So, the post I desperately want to make is a Maneskin post about Damiano's gender identity stuff and also various fun clips I've found comparing his early days as Your Neighborhood Frat Bro with his current Do You Have a Moment To Talk About the Kyriarchy? antics.
But I will resist making that post for now, and instead make a post about a DIFFERENT 20-year-old artist who makes music not-in-English and does a lot of LGBT content! Alyona Shvets (sometimes spelled Alena Shvets as that's technically the correct Russian transliteration)
Alena is a Russian singer-songwriter who defines her own music as "post-bard". As someone who grew up on Russian bard music, I think the definition makes a lot of sense, but a lot of her stuff can also be classified as a lot of other genres.
Mostly, for me, she reminds me of the Gen Z version of
Zemfira, for the Eastern Europeans among you. Certainly in terms of core audience and the themes of the songs. (This is not a bad thing! Zemfira was such an unusual phenomenon in the musical landscape back then, I'm so glad there's more of that kind of thing for a new generation.)
Anyway, I became aware of Alena Shvets because she popped up in a fanvid compilation for "Major Grom: Plague Doctor" (a truly EXCELLENTLY executed Russian comic book movie that will be released on Netflix later this week). One of her songs played for less than a minute, but the voice was so haunting and distinct I immediately paused to look up the singer.
I discovered that Shvets is 20 years old, a St Petersburgh native, a singer-songwriter whose strength is her lyrics and the catchy tunes of her songs (they're all fairly simple and benign but I found after listening I couldn't get them out of my head for DAYS because they were just so catchy).
By accident, I stumbled on her the day she released her most ambitious video yet, for her song about two girls falling in love. The video is very explicit about this romance, and though the song ends in heartbreak, the video ends optimistically.
Which... let me remind you Putin made it illegal to portray LGBT anything in any cultural product aimed at minors quite some time ago, and Shvets' video is explicitly about two girls in school, and her audience is obviously quite young. That doesn't mean the cops are coming for her tomorrow, but it does mean that she's putting herself out there and doing something quite brave that a lot of indie artists would shy away from, especially when it comes to making a queer love story the focus of a major video/single.
(For those playing at home, yes I do find it oddly satisfying that Shvets is doing this considering Zemfira was/is a queer woman as well, but at the time couldn't/didn't feel comfortable actually writing songs explicitly addressed to a woman, but used gender-neutral lyrics instead.)
Anyway, Shvets is very much the typical gen z musician in terms of business model: by age 20 she's put out 5 (!!!) albums, most of them relatively short and the songs themselves are usually between 2-3 minutes. This makes her work extra friendly for things like Spotify and Youtube, and is something a lot of young artists choose these days as a model.
(Maneskin, for example, who are in the same age category, are very unusual because they got signed by a major label early on, when they barely had any original material. They didn't have to do what most artists do these days, which is hustle to make it big on social to get noticed by a label. This is why their albums are far more traditional in format.)
Wow, I've been writing for ages and haven't gotten to showing you any music yet. Let's get on that!
I'm gonna start with the song that originally drew my attention, because the sound of her voice captivated me, so I have good reason to think it's appealing even without understanding the lyrics.
The song is called Ugly Eyes (Nekrasivye Glaza).
Click to view
The lyrics, which are lovely but not her best work, translate to (please note this is my translation and it's more literary than literal so you know, disclaimers):
I have ugly eyes
An ugly soul
Don't ask me to deny it
Blue ice in my stare
Ashen and angry
You can see my pain
By spring I'll thaw again
I have ugly eyes
They look directly into hell
And glimmer with a red spark
Come here, I'll introduce you to Satan
Would you like wine or water?
We'll be glad to have you,
Honestly
That's not the whole song, obviously, but it's the first few verses. Isn't her voice just HAUNTING? There's something about it that makes you sit up and listen. And I love her cutesy thing of singing these sweet, fluffy tunes about having ugly eyes that stare directly into hell.
In a way she also reminds of Billie Eilish, another young artist with dark themes that don't necessarily correspond to "dark" music and use a lot of catchy pop motifs.
OK, now let's do one of her songs that has a fun video! This one is called Wine and Cigarettes (Vino i Sigarety).
Despite her videos regularly having millions of views (this one has almost 5 mil) they all look like they were shot but three of her friends for a budget of about 3$. This is not a complaint, but a disclaimer, because I think an artist at the stage that she's at, if she was working in English, would invest more into videos at that point?
But Shvets' aesthetic is the indi, DIY, me-and-my-guitar thing, and so any "faults" seem like echoes of authenticity and earnestness and lack of pretension (at least imo). I mean also videos are expensive and I'm sure she's not swimming in funds! But she has 5 albums, millions of views and before COVID seemed to have a flourishing career of playing gigs around Russia, so. She's not THAT small time either.
Anyway! I love this video because it's what we in film school used to know as making a zero-dollars budget go a LONG way. This entire video is just one angle, just one location, just Alena sitting in front of the same background, and yet it has so much story, such a powerful message, the visuals are just brilliant.
You don't really need to understand the song to understand the video, it speaks for itself, but I'll put a translation below anyway.
Click to view
Wine and cigarettes
is all we have left
Strangling each other in the bath
and relieving our fatigue
My dream - your embrace,
My space - a hematoma,
Slam me into the wall to keep me home.
Pain, fear, a kiss,
And 12 bullets in my chest.
A cherry tree will lay
Roots in me.
I'll put my radio on the balcony,
Let other people hear us, see us,
Hate us.
Wine and cigarettes
is all we have left
Strangling each other in the bath
and relieving our fatigue
My dream - your embrace,
My space - a hematoma,
Slam me into the wall to keep me home.
Snow, suddenly, in the room,
Barefoot on the ceiling,
My precious - hit me on the face.
I'll definitely deserve the blood,
More delicious than red wine.
You believe, you know, you love.
So, obviously the song is about domestic violence, but what I think is interesting about the video, aside from how effectively it gets the message across through suggestion and metaphor, is how there are so many nuances and details wrapped up in it. The fact that she's wearing a rainbow-colored coat in the beginning, which a man she loves then pulls off of her. That she has to give up her music, her make up, her colorful hair.
It's just a really, really fantastic example of what can be done with very little to make a video powerful and meaningful. I will also say that she was NINETEEN when this song and video came out. NINETEEN.
OK, moving on to a more fun, upbeat song, less of a ballad. Basically if you want just a fun rock song from her, this is it. Once I heard it I couldn't get it out of my head for days.
So, this one is called Killing Machine (Mashina Dlya Ubiystv). I think the video for it is kind of silly, but it's more fun than listening to the song while staring at a static screen I guess, so here it is:
Click to view
I'm a killing machine,
Don't go out late,
Think twice, stay safe.
Cats walk quietly, so better
Look behind you.
I'm a master at hurting scrumbags,
Ow, oh - don't whine.
I'm a killing machine,
Three of you will go in,
But you'll walk out alone.
I'll tear your heart out,
Pour gasoline inside,
Maybe then boys will
Be able to love.
What can you do,
when you just want to kill?
Girls gonna fight-fight-fight,
Girlfriend, cover me,
Who did you say hurt you?
Night will cover, daylight will forgive,
Our business is revenge,
So no one ever saw him again.
I'm a killing machine,
Three of you will go in,
But you'll walk out alone.
I'll tear your heart out,
Pour gasoline inside,
Maybe then boys will
Be able to love.
What can you do,
when you just want to kill?
Get out, you're done for,
The heat is on,
I'm putting on my killer outfit.
Bright make up, crop top,
Yeah I know, I'm fit,
In these bright-bright blue jeans.
OK, at this point I'd like to pause because I'm showing all of Shvets' more "hardcore" songs, when in reality she also has a lot of other stuff! Like a song called
A Boy From St Petersburgh which is just a cute catchy love song about a boy she met and is trying to find again.
She also has the wonderfully titled
Read Books, Use Profanity which has the chorus "read books / use profanity / so few things in this world / are a genuine pleasure" lol it's just lovely and fluffy and wonderful.
But now I'm going to show you more of her queer songs. She's basically written all kinds of songs about love, breakups, etc, some addressed explicitly to men, some explicitly to women. I put her albums on shuffle on Spotify and honestly maybe 10-20% of her songs are things I end up skipping over, everything else is just SO GOOD. But I'm very much a lyrics person, so no guarantees on what listening to her is like if you don't understand Russian. Aside from this post, I mean, where I show you specific songs with context.
So, here's an older song of hers called They Burn Witches Here (Vedm U Nas Szhigayut) which lyrically turned out to be TOTALLY DIFFERENT than what I was expecting. It's basically a Lesbian Breakup Song lol in which Alena sings to a girl she's no longer with.
(This song was written when she was 18 and has almost 7 million views! I just find that amazing.)
Click to view
Oh, how could you exchange me,
Oh god, how to understand you
Your blue eyes - miracles, I'm
Dying for the third day in a row,
Whoever said you can't do that, leave
You're a disease, you exist,
I don't, you scratch yourself and
Crawl towards the light.
Have mercy on me, have mercy on me,
Girl-sunrise, a drop of nectar, a drop of poison.
The streets are on fire, the streets are on fire,
They burn witches here, but they must have
Forgotten about you.
They burn witches here, but they must have
Forgotten about you.
I see in my dreams,
A beautiful death,
Where you burn,
With a blue flame.
Your blue eyes - miracles, I'm
Dying for the third day in a row,
Whoever said you can't do that, leave
You're a disease, you exist,
I don't, you scratch yourself and
Crawl towards the light.
For a change of pace, here's Alena
performing this song live, so you can get a sense of her fanbase, who literally sing along to every word of this song lol
Finally, we arrive at Shvets' latest video, which reached a million views in a week.
The song is called Two Girls (Dve Devochki), and while I love the song, and I think the video has better production values than any of her previous stuff, the story is pretty predictable.
The song is from the POV of a girl who falls in love with her friend, but the people around them pressure the other girl to break up with the protagonist to fit in and be "normal". In the video things end a bit differently, with a more optimistic ending.
Click to view
Yes, I know I'm not allowed to love you,
I understand, but I can't forget your hands,
It's hot under the clothes, we'll see each other again,
Two weeks, the countdown has begun.
Your mom hates me, tells me I'm
A mistake, kicks me out of the apartment,
I fly down the stairs with a smile, I'll
Get high on something, maybe won't wake up,
But I'll never give you up.
Want me to tattoo your name on me?
With tree branches on top?
The world is so cruel, if it senses
Love between two girls.
Hearts bursting in unison,
We'll tie two ribbons in the park,
More powerful than the law or the forces of evil,
Will be these two forbidden girls.
Anyway, if you've made it this far and you'd like me to translate the full text of the song (since in the video the plot goes beyond this point) let me know!
I hope you enjoyed this short tour through the works of a small indie artist from Russia writing tons of queer content and explicitly putting it on screen in these uncertain times. And I hope the catchy music got to you, because it certainly got to me!
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