Am getting a bit lax, I know, with few uploads and all these viral YouTube clips, but somebody sent me this for the second time and I simply have to acknowledge the immensity of it:
In my restless search through the world of music, I've had my dalliances with easy listening. Bossa nova, exotica, cocktail lounge soundtracks, sleazy soul, big band crooner type stuff… and I only became convinced it's all absolutely psychotic music. It's what sociopaths lacking the emotional cues will put on, because that's what they think other people would like. It's what neurotic, pill-popping alcoholics use to drown out all the failures of their life, constantly muttering at the back of their minds. I mean, what do the hired hand studio musicians feel when they play this stuff? What did the writers and arrangers think when they put all of this together? Is there any discernible human emotion at all, apart from a most audacious denial of the facts of life? Who are these people?
Nothing illustrates these misgivings as much as this piece of Soviet stylee easy listening. I suspect there are no lyrics because any lyrics might get the writers, performers and producers in trouble with one or the other ideologist, fickle and sadistic Marxists partial to internecine power plays that put everyone else at risk of ending up in the GULAG. And so a man with a decidedly unhealthy vodka pallor who already looks like a stiff stiffly walks in, smiling bravely as he croons a song of utter denial of the grim, meat hook realities waiting there outside the studio, and which is keeping a close eye on this man, even here and now as he lip syncs to the least expressive music possible, eschewing not only words but even any kind of sincere human emotion that could possibly reflect the reality of any human being, anywhere in the world.
This is the sound of someone asking you if you're happy, when you know that if you don't pretend to be content they'll cart you off to a torture chamber, because discontent equals dissent—an indictment of what they believe to be true and correct, and if it weren't, they will have been so horribly wrong and have wreaked all this tragic havoc for no good reason, so it's better to force people to smile, smile, smile! and keep up the pretense. That way you ward off guilt and maintain your power.
It's an easy listening nightmare.
In my restless search through the world of music, I've had my dalliances with easy listening. Bossa nova, exotica, cocktail lounge soundtracks, sleazy soul, big band crooner type stuff… and I only became convinced it's all absolutely psychotic music. It's what sociopaths lacking the emotional cues will put on, because that's what they think other people would like. It's what neurotic, pill-popping alcoholics use to drown out all the failures of their life, constantly muttering at the back of their minds. I mean, what do the hired hand studio musicians feel when they play this stuff? What did the writers and arrangers think when they put all of this together? Is there any discernible human emotion at all, apart from a most audacious denial of the facts of life? Who are these people?
Nothing illustrates these misgivings as much as this piece of Soviet stylee easy listening. I suspect there are no lyrics because any lyrics might get the writers, performers and producers in trouble with one or the other ideologist, fickle and sadistic Marxists partial to internecine power plays that put everyone else at risk of ending up in the GULAG. And so a man with a decidedly unhealthy vodka pallor who already looks like a stiff stiffly walks in, smiling bravely as he croons a song of utter denial of the grim, meat hook realities waiting there outside the studio, and which is keeping a close eye on this man, even here and now as he lip syncs to the least expressive music possible, eschewing not only words but even any kind of sincere human emotion that could possibly reflect the reality of any human being, anywhere in the world.
This is the sound of someone asking you if you're happy, when you know that if you don't pretend to be content they'll cart you off to a torture chamber, because discontent equals dissent—an indictment of what they believe to be true and correct, and if it weren't, they will have been so horribly wrong and have wreaked all this tragic havoc for no good reason, so it's better to force people to smile, smile, smile! and keep up the pretense. That way you ward off guilt and maintain your power.
It's an easy listening nightmare.
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Ah, those halcyon Soviet times! What ever happened to Alla Pugacheva, Brezhnev's favourite singer? If you could not come up with a politically viable text, just hum. Or trololo. Whatever.
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