Пушка, Nate

Rich text, this one.

Let's set some stuff aside here. Let's set aside the notion of a white woman performing an art created by and spiritually owned by the black experience. Let's set aside how that relationship is complicated when it travels across the water—what it might mean when UKRAINIAN white women perform AMERICAN black art. Let's set aside what we might be missing in immediately looking at Ukrainian pop in an American context, dismissing what might be an interesting and altogether unique path to rap / R&B. Let's set aside putting this album into its proper context—you are welcome to do the research into what the Ukrainian pop music landscape is like and how this fits into it, send me a memo after you've done so.

So, what's left? Language, for one. What a marvel verbal communication is, for all its nuances and foibles and tenses and clauses and rule-breaking exceptions, that words in any language can be stitched together in such a way that makes rapping possible. alyona alyona seems to be rapping her ass off, at least in terms of syllables per beat, and I can hear in her music the ad-lib, line-by-line recording that was commonplace in American rap earlier in the 2010s, so there's an obvious awareness of where the culture is represented in Пушка. In the words of Harold Ramis, that is neat.

The beats are... well, I would have preferred some regionality in the production, but I guess they have McDonald's in Tiananmen Square now. Without a narrative to analyze, the project becomes an observation of tone poetry, and once again alyona alyona feels lock-step with her American contemporaries in hip hop. The modal is aggression first, with pain and regret not far behind. This is played out on the album over and over again, but clear example of this is in how the brash "Пушка" sits next to the more forlorn "Як би я була не я." The feeling is swagger earned through experience, as opposed to youthful arrogance.

There are a lot of people, some of them writers on this blog, who cannot connect with rap music for any number of reasons. The barrier I find most common is "I can't understand what they're saying" or "I don't like what they're talking about." I wonder if taking verbal coherence out of the equation changes anything for those people. Voice as guitar instead of messenger. Rap as tone, not narrative. You don't have to go to the Ukraine to find those things, but they have them there, too.