group Fabrika. “Pro Lyubov” was unavoidable for a few weeks – you heard in stores, in the checkout line at the gastronome, from speakers on the patio of outdoor restaurants. I think I would pay to have this song surgically removed from my head. Here is a link to the video, but seriously, be careful. At the same time, there were guilty pleasures out there. I came to actually kind of like Glyukoza. All of her videos included her as a sort of computer-animated girl that walked around with a Doberman, the tunes had a sort of surf-rock thing going on, they seemed to include a vaguely girl-powerrrr message, and her single “Nevesta” helped me permanently remember the difference between “instead of” and “together,” which in Russian sound very similar to one another. Her career has gone in all sorts of wrong directions in the past few years – too many ballads, marriage to some creepy minigarch – but that album was alright. No politics, no apologies; just dopey fun.