Roman Ryabtsev: “I absorbed music diametrically opposed in style”

In response, I always want to ask: well, I’ll tell you, AND WHAT? What options? Will you find out that you have listened to this too, and give me a pat on the shoulder (albeit virtually) for similar musical tastes? Or will you find out that you hated this kind of music, and suddenly begin to despise me, and throw all my albums to the heap? Or maybe for a long time you will try unsuccessfully to analyze the connection between the music of my childhood and my current work? Will you go to the past in a time machine and replace the music library of your little self with the music that little me listened to in order to grow into the same author as big me? ..

In any case, all this is absolutely useless knowledge, as it seems to me. The music from his childhood has only a partial influence on the formation of the personality of a musician. Books, films, friends, parents, girls, boys… the factors important for the growth of a creative unit can be listed for a long time.

I thought about it and suddenly realized one thing: after all, HOW a person listens to music and WHAT it means to him changes very much with age! I’ll try to analyze and sort it out (I definitely wouldn’t do this at the age of 18–20, but now you can get bored …).

As children, we listen to the songs we like as one thing. Without singling out music, text and performance separately. The children’s brain perceives whole images (or maybe it’s the most correct thing? I don’t know …). And depending on the child’s ability to empathize, the perception of music can acquire all sorts of (not related to its content) pictures in the brain. Well, surely you had something similar? Could you say with clear certainty: this song is gray, this one is like a cake with cream, and this one is like oatmeal (and cold too!)?

I remember that at the age of 8 or 9 I fell in love with listening to music while reading books in parallel. And, well, also pouring a huge mug of tea and making myself sandwiches with jam, how could it be without this? And in the process of such a syncretic absorption of cultural and food content, stable associative connections formed in my head: until now, if I hear certain songs by Joe Dassin, then automatically the brain substitutes the corresponding passages from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Under his song “L’Amérique”, for example, the scene of the frigate “Abraham Lincoln” chasing the “Nautilus” invariably rises before my mind’s eye. Now I checked it: I found this song on the Web, listened – YES! It still works! (and sandwiches were at that moment with apricot jam).

When hormones begin to play louder than the accordion, namely, when a person enters a restless and contradictory adolescence, then music becomes, perhaps, the most important thing in a lifetime. Neither before nor after! Its perception cannot reach such sacred Depth and Importance. It is then that you listen to those very songs, under which 30 years later you will let out a nostalgic tear, saying: “I grew up on them!” Yes, you did not grow up then, do not flatter yourself. You will grow up later when you enter adulthood: work, family, children, loans, bosses, mortgages, fighting with government agencies for all the rights due to you … In the meantime, this is purely hormonal.

The brain of a teenager is like a boiling pot of dumplings constantly striving to run away to the stove, and any extra dumpling thrown into it (song, book, film) can cause a real coup and even disaster! You fell in love for the first, second, eighth time, some song sounds, and suddenly it pierces you, like a lightning strike: “God! Why, this song… it’s ABOUT US!!!”

Of course, no one is ever interested in what the author actually thought and felt when he composed this or that masterpiece (one of the classic examples: Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” while singing a text about how he loves scrambled eggs in the kitchen in the morning) .

But you always know better than musicians WHAT this song is about! Although the author certainly didn’t write “about you” and about anyone like that, at most about his personal experiences. Or even at all: because the contract with the publisher must be fulfilled, the deadlines are burning, and three more songs are not enough for the album… Overflowing empathy during the period of hormonal changes in the body leads to the fact that a person begins to decompose music into components. You may already like the melody and the text, but the arrangement and performance do not come at all (hence, by the way, the popularity of all kinds of covers). A massive division of youth into musical genres begins, no one at school anymore dances to the same songs, everything becomes very serious …

From this follows another very important social function of music in adolescents: it is built into the recognition system “friend/foe”. And sometimes it is the only reason for friendship or hatred. Do you love rap? Brooo!!! Metalist? You are yours, dude! And this devil loves pop music, we won’t even talk to him! (Well, at least real mass fights between fans of different music are a thing of the past, everything is somehow bloodless on the Internet.)

But when a person really grows up… Then, as a rule, the consumption of music content becomes something ordinary and background. It is rare that anyone (except, perhaps, inveterate audiophiles, but this is already a diagnosis) sits in a chair, turns on the audio system and arranges for himself purposeful listening to music, without being distracted by anything. It’s just that an adult doesn’t have time for that. So the music migrates from the headphones that were constantly sticking out in the ears to the car radio (listen on the way to work and the dacha) or even remains only in the radio. Well, or in playlists on the computer. Which, again, play in the background, in the process of work or household chores. And then if this function of background filling of the soundscape is not performed by the TV …

That’s why show business marketers around the world know that the main consumers of music are teenagers: many bands earn more on T-shirts with a logo than on tickets and music sales. But there’s not much money to be made for adults: well, what other songs, when you have to pay the mortgage, and the children don’t obey, and the wife nags! .. No time for songs, sorry. Unless the artist’s management manages to sell them collectible reissues of albums from their youth and VIP tickets to concerts of graying stars. It was then that adult uncles and aunts shed a mean (or not very) tear, lament that “we grew up on your songs!” and fork out in full…

Well, all right: in the end, I will take the opportunity and at once I will answer this constant question to all those who suffer: “What did you listen to in your youth?”

Yes, why didn’t I just listen, dear why. It was precisely because I absorbed music that was sometimes diametrically opposed in style that I became a composer, arranger, producer, and so on, and so on, and so on (again, there are not enough malicious emojis in the newspaper, well, how can you get used to this?!) …