American Wife
Friday, February 25, 2011
A good friend recently pointed me to the below YouTube video, which I enjoyed. (The lyrics are translated here.)
I'd never heard of the group Via Gra before, so I looked them up.
Nu Virgos is the name used to promote the group VIA Gra ... outside of Russia, Ukraine and other nearby countries. The name VIA Gra is both a reference to the drug Viagra and a play on words, since the first three letters stand for "vocal-instrumental ensemble" in Ukrainian, and "gra" means "game" (or "play") in Ukrainian. VIA Gra is a Ukrainian/Russian girl group that hit the charts in these countries in September 2000 with their first single "Popytka No. 5." Their first success outside the Russian language area was in May 2004 with the single "Stop! Stop! Stop!", an English version of their 2002 Russian song. [minor edits, links removed]The group has a rather limited discography and lots of turnover, so it'll be interesting to see what their other work sounds like the next time I'm in the mood for some background music while I'm working. In any event, this was a nice change of pace from my usual listening habits, much like the Gregorian chant I blogged about the last time I found myself unexpectedly busy on a Friday morning.
Enjoy!
-- CAV
25 comments:
Glad you enjoyed the link! There's lots of interesting things about the song. First, the reason there's so much turnover in the group is partly because the group was founded by a songwriter and a producer in partnership--this seems to me a rather Russian institution (for instance, the famous girl duo tATu started out the same way). The songwriter writes songs for the group and the producer gets their career started, and they often hold casting calls for singers.
Second, that particular clip is from a Russian New Year's Eve program (that's why they wish everyone a happy new year at the end--some singers record special new year's messages for their fans that they put up on their official sites, for example). New Year's is the big winter holiday in Russia, not Christmas, and TV stations put on long spectaculars with long lists of singers lasting until, oh, maybe 3 or 5 in the morning (depending partly on which time zone in Russia you are); after New Year's midnight had rung on New Year's Eve a couple of years ago, my wife, for example, camped out on the sofa and dozed with one ear open for her favorite songs and singers until 5 the next morning.
Third, the stunning blonde in the group at that time was Tatyana Kotova, Miss Russia 2006.
Fourth, the song was written for a movie worth lots of comments itself, which I'll put in a follow-up comment.
Fifth, it's not representative of their songs. Much more typical is something like "Crazy"--popped-out techno-steeped dance music.
And furthermore.
That song was written for a recent movie, Stilyagi ("Hipsters" is the official English translaton, I think, but "Dandies" is a more precise translation), the term for Soviet youth in the generation after World War II who sought out American popular music and dress. There's a good article about them in the context of the movie on Wikipedia. The movie itself is available in ten clips on YouTube with subtitles and it's quite worth watching, not only for the story and music but for the way it incorporates a number of anachronisms.
For example, one song in the movie, "17 Let" (Seventeen Years Old), was actually written by the famous Russian "folk-rock" group Chaif in 1992 (though the first release on an album was in 1994, I think), in a rather different style; also, the remade version includes lyrics that don't appear in the original version. (The title of the song as given on the Stilyagi clip is actually the name of the album that "17 Let" first appeared on and part of the song's refrain; it's better translated, "May everything be just as you wish.")
It's a wonderful little love song, by the way, and quite poetic; the singer dreams he sees his wife as she was at 17 when they met, and the first stanza is something like, "I see, I see you anew/In that daring mini-skirt that turned [transmuted, used in expressions for pulverizing, reducing to dust, and burning up into charcoal or ash] my peace/My slumber [also dream] easily [also jokingly] into you [both in the sense of transmuting his peace of mind and dreams into thoughts of her, and also of the thought of her reducing his former peace of mind and dreams into ashes, like a building that collapses into thoughts of her], I entreat you," and the refrain goes, "May everything be just as you wish,/May your eyes sparkle [literally, burn] like before."
Which side-tracks me a bit, but it's worth keeping in mind that much Soviet-era rock was quite poetic; another good example is "Bonfire" (1981) by Time Machine (translation provided there), whose songqriter Andrei Makarevich was a great fan of the Beatles (the group started out singing English folksongs, incidentally). Interestingly, Time Machine was my Russian penpal's husand's favorite group around the time he was drafted into the navy; he listened to them as a sort of anti-Soviet protest. That particular song's a nice reminder that by the 1980s Russian rock singers could sing songs that were transparently critical of Soviet life so long as they didn't trespass against certain broad limits (trashing certain socialist ideals, for example). That was a long-term consequence of the working out of Krushchev's reforms; to prevent another insane mass-murdering dictator from coming to power and decimating the officials, the officials recognized certain vaguely-defined freedoms of expression that were extended to common citizens.
And yet further.
So, a Russian musicologist once told me of how his generation (a bit older than the earliest stilyagi) came to make one of the "bard singers," Bulat Okudzhava, so popular in the 1950s. Earlier under the Stalinist system, any popular art that concerned itself with private life and thoughts was immediately suspect and could earn a free trip to Siberia or any afterlife that might exist; the feel of the culture of the time he summed up with the fact that every branch and leaf of the state apparatus had its own anthem that was sung, I think, at the beginning of every work day. He himself had to sing the anthem of the air servce every day,with lines like, "Our arms are our wings and our propellers are our hearts," and ending "We are bringing a folktale (stavku) to life," which he and his friends would sing as "bringing Kafka (Kafku) to life." (I mentioned this to a young Russian friend once and she said, "Wait, I know that song!" After a pause she smiled and said, "You mean it didn't say Kafku originally?")
When Soviet society had thawed to the extent that art about private concerns was acceptable to the authorities, artists in that vein became very popular. Interestingly enough, by the late 1950s laws put through by Khrsuhchev and company made it legal to sing such songs in concert (though because the state owned all concert venues this could mean very little in practice), and even to own recordings you made yourself of a singer, but it was illegal to copy such recordings for sale. It was also legal to listen to those foreign broadcasts that the state didn't actively block, which led to a wide love of jazz as heard on Voice of America. And through the Brezhnev era, as the system became increasingly decadent, blindly officious, and grotesque, the criticism tacitly allowed in music spread, hence songs like "Bonfire" didn't earn prison terms.
(Though there was still stupidly officious official harrassment of rock groups, of course; for example, there's a delightful song from about 1984 by the retro group Bravo, "Cats", that has lines like "Cats aren't like people, cats are cats...they don't write poetry in the standard forms, they don't give a damn about [literally, they spit on] 'various documents' [i.e., your papers]..." KGB agents would come to their concerts and afterwards ask them, "And what documents would those be?" and fine them for not having their internal passports in order and the like. It's a nice little irony of history that one of the videos of that song available on YouTube is of their 2004 concert in the Kremlin.)
A damned fine book about all of this is Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006) by Alexei Yurchak. It pays too much tribute to modern "critical theory" but otherwise is well worth reading for understanding the social changes and cultural phenomena accompanying the collapse of the Soviet system. It gives a great deal of insight into the milieu of Russian rock music (which has some very fine groups who set themselves some surprisingly ambitious artistic goals in their lyrics), such as the dual face of young socialists committed to socialist ideas but witheringly scornful of the Soviet system, as well as nihilistic pranksterism that reflected a strain of Russian intellectual culture the Soviet system suppressed to some degree.
And I'll let that be that.
Mike,
Thanks for all the additional information and, again for telling me about this group.
Gus
Didn't Heinlein use the term stilyagi in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in reference to the single men who were not part of family/marriage? I think that he presented them as rather a benign type of gang youths.
c. andrew
C.,
Having never read any Heinlein, I don't know, but that would make sense.
(And follow the above link, if for no other reason than to see the photo of "rock on the bones.")
Gus
C. Andrew: "Didn't Heinlein use the term stilyagi in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in reference to the single men who were not part of family/marriage? I think that he presented them as rather a benign type of gang youths."
Yes, he used the term in TMIAHM (but it's been so long since I last read it that it had slipped my mind), and a SF fan club at the University of Michigan, the Stilyagi Air Corps, takes their name from a stilyagi gang in the book.
Thanks, Mike. (Or should I call you, Mikhail?)
"Thanks, Mike. (Or should I call you, Mikhail?)"
Heh. Well, you could, but Russians usually call me Misha. But my Russian penpal doesn't; Misha is also the usual name for bears in Russian folktales, and while they're loyal good animals in folktales, they're also a bit slow in the head. Instead she sometimes teases me by calling me "Big T-shirt" (Bol'shaya Maika), because in Mongolian my English name sounds just like "Only the T-shirt (maik from Russian maika, literally "month-of-May shirt") has gotten too big." Really.
Oh, and there's a famous Russian chocolate treat that has Misha-bears on the wrapper called Misha Kosolapy. They're very good, though I think I prefer the Krasnaya Shapochka, "Little Red Riding Hood" chocolates. You can see both in the picture at the article I linked to.
I'm glad that you don't find your Russian nicknames unbearable...
"Having never read any Heinlein..."
He's well worth reading, but be forewarned: Many people either love him or loathe him, and do so passionately. He's justly considered one of the Big Three in SF with Asimov and Clarke. (When I first started reading SF thirty-odd years ago, I would have ranked them C>A>H. Since then I've discovered a couple of little things called style and characterization and now find Asimov largely unreadable. The Susan Calvin stories and a few others are exceptions. Heinlein, on the other hand, had a somewhat limited style and scope for characters but knew his limitations, so what he wrote, especially before he devolved into a Dirty Old Man in the early 1970s, is vibrant and often compelling. I still like Clarke the best of the three but only in short stories, where he was superlative. In novels Heinlein was the more capable.)
By limitations in style, I mean Heinlein was a bit provincial, a bit too American to fit some of his non-American characters convincingly. His views of women are far less chauvinistic than his feminist detractors claim, but he did show a marked fondness for strong women who looked forward to marriage and motherhood that does overshadow others of his female characters. He was strongly libertarian in the small-l sense, which rubs a lot of lefties very much the wrong way (good for him), but many of his critics with an opposed political bent fail to distinguish between the author and his characters--above all Heinlein took seriously his insistence on making people think by giving them characters in strikingly different situations than present-day America holding ideas outside what's palatable to the mainstream, and for that alone he's a treasure, and following things to a logical conclusion.
(Though he did fail at times--Farnham's Freehold (1964), for example, is often dismissed as a disgustingly racist book. Heinlein seems to have intended it to show the ugliness of American racism by inverting it--how would you, gentle white reader, like it if you lived in a world in which blacks ran things and whites were as despised and mistreated as blacks had been (and often still were at the time he wrote it)? Nonetheless, for me the book Just. Doesn't. Work. I found it much too distasteful.)
It doesn't help their case that many of RAH's critics of the lefty persuasion can't even be bothered to get their facts straight--the foofaraw over Starship Troopers is fed partly by the fact that certain readers just don't like positive portrayals of the military and assume in the face of evidence within the novel to the contrary that the government in the novel is a warmongeringly militarist military oligarchy. The society shown in the novel is not quite sketched out enough to see if it really could work and the debate within the novel is perhaps a bit rigged, but that essentially slanderous caricature is very common among RAH detractors (and was the basis for the abyssmal movie version, which is just a transparently anti-fascist, anti-militarist satire of a grotesque misinterpretation of its source material. It's worth adding that some SF fans see Joe Haldeman's The Forever War as the definitive fictional reply to Starship Troopers; calling it a complement or counterpart at least I think is a defensible position. Haldeman himself said that when he met Heinlein, Heinlein praised the novel to the skies; he was above all an author, and he respected any author who could turn lived experience into a vivid book--and as he himself was unable to become a naval officer after Annapolis due to ill health, he respected any military man who did the same even more).
And the conclusion, which didn't fit above:
But all that aside, he wrote some real corkers. Many of the ideas central to Golden Age SF started in Heinlein, and in many cases later authors could only respond to what are still definitive treatments of consequences of those ideas. His "juveniles" (a dozen SF novels from the 50s and 60s, including Starship Troopers) are classics that are often more mature than much fiction meant for adults (Double Star is my personal favorite, but there are no misses in that batch). And his short stories are not to be missed either--"Magic, Inc.," "The Roads Must Roll," "The Year of the Jackpot," "Blowups Happen," "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," and "If This Goes On--" are all favorites of mine well worth starting with (and a much more diverse lot than his critics would respresent him as having produced).
"I'm glad that you don't find your Russian nicknames unbearable..."
Grrrrrr...
On a related topic, I found that this cultural reference has changed immensely from when I was living in Japan.
The Bosozoku that I ran into in Nagoya were James Dean fanatics. Aside from the fact that they were Japanese, you would have thought that someone had transplanted an idealized Hollywood notion of the 1950's to Japan, complete with motorcycles, sharp toed patent leather shoes and girlfriends in full calf-length dresses. While some of the wilder types, both girls and boys, would dye their hair purple or neon red or green, most of them tried to achieve a non-descript brown.
I would have dismissed the idea that these were gateway Yakuza; we lived in the red light district and our next door neighbor was apparently some kind of capo for the Yakuza.
Our housing was an old farmhouse that had, with some structures around it, survived the firebombings in WWII and for some reason was never replaced. His domicile was surrounded by a 10 foot stone wall with wrought iron gates and lots of established trees. I have no idea if his was a pre WWII structure, although houses on two sides of it were.
c. andrew
Sorry Gus,
I got so involved writing the meat of my comment that I forgot my seque.
The reason the Bosozoku came to mind in relation to the stilyagi was that I had read Heinlein extensively before going to Japan. And when I first encountered the Bosozoku I almost immediately identified them with TMIAHM's stilyagi but with a James Dean veneer.
c. andrew
Mike,
I do appreciate your comments on those sci-fi writers. I'll probably read Heinlein sooner or later, but I tend to be a moody reader of fiction, so I have no idea when that will be. (Lately, I've read PG Wodehouse, and then this ingenious parody of Lord of the Rings...
C.,
It is astounding what a hold American youth culture has had around the world.
Gus
Gus, if you ever do get around to reading RAH, I think that you will find him to be somewhat eclectic. In his book 'Starhip Troopers', he comes across as a total Kantian pushing a duty centered ethics. Starship Troopers is a very Conservative book.
Yet 6 years later (and its been argued that he read Rand in this period) RAH would publish 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' in which the plot revolves around a libertarian revolution on a lunar penal colony. While it is clear that RAH was criticizing the welfare state and egalitarianism, he was also pushing anarchism big time. Heinlein was attacking government as such. While I like that book, its anarchism has always undermined it for me. Interestingly, he mentions Rand (and John Galt) in that book by referring to her followers as "Randites".
Lastly, his book 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is a sexual libertarian critique of religion. As I understand it, 'Stranger' was the bible for the hippies in the 60s and 70s and Heinlein did push free love in that book. So RAH as an author has appealed to Leftists, Conservatives and libertarians at various times in his career. That definitely makes him unique. He's well worth reading and Mike is right, his early stories are some of his best work.
madmax,
I'd heard that Heinlein was something of a libertarian, but not that he'd heard of Rand or been influenced by her.
I barely remember it, but I did once see a (possibly very loose) movie adaptation of Starship Troopers back in grad school. There was a wall of huge insects advancing towards some humans and I whispered to the girl I was with that they looked like they'd make a good gumbo. So I remember that joke better than I do the movie, so I probably wouldn't START dipping into his work with Starship Troopers, anyway!
Gus
Interesting how much and in what twisty directions this comment thread has grown! (One might then accuse me of being a tree surgeon...) I won't belabor the matter of Heinlein any more; for one thing, just on rereading my contribution I can already see one factual inaccuracy (Heinlein did serve in the Navy; he was not allowed to serve in WWII because of ill health, however). I'll just point to an entertaining defense of the man by Spider Robinson, which is better informed on RAH than I could ever pretend to be.
Ah, thanks for pointing to that article. I'll have to come back to it later, but I read enough of it to see that Spider has woven quite a compelling read.
To tie this thread up on an interesting note: It was interesting to me to learn that Heinlein promoted blood donation and why, in part because my "American wife" is working towards becoming a blood banker.
Hey guys, just a piece of information about the song "American wife" you posted originally -- the Via Gra version is actually a rather poppy cover of the original song by all-girl band from St Petersburg called Kolibri - a much more alternative sounding band that only played its own original material. Here's a link to their version of the song on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ULX3-FoMc
Best
Alexei Yurhcak
furthermore, Via Gra's cover version actually uses new lyrics, which completely trivializes the cool original song. Kolibri's original version was about a Russian guy who "does not need an American wife" because he does not need an independent woman with an opinion, but a quite home-keeper with no opinion. Kolibri was one of the first seriously feminist alternative rock bands in Russia, and the song is from the early 90s. Now, the Via Gra version is about "our Russian guy" who goes to America for comfortable life (with a rich American wife) but loses his stylish Russian youth and friends. The message is banal and nothing of the feminist original is left. Via Gra made it appropriate for the mainstream Russian TV, which is why they are - official pop, unilke Kolibri, an incomparably cooler and more interesting band. Here are the lyrics of of both versions of the song -- the original Kolibri vesion: http://megalyrics.ru/lyric/колибри/ему-не-нужна-американская-жена.htm?l=0
The re-written Via Gra version:
http://megalyrics.ru/lyric/виа-гра/американская-жена.htm?l=0
thanks guys
Alexei Yurchak
Alexei,
Thanks for this information. Unfortunately, your link to the original lyrics yielded a basically blank page.
Gus
Gus, you got Alexei Yurchak to comment! Now that's cool--and that's the Internet for you. Reminds me of one time some linguists and linguist fans were discussing something when the question came up, "And just what languages does Chomsky know anyway?", to which everyone else replied, "Huh, what languages does he know?" So someone simply emailed him and had the answer the next day. (In case you're curious, and it is interesting, English, Hebrew, and some Spanish. Though for Hebrew, which of course he knows, he added that in colloquial Hebrew he's essentially fluent but even he is unable to keep up with technical linguistic terminology in Hebrew, so when he gives talks in Israel his technical linguistic talks are in English, his political talks in Hebrew.)
The original lyrics are here (you just need to cut off some punctuation at the end of the link):
http://megalyrics.ru/lyric/колибри/ему-не-нужна-американская-жена.html
That's a shame. On their own the new lyrics aren't that bad, but compared to the original--artistic vandalism, really, completely gutting another singer's song and filling it with utterly different content.
Mike,
Well, I now feel like an ass. That is neat, now that you call it to my attention! (And, should he happen by here again, I thank him for his comment.)
So, I am reminded of two earlier events: (1) I once had Craig Newmark leave a comment here. At least I knew who he was. (2) I once, while alone nearly twenty years ago, met Leonard Peikoff in person. I had no idea who he was until it occurred to me about thirty minutes after our brief encounter that that's exactly who I was talking to!
Gus
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