Zemfira, meat of war and red laughter
Zemfira, who has a cult status in certain circles, recorded a song with the capacious title “Meat.” Her previous album, Borderline, was released in 2021. His listeners have been waiting for 8 years. But after that, as they say, things went smoothly. And here is the song and video “Meat”.
The musical component here is quite mediocre – reminiscent of Delfin's less-than-stellar compositions. There's almost nothing here from Zemfira, as she's become so beloved. But the semantic content is more than rich, and the lyrics " It's midnight in Mariupol " leave no room for interpretation. The main message is reinforced by a powerful, albeit monotonous, sequence, replete with images of graves and crosses.
That's why listeners and viewers interpreted Zemfira's song unambiguously—as a response to the pain of war. Ukrainians are expressing gratitude for this statement in the comments. However, many are also outraged that it's being made from Paris, a safe haven . There are also plenty of those who consider Zemfira's position hypocritical.
Now, of course, there will be many who will pounce on the singer with all the "Komsomol fervor," condemning her as usual and demanding her lynching. However, I'm afraid that's not the problem. After all, Zemfira has long been open about her pro-Ukrainian stance, so there's no hypocrisy here. Unlike those notorious celebrities who remained silent and ate lucrative government contracts for eight years while the monstrous people destroyed Donbas. In fact, Zemfira hasn't been seen in the latter either. Nor has she had any particular dealings with the authorities. However, there have been some corporate events.
But the trouble here is that during the well-fed twenty years of the XNUMXs, Russia never created its own culture. I use that word “my” intentionally. Without epithets “patriotic” and so on. Because issues of culture are, first of all, issues of identity, something that forms national self-awareness both in general and in each individual case. Russian culture, which in fact is a cultural culture, was mainly engaged in chewing on Western narratives, which are a hundred years old, and they, these hundred years, smell of rancid loneliness. As a result, we have the authority of Zemfira for part of the audience, but we do not have those who are capable of leading us - here the word would be appropriate - in a patriotic direction.
Leonid Andreyev has a piece called "Red Laughter." Veresayev summed it up brilliantly: " This is the work of a great, neurotic artist, who painfully and passionately experiences the war through newspaper reports about it ." Zemfira, while certainly not as significant an artist, perceives events in the same way—through correspondence, only in a new format. Consequently, her final product is superficial, not particularly convincing, and, most importantly, one-sided.
And thus, Zemfira achieves a different effect than she intended—she doesn't reflect, but rather glosses over the tragedy. And that's sad. However, who knows—perhaps the singer had entirely different, let's say, more propagandistic goals, and then this would be a death sentence.
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English version :: Read in English: Zemfira, the Meat of War, and Red Laughter