Inarguably one of the group's most famous songs, the Russia rock group KINO and their hit Package of Cigarettes from their 1989 album A Star Called the Sun has become the anthem of the stoic soul, the man who recognizes the fragility of the desire for control and thus hopes for nothing but the solace of an intimate moment between him and the smoke of a lit cigarette. With a Dostoveskian aesthetic permeating every element of the track, where hope and pain and suffering and release and strife and deliverance and despair and hope all occupy the same place at the same time, one gets the immediate understanding of what life was really like in the Soviet Union at the time.
Coming after the group's previous album, Blood Type (1988), the track's acoustically melismatic and all-together introspective ethos sat in opposition to what critics and audiences alike had considered the group to be about. What musically strikes me about the track, right from the get go, is the unpretentious (meaning here purposeful) usage of introspection as embodied through the E and A minor and the methodically simple yet devastatingly poetic introductory melody that is played before the beginning of the track. It seems to snake around its own conclusion, and even when reaching its supposed cadential "conclusion" the melodic narrator radiates a nervous energy before once again moving onto something uncomfortably familiar yet unpredictable. As I study Russian music's theoretical building blocks it does stand to note that the song sits in the key of A minor which, in traditional modal theory, is the Aeolian church mode.
Why is this important you ask?
Because in the notions of what makes Russian music Russian, the use of the natural minor scale (what is that? The Aeolian minor scale, using b2, b3, b6, and b7) was stressed as the preferred scale to use, along with Dorian (second church mode). But more interesting than that is if you schematize the musical introduction to its chordal movement, you are left with some oddities which point to the musical structure echoing the irresolute nature of the text. The chordal progression has some musical ambiguities, at least to my reading, and this highlights the rootlessness of Tsoi's mental space in an melancholically but elegant and rightfully poetic manner. The chordal progression for the first three measures is as follows:
a minor -- C major -- D major (minor 7) -- e minor -- a minor
[9-8 suspension] [6-5 suspension]
[4-3 suspension]
Several interesting things are noted in the first two measures alone. The song begins with an anacrusis, fancy terminology for notes which begin before the first official bar of the music. These two notes are the 2nd and 3rd scale degrees (b and c) of the a minor key, and the minor third that is created as a result of the immediate 9-8 suspension on the first beat give the music a feeling of instant melancholy, as the wilting downward motion of the suspension echoes the somber yet nobly stoic mindset that Tsoi's tragic hero embodies. There is also the recurrent theme of the second and third beats being a bit blurred together, signaled by the tie between them as you can easily hear, which further obscures stability and order for a more off-kilter and rocking sensation instead. In this opening, it's really a circus of opposites because in the bass, you have a rather traditional arpeggiation of the chordal roots (a - c - d- e) which operates on the prescribed downbeats, while in the "vocal" [not the actual vocal line yet] you have "soft" syncopation which slowly makes its way through the third and fourth beats [(2)+3, (3)+4], before arriving back at the beginning (4)+1]. Without going too much more into this, I want to mention two other interesting points.
The musical introduction loops in a way, as harmonically it doesn't grow nor does its shrink and simply sits in its own, "brooding" waters of only a single octave (according to Gerald Abrahams' 1935 book, a leading Russian Musicologist of the 20th century, a signature element of Russian music). This loop is especially evident in the second and third measures in the introduction, as the entrance to beat four (6-5 suspension in e minor) in the second measure is then retrograded in the fourth beat, the B acting as the major seventh leading tone to the C major which introduces the D major, whereupon the C acts as the D major's minor seventh. This is all fascinating, as it shows that not even a single note has a coherent self-identity or further still control over its surroundings. Viktor Tsoi has embedded himself and his existential battle into the very heart and soul of the song itself. What can we control?
One last bit of psychology-turned-musical is found in measures seven to eight. In the seventh measure, according to the harmonic progression it should be a minor -- C major, but paired with the second chord (of which Tsoi only gives us the tonic and the dominant) he places a 4-3 suspension and a D (implying D major, a chord which doesn't come until the third chord). He prefaces the D major by placing it with the C major, causing a rupture in not only the harmonic stasis that is occurring but the rhythmic syncopation as well. He opts-in for a stable 1 and 2, 3 and 4, which slows down the felt metric pulse and forces the listener out of the hypnotic daze he has causes us to fall into. Fascinating technique no? PLUS, he continues this dissonance by starting the vocal line with e (implying e-minor) but having the harmonic progression continue with D major (haunted by the ghost of the F# which lies in our subconscious having been given to us a measure prior). Just remarkable.
So why should you care?
One of the most influential theories of Russian music, that being the sociophilosophical theory of Symphonism summarized in this wonderful line by its popularizer Boris Asafiev, "Music as reincarnation of psychic state in the art of sound," noted how a composer's state-of-being was able to be traced within the very fabric of his music. By understanding the musical fabric and what it was trying to achieve, a more holistic understanding of the artist would emerge, one that could properly convey all the subtleties of their worldview. A better and more clear definition of Symphonism was offered by Asafiev in 1922 when talking about Tchaikovsky's music in his book "Tchaikovsky's Instrumental Creativity." He writes:
“Symphonism is creative comprehension and the expression of the world of feelings and ideas in the continuity of the musical current, in its life tension”
A wonderful example of this phenomenon is this very song, where this self-deprication yet negation of giving up exist side-by-side, covered over with Nietzschean feelings of having hope only in the tiniest of things. The passage of time, the drudgery of living, a cigarette. Tsoi immortalized himself in the very music he created, and it is up to us to hear him speak.
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