Relay cross – Newspaper Kommersant No. 162 (7363) dated 09/03/2022

On the first day of autumn, a solo concert by Yaroslav Dronov, who in recent years has become famous under the stage name Shaman, was held in the capital’s Glavclub. About the singer and his audience – Boris Barabanov.

For the most sought-after young singer in the country, whose clip “Let’s Get Up” was broadcast in its entirety by Dmitry Kiselev in June, and the other, “I’m Russian”, gained 12 million views on YouTube in a month, there were not enough people in Glavklub. The author of these lines expected to see a long queue on the street, as happened during the tour of foreign stars. However, the club with a capacity of 3 thousand people was half full.

It seemed that the artist did not consider his performance at the Glavclub as a milestone in his career, although he himself admitted from the stage that this was his first solo club concert. He already had solo performances in the capital, for example, in the Green Theater of VDNKh. At the same time, the singer participates a lot in national events in the capital region. Only in the last month it was the festivals “Cheese, Feast, Peace”, “Russian Field” and “Spasskaya Tower”. Perhaps those who were only interested in the artist’s two most popular songs, “Let’s get up” and “I’m Russian”, listened to them there, and pay from 1800 to 7000 rubles. for tickets for a solo album in the “Glavclub” did not want to.

The fans have arrived. Many had Russian tricolors handy for waving. They rose above the heads of the audience when the action began.

After a vocalization from the speakers and an instrumental intro by the backing band, Shaman entered the stage and silence reigned. The singer spread his arms and froze in immobility (a trick familiar to all fans of Michael Jackson). The audience went into an enthusiastic cry, but the pause dragged on. The audience felt the magic of the appearance of a star, but for such theatrical effects, the people in the hall were still not enough.

“I stand before you as before God,” Shaman uttered the first lines of the song “Thank you”, and the more he sang, the clearer it became that, after spending ten years in search of his face and style, he settled on a pop-chanson style , which in the new century on the domestic stage was successfully cultivated by Grigory Leps and Stas Mikhailov. Most of the author’s material by Yaroslav Dronov is the same “post-chanson” that serves the conditional “accounting department”, women who yearn for a strong male shoulder and a strong voice. The guy is young and handsome. His senior colleagues, if they please, somehow already rather by inertia, without a twinkle.

The baton fell into good hands. Or rather, not a stick, but a cross. In the social networks of the young artist, you can find his recent photo with a large cross on his chest, in the picture he is in the company of Grigory Leps against the background of a portrait of Vladimir Putin, the caption reads: “Grigory, thank you for the cross, now it will be with me.”

Yaroslav Dronov communicates a lot with the audience, not going far from simple topics like his own biography and the introduction of accompanists. He knows when to let the audience sing and when to show off his own range. He accurately chose cover versions for his program. “Hang Glider” by Eduard Artemiev, “At Dawn” by “Alliance” and “Dancing on Glasses” by Maxim Fadeev are win-win numbers, as is “Fly Away” with a popular fragment from “Prince Igor” in the chorus. The singer honed all this for many years, and the audience finally returns his debt – they bring huge bouquets of flowers, like Philip Kirkorov or Sofia Rotaru.

The finale of the concert is quite Gazman’s in spirit and melody “Let’s get up”, the song “I am Russian”, which just the day before became the subject of a parody by Alexander Gudkov (“I am narrow”), and “The Anthem of Russia”, which Shaman performed in Crimea on the Day of the State Flag and as a result, he came out with it in first place in YouTube trends. This block of songs in Dronov’s repertoire exists, as it were, separately from the “post-chanson” material and makes one speak of him as the face of new patriotism and almost as the “voice of the NWO”. But after the concert at the Glavclub, such a statement of the question seems to be an exaggeration. There were flags, but the Kommersant correspondent did not see a single person with the symbols Z and V in the hall. Maybe not lucky. Shaman does not raise the relevant topics in his monologues between songs.

If we imagine that a person who has spent the last year in a coma has got into the hall, nothing at the concert would tell him about the context in which it is customary to consider this singer. Let’s Get Up is a song about veterans of the Great Patriotic War. “I am Russian” – patriotism in a wheat field. And the anthem – well, the anthem. Jimi Hendrix played the US anthem at Woodstock and Serge Gainsbourg sang the Marseillaise. Shaman is a pop singer who waited in the wings and found his audience. The context itself caught up with him, but he did not resist.