(PC: Husky via his VKontakte response)
This commentary was written on Sunday, November 29th 2020, and thus the designated times and related temporal dates stated in the article are correlated to the publishing date of this text. As of Monday, the 30th of November, no significant changes or follow-up posts have been officially released by either party involved. Because of the economical size of Slava's response [Read here], I am hesitant to put forward my theory that Husky will respond, as what constructive outcome would a public reply engender? Slava [СЛАВА КРСС, Purulent] and his chastisement of Husky, in the year 2020, has come in two forms, through an Interview conducted in September, and a 'diss track' released as part of his Album 'Singles 2020', although one can speculate on possible, ulterior motives behind Slava's public displays of deep-seeded acrimony. I will let the reader discover the [rare, but they're there] sub-textual undertones encased within Slava's answers, as they are painfully indicative of a larger obstacle in contemporary musical culture, that being gross, elucidative naivety and the seemingly automatic predilection towards headstrong unquantifiability through the lens of produced diss-tracks and musical essays.
Update: As of November 27th, Slava has released his newest Album entitled, "Monster that ruined the world," signaling the last discographic output as 'СЛАВА КПСС' according to his own confession in his September Interview. It spans 16 tracks, and will be used for his upcoming 2021 Tour called the 'Lostchance Tour', encompassing two months and 14 venues.
About eight hours ago [5:27 am], Husky posted onto his VKontakte a five-point response [5 ответов гнойному] addressing Slava KPSS [Purulent, Vycheslav Mashnov] and his disparaging remarks towards Dmitry’s new Album ‘Хошхоног’. In a lengthy Interview with The Flow three days ago, Slava opened up about why and how he is ‘leaving’ the Rap Industry, the personal inclinations of his newest Album ‘The Monster who Ruined The World’, his conceptualizations about mainstream Rappers, and many more adjacent topics. However, it was his provocative, and borderline naively juvenile, comments about Husky’s [Dmitry Kuznetsov’s] intellectualism and poetic propensity that not only caught my eye, but more importantly were so ‘breathtaking’ as to cause Husky himself to publically address them. I say this on the heels of Slava’s attempted smear of Husky back in 2018 with his ‘diss’ Track [I use the word diss here as a formality] ‘I'll sing my music (Diss)’ which recounted his distaste for the Artists who came together to support Husky during his stint with anti-expressionary, governmental forces [Read here]. Slava’s stunt was not enough to issue a response from Husky, although it is important to mention that the ‘feud’ [If you can call it that] between the two Artists of immeasurably disparate quality started back in 2016 within Husky’s article for The Village. In an equally lengthy Interview, Husky referred to Slava only in passing, but evidently it was enough to leave lasting animosity between the two, although only Slava seems to be publicly aggrieved,
“Now I write tracks as if by a social order, as I see it, because there are no ideological musicians in Russia at all. All smooth, sleek, the same, and this is especially evident just in the battles. You say, Purulent [Slava KPSS], but personally I don't know him. I sympathize with him a little, because he is a leftist [He advocates for the abolishment of Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Codes]. Although he, too, is probably such a leftist that ***** is not (at all) leftist. Most likely, this is some kind of pose. He makes music so-so. All the songs are about myself, nothing new.”
This obviously rubbed Slava quite sore and subsequently, through the interim of 2016-2020, he has created a plethora of tracks of various thematic leanings which all unify around the same anti-Huskian sentiment, not including his November release [ХАСКИ ANTIBULLYING DISS (2019), Panelka (2017), Shake my Paw (2016)]. In each one of these scenarios, senza 2020, Husky has remained quiet and likewise refrained from publicly addressing Slava’s pseudo-musical tirades, opting instead to answer through the mode he knows best, that being with his philosophically-inclined, musical rationalism. Even Husky acknowledges that to engage with Slava via broadcasted hostility would bring not only raw attention to him as an ‘Creator’ [Of what you can decide] but yet another piece of coal to the contemporary Rap-Genre oven, which fuels itself on vulgar acts of sensationalism. Husky states at the end of his ‘open-letter’ to his [potentially] envious colleague, “As I write this, I'm scared - haven't I ended up as a toy in a dark battle-rapper game, have I become a component of the promo for his new album?” This sentiment is a consistent trait for Husky, that being his aversion to the Rap-Battle locality, where performative castigations replace actual artistry, “it's a sport that has nothing to do with music.” Husky’s frustration with Rap’s continual denigration and the callously bumptious appetites of Russia’s mainstream Rappers is visible to even the most virgin Rap-listener by way of his new Album, which covers an eclectic array of Post-Modernist, Post-Humanist [meaning man’s ‘fall’ from God, a Neo-Religious Harmatiologcial take on anti-Humanist philosophy] themes, articulated within a chiefly Huskian-Surrealist edifice [A self-produced term which can rearticulated Self-Deprecating Heroic Nihilism, akin to Scriabin’s philosophical attitudes].
(PC: Published cover-art)
Not everyone was thrilled with Husky’s new Album though, the [personally considered] failed Rap-Battle contender Slava [He went against Oxxxymiron in a widely publicized Rap-Battle back in 2017. Read here] considered it written in ‘the style of old poets’, with the sole intention being to profess to his ‘unassuming listener[s]’ the supposedly incorrect philosophy of ‘Look, I'm a poet.’ As a relatively new, Russian-American lover of Husky’s entire discography, I can earnestly confess that what drew me to him was his deep, cogitative proficiency in socio-cultural articulations and his unique lyrical verbiage which, although physically illustrative in its construction, conceals much more than it visualizes, i.e., his defunct 2020 Album 4PMP [I never did figure out the symbiology]. Comments like, “I don't feel any emotion...I'm bored of running just in silence [Alluding to Husky’s music being nothing more than work-out music]...What is this pathos [built on what Slava describes as ubiquitous ‘carbon monoxide meanings’] based on, brother ?! What the fuck is it based on?” all point to Slava’s nescience to Husky’s intra-cognitive, anti-Demosthenic [not purposefully trying to persuade via his lyrics] philological poetry-turned Rap [It is clearly evident that his linguistic, yet paralinguistic, atmospheres are constituted as poetry well before being set to music]. What I find especially bothersome with Slava’s commentative ignorance is the false assertion that Husky lacks any codified, individual poetic language. He says that instead of employing archaic phraseology with the apparent goal to ‘hang this dead structure [no example is given] on hip-hop’, Husky should instead invest his time into developing an idiosyncratic dialect built on ‘all this heritage that you are studying.’ He then goes on to praise himself for having an innovative, non-tautological musical language, “based not on an attempt to repeat someone else's poetics.” Right. Sure. Okay there.
(PC: Published cover-art)
Before commenting on Husky’s response, I first suggest you 1) read Slava’s Interview, and 2) listen to Slava’s September diss-attempt, as Dmitry’s comments are responding superficially to the Interview, but collectively alongside the September track, not to mention the cornucopia of incendiary content directed at Husky to be found in a purported, 184 public Interview's [Husky makes this assertion, not I]. Organized into a five-pillared counterargument to Slava’s inaccurate presumptions of an apparently ossified poetic mimesis and a 'painfully obvious' lack of idiosyncratic tongue, Husky directly challenges 1) the idea that being a ‘student of philology’ is a negative attribute, 2) that he linguistically composes using the remnants of ‘old poets’, 3) the unmitigated vulgarity of wanting to ‘fuck the [metaphorical] corpse of poetry’, 4) the outrageous claim of an absence of linguistic individualism, and 5) everything else, because in the words of Husky, “Purulent is like a great combinator and his many points move”. You can read the entire letter here for yourself, but the main take-away can be summed up fairly succinctly within Husky’s remaining lines and phrases, namely, “I don't want to turn my love into jaundice! I want to fuck the corpse of poetry! And will!” Even though the sagacious proverb, “Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know [...]” written by Tao Te Ching around 600 B.C., may seem incongruous, it serves as a perfect example of how Husky operates within the dichotomously modernized, yet in many respected devolved, world and simultaneously detached from any socio-culturally infused, anthropological bifurcations. He acts within the world, yet resides well outside the walls which encase human barbarity.
At 6:48 am [10:48 pm Nov. 28th EST], Slava KPSS [His Cyrillic spelling is СЛАВА КПСС] issued a dwarfish, tripartite response. Its dialectical value was [and still is ] insufficient for any sane individual, and because of its modest, yet profane, architecture, further rational thought on its contents is strongly discouraged. Now, what could Slava had said which would require such a coded preamble, without actually disclosing its textual substance? Well, here it was, “3 Answers for Husky. 1) Иди на хуй [F**k you], 2) -Same thing-, 3) -Same thing-.” One commenter, an individual with Huskian leanings, had said, “High level of discussion in Eastern European rap, “ and a further commenter clarified the geo-locality to, “in the Mordor [fictional ‘Middle-Earth’ in Lord of The Rings] part of the continental Beshkek, “ the northernmost region of Kyrgyzstan located in ‘The Steppes’. Images of mountainous seascapes of greys, browns, white[due to snow], and rock forms both kind and angry paint a very lonely picture. This is where Slava resides, he rebels against everyone, yet no one is actually against him. He lashes out because of boredom, but imagine if he channeled his endless accidie into music worth listening to? That would be a sight to behold, 'real music'.
Whether this debacle between a wholly-invested party [Slava] and his unlucky associate [Husky] is over, we shall see, and knowing Husky and his inspirations, it may be publicly over, but these experiences could engender future music, and his current working repertoire, with new layers of meaning. Regardless if there is any foreseeable conclusion, the now three-year, multi-platform, atypical dialectic has been an interesting introduction into the irrational, yet indispensable, world of Artistic deconstructivism, where the old is folded into the new, thus repurposing the comfortable and enriching the unconfirmed. You may not ‘like’ Husky and you don’t have to, but what you cannot do is aurally vomit half-baked assertions which, with close inquiry into the stated lines of argumentation, can be ruled out to be nothing more than the deranged, gaga-ramblings of an Artist without a mission. One must learn to step-back before stepping forward, and Husky took his time, now it’s your turn Slava. You took two months off one time, I would suggest you take another two, and then another. In fact, stop giving Interviews and go to Vrndavana, Husky did and so should you.
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