Tag: protests

Songs: Tantsy Minus “Step by Step” & “With the Free Wind”

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I am very bad at keeping track of new music releases, even from bands I love. Perhaps there is a service that notifies you when a “new album from a band on your list has been released” — that would be wonderful.

As a result, I usually check for new releases only occasionally, especially before a trip, because I enjoy sitting on a plane, putting on my headphones, closing my eyes, and detaching myself from all the hustle and bustle around me.

This time, for the trip, I decided to load the latest albums of the band Tantsy Minus, which I have loved since their mega-success in 1999. Since then, a few of their songs have remained in my playlist, including my favorite Polovinka from their very first studio album. Vyacheslav Petkun, the band’s leader, has a very unique, raspy voice. But as his career has shown, he is also an extremely talented singer. After all, it was his voice, with its raspiness, that was chosen for the role in the musical Notre Dame de Paris, where the legendary Garou performs in the original. Yet Petkun sang wonderfully in the Russian version too, which I did not expect from him at all.

But let us return to the new albums. At first, I was not particularly impressed by what I heard; some lyrics even left me puzzled. However, I finally got to the last two songs from the album 8. And this is where it truly struck a chord with me.

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Songs: Dai Darogu! “The Extremist” & “The Coffin on Wheels”

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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:

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Songs: AP$ENT

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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.”

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Song: Vasya Oblomov “Now Far Away from Here”

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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”

Song: Tor Band “Go Away”

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Until 2020, I knew nothing at all about the band Tor Band from Rogachev, Belarus. The guys had found their niche and started releasing protest songs back in 2017, but they were still known to very few. In 2020, though, they became almost the anthem of the protests alongside many others. Their “We’re Not a ‘Little Nation’!” quickly gained popularity among protesters. After that, they began releasing similar songs one after another. You can’t say all of them are of the highest level of performance or use non-trivial musical approaches. But could you say that about Vysotsky, for example? And yet Tor Band’s work spoke to the soul.

But our “most humane state in the world” got to them as well. All the musicians—and even their wives—were arrested; the band itself was declared an extremist formation. I can’t even imagine what’s being done to them now in the regime’s jails. And the sentences they face are anything but humane.

I don’t consider the expression of an honest opinion to be extremism. They’re merely saying what those in power don’t want to hear. And that’s why I think it must be repeated and repeated until, someday, it’s heard. If only because, for now, I can still do it.

There’s no official music video for the song “Go Away,” but there is an unofficial one—that’s the one I’ll share.

Tor Band — Уходи

Book: “The Square of Changes”

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A few days ago marked two years since the death of Raman Bandarenka — a man who became one of the symbols of the 2020 protests in Belarus and, sadly, one of its victims. Raman was one of the residents of a Minsk courtyard at the intersection of Chervyakova Street, Kakhovskaya Street, and Smarhonski Tract, which during the protests became known as “Square of Changes.” Another resident of this “square,” Stsiapan Latypau, who handed out flowers to protesting women and actively took part in the life of his courtyard-“square,” was detained, attempted suicide several times during his trial, and ultimately received 8.5 years in a high-security prison.

In today’s world, we often know very little about our neighbors, especially when living in the huge “ant hills” of residential districts. But this courtyard became known to all concerned Belarusians. It appeared in many news reports, tea gatherings and even concerts were held there. Residents hung white-red-white ribbons on the fences, painted a mural on a transformer booth, and fought to preserve it. And it was for this reason that it received its own name — “Square of Changes.”

This courtyard, this phenomenon, has already been forever inscribed in the history of modern Belarus. And in 2022, Yauheni Otsietski decided to publish a photo album about this “square.”

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Song: Sergey Kosmos & Sergey Tikhanovsky “Rasbury turmy mury”

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Once, the song Warriors of Light by the Belarusian band Lyapis Trubetskoy unexpectedly became something of an anthem for Ukraine’s Maidan. During the current protests in Belarus, it’s hard to say that any particular song has become the anthem. However, the events themselves have inspired the creation of many beautiful songs, some of which I’ve already shared on my blog. But there’s one song that has unexpectedly been heard in many places and from many voices. It’s called Razbury Turmy Mury (often shortened to Mury), which translates from Belarusian as Tear Down the Prison Walls (or simply The Walls).

The history of the song is also remarkable. It’s recounted on Wikipedia, but I’ll summarize it briefly. The song was originally written by the Catalan author Lluís Llach as a protest against Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.

In 1978, the Polish bard Jacek Kaczmarski took the original melody but wrote his own lyrics, which were different from the Spanish version. However, this song became the anthem of Solidarity, the leading opposition trade union in Poland at the time.

It was this version, with Kaczmarski’s lyrics, that became known in the post-Soviet space, and it was translated into both Russian and Belarusian. Notably, it was the Polish text, not the original Catalan one, that was translated.

When the protests began in Belarus in 2020, the Belarusian version of the song was performed by various artists. However, the version I find most powerful and moving was recorded by Sergey Kosmos and Sergey Tikhanovsky, the latter being the individual who initially planned to run for president but was imprisoned, after which his wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, stepped in as the candidate. For their rendition, both Sergeys added two verses to the original translation.

Below the music video for the song, you can find the lyrics in both Belarusian and English (the latter has been translated literally from Belarusian).

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