Alexander Zaitsev. Chasing the sun

Chasing the Sun - 7
Alexander Zaitsev

Publication date: April 17, 2000

Chasing a "vague object"

At one time I was amazed that Americans, with very rare exceptions, did not listen at all to what their native singers were singing about. A man sits, listens, smiles, taps his foot, moves his shoulders - it’s clear that he likes the song. And you ask: what are they singing about? - stops short, blinks his eyes, lengthens his face - “didn’t pay attention.” Not a damn thing! And Neil Young is there, you know, working his ass off.

Moreover, not every “native speaker,” as teachers often call them, will be able to understand the spoken words. Well, this is quite familiar to us. How many unintelligible things I came across as a teenager in the days of my first introduction to the “treasury of Soviet rock.” The songs of Grebenshchikov and Kinchev seemed especially difficult to study in detail. In Shevchukov’s “Church,” instead of “he bandages my wounds,” I heard some “bentuitrads.” It was a mysterious word, but still not very much, because there were many of them. Not to mention the “Rastafari” and “Sensimilla” that Grebenshchikov often came across. Listening to all these recordings now, I no longer find any mysterious words. Everything is sung quite clearly. On the one hand, it is clear what the author wanted to say. On the other hand, that mysterious world, which grew up on incomprehensible phrases and words, disappeared: all of them soon began to be taken for granted - in every song there had to be something that defied understanding. It was in these places that the fantasy finally got out of hand. In Kinchev’s line “look how August is falling from the apple trees,” instead of “August,” I and all my comrades (a collective obsession!) heard “cactus.” After several attempts to listen and find some other, more appropriate word here, we resigned ourselves: well, the cactus falls and falls. That's how it should be.

Probably, it was the so-called poor listening - the inability to clearly understand words. Over time it improved. However, the older you get, the clearer you see that complete information about a subject in most cases is simply not needed. Especially in relation to art. When in everyday life the level of information content in messages decreases, art almost always begins, or at least something close to it.

It happened that I was drinking on a Tver train with a man who articulately uttered only the words “at the 127th kilometer”, “combat exercises” and “Yeltsin”. Moreover, only he spoke, almost continuously. It was not necessary to understand his speech, just as it was not necessary to listen attentively to the “messages” of most singers or singers there. The main thing is to catch the drive of communication.

One day, in the countryside, at the very door of a store, I met a man who asked me the following question:

- BjbjbchjjjdhkhddbbjbjvvvyyyybjBAZAeeyyblblbj?

I shook my head negatively and entered the store, leaving the man clearly upset. Half a minute later he again found himself next to me and, after stomping around, asked approximately the following (with hope):

- Is it possible to repair the washing machine?

I looked into his blue, trusting eyes and decided: what is it worth to me? - answered:

- Yes.

The man beamed, smiled, and went off somewhere.

If there had been some old woman in his place - they have no problems with pronunciation - she would have poured out a torrent of things at me: about her drunken son-in-law, about her stupid daughter, etc. A bunch of words instead of something so abstract and so poetic: “ebzhtbzhtchBAZA...”

The group "Two Airplanes", for example, became famous for their songs in gibberish: "Bambula" and others. (Although Bambula is such an American composer.) Then, apparently deciding to get closer to the people, they sang: “heavenly beer”, “macho-macho-asshole”. For what? For the people, this kind of poetics is closer to them - “nybdybtchoshchsebdyb.” Space for imagination, for self-expression. This is all clear and distinct in Europe. We, as always, are between - between Western intelligibility and Eastern allegory. And we have our own path, as always. There is no allegory - everything is said directly, from the heart. And at the same time, you can’t understand anything.