A Musical Reading of Morgenshtern's Почему (2022)

A still-photo from Morgenshtern's music-video of Почему?

This is a test-run of a potential format for my Masters dissertation's Chapter 3

Brief Introduction

The contentious, "post-ironic" or even "stiobic" Russian rapper named Morgenshtern, the sobriquet to the eccentric party-man/self-aware incendiary Alisher Tagirovich Morgenshtern, released the music-video to his 2022 single "Почему," or Why in Russian. This single was released back on January 14th of this month, right in the midst of what can really only be described as Russia's Hip-Hop purge No.2, the first occurring in the last quarter of 2018 and never really ending, as concerts by another Russian rapper named FACE [real name being Ivan Timofeevich Dryomin] kept occurring up until September of last year, forcing him very recently to leave the country as well without anything so much as a warning, with only a secondary public statement being issued from his Aunt.

Nevertheless, Morgenshtern's new home is now in Dubai, and it seems that the "affluent Middle-East," here purposefully denoting UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and other central-eastern countries, is becoming the haven for a new cultural center of Russian Hip-Hop. Such a position comes after the 2017 announcement that Timati was opening-up a fast-food branch in the UAE, affiliated of course with his Black Star empire which, unfortunately, earns him the title of mogul. He had also announced a location in Los Angeles, the place where he first found Russian Hip-Hop, again unfortunate. Nevertheless, this song is heavily significant for a plethora of sociopolitical reasons, mostly being the fact that Duma politicians, in particular Vitaly Milonov, have been decrying the rapper's music due to its intensely ludicrous and hegemonically destabilizing influence in the country.

In tandem with my Masters dissertation's focus of chapter three, where I hope to rework how Russian Hip-Hop is studied and suggesting a methodology or conception of an idea that would radically reduce the "literary centrality" of current analytical paradigms around the genre, I will briefly talk about the track's importance from a MUSIC-FIRST perspective! What we'll uncover may be nothing, or maybe everything!

The Tools

In order to make the process advantageous for my dissertation, I am going to outline and explain a few of the tools that I'll be using in order to reap the most bang for my listening buck when trying to understand Morgenshtern's worldview as exemplified through the song's "auditory" worldview. This way, not only will the broader method of study be easier to follow in a epistemic sort of manner, but organizationally I'll be able to coherently investigate certain aspects of the musical texture in liberated isolation.

1. Dalhaus, 1928: "Analysis and Value Judgment"

In this "short" yet full work, Dalhaus lays out various postulates on how a theory of aesthetics, aesthetic objectivity, and aesthetic judgments not only are created, but are rather fickle in constitution as they are based on a wide variety of previous tenants. However, among the myriad of possible avenues to use I find valuable a couple for this particular study as a philosophical ground-floor when it comes to music analysis. In the second-half of the book he denotes the dialectic between "good" and "bad" music, such a misguided dichotomy coming from the notion of music having or not having an "aesthetic right to exist." Therefore, a new theory of Russian Hip-Hop will presuppose that every track has a teleology, a reason for being that must be aired through proper investigation into the musical fabric where the answer is derivable.

2. Kyle Adams, 2015: "The musical analysis of hip-hop"

Sourced from its home in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, this chapter clearly delineates the traditional analytical tenants of classical music and Hip-Hop, while simultaneously proposing a way to marry the two, characteristical groupings in a way that allows the greatest amount of analytical continuity between them. I will be referring to both groupings, as it's helpful to have a pragmatic list of studiable attributes to look out for in the process of auditory deconstruction. He also mentions how the performance, at least in Hip-Hop, is married to the performer. Therefore, when addressing the Hip-Hop song's theoretical underpinnings, I must be careful not to disregard inflection and other colorings to the musical lines, as one is the other.

3. Simon Frith, 2007: "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music"

Being one of the world's most influential popular music Scholars, I had to include his work and thoughts in the realm of aesthetic theory and analytical notions of how best to analyze popular music, as it's an incredibly complicated genre, having little to no separation from the society which births it and being an inherently populist artform. Therefore I am using the sixteenth chapter of his seminal publication, as it exclusively talks about how best to conceptualize a functional "aesthetic code" that could be used to analyze the musical semiotics and aspects. However, right from the beginning he notes that popular music is "aesthetically worthless" as its inseparable from the societal constructs around it. He goes onto explain such a notion in length, but what's important here is what he calls his "four tenants of aesthetics." These four points all center around negotiating sociology, culture, aesthetics, and expression.

Of course, there's a huge amount else that I would love to use. But I am aware this is only a test run of my dissertation chapter and therefore, a good portion will not be mentioned here. As I write this, there are four journals to my left with pertinent info!

How does it Sound?

Upon the first listen, there is a clear usage of "popular" aesthetics which read not in-line with pre-2010s style of Hip-Hop. That's to say there is an almost 100% lack of rhythmically-centered rap which prioritizes the vocal viscerality over the benign. Secondly, the track features a synth-based atmosphere, repetitive and layered ostinati, auxiliary voices, a punchy-base substructure, standard large-scale form, and melodic vocal lines which all collectively resonant with contemporary Hip-Hop aesthetics. Therefore, we can deduce straight-away that the song doesn't seek to challenge any aesthetic norms, and instead is using them for a specific purpose.

However, the question then becomes: What is that reason and how are they shown?

Taking from Frith's notion of "Technique and technology," meaning the ways in which a piece of music is constructed is tied to the infrastructure at the artist's disposal at the time of creation, and that any imbalances in living condition will be personified through the music's construction, we could deduce that the hyper-usage of electronic and synth-based textures is the direct result of having access to modern applications. This accessibility of advanced digitalization processing and post-production software, and ostensibly a team who are cogent users of it, will inevitably birth a track that is infrastructurally sound and which exploits the full advantages of such resources. Thus, the argument that increased usage of synth denotes affluency could be made.

We've now deduced the abstracted musical environment, as well as at least one textural parameter of the track, along with an adjacent suppositional hypothesis. Staying in this sociological state-of-mind, if we revisit Adam's delineated elements of Hip-Hop, another point of interest could be the general form of rhythmic life of the work, as such elements are important to a Hip-Hop song as its the continuity of the rhythmic pulse and the hypnotic quality of the melody that draw in audiences. When listening to the track, disregarding the slight introduction where the auxiliary audio is foregrounded in preparation for the main ostinato, present is rhythmic conventionality and a melodic line that do not change. Therefore, there is a Foucauldian type of power-trip encased in the track, envisaged by the track's unchanging musical ethos. I get the strong sense of sublimation when I listen, as if the repetitive nature is intentional, and not simply the acting-out of aesthetic norms by a mainstream rapper.

Here is where the sociocultural and sociopolitically-tinged intertextual dimensions arise, as to understand why Morgenshtern has used a repetitious texture, heavy in synthetic instrumentation and overlaid with a very artificially melodic vocal line which lacks in typical rap grunge, one has to understand what is trying to be personified through the song and, by extension, by the artist himself. Such a thought is derived from Adam Krim's 2000 book "Rap music and the poetics of identity," where he outlines his notion of the "poetics of music," denoting the dialogues between the artists and their surroundings, although more intrinsically as well between the artist, their labels, the grosser industry, and the consumer expectations that drive it. The term he uses is "imbricated sociality," denoting the overlapping of social realities, all which cause an uneasy bricolage-like texture, evident in rapper's corpuses when obvious and drastic changes of aesthetic are seen. There is a reason for that change.

For sake of brevity, I won't be going into what the reasons are for the vocal aesthetics, although in the dissertation here is where I would expand on the sociocultural factors.

Conclusion

What has been outlined in this (incomplete) study of Morgenshtern's track? I have attempted to rationalize why the musical texture is constructed the way that it is, come to understand why the musical vocalization and surrounding atmosphere is so heavily encased in repetition, and began to ponder upon the reasons for the reasons why this might be. Although I haven't gone into them here, the most obvious reason would be because the track is squarely describing, in a chastising and sardonic way that is archetypally eccentric, his fast departure from Russia and his new-found success therein. It reads incredibly pompous and self-righteous, however one needs to factor in the contending opponents that are at the receiving end of his egotistical ire. Having now moved to Dubai after having accumulated excessive wealth, and with it influence, he has no more need to deal with political challenges and witch-hunts. In effective, he has no more need for Russia itself seeing as he's financially set for life.

Therefore, the clear laziness of the track and the bland nature of the music reads as conveying this sense of blasé and uncaringness about rap itself. It was a tool to at first make fun of such rapping excessiveness, then he accumulated it for himself, and now the seriousness of the "game" is no longer there, and his fame no longer sequestered to one country. Such infra-political notions are not clear to spot without first conceiving of the possibility that they are there. Like Foucault notes in practically every writing, in some fashion and semantic format, power is indeed everywhere.

More Reading

1. "Morgenstern still has not returned to Russia: where is the disgraced rapper now" (Pronedra: January 8th, 2022)

2. “It became cold there”: will the musician Alisher Morgenstern return to Russia" (Pronedra: December 21, 2021)

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