Alina Simone
Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware
54 40' or Fight
By Jose Fritz
It was a new sensation. I was the only person in the room who had no idea what was going on. There was shouting in Russian both onstage and at the bar. A man on the corner barstool was yelling something over and over at Alina. She yelled back. It might have been profanity, racial epithets, or threats of violence, but he was satisfied with whatever she said last. Alina went on to play a full vigorous set accompanied by a full band including a particularly good guest violinist named Ljova Zhurbin.
She told me about this record over dinner when she was still touring on Placelessness. We were in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and she was doing an in store in about two hours. The sun was still up and that was conducive to nothing. She explained her love of Yanka Stanislavovna Dyagileva. It’s a strange feeling to outlive your idols as we spend our formative years identifying with them. We study and scrutinize them. We emulate and lionize them, and live vicariously through them. There is a strange sensation, even as an adult to outlive one of your idols, probably more so when they commit suicide. In the idolized, flaws are as vast as virtues.
It was foreign to me literally and figuratively. New ideas, new ways of expressing them, even with coaching, I could only pronounce those first two syllables: Yan-kuh. The idea was crazy. She was going to record an entire album of Yanka covers. I nodded a lot and ate my pad thai. The idea was eloquent, idealistic and beautiful.
The album had every possible obstacle ahead of it: Intellectual complexity, foreign language, a completely unknown set of covers and a deceased original artist. There were impediments here that I had never even heard of, never even imagined. I loved the idea and I wasn’t going to say anything to discourage her. It was possible, arduous but possible. I saw it fleshed to life less than a year later.
As lost as I was at the show, the record itself is both intimidating and engaging. There is not even a glimmer of an inkling of an idea of an imagined moment of hope that in the great expansive universe of possibilities I will fully understand it. I do not speak Russian, I know nothing of Soviet punk rock, nor do I have anything more than the faintest understanding of Russian culture. I go at this assuming that buried in it, there is that feeling I have always heard in her work. It’s wrapped tightly inside the hide of this unforeseen animal. Its unexpected horns of subtext, maligned gypsies fiddling, dejected cellos, and songs that sound like the rooms they are recorded in.
The album reminds me of a few dubbed cassettes a tape-trader in Luxembourg sent me. The hand-written insert listed a dozen bands whose names I can neither spell nor pronounce. But it was all there, the raw chords distorted only by poor fidelity, the exotic anger, and the familiar feeling youthful rebellion. That’s what it feels like listening to this record: the strangeness and its intrinsic struggle to understand why everybody loves something.
|
