The Peculiarities of Primetime Russian R&B: XXXL

Russian rap and r&b have a difficult existence.  Today’s quintessentially American genres do not always travel well: a country like Russia has to overcome various obstacles in order to comfortably adopt them.  Tales from the streets of New York or LA are often so profoundly “local” that they don’t survive reinterpretation in another country; they are proud celebrations of a given neighborhood or zipcode, no further.  Taking and reshaping those domestic metaphors as allegedly “universal” experience – outside of ethnic specificity, even – is a risky business.

The second issue concerns the other extreme of rap and/or r&b: far from the rough ‘n’ ready stories of gangland, where we have the (easily mockable) tendency towards bling.  Moscow’s recent, oil-fueled decadence may have created a fitting context for glitzy r&b, but for most of the nation, it all looked very strange indeed.  Desirable, perhaps, but strange.

Which leads us to compilations such as the twentieth anniversary CD in the “XXXL” line underwritten by Moscow’s Monolit Records.  Initially these CDs – earlier in the series – had contained a great deal of filler, but as Monolit has put considerable time and effort into the TV-friendly end of r&b, their XXXL discs now contain a much higher percentage of known entities.

And heaven knows this is a potentially big market, despite all the problems listed so far.  If we were to take a walk around the biggest and least discerning music portals, such as music.lib.ru, we would discover tens of thousands of tweenage rappers.  Almost exclusively male, they ramble on in pre-pubescent tones over a couple of downloaded loops.

The fans are obviously there, so what does primetime r&b hope to offer them?

One key factor here is language.  By that we mean the issue of rhythm; almost three quarters of all words in a typical English-language conversation are monosyllabic.  The average length of Russian words, however, is between two and three syllables.  This means that the punchiness of much Anglo rap becomes a more lilting, almost conversational style in Russian.  That same style, in turn, seems to have influenced the content matter, too.  This is immediately suggested by the opening number from well-established Ukrainian ensemble Boombox (below).  Their own rambling, often mumbled rapping underwrites something they call “slob rock” (zhlob rok).

They’re dressed and ready to slouch.

The suitably loose-sounding track they offer here is called “She Who…” (Ta, chto) and concerns the need for a young man to keep going after a girl has vanished from his life once and for all.  “I’ve got to keep living somehow, simply to eat bread, and drink water…  To be ill, to take medicine, to make comments on your blog… To keep my mood up, best I can.”

These are hardly gangland epics!  The same stoic spirit is continued by Pavel Volia (below), who’s also well-known as a TV presenter and comedian.  It’s hard to imagine two other media professions that are less suitable for a fledgling rapper: the coziness of primetime TV would surely cancel any aura of dramatic sexuality, and anybody who cracks jokes for a living will have a very hard time selling stories of the streets!

Volia weighs up the pros and cons of possible extremes in a young man’s biography, all the way from great riches to premature adulthood, family responsibilities, or student poverty.  At the end of the song, having considered these various fates, he declares “It doesn’t matter who I am or who you are.  The main thing is that my Mom likes this song.”

Prior to any trajectory in life (towards fortune or failure), the most important factor of all is home.  Foundation outweighs the future.  Once again, we’ve got a story of trials and tribulations.  Life is to be endured, rather than molded in any confident way.

In some articles surrounding our next – less famous – artist, who goes by the name Dzhi Vilks (above and below), there have been suggestions that rappers today should “take responsibility for their words” like the bardic songwriters of the 1960s.  This is a fascinating parallel.  Odd though it may seem, those same bards are perhaps the most logical (logocentric!) parallel to today’s rappers, though that suggestion would leave most people in a state of horror.

Vilks lays claim to the intelligentsia’s heritage of learned lyricism with his “adult r&B.  It’s melodious, passionate, grown-up, and not at all vulgar.”

Even though such comments can be attributed to TV prudishness, they do underscore the idea that this kind of r&b is striving for something it sees as “wisdom.”  It strives to find and understand preexisting ideas; it does not have the gross cockiness of much American r&b that so finds expression in violent misogyny, as we’ve seen this week in the US news.

And on the subject of women, we should mention one of the female performers on this compilation.  It doesn’t take long on amateur Russian rap portals to see that girls have a very hard time being accepted as young performers.  Most female r&b acts suffer similar prejudices – until they reach adulthood, after which they tend to be showcased in sexual, rather than musical terms.  The odds, in other words, are against them.

One of the better female acts on XXXL 20 (the very name of which has clear pornographic undertones) is Knara, whose full name would be Knara Mikhailovna (below).

In a step away from pole-dancing and other visual cliches of female r&b, it’s interesting to see how Monolit is promoting this young woman.  The label does so in ways that place her on a level playing-field with the men – but grant her an undifferentiated worldview.  The purported outlook of her songs is very similar to what we’ve seen so far from her male stablemates.  All these artists voice a similar philosophy.

Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 28 years ago, Knara – “like all Soviet girls, went to school, where she was argumentative and something of a trouble-maker.  She always knew that she’d be a singer, though…  Being the youngest girl in her family, she was slightly spoiled by her father’s affection, yet she was constantly aware that things come to you in life through effort.  They don’t just fall from the sky.”

This apparently is what “rebellious, edgy” rap has become in Russia.  In its most widespread and popular forms, the tough lessons it offers are not those of self-defiance or confidence, as in America.  Quite the opposite.  They teach argumentative trouble-makers that life is a rough ride.  Success is synonymous with survival; happiness is a form of endurance.

Knara already looks tired.

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