Ума2рман - Ночной Дозор

а ну-ка наколдуй мне: Forget all your superheroes – Anton Gorodetsky kicks their ass! If you have watched the European version of the Russian movie “Night Watch” you have unfortunately missed out on this amazing track which effectively summarizes the plot of the movie. Which is quite an achievement on the part of the band - I mean how many hip hop songs do you know that tell the plot of an entire movie? But I am getting ahead of myself. I remember the day my father brought this album (V Gorode N) home after getting it from one of his students. When this song came on, I was at first extremely amused by the opening: The first lines seemed so awkward and disconnected from the rest, seemed so much like Russian hip hop trying to emulate other models that I couldn’t fight feeling it was slightly ridiculous. It felt as though I had just gotten into the groove of the song when it skipped onto something completely else, never to get back to the beginning again. Yet, my amusement soon gave way to awe, as the song went on and I realized how amazing hip hop in Russian sounded, especially this song with its falling speech melody at the end of each line (as I realize now, similar to Mexican rock/hip hop band Molotov’s song “Here We Kum”). I have long admired hip hop for its word craftsmanship and its awesome beats which tend to hit you directly into the oldest part of the brain. Yet I could never really warm up to most hip hop lyrics, for their sexism as one obvious reason, but also for the need to put down your competitors/opponents as something which is directly opposed to the ethos of punk music in which everyone can be a musician as long as he means it. Still I could not stop pondering the potential that hip hop held for really saying a lot in case an artist had a lot to say. Rage Against The Machine is certainly one band which realized hip hop’s potential in that sense, but this is not bad at all either. Umaturman’s mix of musical styles is truly admirable, and despite this being their only hip hop song as far as I know, it does not mean it lacks quality in any sense. I did not know anything about the resourcefulness of these lyrics when I first heard the song since I understood exactly zero of it. By now they have been explained to me since, and I feel that the potential of hip hop lyrics has been realized in a way that satisfies my sense of musical economy: Telling an entire story – in this case the plot of a movie – appears as putting the lyrical potential of a hip hop song to good use. Umaturman went on to enjoy a special place in my listening habits, particularly as the soundtrack of countless vacation car rides with my father. It’s hard to get tired of accomplished pop music so diverse and lovingly created – you have ballads, up-tempo tracks, reggae, Latin rhythms… you name it(, we got it). Still in all of it there is a sense of Russianness, if there can be such a thing. It is hard to pinpoint, but there seems to be some very abstract quality in the melodies which has written Russian all over it (just as I get the notion of something typically Japanese in the music of Japanese bands as diverse as The Alfee and Koji Kurumatani). Of course pop music was not invented in Russia, and neither was hip hop. Therefore if Russian artists appropriate these genres, they had better add something of their own, lest their music become derivative and cheesy like a cheap rip-off. However, there is a thin line between adding something of your own, and becoming a parody of yourself in your emphasis of your “own-ness”. We don’t want a Russian band that tries very hard to be Russian and in trying so hard ends up reinforcing clichés and becoming a parody of their own Russianness (for example if they started including balalaikas in their songs which would be the cheesiest way a rock band could emphasize Russianness). Fortunately, Umaturman don’t have to try hard. They seem to just write music that they like which they might think sounds similar to the models it is based on, but which for some reason turns out Russian. I suspect that it is the situation of living some place in Russia which as any other place has its unique soundscape – songs on the radio, music traditions etc. – for all their lives that determines the band’s musical grammar and logic, and at some point in the creation of music adds that certain unmistakable flavour. Why do I like the Russianness in Umaturman’s music? It is no secret that Russia is getting a bad rap in Western media these days. Since I lack the necessary unbiased information, I am in no position to comment on politics in any way, but I am certainly in a position to say that I would never extend any possible political strife to the country, Russian people, and Russian culture. I have never been to Russia, but I suspect that as in any other country there would be friendly people, and some that I would not like at all, and if I lived there long enough I would become close to some people, have good and bad experiences, learn the language (better), and fall in love. I have met Russians outside of Russia, not least in my own house on a number of occasions, and my experiences have by and large been favorable. So listening to music with something Russian about it adds to the variety in life and widens the horizon. Mother Russia, do not suffer, I know you’re bold enough; I’ve been around the world and I have seen your love.

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다시 한 번 말하겠지마는: I was first introduced to this song on an afternoon in Wonju during the early rainy season of 2010 by my then-girlfriend who called it an example of Korean indie rock. She outlined the lyrics’ content and pointed out that the “hand dance” in the video was amazing since the movements represented exactly what was happening in the lyrics. The consensus among most Koreans seems to be that Chang Kiha’s song writing is remarkable for its use of the Korean language. When I recognized the song coming out of a store in Seoul a few weeks later, the Korean friend I was with commented that Chang Kiha in his songs “spoke like a book”. Two years later when I discussed the band with my Korean tutor in England on the occasion of the band’s visit to London, he too called Chang Kiha a genius, pointing out that whereas most K-pop bands used Korean in a way that rather unnaturally made it sound like English, Chang Kiha had succeeded in adapting the idiosyncrasies of the Korean language to rock/pop music which seems to be something that even Koreans who are not particularly fond of the band give them credit for. I am not familiar enough with prior Korean rock or K-pop, or well-versed enough in the Korean language to assess the novelty of Chang Kiha’s writing. What I can tell is that his lyrics are extremely close to spoken-style Korean as opposed to written Korean, and frequently feature a vocabulary that tends towards the colloquial; for a number of the words I looked up, I realized I knew alternative Korean words which were the ones that are taught in language class. This is not to say that the vocabulary is eclectic or contrived, but just that Korean language frequently has a number of words meaning the same thing, and that Chang Kiha uses words which may be seen as not being the standard vocabulary, much like you would in a casual conversation. Some examples are ŏjŏkke, manyang and ttan te. This as well as the number of idioms used in the chorus and other places endows the song with a very Korean flavour that is almost impossible to capture in translation. What I can comment more on is the music. All in all it can be best described with the words of a Chinese classmate upon seeing the lunch menu in the university cafeteria a couple of days ago (the lunch was a Korean take on Western food, including yoghurt, corn soup, bread with butter and jam, French fries and spaghetti, for those times when you need an extra generous helping of carbs): shingihan chohap (a wondrous combination). This song is a most shingihan chohap indeed: You have the somewhat cheesy, hurdy-gurdyish main keyboard figure with its folksy bass accompaniment, the main charm arising from the displacement of the three-beat figure in the keyboard against the four-beat meter across the space of two bars each. Then you have the abrupt breaks, the verse with its funky bass and the strange pick scrape sounds on the guitar, the unexpected shift from b flat minor to g minor (relative key to the parallel key b flat major) for the threatening and dramatic chromatics in the pre-chorus (James Bond theme says hi), and finally the return to cheesyness with the call and response in the chorus and the awkwardness of the spoken lyrics between the repetitions, growing ever more chaotic and increasing in rhythmic complexity as bass and drums add accents of their own. But maybe the shinghan chohap is the postmodern songwriter’s device of choice as he creates something like a musical collage and makes use of everything that is available to him. If we measure the quality of music with the question of how well it achieves to be what it is trying to be, this is certainly a very accomplished song in bringing something unlikely and refreshing to the table of the South Korean musical scene. Chang Kiha’s biggest achievement may then be in what he is trying to achieve – after listening to more of their music and also interviews with him, I believe he has a very authentic and interesting musical vision and the necessary confidence that sets him apart from those who are insecure in what they should be trying to be and end up being no more than derivative and generic. This is probably the most difficult song arrangement I have made, mostly because of the verse and my determination to adapt the pick scrapes into a descending chromatic figure – since there is not much else going on in the instruments during the verses, omitting the pick scrapes is unfortunately not an option and I could not think of an easier way to adapt them to piano either. Despite creating some additional exercises and practising those parts Hanon-style for months, it has been a challenge to get a halfway decent take without major mistakes throughout the whole of the song (I don’t edit my videos). I am even more self-conscious knowing that whenever Koreans do anything in front of an audience, they will usually have perfected it. Yet there was a point when I felt I had to get this one out and move on to something else. Goes to show that all Europeans can do is copy Asians.