The directness of the yellow guitar – Newspaper Kommersant No. 193 (7394) of 10/18/2022

In just three days, the video version of the concert of bards Alexei Ivashchenko and Georgy Vasilyev, which took place on September 26, 2022 at the Moscow Youth Palace, gained more than 250 thousand views on YouTube. This is an impressive indicator not only for the author’s song, but also for domestic popular music in general. Not every pop artist and not even every hip-hoper can produce such a result in such a time frame. The link to the concert, which runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes, is constantly recommended to each other by users of social networks. This makes us think not only about whether we should expect a new wave of popularity of the duet, nicknamed by the people “Iwashi”, but also about the sudden demand for the genre itself.

If Alexander Rosenbaum and Oleg Mityaev give concerts non-stop, then Alexei Ivashchenko and Georgy Vasiliev have not given full-fledged concerts for more than 20 years. In 2000, the duo announced the cessation of creative activity. In October 2002, during the screening of the musical “Nord-Ost” by Ivashchenko and Vasiliev, a terrorist attack occurred in the theater center on Dubrovka, and subsequently this project of two friends was also closed.

Georgy Vasilyev, in the 1990s a successful businessman, in the 2000s he took up a new business – animation. Together with Alexander Tatarsky, he launched the series “Mountain of Gems” and “Fixies”, and wrote songs for the latter. Alexey Ivashchenko focused on musicals and adapted The Little Mermaid, The Phantom of the Opera, Singing in the Rain and The Sound of Music for the Russian stage. Ivashchenko also continued to work actively in the song genre – both alone and in the company of Andrei Makarevich (included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the list of individuals-foreign agents), Roman Lugovykh, Irina Bogushevskaya and others. In fact, both bards did not give up their favorite work, but the first The duet gave a big solo concert for many years only in the fall of this year.

After such a pause, it was probably not difficult for the duo to gather a full house in the two-thousand-seat MDM hall. Many fans of Ivasey carried their love for their kind songs and ironic entertainers through decades – Ivashchenko and Vasiliev began performing together in 1979, and first performed at the Grushinsky Festival in 1986. But the resonance in social networks was unexpected. The song “We are not zeros,” written a year and a half ago and performed by a duet at MDM, was sent to each other on Facebook and Telegram almost more actively than the rhyming feuilletons of experienced coupletists like Semyon Slepakov.

Here are a few comments on the concert: “Not an ounce of falsehood, but only courage, humor, humanity and life”; “In our time, hearing what Aleksey Ivashchenko and Georgy Vasilyev sing and talk about is a priceless luxury”; “While the scraps of our rock and roll are slowly dying on the pavement, Ivashchenko and Vasilyev are raising the hall with a real anthem of resistance and human dignity.”

At the same time, a significant part of the concert “Ivasey” was performed in the absolutely traditional style of the national author’s song. This is a genre that requires unconditional loyalty to the textual “wink” characteristic of the distant 1980s, to puns like “dough song / protest songs”, rhymes like “it” – “shit” and a special kaespesh oil in vocal layouts, familiar from project “Songs of our century”. The usual hits of “Ivasey” are not the kind of satire that cuts from the shoulder, but rather the one that gently strokes the head. The cuteness and herbivory of the bard song as such, apparently, did not cause doubts among responsible comrades, on whose shoulders today lies an important mission – not to let the enemy enter the stage. Or these comrades were distracted for a second by something, obviously more harmful, completely foreign agents.

But the turning point in the show came when Georgy Vasiliev spoke about his hometown of Zaporozhye. It became completely clear that the concert was not started for the sake of a comeback of two elderly bards. This is a statement of strong, one might even say, courageous artists who are sick. In Internet discussions, some suspected Georgy Vasiliev that his tears during a monologue about Zaporozhye were fake, but, as the performer told a Kommersant correspondent, on the eve of the concert, he was sent a photo with a bombed-out house in the area where he lived 17 years of his life. After that, he simply could not talk about his homeland calmly.

Many of those who attended the concert write online that they came to it with the whole family. And it is clear that if teenagers sit in the hall and sing along to the songs of “Ivasey”, then this knowledge was inherited from older family members. But there is another circle, thanks to which the concert took place in principle, these are the donors who raised funds to organize the concert on a crowdfunding platform. 1895 contributions, total amount – 2.7 million rubles. Perhaps the willingness of donors to support Ivasey so powerfully and their position is even more important than the number of views on YouTube. An open conversation about today between two singer-songwriters turned out to be a “folk” project.

According to Georgy Vasiliev, after the concert, they were bombarded with offers of performances with Alexei Ivashchenko. However, none of them has been accepted. It was important for the duet not to earn money, but to speak out. And he spoke up.

And it can also be assumed that after this statement, the genre of the author’s song will again become relevant. Its obvious merits have not gone away. Voice, guitar, you can even without a microphone. In the concert hall, in the kitchen, in the woods by the fire. Nothing changed. The main thing is a confidential intonation and an honest word. It is only important that new artists appear in this genre who are able to take the baton – such as, for example, “Neobardy” or Igor Titov. A visual aid – here it is. 250k views and the counter keeps spinning.

Boris Barabanov