I’ve never been a fan of the band Dai Darogu!, but when they released the music video for The Extremist, it was so good that I immediately added the song to my playlist. On the one hand, the lyrics seem like “this is absurd, it can’t possibly be true.” But on the other hand, unfortunately, it’s pure truth. All these supposedly “absurd” topics in reality cost the lives of political prisoners in Belarus, whose fate we sometimes don’t know for not just months, but even years. Recently, they finally showed Maria Kalesnikava alive, while people had already stopped believing she was still alive.
By the way, to take the absurdity to an even higher level, in February 2023, a court in Belarus officially declared both the music video and the song The Extremist as “extremist.”
Since the song is in Russian, below is its literal translation.
If you haven’t seen or heard The Extremist, I highly recommend it:
At one point, I was in charge of the audio design service department at Wargaming and even got to participate in a field recording of real tanks in Jordan. Officially, I was in charge of the entire trip, but in reality, I was mostly getting in everyone’s way 😉
A bit later, we decided to restructure the team, but I still maintained (and continue to maintain) good relationships with many of the guys. I remember when a new guy, Andrey, joined the Minsk team—now widely known as Andrius Klimka, the creator of many iconic tracks from the game World of Tanks as well as its promo videos.
Andrey truly crafted some legendary tracks, and a couple of them have found a permanent place in my playlist. Those are the ones I want to share today.
The Belarusian band Naviband is preparing to release a new album, and in the meantime, they continue to release singles. About a month ago, they released a new song called “Mama”. It’s a very melodic, gentle, and somewhat unconventional lullaby (at least that’s how it seems to me). It immediately grabs your attention. I highly recommend giving it a listen:
Naviband — Mama
Yesterday, I suggested that the song feels so familiar because I can clearly hear musical interweavings with the song “Kalykhanka” (which is Belarusian for “lullaby”). This song was used as the theme music for the show of the same name from my childhood (the Belarusian equivalent of the Soviet “Good Night, Little Ones”). It’s not plagiarism, but there is definitely a connection, whether intentional or not.
Despite all the triumphalism that has been built around Victory Day in recent decades, there are things I continue to love. One of them is the wartime songs by Mark Bernes. One of my favorites is “Where Does the Homeland Begin,” which plays over the credits of the four-part film “The Shield and the Sword” about the Russian intelligence officer Alexander Belov / Johann Weiss.
Incidentally, the film itself is also one of my favorite war movies. Yes, in some ways it can be considered propaganda, and not all episodes made sense to me even as a child, but I still love it madly and rewatch it every few years. The book on which it is based, on the one hand, reveals the characters better, but on the other hand, it’s quite heavy and tedious. The film turned out much better. And it was the first film in which the very young Oleg Yankovsky starred, by the way.
In modern Russia, one of Mark Bernes’ songs, “Do the Russians Want War,” has been banned. This says much more about the memory of real history than all the showy veterans and parades.
And the song “Where Does the Homeland Begin” remains one of the best to this day and is constantly playing on my playlist.
Here is that song in the closing scenes of the first episode of the film:
Usually, in my blog, I write about songs that I like for some reason, songs that I recommend. The song “God Save the Tsar” by the band “Rabfak” is not exactly a masterpiece, and I won’t be listening to it repeatedly. But it correlates so much with my feelings about everything happening with the rock scene and the so-called “fighters against the regime” from back in the day.
YouTube suggested a music video by the band “Logovo,” a band I knew nothing about. Even searching didn’t reveal much.
However, the video had a strange effect on me. It was made using images created by neural networks. The song itself isn’t exactly captivating from the first notes, and the lyrics seem to be about Neznaika, but not quite. After clicking the link, I listened to the song all the way through, and I liked it more than I didn’t. I admit that the image of Neznaika played a significant role—he’s portrayed in such a heartfelt way that it really warmed me, especially since he looks a lot like my younger son.
I listened to it and then forgot about it. But then the video popped up in my feed again, I listened again, and then set it aside. And again.
Today, I realized that there’s something about this song that keeps drawing me back. So I decided to share it, and I’m also curious to hear what others think about the song.
A former colleague of mine quoted a song by the band “Lyapis Trubetskoy” yesterday, which suddenly reminded me that my daughters had a tiny involvement in the band’s next album.
Back in 2006, when my wife’s younger sister, Olya, was studying to become a TV director, she had to shoot a music video for a coursework project. She decided to create a video for the song “New Time” by the band/artist “Mara.” For the lead role, she chose her niece—my eldest daughter Sasha, who was 5 years old at the time.
After leaving Belarus, I stopped listening to the radio, and as a result I drifted away from the musical atmosphere of my home country. So until the recent wave of bans targeting the singer AP$ENT, I hadn’t even heard of him. But once his music started being blocked practically everywhere — reportedly even at the state level in Russia, as if it were somehow corrupting minds — I decided to find out what kind of artist could cause that kind of reaction.
It turns out that in Russia he came under fire because of the song “Can I Go With You,” which he wrote last summer. There’s nothing overtly controversial in the lyrics — at least not if you don’t know the realities of the musician’s own life. The song unexpectedly went viral on TikTok, spawning countless videos with cats asking to come live at your place and other cute edits. Judging by those clips, many of their creators have no idea what the song is actually about. There are whole compilations of such TikTok videos — and it was precisely thanks to that viral spread that everyone suddenly heard about the track.
In reality, though, the musician hid in the lyrics the bitterness of leaving Belarus, where his wife began facing persecution over her posts. It’s actually spelled out in the song — though woven subtly between the lines. And the author doesn’t deny it; on YouTube he even accompanied the video with the words: “Those who know even a little about what’s happening in my life will understand.”
Alexey Rybnikov is a legendary composer who, in addition to several great rock operas, gave us unforgettable music and songs for many films we love. I adore all of his work, but as the first song set to his music, I decided to talk about “The Astrologer’s Song” (also known as “The Song of the Stars”) from the fairy-tale film Pro Krasnuyu Shapochku (About Little Red Riding Hood) by Leonid Nechayev, released by Belarusfilm in 1977. Besides the melody, the song also features wonderful lyrics written by Yuli Kim.
As usual, I’ll remind you of the song itself and also show a few of its most interesting performances. And for those who read the post to the end, there will be a small surprise waiting (I’m sure it will be a surprise for most of you).
So, the film itself is a musical fairy tale very loosely based on the well-known original. The wolves there are a whole family, led by a strong-willed she-wolf played by Galina Volchek; the wolves are not evil at all and even a bit clumsy; and there’s also a wonderful wolf cub played by Dmitry Iosifov, who two years earlier had played, for the same Nechayev, the most famous Buratino of the Soviet screen.
Besides the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf (or rather, the wolves), and the Grandmother, the film weaves in many other plotlines and colorful characters. And on top of that, it became famous for several songs set to music by that same Alexey Rybnikov. When I was a child, the song most often performed outside the film was Little Red Riding Hood’s own number — the one that goes, “Ah-ah-ah, in Africa the mountains are this high.” There was also a well-known conversational song with a spoiled child. But no less famous — and perhaps even more so — was “The Song of the Stars,” performed by the Grandmother (Rina Zelyonaya) and the Astrologer (Evgeniy Evstigneev). Both musically and lyrically, it’s far more lyrical than the film’s other songs. That’s probably why it became so beloved.
The death of Alexey Navalny in prison still hasn’t left the news feeds for a second week now—alongside the war in Ukraine and the fighting in Israel. First, Leonid Kaganov wrote a set of deeply piercing verses. And then Vasya Oblomov set them to music, and that’s how the song was born. Very sad (as a lot of Vasya’s work is), but at the same time honest—and somehow, it even gives me a new kind of hope.
The song is in Russian, but on YouTube you can turn on auto-generated English subtitles—they do a decent job of conveying the meaning overall.
Vasya Oblomov (music) / Leonid Kaganov (lyrics) — “Now Far Away from Here”
