[This is part of a larger article focusing on Husky, a Russian rapper styled in the Gopnik fashion, and his 2020 song 'Revenge' from his album Hoshkhonog. Specifically, I am looking at the role of the Indian 'Bhairavi scale' played on an old Soviet instrument and the 'neo-Exotic' aspects of the composition, its correlation to a theoretical shift in the direction and focus of Russian rappers away from the Western home of the genre to which the post-post-Soviet youth has affixed their gaze with heavy posturing]
[Update: This song is the second track on Husky's in-the-works 2022 Album called Русский Альбом, the name alluding perhaps to an album dedicated solely to his Russian heritage.]
The song in reference here is Revenge, the 14th song of Husky's 2020, 16-song album called Hoshkhonog, the title of the Album referencing a typical Buryatian dish from the rapper's home-town in Buryatia, located in South Eastern Russia. The province, that lies right above Mongolia is home to a large population of Mongolians who, in the process of time, have populated the oblast or region that lies on the Eastern side of Lake Baikal, a point that Husky makes quite obvious in many of his songs, especially his 2021 song 'За Байкал' [Beyond Baikal], where he talks about his childhood and the hard lives of those who live beyond the watery wall of the historically poignant body of water.
In the studied track, among the hardline, syncopated beats and Husky' signature rhythmic oratory skills, therein lies a novel aspect of the track, one that does not extend farther into his corpus, and serves as the premise of the article in question. An intrinsic part of the track, he uses [upon further inspection] an instrument that I was not privy to or even knew existed until I did some investigation after Husky released the music video to the track now three weeks ago on YouTube [ you can watch the video here]. Originally, I thought it was a harmonium because of Husky's travel to India, specifically Vrindavan, the famed place and residence of the Hindu God Krishna. However, because Husky is an astute follower and avid student of Russian history, both past and very much present, I suspected that this might not be the case.
Like aforementioned, when he released the video, of which deserves its own study as its gruesome nature [picturing homicide, fighting, and tons of blood] holds within it hermeneutics that are not understandable without first understanding the text and the meaning behind the song itself. In the beginning and ending of the video, we see Husky playing an instrument that is like the accordion in the Western tradition. The accordion didn't make its way to Russia until 1820, diffusing in its popularity in the mid 1800s when Tchaikovsky and others began setting the instrument in more formal manners. By the early 1900s, it had become a stable ingredient in the musical framework of the country, and now in the contemporary era [i.e., post WW2, 1940s onwards], the accordion has become a staple in performance.
However, there is still another novelty about the way that Husky uses the accordion because, in the beginning you can hear that a multi-voiced polyphonic style is heard, a peculiarity within the accordion's capabilities. Thus, it could not have been just an accordion that he was using, but an instrument that would allow for multiple voices to play, along with a drone underneath the polyphony overhead, plus room for treble embellishments. That is where the cathodic harmonium comes in, an early Soviet instrument that was a first in the Soviet electronic tradition, capable of playing in three-part polyphony.
So, through this realization, we come to understand what Husky was playing in the video, and more importantly why it is significant that this was the instrument that he was playing. Not only is he is referencing his time in India, at some point he must have come into contact with the scale and Indian music theory by extension [plus the use of an instrument with the word 'harmonium' in it, as such is the typical instrument in worship services in India], but he is also looking back into Soviet history and referencing the past through his choice of instrumentation. He could have used an accordion, or even a synthetic version, but he chose to utilize this particular instrument and use that particular scale, E-minor [Phrygian mode in particular, equivalent to the Bhairavi scale, notable for its suitability for Godly worship and ecstatic properties].
The logical question is then why did he use these and what were his intentions? These, along with more questions will be answered in time. But for now, I wanted to briefly introduce my preliminary work and findings, as I am excited to investigate this track and its correlation to my theory that as Russian rappers are exhausting all that the West has to offer, they are now looking elsewhere for inspiration, forming thus a cyclicality in relation to Russia's relationship to the West. At first they look to the West, then they try to emulate [often failing and/or succeeding in waves], then they think of themselves better than the West while still looking to the West for inspiration, then finally they rebuke and chastise the West for all its iniquities and fling themselves away from their original inspiration for something of a national alternative. We see this in the contemporary, Putinian era of Russia's 'development,' as more and more is Putin looking away from the West as the arbiter of the modern 'future' and taking their future into their own hands, often at the expense of others.
Hence, I argue that Russian Hip-Hop is doing this too, moreover this was something that was done in the past of Russian music as well with the concept of exoticism. They marveled the splendors and foreign aw of far Eastern culture, trying to emulate what little they were aware of. We see this through Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and so many others. But this has never been extended to Russian Hip-Hop, and while I can understand that this song may not be resemble a total, genric shift away from the West to something other, I do think that Husky's usage of this scale signifies something important about the sensibilities of the genre. This is a theory that I will be exploring more in my Masters Thesis, so I look forward to forming cogent arguments for this theoretical position.
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