A Musical Reading of Morgenshtern's Почему (2022)
- John Vandevert
- Jan 15, 2022
- 1 min read
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
How does it Sound?
Conclusion
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