Hope Hale from Elementary Russian sends me this…

I've really gravitated towards Серёжа Местный, the song Дети in particular, and Malbec (with Suzanna, the 2 dudes without her are unremarkable) ...but I'm just not really sure what to say or what to share.... for me its just as simple as I enjoy the music; I enjoy the tempo and I can easily pick out words and grammatical structure that I recognize. They have a good sound, the emotion that is translated through music is also pretty impressive. When listening to music like this, I don't look up any lyrics until after I've decided that I actually like a song, and typically I also don't bother to look at lyric translations until I'm aware of how it registered on my own emotional charts, just for funsies to me. I've read up on these artists and they seem to have had pretty typically rough lives, the kind of rough that is common for both a Russian and an artist.

Here’s the tune, Серёжа Местный - Дети. I’d rename the song, Дети сольнца, дети темноты… Children of Light, Children of Darkness. Watch it, some of my comments below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6i5zJifT4

Wow. What a downer of a song. Couple things to remark on (from Dr Denner):

  1. Wow, this song is from 2012. It’s truer today than it was a decade ago. A perfect song for the senseless invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.
  2. It’s mostly about addiction, and how crappy life in Russia leads to radicalism, in this case, to suicide. Depressing.
  3. Long history of songs being poems in Russian. I don’t personally love this tradition, but people rightly say, “lyrics are better in Russian.” This tradition of songs=poems runs back to the 19th century (to Dostoevsky, in fact!), and it’s a failing in Russian culture, in my view. Russian literature and poetry never broke the connection between “high” and “low” culture, and so much of Russian stuff from the 20th century suffers from this inability. Remember: Laughter and joy is real! But in Russia, it’s all “concrete walls” and tragedy. Jeez, dudes, lighten up a bit. Listen to Oh Wonder! Listen to some Bach! Read some Schiller. Lighten up.
  4. Hip Hop, here in the USA and in Russia — it takes itself so seriously, it’s so preachy (but not incorrect!)… it so fails to recognize the human condition. You know your mom loves you, right?
  5. From the perspective of language learning, this song is pretty good. Despite being a hip-hop song (oh God I sound old!), this song is consistently in the R1, highest register of spoken language. No errors in the grammar, and the word (lexical) use is quite sophisticated. The language is simple enough to understand, too…