#Soviet Jazz
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
1930s-40s Soviet Jazz: Alexander Tsfasman- Phantom Dancer 26 November 2024
Alexander Tsfasman, was a Soviet jazz pianist, composer, orchestrator, conductor, bandleader, publicist and public figure. His recorded output covered original compositions including Gershwinesque and Whitemanesque suites, Russian, German, and American jazz tunes. Tsfasman was the first to record jazz in the Soviet Union. He was was the only Russian member of the International Jazz…
#1920s jazz#1930s#1930s radio#1930s swing#1940s#1940s radio#1940s swing#1950s TV#2ser#airchecks#alexander tsfasman#band remotes#big band#bob crosby#classical-music#greg poppleton#jazz#jazz singer#live music#music#news#old time radio#pianist#pop#radio#russian jazz#songs#soviet jazz#swing#sydney
0 notes
Text
Rare Soviet Oriental Jazz & Groove Mix Compiled and Mixed by Sasha Svistunov
Once upon a time, I had a decent working knowledge (at least for an American expat) of Soviet Jazz. It keeps popping back into my life, and I still find it a joy to listen to even 30 years down the road. Thanks to Shasha Svistunov for compiling some real treasures here, including quite a few whose names are new to me! Brief run-down in English Tracklist: 1. Oleg Kutsenko Leningrad Instrumental…
View On WordPress
#Armenia#Azerbaijan#Dagestan#Ethno-Jazz#Georgia#Jazz#Music#Russia#Siberia#Soviet Jazz#Ukraine#Youtube
0 notes
Text
they need to make a russian film (preferably show) of master and margarita just like it is on the book: creepy, dark, supernatural, philosophical, soviet and especially not modern like they did on the 2023 film
#i'm watching the russian show of 2005 and its funny as heck#but also I hate American produced films of the last years#all they do is ruining masterpieces#like wtf is a black jazz singer doing in the fucking soviet union?#yikes#master and margarita#mikhail bulgakov
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
VA - Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock & Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia - new compilation from Ostinato Records
Compiled from ultra-rare dead stock pressed at a Soviet-era vinyl plant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this first-of-its-kind fully licensed album features a supreme selection of Uzbek disco, Tajik electronic folk, Uyghur guitar licks, Crimean Tatar jazz, Korean brass, and genre-defying styles from Soviet Central Asia. Drop the needle, and you're not just hearing rare Soviet dance music. You're journeying along the Silk Roads, revisiting raucous USSR disco nights, and immersing in grooves that inspired Soviet youth to envision a different future, ultimately unraveling the Iron Curtain from within.
About the vinyl release:
Not a gatefold, but a trifold. A gatefold has 2 panels when you open up the LP package, a trifold has—you guessed it—3 in the center spread, along with one more panel adjoined to the front and back cover. A comprehensive historical package complete with rare 1970s & 80s photos from the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere in Central Asia.
#70s#80s#compilation#various artists#russia#soviet union#uzbekistan#disco#folktronica#rock#jazz#Bandcamp
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
abba - kisses of fire / voulez-vous (A) & (B) Гунеш - Девушка / Обман Мелодия, USSR, 1980
12 notes
·
View notes
Text
TIME, May 22, 1933
#1930s#1933#freedom of expression#book burning#philistinism#nazis#germany#bolshevism#soviet union#rockefeller#diego rivera#Jazz#juxtaposition
9 notes
·
View notes
Photo
The Pornography of Music
39 notes
·
View notes
Text
anyone wanna join me in tumbling down a "nightmare jazz" music genre rabbit hole? because apparently that's the vibe i'm going into this weekend with
5 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Savoy Ballroom in Harlem
“The World’s Finest Ballroom.” “Home of Happy Feet.” Langston Hughes called it the “Heartbeat of Harlem.“
The Savoy was a legendary dance hall owned by Jewish mobster, Moe Gale, which operated from 1926 to 1958. Unlike many ballrooms such as the Cotton Club, the Savoy always had a no-discrimination policy. Generally, the clientele was 85% Black and 15% white.
The normal entrance fee was 30 to 85 cents per person, depending on what time a person came. 30 cents was the base price, but after 6 p.m. the fee was 60 cents, and then 85 cents after 8 p.m. Each year, the ballroom was visited by near 700,000 people.
Many dances such as Lindy Hop were developed and became famous there.
The ballroom had a double bandstand that held one large and one medium-sized band running against its east wall. Music was continuous as the alternative band was always in position and ready to pick up the beat when the previous one had completed its set. The bouncers, who had previously worked as boxers, basketball players, and the like, wore tuxedos and made $100/night. The floor was watched inconspicuously by a security force of four men at a time who were headed by Jack La Rue, and no man was allowed in who wasn’t dressed in a jacket with a tie.
Chick Webb was the leader of the best known Savoy house band during the mid-1930s. A teenage Ella Fitzgerald, fresh from a talent show win at the Apollo Theater in 1934, became its vocalist. The Savoy was the site of many famous “Battles of the Bands” or “Cutting Contests,” which started when the Benny Goodman Orchestra challenged Chick Webb in 1937. Webb and his band were declared the winners of that contest.
#history#harlem renaissance#swing dancing#lindy hop#big band#ella fitzgerald#i don't reeeaaally gel with langston hughes' proto-tankie vibes#(especially some of the stuff he said re: his cpsu-sponsored visit to soviet central asia)#but he was pretty unique among harlem renaissance writers for wholeheartedly owning jazz as an art form#at a time when certain other writers (valuable as their output were) dismissed it on respectability grounds#*cough w.e.b. du bois cough cough*#between the great migration and the great depression#there rise a thousand dance stars
577 notes
·
View notes
Text
Swing in 1930s-40s Europe - Sonic Journey on ABC Radio, 30 November 2024
Swing in 1930s – 40s Europe, is the Sonic Journey I’ll be taking with ABC Weekends Breakfast host, Simon Marnie, on ABC Radio Sydney, after the 11am news till noon on 702 ABC Radio Sydney (2BL). Simon Marnie and I will be sonically journeying to 1930s-40s Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and France, and…
#1920s jazz#1930s#1930s swing#1940s#2ser#ABC#abc radio#abc weekend breakfast#europe#european jazz#european swing#eut#greg poppleton#jazz#joanie o&039;brien#music#old time radio#radio#simon marnie#songs#sonic journey#soviet union#swing#sydney
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Oh. Music made just for one specific somewhat obscure media and nothing else. I love you but I hate you.
#handful of grains#This post is about the song 'On The Street' from a couple of Steven Siegel's documentaries on New York.#The jazz section that plays on Donald in Mathmagic Land.#The dance music that plays in soviet animation 'The Millionaire'.#And the pop song from the ads for Perestroika shoes from now defunct company CANADA.
1 note
·
View note
Text
Chapter 4: Executed Jews
By Dara Horn, excerpted from People Love Dead Jews
ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH ONLINE before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people's exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: "I am Benjamin Zuskin's daughter." That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.
My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem's Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal — meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday's oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn't know what to make of it.
The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, "I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?"
The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool — and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.
I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story — about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he'd made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents' shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz's opus History of the Jews.
In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes — only to discover that "in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans." Their Zeus-worshipping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn't comply.
Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That's the part of the story we usually hear.
Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father's terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them — something that doesn't match what we're usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn't involve "intolerance" or "persecution," at least not at first. Instead, it looks like the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.
Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.
For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.
I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.
Spoiler alert: they lost.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala's father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall's first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia's 1919-1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.
It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall's art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, "universal appeal" — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union's policy of endorsing Yiddish as a "national Soviet language." In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay "Three Centers," about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.
But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.
No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.
The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.
The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.
Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:
As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.
This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoel's state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father's arrest. In her biography, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.
It's as close as we can get, anyway. Her father Benjamin Zuskin's own thoughts on the topic are available only from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three and a half years in the notorious Lubyanka Prison announces that the day's interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long — leaving to the imagination how the interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn't make it to trial alive.) His years in prison began when he was arrested in December of 1948 in a Moscow hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner, Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated.
But in order to truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know what was lost — to return to the world of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin's first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It's a Lie!
Benjamin Zuskin's path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's work. Zuskin, a child from a traditional family who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world's destruction: his native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in Penza, a city with professional Russian theater and Yiddish amateur troupes. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater's leading light.
In the one acting class I have ever attended, I learned only one thing: acting isn't about pretending to be someone you aren't, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most productions but also taught in the theater's acting school, embodied the concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle — without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry animated his every role. As one critic wrote, "Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound."
Zuskin specialized in playing figures like the Fool in King Lear — as his daughter puts it in her book, characters who "are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world." Discussing his favorite roles, Zuskin once explained that "my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own."
The first half of Ala's book seems to recount only triumphs. The theater's repertoire in its early years was largely adopted from classic Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Seforim. The book's title is drawn from Zuskin's most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele's Don Quixote-inspired work, Travels of Benjamin the Third, about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play's reception, was lauded by the New York Times as "one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater."
One of the theater's landmark productions, I. L. Peretz's surrealist masterpiece At Night in the Old Marketplace, was first performed in 1925. The play, set in a graveyard, is a kind of carnival for the graveyard's gathered ghosts. Those who come back from the dead are misfits like drunks and prostitutes, and also specific figures from shtetl life - yeshiva idlers, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester — divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin — whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is "The dead will rise!" "Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth," Ala writes, and then relates how after a performance in Vienna, one theatergoer came backstage to tell the director that "the play had shaken him as something that went beyond all imagination." The theatergoer was Sigmund Freud.
As Ala traces the theater's trajectory toward doom, it becomes obvious why this performance so affected Freud. The production was a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of something supposedly dead (here, Jewish civilization) coming back to life. The play was written a generation earlier as a Romantic work, but in the Moscow production, it became a means of denigrating traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That fantasy of a culture's death as something compelling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent of Freud's death drive, but also reveals the self-destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet-sponsored Jewish enterprise. In her book, Ala beautifully captures this tension as she explains the badkhn's role: "He sends a double message: he denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it really does exist."
This double message was at the heart of Benjamin Zuskin's work as a comic Soviet Yiddish actor, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending that his art could exist without it. "The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing of the past charmed me," he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to privately express misgivings. The theater's decision to stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish repertoire was inferior. His own integrity came from his deep devotion to yiddishkayt, a sense of essential and enduring Jewishness, no matter how stripped-down that identity had become. "With the sharp sense of belonging to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the theater forsaking its expression of this belonging," his daughter writes. Even so, "no, he could not allow himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, but 'the heart and the wit do not meet.'"
In Ala's memory, her father differed from his director, partner, and occasional rival, Mikhoels, in his complete disinterest in politics. Mikhoels was a public figure as well as performer, and his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, while no more voluntary than any public act in a totalitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, traveling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army in their battle against the Nazis. Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, but seems to have continued playing the fool. According to both his daughter and his trial testimony, his role in the JAC was almost identical to his role on a Moscow municipal council, limited to playing chess in the back of the room during meetings.
In Jerusalem, Ala told me that her father was "a pure soul." "He had no interest in politics, only in his art," she said, describing his acting style as both classic and contemporary, praised by critics for its timeless qualities that are still evident today in his film work. But his talent was the most nuanced and sophisticated thing about him. Offstage, he was, as she put it in Hebrew, a "tam" — a biblical term sometimes translated as fool or simpleton, but which really means an innocent. (It is the first adjective used to describe the title character in the Book of Job.) It is true that in trial transcripts, Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co-defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fingers. But was this ignorance, or a wise acceptance of the futility of trying to save his skin? As King Lear's Fool put it, "They'll have me whipp'd for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipp'd for holding my peace." Reflecting on her father's role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, Ala writes in her book, "When I imagine the moment when my father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close-up . . . his shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last line in the film — and perhaps also the last line in his life? — 'I don't understand anything.'"
Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how impossible his situation was. In one of the book's more disturbing moments, Ala describes him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, a work whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played the role before, but this production was going up in the wake of Mikhoel's murder. Zuskin was already among the hunted, and he knew it. As Ala writes:
One morning — already after the murder of Mikhoels — I saw my father pacing the room and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh's role. Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together with me, continued to pace the room and to memorize the words of the role. That evening I saw the performance . . . "The doctors say that I need rest, air, and the sea . . . For what . . . without the theater?" [Hotsmakh asks], he winds the scarf around his neck — as though it were a noose. For my father, I think those words of Hotsmakh were like the motif of the role and — I think — of his own life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Describing the charges levied against Zuskin and his peers is a degrading exercise, for doing so makes it seem as though these charges are worth considering. They are not. It is at this point that Hanukkah antisemitism transformed, as it inevitably does, into Purim antisemitism. Here Ala offers what hundreds of pages of state archives can't, describing the impending horror of the noose around one's neck.
Her father stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous threats, and saw that he was being watched. No conversation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited near his apartment building to give him news of his older daughter Tamara (who was then living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk behind him while speaking to him and then to switch directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin "approached the guest so closely that there was no space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, 'Tell her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.'" It is true that no one can know what Zuskin or any of the other defendants really believed about the Soviet system they served. It is also true — and far more devastating — that their beliefs were utterly irrelevant.
Ala and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan after her father's arrest, and learned of his execution only when they were allowed to return to Moscow in 1955. By then, he had already been dead for three years.
In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.
"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That evening I went out to the Old City again, to watch the torches being lit at the Western Wall for the second night of Hanukkah. I walked once more through the Jewish Quarter, where the oil lamps, now each bearing one additional flame, were displayed outside every home, following the tradition to publicize the Hanukkah miracle — not merely the legendary long-lasting oil, but the miracle of military and spiritual victory over a coercive empire, the freedom to be uncool, the freedom not to pretend. Somewhere nearby, deep underground, lay the ruins of the gymnasium where de-circumcised Jewish boys once performed naked before approving crowds, stripped of their integrity and left with their private pain. I thought of Benjamin Zuskin performing as the dead wedding jester, proclaiming, "The dead will rise!" and then performing again in a "superior" play, as King Lear's Fool. I thought of the ground burning beneath his feet. I thought of his daughter, Ala, now an old woman, walking through Jerusalem.
I am not a sentimental person. As I returned to the stone house that night, along the streets lit by oil lamps, I was surprised to find myself crying.
#People Love Dead Jews#Dara Horn#Soviet Jewry#Soviet antisemitism#antizionism is not antisemitism#jumblr
338 notes
·
View notes
Text
You may have seen photos of him before, such as this one from 1886, when he (on the left) was already 50 years old:
It just struck me today that in his lifetime he has lived through the invention of photography itself, as well as moving pictures, television, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays and streaming; the first sound recording, 78rpm shellac records, 8-track tapes, CDs and MP3s; bicycles, cars, motorbikes, zeppelins, airplanes, helicopters, spaceships, satellites, the Moon landing, the Mars rover; the telephone, the internet, the smartphone, lasers, plastics, cellophane, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric ovens, microwaves, atomic bombs; the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK, the American Civil war, the Boer War, WWI and II, Vietnam, 9/11; Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, impressionism, surrealism, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jazz and Blues and Rock & Roll, Disco, Punk, Hip-Hop and Grunge; Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Wilde, Harry Houdini, Sherlock Holmes, Gandhi, Jack The Ripper, Sigmund Freud, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, Communism and the Soviet Union.
None of these things existed before him. Yet he's still alive today, walking around and eating grass.
88 notes
·
View notes
Text
Filbrick and Caryn Headcanons
Thinking about the other Pines Parents,the ones that indirectly caused the Stans' issues. Filbrick Fuckface and Caryn best mom ever.
CARYN
A loving mother of three sons (Shermie Ford and Stan),and a powerhouse that can and will throw hands if anyone ever messes with her family. She may not be as physically strong as her husband and her youngest son,but she knows how to use a gun and has participated in several self defense classes so she knows how to handle herself out there whenever her family is in trouble (now i'm imagining badass Caryn trying to protect Ford from bullies lol). Sassy lady,Shermie and Dipper got their sass from her (i hc that shermie is a sweet but sassy guy,dipper however is just like that). A liar and a cheat,but with a heart of gold. Just like a certain younger son of hers. She scams and outright gaslights people with her phone psychic sessions but she will choose family no matter what in any situation. Also she used to pickpocket and shoplift as a teen during the Great Depression when money was slow with her parents because of the stock market crash (according to the timeline in my head,Stan's craftiness had to come from somewhere. She had to steal food and money for herself while avoiding getting in trouble for being a flapper dancer (type of rebellious woman in the 1920s).
Caryn used to be a dancer at some pub,doing all sorts of dances from general blues to jazz to even exotic,sensual~ dances if the audience paid her enough. Her performances were outstanding and so beautiful as if the music was flowing through her body. One of these performances,lead to her meeting Filbrick who was so amazed by her moves that he ended up taking her to dinner at age 17 in 1939 while he was 18.
She had always been close to Stan,which is why the man became such a mama's boy who always did her every word and helped her with anything he could manage despite being convinced that he can't do anything of use due to Filbrick's treatment of him. She had always protected her youngest son from everything,including his own father,because she knew that with such a bright light,it was bound to go out eventually with the harshness of the world. She learnt that the hard way herself when she had to live out in the difficult 30s era and thus she was trying to preserve her son's innocence for as long as she could. She loved Ford too,but she put her attention on Stan more as she knew that poor insecure boy needed it more than his older twin brother. Although don't be mistaken,she loves her boys equally and she will fight tooth and nail for all three of them. She and Filbrick always loved each other,very amorously. Although having Shermie and then the Stans along with having to deal with a rough financial situation kinda broke them both. Filbrick barely graduated high school with his father opting to send him to two years of military training rather than letting him finish his schooling while Caryn finished college in New Jersey with an art history degree despite her not finishing high school to term in Russia due to the fact that she had to survive the Soviet Union's tyrannical rule and then later leave before she could,plus her art history degree was basically useless as it wasn't viable for any careers at the time. Both of them couldn't land any jobs for the first few years of the Stans' lives,and it ate up at them. The two used to be close,but now that they have three children to deal with and being too financially unstable to support them all plus Filbrick getting snappier as his dormant anger resurfaced due to his father indirectly causing him to be useless while Caryn starts getting stressed from everything was starting to tear their relationship apart. Both Caryn and Filbrick got angry,at themselves,and each other. They started to have a rocky relationship from the problems stacking up on them plus the fact that they're both getting stressed and snappy from said problems. But they eventually got their shit together after finally managing to set up a business via a small pawn shop while Caryn works as a professional liar with her psychic calls in their 20s. They began doing better in their relationship after this happened and they started to love each other again rather than taking their stress out on one another,although Caryn couldn't let Filbrick's treatment of Stan slide..
She used to be into fashion design jewelry making as well as collecting old cassette tapes that weren't hers (she just stole random cassette tapes for fun,she liked the stories and mysteries that came with them),but now as a full time mother and part time liar,she doesn't have the time to do such things anymore. However now as she's getting old and gray and her sons don't need her anymore,she gets to delve into her old interests again as she's able to tell stories to her great grandchildren about her hobbies and her old flapper dancing career. Caryn is Russian to me. Cuz her surname is "Romanoff" which is a different way of spelling "Romanov",a Russian last name. She used to have a slight Russian accent when she was younger. She is currently 90+ years old as she was born in 1922 in the timeline i made up. Her mother Winona Romanoff was the kindest and sweetest woman she ever knew,she was always supportive kind as well as helpful in every way,she was a very accommodating mother that was lenient and let Caryn do whatever she wanted because she wanted to support her daughter and give her room to grow while also always being there for her. However this also made her a pushover as she helped literally anyone and everyone even if it was difficult,people often asked favors of her because of this. Winona's kindness inspired Caryn to love as deeply and as unconditionally as her,even when said kindness lead to her downfall. Winona died in the Great Purge aka one of the horrible genocide events that happened during the Soviet Union which was initially used to pick off any political opponents but it eventually escalated to killing off innocent civilians as they got accused of staging coups and such,it was in her nature to not fight back as she always wanted things to be peaceful and so she didn't deny that she staged a coup against Stalin even when she knew that accusation wasn't true,she later got shot to death in some labor camp a week later even after she told Caryn that she'd be back before she knew it. Caryn knew that something was up but she didn't dare to look into her mother's case as she might be next after the current unstable government thinks that she's doing something suspicious,plus she was only 14 years old when Winona got killed (great purge started in 1936) and so she didn't have the mental energy to do that when she needed to grieve her mother. She got by via selling her homemade jewelry and dresses. Caryn then moved away to America at 16 soon after realizing that it's unsafe to stay in her home country regarding how the Soviet Union has ruined it with their government practices and she ended up in New Jersey where she gave into the flapper lifestyle as well as where she met Filbrick. She always supported Shermie and Ford's interests,no matter how strange they were. With Ford's obsession with the sciences and Shermie's eye for the performing arts,Caryn knew that her sons were going to become extremely successful one day if they put their minds to honing their craft. She gave Shermie advice on how to make his lines sound more natural after reading a guide book on theater for him while pointing out that Ford's equation needed another variable as she tried to keep up with her genius son despite not being nearly as smart as him with her streetwise skills. She also supported Stan's interests in comics and art,but it seems that Filbrick's harsh words about how art is useless and that it won't get people anywhere career wise were stronger than her steadfast support as Stan ended up quitting drawing in his teens. Caryn had Shermie when she was 25,and then the Stans when she was 30. Neither her nor Filbrick were ready to become parents,but they were too into their bedroom activities to consider protection. Caryn had a good chance of being a good mother due to her having a great woman as a role model when it came to parenting,but Filbrick didn't. He had an asshole for a father and that greatly affected how he treated the Stans,which is why Caryn and Filbrick often clashed in their views of how to raise their own sons.
She feels bad for not protecting Stan and Ford enough. She wanted to use herself as a shield for Filbrick's harsh words and outbursts toward Stan,and be Ford's protector whenever he was being bullied by horrible children who ridiculed him for his fingers as well as nerdiness,but the times were difficult as she had to deal with helping Filbrick keep the family business afloat as their financial situation wasn't getting any better plus she decided to leave Shermie to take care of them instead in order to ease the load on herself. Although she regrets not being there for them as she soon realized just how bad her twin boys had it when Stan and Ford explained their lives when they visited Post Weirdmaggedon. Ford felt unwelcome in his own hometown as he went to seek out some place where he felt he belonged in the form of Gravity Falls while also feeling like no one but Stan (and later Bill) understood him,while Stan grappled with self hatred for years all because of Filbrick's shitty parenting. Caryn literally cried after knowing this,knowing that she failed as a mother when her boys suffered this much. However Stan and Ford reassure her that it's okay and that they got over those issues with the help of their family,then the family hug together.
FILBRICK
Terrible father of three,hated by everyone except Mabel.
I was strongly convinced by him being a horrible asshole that didn't care based on how the show implied how bad Stan had it with him,but writing Filbrick differently in aus kinda made me think that it's actually more complicated than that. I believe that he was actually abused himself under the guise of being trained by his own father to be tougher when the man was deadass using him as a punching bag,which is why he ended up extending that treatment to the Stans. Especially Stan,as he knew that Ford could make it. However,he also tried to fix Ford too due to him being pretty scrawny and weak but he soon realized that his brains will be enough.
This man is a heavy smoker,which explains why Stan has such a raspy voice. He made his son smoke with him at times,and he threatened to smack him if he didn't. But Stan got too into it to the point of his voice forming a permanent rasp (filbrick actually regretted this,as he secretly didn't want his kids to take up his bad habits).
Filbrick's anger issues are Terrible. They weren't as bad when he was younger and only had Caryn his beautiful flapper girlfriend to worry about but now that he has three kids his own issues as well as his still wavering financial situation to worry about,his dormant anger started to resurface. In fact,both of the Stans ended up inheriting his irritable personality but in different ways (Stan gets mad whenever people spite him or hurt his family/family hurts him,Ford gets mad due to his ego).
He died from a heart attack at the age of 60 (i was actually thinking about Ford's death here lmao. "you will die of a heart attack at the age of 92"),a month after the moment Ford got sucked into the portal. Good riddance,sort of (i feel bad for him).
Imagine Stan going to both his own funeral and his dad's,complicated feelings~.
His thoughts about Shermie and the Stans,Surface level and Real ones; Surface level - Shermie is a useless weirdo obsessed with theater and one that is too emotional to make it out there as a hollywood big shot like he wants,Stan is a good for nothing dumbass nuisance who may be strong but too reliant on his brother and his skills as a swindler to truly be successful,Ford is the only son that i believe in and the one that i know can be a better man than i am. Real thoughts - Shermie is so unique and bright,he could make it out there if he wasn't so sensitive,if only i had the skills to bring out his creativity and say that he needs to work on getting thicker skin without damaging my relationship with him. Stan is a lot like me,a meathead with a big heart but one that the world keeps bringing down with it's drama and problems and general harshness,i wish i could give him the same treatment that his mother gives him,but i'm too deep into my own issues with MY father to even try. Ford may be weak and scrawny,but his brilliant mind will bring him to the top,i know it,but i wish i could have tried to spend more time with him. With all of my sons,giving them more interactions besides yelling and abuse...
Before his untimely death,Filbrick wrote a letter to the Shermie and the Stans detailing how he was sorry and explaining why he was so hard on Shermie and Stan. Because he knew that he didn't have much time left with his smoking leading to his lungs getting weaker plus his anger issues causing him to develop coronary heart disease,but he wanted to at least give his children closure before he went down to his fiery punishment (yeah i hate him. he's going to hellll). He made Caryn keep it in a box somewhere Post Weirdmaggedon,as it was for the time that their boys visit. (i did this cuz i wanted Filbrick to die a painful death as some sort of karmic punishment for what he did to the Stans,but also i want the man to at least have some closure and let his children know that he did love them,repairing their relationship with him even in his death).
He actually used to work at the pub next to the one where Caryn had her performances as some janitor boy in order to pay the bills to his rickety apartment. He crashed at adult pubs and bars often when he was an 18 year old delinquent rascal in order to drink because he was bored,which is why he ended up working at the Charming Martini pub to drink more conveniently at longer hours without getting kicked out and then he later started to work at the Lustrous Lounge where Caryn danced so that he had an excuse to spend more time with her.
He is only a stone faced and hardly expressive person due to the fact that his father forced him to not show any emotion,as expressing his feelings were considered weak for a hardened man of war like him. This ideology was taught to him in high school,at the ripe age of 13,and it was basically beat into him as the bright chipper as well as mischievous child that he used to be turned into a stoic warrior with hidden anger issues underneath his unemotional gaze.
Filbrick's anger issues stem from his horrible father Franklin Pines,who was a veteran and a very troubled man with a history of getting into fights or beating people into submission for the fun of it. Franklin was sent to military camp at 14 because his own father didn't want anything to do with him as he came to be from a quick fling,which is why he was taught military ideals from a young age and by the time he was old enough to have Filbrick (19),he wasn't able to let go of them anymore. The man was hazed and abused by his own father,making him swallow pills whole without water water boarding him slapping him in the face repeatedly making him do pushups for two days straight without any breaks and so many more atrocious hazing rituals. Franklin did this both as a form of bonding (apparently people do this as bonding in real life military camps) and as punishment,because he didn't know any other way to do such things nor did he ever consider it was wrong as he thought it was normal. Franklin was also quite strict as he didn't let him go out any longer than 5pm because then there wouldn't be any time for training,plus he made him eat vegetable gruel instead of actual meals in order to prepare him for the real military where that's the only thing served. Franklin was doing this because he planned to send his own son to the military in order to make him a real man like his father did (he thought that his dad did that to fix him,but really it was just to abandon him). All of this intense treatment made Filbrick rightfully angry as he was never given a normal childhood and he couldn't even do anything about it as he would just get smacked again if he ever tried to go against his father,which is why he held onto a dormant anger for years until he finally escaped from his crazy father at 18,going from Nebraska to New Jersey on a train as he sneaked out at 3pm before his curfew. He was finally able to have a peace of mind after being able to experience a normal life without the thought of constant training and hazing haunting him,and his anger issues settled for a bit as he got to feel calm in the considerably more peaceful of his shitty but cozy apartment rather than his father's trailer park van/mini military camp. Besides his father shaping him to be such a horrible person with skewed views on things,he can actually be quite loving and caring when he wants to as evident in how gentle as well as amorous he treated Caryn. He has a big heart,but it has been hardened by years of abuse and literal torture. He can't bring himself to be as gentle with the Stans,as he doesn't know how and his father's outdated ideals are all he knows. Filbrick made sure to not make his own children go through the torturous treatment that his father made him experience,although the ideals of strength and being a real man stuck to him which is why he was so hard on Stan and Shermie. Stan is a lot like him,a meathead with a big heart but one that the world keeps bringing down with it's drama and problems and general harshness while Shermie is the exact opposite of him with him being emotional and scrawny and too nice for his own good.
#gravity falls#ford pines#stanford pines#stanley pines#stan pines#filbrick pines#gravity falls filbrick#caryn pines#caryn romanoff pines#stan twins#gravity falls caryn#mystery twins classic#grunkle stan#grunkle ford#great uncle ford#gravity falls headcanons#gravity falls writing#gravity falls fanfiction#gravity falls fanfic#canon divergence#gf headcanons#gf writing
63 notes
·
View notes
Note
hi do you like ok computer (1997)
because i really just don't get it (especially as the second-best album of all time) but i reeeally want to & i respect your opinion on that a lot
yea that album kinda changed the course of my life lol. wall of text incoming
first - don’t let rym or aoty or whatever tell you what’s good and what isn’t, everybody’s got their own taste & criticisms that go against the grain are very important!! i will say anything that’s that consistently highly rated across different websites & publications is probably undeniably significant and worth listening to. whether listening feels like discovering a new favorite or sitting through a history lesson is where taste comes in. it’s important to interrogate the canon too as there is an enormous amount of implicit bias in what even gets in front of critics and in the metrics they grade music by. review aggregate sites have democratized this process a bit & all the good and bad of democracy has come with that lol.
so, the album gets praised for a couple of reasons - its innovative production, its commentary on the historical zeitgeist, and the pop appeal of much of the songwriting.
production - the album makes heavy use of cutting edge effects units, digital editing, computer trackers, sampling, and even features little bits of voice synthesis. most of it is stuff that had existed in music before radiohead, artists like aphex twin (and much of the rest of warp records’ 90s catalog) and bjork were ahead of the curve in a lot of the aesthetic aspects of okc and had influenced radiohead a lot, which is even more evident on their followup kid a. radiohead was not breaking new ground in using these sounds, but they were among the first to put it all in a rock context, taking cues from the weirder cuts on the beatles’ white album, the experimental “krautrock” band can, and miles davis’ classic jazz fusion album bitches brew.
context - radiohead had grown up during the decline of much of the social democratic programs that had helped to facilitate the education and performing careers of much of their early influences such as joy division and the smiths. by the time okc was being written they had lived through the austerity of the thatcher era, the fall of the soviet union, and now were watching the labour party turn increasingly neoliberal under tony blair. there was a general sentiment in the west that the progress of history had slowed or even stopped in favor of the neoliberal order. at the same time, tech was booming and computers were starting to find their way into more aspects of daily life. the album imagines a boring dystopia, where machines are rabidly advancing but humans are stuck in stasis. a major connecting theme is infrastructure - the airbag through which thom yorke is “born again,” the “cracks in the pavement,” the family politics that separate romeo and juliet in exit music, the mechanical voice of fitter happier giving contradictory directions for maintaining the status quo. even the escapist fantasy of no surprises comes in the form of carbon monoxide. and then, the record ends with the “ding” of an appliance that has completed its task.
songwriting - the band’s previous album the bends really is a pop masterpiece. i recommend it to anybody who wants to get into radiohead but doesn’t vibe with their later work. okc expands that compositional style through, for one thing, the more apparent influence of classical music on tracks like paranoid android or the Chopin homage exit music; let down even features polymetric layering characteristic of Steve Reich. it also features some songs that are too good to even need to push the envelope much, like karma police or one of my favorites, no surprises, which seems to reference the beach boys’ wouldn’t it be nice or the velvet underground’s sunday morning.
to be honest, i like okc mostly because it really spoke to me at a formative time in my life, when i was like 15 and felt heavily disconnected from the world around me. the album deals with those feelings in a very different context but it’s a feeling many people can relate to for many different reasons - i was closeted in a conservative culture, not a depressed british rock star lol. it also was an excellent gateway into many of the bands’ influences, who are also favorites of mine now. most people who love the album don’t really go as deep as i like to with understanding it, but maybe what i said here will give you something else to listen for, idk. maybe you just gave me an excuse to infodump about an album i love lol :)
#asks#if anyone is nerdier than me about this please feel free to correct me on anything here#especially the british history i am largely paraphrasing mark fisher here as i often am
61 notes
·
View notes
Text
Yugoslavia and yugo rock
Joker Out’s new song, Šta bih ja, was inspired by yugorock! Not sure what that means? JokerOutSubs has got you!
‘Yugo rock’ or ‘Yu rock’ is rock with some elements derived from traditional/ethnic/folklore music, as well as other musical genres, including blues, country, reggae, jazz rock and rockabilly. They were added to appease the public, since rock itself was considered a western influence.
Rock music in Yugoslavia became popular in the sixties. Before that, after the second world war, partisan songs were more popular. This is music associated with resistance groups that fought German occupation across Yugoslavia, Italy and other parts of Eastern Europe. However, in 1956, the Cominform (a coordinated body of communist parties across Europe, designed to keep all communist governments following Stalinist principles) was dissolved. After this point, the connection with the Soviet Union was severed and music tastes began to change accordingly.
With influences from the west, rock music started gaining popularity. At first, musicians only sang covers of foreign songs (as closely to the original as possible) but in the sixties, bands such as Indexi started making original music. In the seventies, Bijelo dugme were formed and became incredibly popular. At the same time, Parni valjak were also rising to fame. However, the ‘new wave’ of Yugo rock was said to be started by a group called Buldožer.
Some characteristics of New Wave were more political lyrics and taking inspiration from punk. The most famous New Wave bands in Yugoslavia were Azra, Idoli, Prljavo kazalište, Električni orgazam, Psihomodo pop and, in Slovenia at the time, Lačni Franz, Buldožer and Pankrti (an interview with their singer Peter Lovšin can be found at • [ENG SUB] Bojan Cvjetićanin about roc... ).
A second New Wave generation from Belgrade emerged in later years. Among their representatives were Partibrejkers (formed 1982). They combined the blues with British R and B, rockabilly and classic rock and roll.
In 1982, the groups Ekaterina Velika and Disciplina Kičme (Disciplin A Kitschme) were established, contributing to the second New Wave generation, along with Slovenian group Videosex (formed 1983) with singer Anja Rupel. One of their most famous songs, a cover of 'Zemlja pleše,' can be found at • Videosex - Zemlja Plese - The Original
The New Wave was characterised by a burst of creativity and activity in the music scene across the region, with many artists emerging and creating excellent music in a short period of time. Many have drawn parallels between the New Wave era and today, where in Slovenia many young bands are gaining recognition. This parallel is only strengthened by the fact that Joker Out, one of the most successful young bands in Slovenia today, have a song named Novi val (New Wave).
The socio-political significance
Yugoslavia (1918–1992), a federal republic, was made up of six republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Despite the differences between the republics one could argue that the pop-cultural identity was so strong, having influence that went beyond government control and the ability to connect people through the region, that it could be named as the seventh republic. Besides sport, yugorock was one of the last connecting links within a country that was drifting apart in a variety of areas, including economic.
Important yugorock bands
Bijelo Dugme: Considered by many to be the biggest Yugo rock band, Bijelo Dugme were formed in 1974 in Sarajevo. They were the biggest trendsetters in rock music at the time. They had a huge influence on Joker Out since their earliest days as a band. In the 'Kofi brejk' interview Bojan shared that the first concert he ever attended was by Bijelo Dugme, and they were also mentioned several times by Joker Out as having had a big influence on the whole band. In addition, Joker Out covered two of their songs, ‘Selma’ (Radio Koper, 32 min) and ‘Djurdjevdan’ (Belgrade concert, 3.11.2023). You can check out some more of their songs on our playlist linked at the bottom of this post!
Plavi orkestar were formed in 1983 in Sarajevo and had a rich career with eight albums, releasing hits such as ‘Ako su to samo bile laži’, ‘Lovac i košuta’, ‘Odlazim’, ‘Bolje biti pijan nego star’, ‘Suada’ and many more. Some media outlets, like Jutarnji list and Mladina have compared Joker Out’s style to theirs, and Bojan also mentioned Plavi orkestar as one of the bands that influenced him.
Parni valjak are a Croatian band, formed in 1975 in Zagreb. They had many ‘evergreen’ hits, including ‘Sve još miriše na nju’, ‘Jesen u meni’ and ‘Zastave’. In the Carpe Diem series, when asked whom they would listen to forever if they could only choose one artist, Jure chose Parni valjak. At Arsenal Fest in 2023, Bojan interrupted an interview to sing along to ‘Jesen u meni’ as they were playing in the background!
Indexi were a Bosnian band, who were active from 1962 to 2001. They were extremely influential, with hits like ‘Svijet u kome živim’ and ‘Negdje u kraju, u zatišju’, and became known as the ‘pioneers of psychedelic rock and roll.’ In the Kurir interview, Bojan mentions them as one of his musical role models.
Ekatarina velika, sometimes shortened to EKV, were a Serbian band who were active between 1982 and 1994. They are considered one of the most influential artists in the yugorock scene, with popular songs like ‘Krug’, ‘Par godina na nas’ and ‘Srce’. In the Rdeče in črno interview, Bojan’s voice was compared to that of the lead singer in Ekatarina velika.
Idoli were one of the most remarkable new wave bands based in Belgrade, active during the early 80's. They are regarded as one of the most outstanding and influential representatives of the Yugoslav rock music and their album 'Odbrana i poslednji dani' ('Defense and The Last Days') was voted as the greatest Yugoslav rock album of all time. During the Kurir interview, Bojan mentioned that ‘Ona’ was inspired by Idoli and their unique sound.
Songs Joker Out have mentioned
‘Računajte na nas’ by Đorđe Balašević is a very important yugorock song in Joker Out’s history, as it inspired the lyrics of ‘Carpe Diem’. While ‘Računajte na nas’ (‘Count on Us’) is about a generation standing up and fighting for peace, Bojan switched the lyric to ‘ne računajte na nas’ (don’t count on us), meaning that you cannot count on them to join in with the ‘game of hatred’ pervasive in modern society.
‘Kreni prema meni’ is a song performed by Partibrejkers, a Serbian rock band from Belgrade, known for their rebellious energy, both in sound and spirit. The band is still active and well received all over former Yugoslav countries. The song was covered by Joker Out at the Lent festival in 2018.
‘Sanjao sam moju Ružicu’ by Leteći odred was covered by Apokalipsa, Bojan’s former band, in 2015 during Vičstock Avdicija. Bojan also sang it at the Prulček bar with Buržuzija, Kris and Jan’s former band. Leteći odred is a Croatian pop band with a prosperous and successful musical career and performances for over 30 years.
In September 2016, Joker Out posted a setlist from one of their earliest gigs on their Instagram. It included three notable yugorock song covers - ‘Frida’ by Psihomodopop, ‘Motori’ by Divlje jagode and ‘Ne Zovi Mama Doktora’ by Prljavo Kazalište.
If you’d like to listen to any of these artists or songs, check out our curated playlist on YouTube or Spotify!
Sources:
Kregar, Tone, et al. Za domovino - z rockom naprej! Jugo rock: slovensko-srbske paralele. Muzej novejše zgodovine Celje. 2020.
Perković, Ante, and Lah, Klemen. Sedma republika: pop kultura in razpad Jugoslavije. Zenit, 2018.
#joker out#jokeroutsubs#bojan cvjetićanin#bojan cvjeticanin#jan peteh#nace jordan#kris guštin#kris gustin#jure macek#yugo rock#yu go rock#Spotify
68 notes
·
View notes