On May 5th of this year (three months and four days after the start of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict) Husky (otherwise known as Dmitry Kuznetsov) released yet another semantically-rich and musically 'interesting' track to add to his sizable corpus of work which spans nearly two decades, and features everything from albums, singles, and joint projects, to short-films, feature-length documentaries, and music videos. Seeing as I am analyzing his 2021 album for signs or rejections of 'musical Russianness,' it would only be fitting if I apply such thinking to this recent song.
'Song for K' (Песня для К) is dedicated to his daughter named Katerina, for whom his wife Alina Nasibullina gave birth to born in/around 2018. As of 2022, she would be close to 2-years old, a harrowing time to be a child in Russian sociopolitical history indeed. As Husky wrote in a Telegram post on May 6th, he wrote the song especially for his daughter, and was responsible for the music and some of the mixing. However, back on March 21st of this year, Husky had begun working and had finished the single late last year (fall of 2021), expressing several key points to the comprehension of the track's visual and sonic aesthetics. He states that the track is an open love-letter to Katerina, "the kiss that I send her now and which lands on her cheek in many, many years." Further, the musical style (upbeat, energetic, light-hearted) was purposefully designed in order to engender a feeling of nurturing, care, safety, and happiness, "warm, affectionate, gentle, but quite dynamic." The song (along with his other song 'Invisible') is said to be among the constituent elements of his next album, "Русский Альбом" (Russian Album), dedicated to addressing what Husky deems as the inappropriate lack of Russianness in domestic rap musician's music (The-Flow). This point alone is seminal, as no other current Russian rapper has been so brazen in their animosity against unscrupulous Western influence in Russian Hip-Hop than Husky has.
I must be perfectly blunt, I am not a fan of this track's musical life, although the intent behind it is laudable and virtuous in its own right. The track's body comes across as highly scattered, and while his stated intention to infuse the track with paternal sentiments may have helped shape the lyrical life, musically-speaking the juxtaposition between rave-styled histrionics, and folk instrumentation, with a lack of coherent melodic continuity (senza the rap "flow", although less a flow and more half-hearted singing) is not generative but just plain cacophonic. The song leaves a listener in a state of intense confusion, as I didn't know what to listen to amidst the turbulence of the track, how to sympathize with what I did hear, and generally was left feeling intensely irritated, and certainly not bemused nor comforted. However, Husky does stay true to his love of formal schema, the presence of an introduction and conclusion being one of the very few things about the track that I did enjoy. Take your own listen, but be warned. It is aesthetically incomparable to Khoshkhonok, and may mean that Husky's musical style is taking a new turn. Hopefully, it won't be in this track's direction.
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