In my residential area (an incredibly unattractive socialist environment, complete urban blight, named “new construction” for the sake of sounding pretty) is now full of gossip about a maniac serial killer allegedly specializing in street peddlers of audio cassettes. This is a special category of youth. Most with round crew-cut heads and big ears, peddling their wares from morn till night in public places: mainly near markets, public transportation, or kiosks, each surrounded with battered loudspeakers emanating deafening hoarse sounds which most younger local residents call music, while a handful of aesthetic cranks wince and say crap.
And so word has it that there is a man riding in his car and shooting them down with his submachine gun right through the car window (no one knows what model). So peddling music, it seems, is getting to be a hazardous occupation as the number of riddled skulls and loudspeakers grows. On hearing this I was first tempted to heave a sigh of relief that it is happening at long last. But then I noticed that the “music” did not diminish and changed my mind.
This “music” is everywhere. The city is saturated with it. It assaults your eardrums downtown and in every suburb, in every cafe, bar, backyard, even out of town, in the lap of nature.
And to think that all this is happening in Halychyna, this land of lasting Ukrainian traditions, Easter eggs, and rushnyk embroidered towels, where Ukrainian is really spoken by most people. What is this country listening to and whom?
It looks like the much-advertised progress in our “young Ukrainian show business” has been destroyed by certain exalted TV hosts. In any case, one never hears any Ukrainian pop songs in public places. And this is not Russified Luhansk or Mykolaiv. This is Western Ukraine. Of course, the reason could be that our Ukrainian pop stars produce elite music, something incomprehensible to the local plebeians. But in the case of pop music the noblesse oblige principle is particularly true. This kind of music has to win over hearts and minds, spread over vast territories, collect huge audiences, and bring staggering profits.
Meanwhile, all this belongs to something else. For example, we are besieged by some obscure women’s group from someplace called Rybinsk in Yaroslavl oblast, which has for over a year been terrorizing no less effectively than the Bolsheviks our part of Central Europe with “what you want, what you want, you won’t get, you won’t get”. There is also a girl’s vinyl voice that has even longer been repeating “the wind blows from the sea” and adding, “It’s clearly not my destiny/You don’t love me/You just laugh at me...” with each line repeated to stick in memory, and, needless to say, in Russian.
Here I have almost a reverence for the author of such archetypal lyrics. These girls want love and all they get is – well, what can you expect from young people whose mentality was shaped by the archaic patriarchal criminal dormitory atmosphere, when the first year is marked by destructive sexual experiences and later ones were summed up so well by Pozayak as: “I want to love and be loved in return and they are all deceiving me”? Maybe the only correct answer is that same “what you want, you won’t get.”
I could not live without music. I grew at a time when the kind of music I liked was, to put it mildly, frowned upon. I made friends depending on what kind of music they listened to. Then we would listen to real music and together hate the official Soviet hit parade. In fact, we hated everything Soviet. This is why I have such a painful reaction to this street noise and even feel guilty pleasure about the anonymous avenger cutting down horse loudspeakers and round-headed peddlers with his machine gun, even though I know it is not true.
But perhaps things are following their natural course. Boys and girls of genuine village descent, now second or third-generation urban dwellers (against their parents’ and grandparents’ will) are trying to make up for their “simple origin” by indulging in the music which is now in vogue. Genetic codes are broken, authenticity forever lost, and no urban culture acquired. And the music in vogue comes from Russia, of course. Perhaps I should write an epigraph in lieu of an epilogue. Several lines from Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid about Cossacks singing songs, adding that most of those songs were Muscovite.






