Phenomenologically speaking, Хаски’s music occupies three distinct roles: The ontological rationalizer, the pessimistic relativist, and the indiscriminate universalist. His cognitive disposition seems predisposed to metaphysical conjecture, situated in ruminations of an unnatural, borderline epigenetical sentiment. However, to declare Хаски introspectively mundane is to discredit his very real ingenuity, thus the attribution of ‘rationalizer’ is done deliberately as to highlight his literary prowess at summarizing the intangible psychology of man, more importantly his relationship with man. Stated in a 2016 Interview, Хаски revealed an insinuated truth within his entire discography, “Prostitutes sell, roughly speaking, their meat, their bodies, and all these people in jackets sell their souls,” an interpretation of the bodily autonomy of a sex-worker as opposed to the myopically focused businessman. The former party’s universiological rationale situates itself in its interconnectedness, forced associations, and base desire to live, while the later party’s intention is cumulative success, irrespective of extraneous contingencies, although they may be formally considered if found to hold levels of operative value. Observing Хаски as a pessimistic relativist invites epistemic considerations of the very nature of good/bad and related dichotomy’s, as throughout Хаски’s music, polemic confessions and subjective evaluations are purposefully attached alongside societal and cultural references, seemingly intimating that they are practically indistinguishable from the other.
The intimate, once reaching its interior threshold, bursts into the sphere of the sociological, in turn bleeding into the cultural, sequentially feeding into the constantly evolving modern ideoscape, defined as, “the ideologies of states and the counter ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.” Appadurai’s five flows of globalization serve as a terminological illustration of Хаски’s artistic expression; The ethnoscape, the corporeal being’s motility within organic and manufactured principles, the mediascape, the constructed, marketable personage and the diffusion of their digital footprint, the technoscape, societies now solidified demand for rapid, neo-Industrialist developments in every corner of contemporary life, the financescape, currency’s increasing volatility, global movement, and governance on what and who creates, and the ideoscape, the ‘landscape of media’ that consciously reconstructs the human psyche into valuing that which is objectively finite, yet seemingly necessary, paired with state-induced ideological recalibration. By observing Хаски as a despondent character who, through his music of indulgent dismality, attempts to demystify abject mundanity through literary feats of contradictory natures, namely pairing Dostoevskian hopelessness with Pushkinian command of form and lyricism, I argue that what is revealed is less objective societal castigationism, and more of a counterargument to the Correspondence Theory of Truth, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”
Even though one may call human society flawed and defiled by the inundation of gratification culture, one’s perspective of reality is only tied to their experiences, case in point the paradox of conscious attempts to formulate a cogent depiction of ‘objective’ truth through the usage of human, subjective cognition. “If truth is correspondence, then, since knowledge requires truth, we have to know that our beliefs correspond to reality, if we are to know anything about reality,” and it is in this refutation that Хаски embodies the pessimistic relativist. He presents associational conformity, euphoric pursuits, and relentless dogmatism as mainstays of the contemporary commonwealth, often employing, in sardonic under and overtones, topical references, poetic verses, and sacred iconography in his attempts to transgress the constrictive parameters of carnal humanism and the grim expansion of ‘attractive’ Philistinism. The bewitching properties of psychological consumerism, i.e., appeasing base desires, engorged individual ego, utilization without compensation, and its grip on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world cultures point to the disintegrated state of Ayn Rand’s Trading Principle, “living by trade, offering value for value, neither seeking nor granting the unearned.”
Хаски’s third designation correlates with Webster’s depiction of a poet as a mimetic, yet modern aesthetician, able to toy the line between abstraction and materiality. Хаски’s dualistic poeticism meditates upon seemingly dissimilar, yet ubiquitous truths, ie., the contiguity of self and society, and the relationship of society and self, Webster even slightly highlighting this paradoxicality by noting the poetic audience's expectations, “...The poet [is] believed to be his own lay figure. He is taken as offering his readers the presentment of himself, his hopes, his loves, his sorrows, his guilts and remorses, his history and psychology generally.” Suffice to say, Хаски, isolated but not alone, vacissilates between emotional modalities, enlarged by his own lethargic tendencies and intransigent hunger for a chimerical reward that one can surmise he recognizes will never be his. In the same 2016 Interview he says, “I repeat that I don't consider myself leftist - it's a cliché. Let's say someone says: "I am a Russian nationalist." But in fact, he may not be entirely a nationalist, everything can be more complicated. Maybe he's just a statesman. Or a Nazi. Or just a fool. Or maybe I’m a fool.” Husky is a didactic figure, his poetry is his methodology, and his music exists as the medium for his prophetic teachings. Although adopting a Gopnik exterior, complete with Adidas clothing, shaved head, and rough shave, he honors and continues Pushkin’s legacy through neo-Symbolist philological symphonies and concerto's. Germann Larosh dubbed Glinka as Pushkin's musical equivariant, and Boris Asafiev considered Glinka a master at balancing 'international high culture' with the tangible 'Russian folk,' dubbed the multi-faceted term 'symphonism,' defined by Asafiev as lyricism of thought and the continuation of 'the primal force,' otherwise known by him as the 'volitional impulse.'
However, I dub Хаски as the contemporary alternative of Pushkin, and very much Glinka as well, according to Asafiev's narrative, as recalled in Elena Viljanen's lengthy book, "The Problem of The Modern and Tradition." The decipherable and the elusive are perpetually intermixed, and topicality is interwoven with mundanity, allowing a front-row seat to Хаски's gospel of self-actualization, perceptible, in its infinite finality, throughout his newest 16-track album, Hoshkhonog, a reference to a Buryat cuisine dish made of horse rectum, an allusion to the album's content. Unlike other rappers, Хаски challenges what can and should be construed as oxymoronic, correct, realistically established, antithetical, you name it. Opposite are correct, and wrong is right with him, and perhaps the answer doesn't matter so much as the question itself, perhaps even the act of questioning is more crucial.
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Further scholarship on T. W. Adorno's Philosophical writings of music's relationship with language...
Adorno, T. W. (1956). Music and Language: A Fragment. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://msu.edu/~sullivan/AdornoMusLangFrag.html Quasi una Fantasia, Essays on Modern Music, Theodor W. Adorno (Translated by Rodney Livingstone), VERSO, London, New York
Adorno, T., & Gillespie, S. (1993). Music, Language, and Composition. The Musical Quarterly, 77(3), 401-414. Retrieved October 3, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/742388
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