Пушка, Joe

чотири новели

~~~~~~~~~~~

Look, I'll tolerate a little bit of cursing in music as it pertains to my children's listening habits, but not a whole lot. Not now, anyway. Not at these very specific ages. I understand that kids are gonna use foul language with their friends, it's unavoidable. Every third word that comes out of my own mouth is a swear word, and it's been that way since like eighth grade. But that started when I understood the dance that we do, as humans. I grew up in a household that so frowned upon cursing that I can literally count on one hand how many times I've cursed in front of my father (and have), and yet there have also been times when I've witnessed firsthand my father's own potty mouth, mostly when he's around friends and I happen to be there too. Cursing is contextual, in other words. And a four-year-old isn't the age where she can comprehend that idea.

Because this idea is also reflective on one's parenting, right? Even if I don't necessarily care if a four-year-old curses in public, society cares about it. Willow saying "fuck" out loud could be interpreted, and probably should be interpreted, as a sign of bad parenting. It's the canary in the coal mine—the canary is coughing "fuck" and so what else is going on down here in this mine? I know that there's nothing wrong, but I don't want to give the wrong impression. If that makes sense.

All this to say that, sure, rap music—or at least the rap music I've been exploring as I slowly wade into the genre across my 30s—is, anecdotally, filled with a high percentage of curse words. It's maybe not even the "fuck"s, maybe even more so the possibility of the n-word, which I don't mean to categorize alongside "fuck," since it's worse and has a worse connotation and a lot more baggage, especially in the context of a four-year-old white girl saying it. She never has, and I'd rather not give her too much exposure to a word that she has no business even thinking about, at least until she's old enough to understand why she cannot say it, even though Kendrick Lamar can. (The n-word is probably a different blog post, sorry, I'm just covering all my bases here.)

And all that to say that, well, we certainly didn't have any of those problems this week, did we? Our girl alyona alyona is not even speaking English. I don't know what she is saying. There are translations, and I hope another reviewer had that experience this week, but I purposefully did not give it a go. I preferred to instead blast this certifiable rap music, turn that dial to full blast, and guilt-free for once. Is she saying any Ukrainian slurs? I have no idea, and that's okay. At the end of the day, regardless of what else I think about this album in particular, I'll be appreciative of that.

~~~~~~~~

So I guess I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the word "Пушка" is Ukrainian, and not Russian. Both languages use the same alphabet (akin to how, for example, English and Spanish both use the same alphabet to different effect). I google translated "Пушка" for both Ukrainian and Russian, and the English results were "gun" and "rifle" respectively, which are pretty close. And that's not even to say that Genius.com claims that it means "bomb," which is still a weapon but not the same kind of weapon.

The only reason I think that this matters, besides respecting cultures and what have you, is that our book club book last month was a story set in Ukraine, and while it was translated to English, the narration was very specific about which characters spoke Ukrainian, and which characters spoke Russian. On top of that, it was very specific about what that difference said about each individual character. E.g. the protagonist was a Ukrainian language teacher for children, but purposefully chose to speak Russian to certain characters, especially when he was suspicious of the other character's motives or allegiances.

And see—maybe this was unnecessary to speculate about, since I was able to find a very recent profile of the rapper, and it explicitly lays out alyona alyona's choice of language. She grew up speaking "Surzhyk," which is a mixture of Russian and Ukraine, she initially rapped exclusively in Russian, and then in 2014 made the conscious decision to switch to rapping in Ukrainian, as an act of national pride (civil unrest = increase in nationalism).

So this shit matters. I'll maintain that it wasn't necessary to translate the lyrics to understand this album. Language can still mean something if you don't understand it. It can still color your world.

~~~~~~~~~~

But that can also only take someone like me so far. I feel like I'm maybe approaching some point where I can appreciate hip hop as "music" and not as a "subset of music." Like, we've covered enough hip hop on this blog in the past few years that maybe I can say "I like this" and "I don't like this" without having to endlessly qualify that my expectations are different because of my being illiterate in the text of rap. I don't have to say "I don't listen to rap, but..." anymore. I listen to rap.

So I don't have to make, say, a four-quadrant chart to track where I land on this album. I'd be judging any album we review here based on lyrics and production, not just a hip hop album. So if I say that a lot of the production on this album sounds generic, don't take that the wrong way, okay? Yes, this sounds like "rap"—because it is—but it also sounds like a very specific type of rap that I don't often find exciting. Would we call this "trap"? (I didn't say that I'm a rap expert or anything.) If we're going by the intro paragraph on Wikipedia, then yes, sure, this qualifies as trap music. Which doesn't strike me as a very dynamic subgenre. 

I'm then left with the rapping itself, which is kneecapped by the fact that I don't even know what she is rapping about (my fault, my fault). It's thus whittled down to how she is rapping, and yeah: very good. Lots of double-speed vocal flourishes and cadence modulations and little "woop"s interspersed throughout. I'd be impressed even if the beats were worse than trap beats (what would that be? no beat at all?).

But again, that only takes me so far. You can feel the energy, and I'm sure that shit radiates far and wide in certain colder climates, but here, on this basement couch, where I listen to alyona alyona while in quarantine, I feel worn out by the end of album. Perhaps fewer songs featuring autotune, which is always a sign of waning? Just needs more substance is all, because the skills are there.

~~~~~~~~~~~

This is probably gonna be one of those weeks that I appreciate the story more than the music itself (though that qualifier doesn't necessarily prevent me from listening to the album in the future and finding some more substance that I hadn't seen before). alyona alyona is, by all accounts, a success story in a part of the world that desperately needs a few more right now. 

One, she doesn't fit the mold of your typical musical artist in this genre. Two, she was a kindergarten teacher before switching to full-time rapper, which makes her a multi-hyphenate. Three, as I said above, there is a great potential for joy in this music, in the particular context in which she operates.

Have you watched any of her videos? A lot of them take place in what appear to be bleak-weather war-torn areas, and there alyona is, in the midst of it all, rapping her fucking heart out. Like a flower growing out of concrete, there is beauty here, and there is hope here, and fuck me if I may ever hesitate to see it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5