Mumiy Troll: Carefully Choosing One’s Words – in Order to Reject Them

Vladivostok’s Mumiy Troll are continuing their tour around the United States, moving on occasion southwards to Mexico – or in a northerly direction to Canada. The band recently appeared at one Mexican festival that caught the attention of local press outlet Enelshow.Com: “Few people could join in with the Russian singing, but everyone was swaying in rhythm. The energy and movement of Il’ia Lagutenko, the band’s lead vocalist, were both unique and deserving of the crowd’s boundless admiration.” This type of touching naivety colors a lot of the press coverage, bordering at times on slight silliness: “After the concert, the band’s CDs were sold out in a second. Many people couldn’t get hold of a copy.” Elsewhere we hear the words of one Mexican viewer in particular: “We really liked listening to the group. Our ‘vibrations’ matched the music of Mumiy Troll.”

Issues of authorship may lurk behind such allegedly spontaneous statements, but the general tone of these and other observations still plays a telling role at this stage in the band’s travels.

The point is that Mumiy Troll have just been booked to play on US network television, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the ensemble’s promotion department. A style redolent of our Mexican press clippings presides in the following announcement (We’ve altered the English a little): “Besides playing concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, Mumiy Troll will perform on CBS’s renowned ‘Late Late Show.’ This is one of the highest-rated shows on American television, together with Oprah Winfrey’s and Larry King’s broadcasts. It is presented by an Emmy award nominee, the British actor Craig Ferguson. The format consists of chats with America’s favorite figures, plus interviews with celebrities from all around the world. The occasional humorous sketch is also involved. Il’ia Lagutenko will answer Craig Ferguson’s questions, while several songs – performed by the band – will also be included.”

There’s good reason to be pleased with this media coup.

The particular importance of the booking is manifest in the context of a similar appearance by Tatu in 2003, when the duo appeared on late-night TV to (eventual) public fanfare and/or furor. Over and above the faux-lesbian scandal that was already being used to great effect by Lena Katina and Iulia Volkova, the duo then caused additional worries with their choice of clothing. They both sported a white t-shirt, across which were scrawled two words in Russian. In translation they said “F**k the War,” in response to the recent US invasion of Iraq. Late-night TV producers, not being speakers of Russian, had no idea what the brief text said – and happily let the singers perform in front of millions of unsuspecting viewers.

Chaos then prevailed – as soon as somebody found a dictionary (that was liberal enough to include obscenities).

In other words, these type of TV bookings play an important – primarily charismatic – role in the development of an overseas brand. Lyrical specificity, and even the music itself, both take back seat to a profoundly subjective – perhaps orientalist – “charm” that can be effected in any number of ways. Heaven only knows, for example, how exactly those Mexican crowd members might have qualified their enjoyment at the recent festival, or to what they might have attributed their nondescript “swaying and vibrations.” A vague, wholly affective state comes into play that may, in fact, not be the result of a performer’s successful transcendence of their exotic origins, but precisely because they are so “intriguingly alien.” Whether, in that case, it makes more sense for a Russian performer to either downplay or emphasize their “incomprehensibility” becomes itself confusing.

One’s gaze moves upwards in contemplation of such matters.

This same conundrum brings us to the new EP from Mumiy Troll, “Paradise Ahead.” The title track, together with several others, comes from last year’s double-CD, entitled “8.” All of the songs have been translated into English, though some of the backing vocals and more complex lines have been left in Russian, either due to their complexity, or because a little local flavor never hurts.

And then, over and above the issue of literal translation, certain sociopolitical nuances also beg the question of whether they should/need to be clarified for a US audience, starting with the EP’s very title. Read possibly as a straightforward or amorous utterance, it also carries a second, ironic significance (as in the original text) of some Soviet social goal.  In other words, small elements of Slavic obscurity are left in place, often as nods and winks in the direction of a Soviet mystique. References, for example, to Pacific Fleet submarines, Siberian nuclear stations, and other forms of recent menace all help to make sure that the musical or textual translation is not complete, so to speak.

A delicate balance needs to be struck between incomprehensibility and absolute (i.e., dangerously, forgettably normal!) clarity. Singing in well-enunciated English, whilst sporting vile Slavic t-shirts was clearly a successful approach to the same problem. It set the benchmark, at least for a certain section of the marketplace.

A useful snapshot of US audience reactions, and how these “comprehensible” cultural stereotypes work hand in hand with insurmountable language barriers can obviously be found in the local press after gigs. Take this one southern newspaper, which is rife with all manner of clunky cliches: “If you were a Russian, what would you do after seventy years of stifling Communist domination? Probably the same thing you’d do if you were a Western European after fifteen hundred years of Catholic domination – you’d go a little bit crazy. That’s only natural. Still it’s nice to know that the sworn enemy we were once facing down and squaring off with in a little game called ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ are in fact not only nice people, but… know how to party. The challenge is to channel all that newly unleashed energy into something creative… like Mumiy Troll.”

A recent interview with Lagutenko – conducted in English – made reference to the same, yet elusive middle ground between things ordinary and the exotic. Knowing how to find that realm in another language is harder still. The singer was asked: “You’ve only recently started releasing songs in English. How has working in English affected the band’s process?” His response: “Nothing really changes. It’s just a bit more people involved in the process, as sometimes I’m going too far with my language experiments. You know, you should always be aware of that line which divide experiments from excrement . I usually get advice from my bi-lingual friends. We don’t want to trick anyone with too much complexity…and if our drummer – who doesn’t speak a word [of any language] other than Russian  – can understand what I’ve tried to say in English, then it is usually a victory. ”

That last phrase is especially interesting; it speaks of a desire to find language that will allow the band to sidestep it. Great attention will be paid to the lyrical aspect of presentation… such that nobody notices it. Once again, the line between the quotidian and the distractingly (or disconcertingly) queer is fine indeed.

Lagutenko has attributed any success in this ongoing search to his desire for increasingly wide or “global” contact with an audience. To find common ground with those Mexican festival-goers, for example, is to sidestep speech altogether. It means either singing songs of nothing in particular – or of potentially universal significance. Nonsense and universal semantics begin to sound synonymous.

A journalist not long ago asked Lagutenko: “How do you find English-speaking fans identifying with Mumiy Troll?” He replied that: “There are some people who have a fascination with Russian culture, and believe me, you hardly find anything worthier than Mumiy Troll in modern Russian rock music! I’ve heard stories of some universities (in Colorado and California) using our songs for Russian lessons. There are some people simply curious enough in [the] worldwide rock scene and they are happy to learn that there is a decent rock act out there in Russia. I guess it’s a sign of modern times. People start to think more globally and music is a great medium.”

It’s instructive to note that of all the quotes gathered from the North American Press this year, the one that has been foregrounded with greatest pride by the band comes form the New Yorker. It speaks directly to a harmony between “incomprehensible” Russian scripts and a most familiar overlap with homegrown genres. The result is both recognizable and rare at the same time. “You don’t need to be able to read Cyrillic to understand this Russian band – a fluency in groovy post-punk and edgy guitar rock is all that’s required. The foursome, based in Vladivostok and Moscow, fires off sparkling pop songs that keep its young chain-smoking fans dancing.”

When asked a few weeks ago – at the end of a press chat – whether he’d “like to add anything,” to these and related issues, Lagutenko quipped: “Like they say in Russia — less words more action!” Not no words, just less of them. Just enough to maintain a distance of intrigue. Two words, a black pen, and a couple of t-shirts from Walmart should do the trick.

Or a pose with the familiar faces of the modern Russian navy… at a place of unimaginably violent Soviet rebellion.

Download music and images from this site to your smartphone!

Go to www.cloudtrade.com and look for us under far_from_moscow