An order of magnitude louder – Newspaper Kommersant No. 230 (7431) dated 12/12/2022

At the same time, new albums by prominent domestic rappers Vladi and Loqiemean were released. Boris Barabanov talks about recordings that illustrate the state of Russian-language rap in 2022.

In mid-August, the Kasta group reported on the pages of social networks that it was “on the list of artists … for whom the authorities canceled all public concerts in Russia.” “Organize with your companies of friends,” Rostov rappers wrote, “throw off, book yourself a small suitable place, contact us – we will come and perform … If in the Russian Federation, then do not advertise it, otherwise your holiday will be disrupted.” A week later, the number of invitations to such holidays was in the dozens. The group moved to the underground.

We are talking about a team that stood at the origins of recitative in Russian as such. Among other things, in the first album of “Casta” “Louder than water, higher than grass” (2002), the song “An order of magnitude higher” appeared – a dialogue of a lyrical hero with a friend who was going to emigrate. It is difficult to imagine a more patriotic text: “Yes, I just saw those faces, you will dry up there. / And if you look inside, you will die of longing. / It’s empty there, and you, bro, are Russian, / it’s important to you, and the rest is … with him.

20 years have passed, and Casta, like several dozen other significant domestic musicians, is deprived of the opportunity to communicate with compatriots in a full-fledged concert format. But the sound recording remained, and now the fifth solo album of Vladi (Vladislav Leshkevich), the leader of Casta, the head of the Respect Production label and the author of the song “An order of magnitude higher”, was released. The album is called “February Lasts”.

The opening track “Timelessness” is the questions posed by the new time to an enlightened city dweller. “When the rocket flew into the house in a direct course, / what about acting and art?” Or: “What is a “people”? / What is “we”? Who are “ours”? / It’s all old now.”

Vladi alternates songs on behalf of the author with texts on behalf of fictional characters. “Burn in hell, all the firmware is Soviet,” Vladi says on behalf of the actress who “became clear” after February 24 in the song “How is it, …, maybe?”. “I fell to my knees, howled, said that I repent / that I suffered, as if I were you, that I wasn’t a scoundrel,” confesses an immigrant screenwriter in Thailand (“From Moscow (Paradise on an Island)”). “Who are you to have something here? You are like enemies, you are like animals,” the hero of the song “Don’t exaggerate” attacks the frightened hipster intellectuals. Perhaps the most important character of the album pops up in the song “Call Names” – the “deep people”, as they are now often portrayed: “It would be better if you didn’t chat for the whole bus. / Who did you call that? Sorry right now. / I’ll sue you, I’ll take care of it. / You will be shot, you will die writhing.”

The cruel disappointment of the song “The Biggest Country” (“Without breathing to the Volga mothers and to the quiet dons / I will clean my head from terry chtoni … I tear off the growths of birch and mountain ash …”) follows the “Event” – a picture of how the catastrophe fits in into the picture of everyday life, “into the kitchen dimensions, into the daily stream.”

Loqiemean (Roman Khudyakov), the only guest in the album “February Lasts”, took part in the recording of the track “By Burying Yourself”. Back in the summer, after recording the track, he was surprised on Twitter why Vladi had not yet been given the status of a foreign agent. Now, on the day of the release of the album “February Lasts”, Loki released his new disc “Pov3stka”. The meaning of this word in 2022 was actively acquiring new meanings: at first it simply meant what everyone is talking about and thinking about, and only in September the agenda became just an agenda – to the military registration and enlistment office.

“I am more Russian than Shaman, even though there is more of a cross,” Loki says in the introductory track “To Pain 2022” and then paints this pain in 15 texts with all the fury of an opposition rapper. The Pov3stka album is more verbose than Shaman February Lasts, heavy both in terms of musical accompaniment (many guitars) and in terms of informational and figurative load. “A fly has flown into my people – zzzz! ..” (“Fly”) – Loki takes details in the most prominent places, but is able to inflate epic canvases from them with gaming slang and references to the Bible. Unlike Vladi’s album, which does not need a translator, Khudyakov’s reading style and Pov3stka’s lyrics require immersion in the domestic rap context. In addition, Loqiemean often refers to his origin (he comes from Tomsk), and knowledge of regional realities will not hurt here either. Nevertheless, there are compositions that make their way even to an unprepared listener: “The country has given us all quotas for fear. / I’m filing for an insurance deduction, like this” (“Cotton 99%”).

Vlady and Loqiemean continued a number of releases by Russian-speaking rappers, who this year spoke quite unambiguously on the current agenda. The first were Oxxxymiron (“Oida”) and Noize MC (“Land of Rains”); acting under these pseudonyms Miron Fedorov and Ivan Alekseev are included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the list of individuals – foreign agents. Basta and Husky did not react creatively to the main theme of 2022. There has not yet been an answer comparable in resonance with the works of Oksimiron and Vladi from the opposite side of the ideological barricades either.

Except that only Rich and Akim Apachev, supported by patriotic Telegram channels, spoke out. The first – in prose – complained that YouTube “pulls Oksimiron to the first place” (3 million views of the “Oida” video in two days) and at the same time the media and music publics ignore Rich’s tracks “about the fact that the boys are now at the front donating yourself.” The second released the track “We”, which rests not so much on the original lyrics, but on the sample of “Goyd” from the famous speech of Ivan Okhlobystin and Tsoev’s line “We will continue to act.”

Apachev writes in his Telegram that Vladi is now an internal ideological enemy who did not notice “the genocide of the Russian Donbass, May 2 in Odessa, May 9 in Mariupol.” Here it is worth arguing that for Vlady, the events on the territory of Ukraine are a long-standing pain and Akim Apachev should have listened to the track “Die Like a Hero” from Vlady’s album “Another Word” (2019). Real replicas and interjections of soldiers from amateur military videos are woven into the audio track. It doesn’t matter which conflicts they are based on. Without the conflict in Donbass, this track would not exist. For these eight years, Vladi looked where he should have.