Alexey Munipov. Foreman Boogie

The Chaif ​​group celebrated its fifteenth anniversary

The great anniversary took place at the Olimpiysky sports complex: a solo concert, a crowd of spectators, singing in chorus. Argentina rolled into Jamaica again, wine was found in the smoky kitchen, and the suffering of the no longer young Shakhrin echoed in the echoing hall with the appropriate “Oh-ye.” Silver wedding, in a word. By the way, modest musicians compare their fifteenth birthday with a wedding: they say, neither the groom nor the bride needs to prove their love, but the public asks - so with kisses, shouts of “Bitter”, a noisy abduction from the seraglio and torn harmonicas. Well, they ask - we’ll play, we’ll sing.

The concert program is crowned with an ominous slogan borrowed from the ViD company: “Everything is just beginning.” In this “it’s just beginning” one hears not at all the senile “we’ll fight again,” but on the contrary, a hidden threat, a retaliatory strike, or rather, the Terminator’s catchphrase “I’ll be back.” It’s just that the Chaif ​​group was about ten years late with its comeback.

Terminator-Schwarzenegger, as we remember, said “I’ll be back” and in the sequel turned not into an asp, but into a guardian angel, from an evil investigator he turned into a good one. So “Chaif” in the early nineties suddenly started playing not “post-beat-sub-punk”, as they characterized themselves, not angry yard songs (“I’m a dog, I’m hanged by punks on a fence”), but cute, toothless, - good-natured puppy motives - “A bottle of kefir, half a loaf. Oh, how good it is” (3 times). The punks cheated - a continuous orange mood began.

The musicians explained the change from minor to major simply: “In the eighties, people seemed to have fallen into hibernation, we wanted to wake them up, to become a kind of irritant. But now there are a lot of irritants - I want to level out this negativity, help find spiritual comfort” (interview with the magazine “Faces”). This is not altruism, not even the ideology of “whatever you please” - rather the reaction of the common amoeba to the needles of the external environment.

Apparently, this is exactly how the country's most popular rock band should act - and there is no doubt that Chaif ​​now deserves this title. If we consider the love of the public as the only criterion, then only “Chaif” deserves the status of a supergroup, and no one else (however, there are still a couple of candidates, but we are not talking about them). And the oddities corresponding to the supergroup are also present: not by me (but by the critic Semelak) it was noticed that the “chaifs” have a strange sadomasochic intonation here and there - sometimes a vine will come from God knows where, which whips across the cheeks, excited by nudity, sometimes in the chorus of the latter the hit flickers “what a pain, what a pain.”

One way or another, the strategy of the “chaifs” (play to make everyone feel good everywhere; be sure to please; bow at the feet of the audience; ask for hits - give hits; cry and laugh to order; and, of course, it’s better to sing along in chorus) has brought its rock-solid fruits : the concept of “Russian rock” can now and forever frighten children, brand freaks and anger people, and also give out, like a black mark, to young bands who have swallowed the bait of bad taste without wincing.

However, to the credit of the musicians, it is worth noting that for them this dubious progress is much more natural. The staff at Chaifa are nice, friendly and absolutely sincere people. They really always want the best. They really sing their songs honestly and truly, and they ruined the reputation of Sverdlovsk rock (which began with truly outstanding and more than inventive groups) without even wanting to. They can handle fame, they don’t tire of fans - “Chaif” marches through life.

In the person of “Chaif”, those who were not entitled to them according to their staff found their true singers. Not at all the generation of janitors and watchmen, aesthetes from the stoker's room, but a completely different generation - good-naturedly smoking builders, pigs and bakers, reliable and responsible people whom the newly converted janitors and friends of janitors never welcomed: young Eddie, let's say, biliously called them goats tribe. If he had met Shakhrin at that time, there would certainly have been a fight - the vocalist of the group "Chaif", as you know, worked at a construction site as a foreman and was even a people's deputy of the district council for some time. Guitarist Begunov, let us add, served in the Soviet law enforcement agencies, so it wouldn’t have seemed like much to the teenager Savenko if he had visited the Urals. A foreman and a policeman are a rare, unreal couple for an underground rock band.

But there is no doubt that from time immemorial these comrades will still look like rebels and rock heroes. Just as now the Vagants seem to us to be a gang of angry schoolchildren, although they were for the most part a brawling bunch of drunken clergy-beggars. And our current philippics will be forgotten in the same way as the caustic lines of “Patrologia latina”, branding wandering scoffers, or the decrees of provincial councils about “those who sing songs at a feast, engage in shameful buffoonery and get drunk”, about “goliards” - damn children, that is .

For feasts, you can’t find anything better than Chaif’s songs - to sing “Oh-ye,” you don’t need to know the words. The eternal hymn of our longing will be sung again, and again, and again.

It's bitter, comrades. Bitterly.