„Ničen’ka“, „ričen’ka“ und die Division „Galizien“: Ukrainische Tracks auf russischen Pop- und Metal-Alben

Abstract

This essay offers an analyzis of Russian pop and metal-music and its specific use of Ukrainian language on Russian albums. On the album “Brillianty” for example, released by the Russian girl-band “VIA Gra” in 2005, the second track entitled “Oy, hovoryla chysta voda” as opposed to the other tracks on this album is performed completely in Ukrainian. By means of the lyrics and the visual presentation per video, the song in general evokes the traditional Russian clichés of a simple-minded, bucolic Ukraine as opposed to a more elaborated and higher form of Russian culture. Since the video initially has been a part of the musical “Sorochinskaya yarmarka” based on Nikolai Gogol’s story with the same title, the use of Ukrainian literature in Gogol’s novel and its very begin are compared to “Oy, hovoryla chysta voda” and also to the specific visualisation of the lyrics in the video. The lyrics (which were in fact written by Dianna Gol’dè) are also compared to Ukrainian folk-songs. Next to “VIA Gra”, the Kaliningrad Metal-band “Holdaar” in 2011 also made use of one single track in Ukrainian on the album “Deti Sumerek Bogov”. As the fourth track on this album, “Holdaar” performs a historical song of the Fourteenth Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS and puts this track amidst other Russian songs which are based on the right-wing ideology of NS-black metal (NSBM). In order to demonstrate that the division seems to be used in Galicia to create a specific form of regionalism which deliberately separates Western Ukrainian historical memory from Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine, the song of the division is linked to several examples of Western Ukrainian historical memory and literature. Part four of the essay finally turns to the last track on the album “Popsa” released by “Payushchiye trusy” in 2009 and to “Net nichego khuzhe”, the final track on “VIA Gra’s” album “Brillianty”, and demonstrates that Ukrainian language has not necessarily to play the role of the simple-minded subaltern on Russian pop-albums. The last (Ukrainian) song on “Popsa”, for example, in a witty manner makes fun of the various PR strategies to gain commercial success in the pop-business. “VIA Gra” in its turn in “Net nichego khuzhe” cooperates with the Ukrainian hip-hop-band “TNMK” to present a mixed Russian-Ukrainian song which depicts uniform TV-entertainment in a most dystopian way.