Tragic city review. LSP “Magic City”: album review

Imagine being read a fairy tale for adults, in which the main character has everything that the average modern young man could dream of? Money, girls, promiscuity, lots of alcohol, forbidden hobbies, eternal parties... But for some reason our hero, despite his carefree and relaxed lifestyle, seems unhappy. And gradually, everything that you considered to be a wonderful story about non-stop fun, one might say, almost imperceptibly turns to tragedy, the fall of the image of a party girl and a reveler, his transformation into an adult, sensible person to whom this whole circus has become alien. This is exactly what happens in The Tragic City. If the previous album (Magic city) is a story about life without love, but with all the beauties and failures that are encountered everywhere by young guys, mainly guys aged 16 to 25, then Tragic city is the embodiment of the growing up of the lyrical hero LSP, the road to the light, to the ability to love, to value not only sex and money, no! The bucks are fading into the background. Nobody says that the hero of LSP refuses the clubs and bars that are familiar to him and his circle; sits at home and drinks lemonade alone, thinking about the one and only girl who has carved a niche in his heart. He has booze, whores and so on, but from what side do we look at it now?

Review of tracks from the album Tragic city: primitive or postmodern message?

We flew in the clouds like Pushkin...

“Balls, beauties, lackeys, cadets!” Whether 200 years ago or today, young people love fun, an idle lifestyle in all its forms! At that time, the great Russian poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin became famous not only for his great poetic and writing talent, but also for noisy celebrations with alcohol, ladies and duels. The very first track in “Magic City” - “Crawl” - makes it clear that the hero’s mood is still the same - drinking and blowing, all this is a long-past stage, it is powerless against him, but it gives inspiration and allows him to forget about problems. This man’s motto is “grandmothers, women and games are all you need!” If in “Crawl” the theme of drinking and sleepless nights in clubs is clearly expressed, in the next composition the theme of sex, corrupt women is raised, we are talking about ways to plug a hole in the heart.

Analysis of LSP tracks “Coin” and “Dengineproblem”

“Coin” advertises the hero’s attitude towards girls - no love, no feelings, no worries - and it doesn’t matter who he sleeps with, the role is played by a coin flying into the air. Yes, our hero can be understood, there is no love at all in his life, it needs to be replaced with something. If substances and alcohol don't help, sex will certainly help!

If you start listening to the album and end with these two songs, you might think that this is the typical work of a new school performer - fashion trends, club rhythm, at first glance, tracks that do not carry much meaning... The third work in the album also begins - “Money Problem” . The track is a kind of turning point in the album, a point of no return. Everything we talked about earlier depends on one factor - money. Without money there would be no drinking, no models, no sense of superiority, no fun!

"I had a problem - I loved her,
Money appeared - I forgot about it"

This quote personifies Oleg’s attitude towards finances and determines his position in life.

As the hero believes, money cannot betray, lie, or abandon in a difficult situation, it does not cause difficulties, it helps to overcome them. Despite the rather selfish message, you can see that Oleg doesn’t mind money and girls for his friends:

"I am the slave of the golden calf,
And I’m happy to buy everything my brother wants...” (Money problem)

“My guys are here, they are hungry,
They want whores - I've got it!
Which means they also have
And this is my code of honor
And I take two, although I could take six!” (Coin)

But the second part of the track allows you to think about the meaning of the above! The hero comes to the conclusion that for him money is becoming higher than creativity, higher than ideas. Two elements fight in his soul - money and songs. Oleg remembers that once upon a time he was happy and had empty pockets. It would seem that in the first verse we already heard his position - money makes his life better. But, upon reflection, the hero comes to the conclusion that they only help him abstract from the harsh realities: his fame and earnings have made many of his friends hypocrites, people literally stick to LSP for the money, and girls now sleep with him not for his sake, but for the sake of in order to also grab a piece of the pie. Money kills the thirst for adventure, adventure and searching for something new in this world; there is nothing to dream about - everything is available.

“When the whole world is open to me,
But he’s not so interesting anymore...”

As a result, in order to earn money, you need to work hard. But the more you work, the less time you have to spend, the less time you have to live and spend time with loved ones. But despite all the disadvantages, the hero loves his money, because he cannot do without it.

Thus, Oleg moves exterioribus ad interior (from external to internal), talking about the frailty of existence, the meaninglessness of fun, telling us about the bright side of his character’s soul. We see the hero not only as a debauchee, but also as a romantic, a reasonable person, although sinful, but at the same time not as lost to society as it might have seemed before. However, behind all dreams lies one truth - we are all mortal, sooner or later we will come to God and repent of our sins, although this is not easy. And if before everything was rosy, various kinds of vices beckoned, now I want simple human happiness and a feeling of freedom from obligations.

Analysis of the track “Body”: the poetics of life’s wanderings

The fourth work on the album, “Body,” found a response among listeners for a reason. The performer allows us to dream, to get lost in our own judgments about life, about our attitude towards it. It is worth noting that the song is very poetic, full of beautiful epithets and metaphors, which creates an atmosphere of abstraction and allows you to immerse yourself in the depths of the soul. It is noteworthy that LSP touches on the topic of faith in God:

“Or come to God after all,
Don't be embarrassed by a hole in your sock..."

Sounds ambiguous, right? Either believe, or die, or take the first step, taking your will into a fist, and admit its existence, or be prepared to die and answer for your sins. Oleg mentioned the Lord more than once in the album and discussed his role in life, but at this stage the hero had not yet come to a final answer.

Reasoning leads to the idea that the body is not made of iron, all the vices passed through ultimately affected one’s health in one way or another, the past makes itself felt - what brings pleasure becomes just a bad habit. For the sake of these habits, we cheat, we spend money on them, so that in the end... We just die. The moral is simple: as a result of whatever it is, we will all end up in the grave; before death we are all equal. But when and how? Will we make it all in time? And even if we do manage to do it, does it matter to anyone?

With these thoughts, the main character decides to leave the Magic City, bored with its monotony, fornication and the absence of at least something sacred. It's time to get on the right path and clear up the mess you've made!

“Who will help? - The devil knows!
Maybe God..."

The last Sunday in the old way, the last time repeating ordinary entertainment and the full realization that they have simply become boring.

New Chapter: Labyrinth of Reflections

Many people remember the feeling of first love, the feeling of blissful ignorance, anticipation and lightness. It seems there is no person who has never fallen in love. Our hero is no exception. Previously, the thought had never crossed his mind that he wanted to get to know the girl better, to study her inner world! Who would have thought, but we see excitement, fear of losing a person, longing not for someone’s shape and skills in bed, but for the soul. Happiness, as it turned out, is not in sex, but in love. Here it is, a plug for a heart that has a hole in it. Love has taken possession of the character so much that he is ready to give up everything for this girl, but not all at once, because they know each other so little.

Analysis of the track “White Dance”

As in romantic films, time passes quickly, moments pass unnoticed, the old is forgotten and the new comes. Before the hero even blinks an eye, he is already dancing the White Dance at his own wedding, happily declaring that this is love! And you don’t need a crowd of guests around, there are those closest to you, and it’s better to share your happiness with them. Either out of happiness, or according to the good old tradition, Oleg got drunk again with his bride. In this state, the past makes itself felt - he calls his wife “his sweet girl Sasha” (a reference to the track “I'm Bored of Living”). A struggle flares up in the heart again between the romantic, kind feelings associated with his wife, and with the lust and passion of that sweet lady who charmed Oleg so long ago, struck him to the core, but got lost among the rest, almost the same “one-night stands.” So Sasha remains just a ghost, unattainable and left in the past, completely lost because of the ring on her ring finger.

My life isn't worth a manicure: "Trap" and "Another Day"

And it seems like this is happiness, love, young people, wedding, diamonds, romance - all the cream of true love! But they, unfortunately, are mercilessly mixed with the strong coffee of everyday life, quarrels and disputes. Now our hero is no longer loved, he is a bastard and a scoundrel, in a word, garbage. The wife thinks too much about herself and puts herself above her husband. Is this what Oleg wanted? Hell no! A stamp in a passport really changes everything, time puts everything in order, shows who is who. He recognized her completely; she was not his wife and a beautiful girl whom he wanted to know; on the contrary, she was a hypocritical whore and a fool. This is how relationships collapse, because imaginary love turned out to be just love.

So our character leaves home to distract himself, unwind and wash away the burden of family life, “The under-poet leaves his wife.”

To put himself in order and forget negative emotions, Oleg comes to the Moulin Rouge, where, it turns out, there are also girls who can capture someone’s heart with just one dance. A parallel is drawn between admiration for the spiritual - that is, the inner world of a person and external attractiveness - it was this that served as bait for the character who despaired of his beloved. An equally important topic is raised - a girl who sells her body for money is unlikely to believe in someone’s love and reciprocate it. They don’t say warm words to such people - their mission is different. They only let the man know that he is not so bad and is capable of much. They tell them their deepest secrets and desires, share their experiences, but who confesses their love to them? Even if we put this fact aside, courtesans will not give up their craft for the sake of love; a man in their eyes loses morality. As a result, the character still remains with his wife, despite his prejudices and the understanding that their relationship has become a regular routine, a monotonously continuing fall from a cliff.

“We will one day wake up with no one, among dead people, dead ideas...”

Analysis of the track “End of the World”

The morning of the next day was not supposed to bring anything new. Everything should have gone according to plan, if not for the damn cell phone that woke me up in the morning. And if yesterday the end of the world was approaching in life together, today is a harsh reality, this day will be the last for humanity. In a critical situation, love awakens again in the souls of the hero and his passion, seemingly having already left their couple. Against the backdrop of flying saucers and shootouts, you no longer want to think about everyday problems, about boredom, you just want to spend the last hours of your life together. How would you spend the last 24 hours? Oleg made his choice in favor of feelings, and this is a big step on his part. At the beginning of the album, we saw a fashionable guy, whom the news of the end of the world would prompt to think about another binge, and one the likes of which the world has never seen before and will never see again. The main resident of the city of tragedies had his priorities completely changed; under the threat of inevitable death, this man finally realized what he really was like.

Analysis of the track “Spit into Eternity”: which LSP will remain at the end of the world?

“You can take my money! –
For me this is a small thing.
You can take my women! —
You won't take my courage.
You can take my goals
If you know what to do with them,
You can't do it alone -
Catch this spit of mine into eternity!”

It doesn’t matter to Oleg how much money he has, what kind of women he has, etc. - the essence is the same - after leaving this world, he needs to leave some kind of mark in order to be remembered! You can’t take money and women to the afterlife, you can’t achieve goals after death, you can leave something behind, even a small spit. I also want to be different from the rest, not to look like anyone and show my individuality: “My poem in black space seems so white...”

The hero admits that his lifestyle was previously irrational, rather even a dead end:

"I got lost in three pines,
I’ll call them Pussy, Money, Weed...”

And life is too short to give it to these three old acquaintances, it will not do honor, will not give honor and respect, and will hardly lead to merit. And what happiness comes from this?

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Three years ago, the mainstream of the Russian hip-hop scene, which had already noticeably expanded and absorbed everything that was fashionable and relevant, could hardly boast of its authenticity. We had trap in Russian, and battle rap with grime, which were popularized by immigrants, and cloud, and rap rock, and even some echoes of hardcore, but there was really nothing “domestic” in it except the language. Hip-hop in the country was divided into two sections: the insipid conjuncture and the heavy rap of marginalized people from the hinterland about Russian reality (of course, sometimes done with great talent). But after that very year 2015, rap in Russia finally became independent and began to develop according to its own rules. Rappers began to appear who were no longer shy about experimenting and crossing different genre (and subgenre) boundaries, who had learned to be inspired and not copy, who had created their own syllable and “language”, and not just Russified fashionable overseas words, without losing the understanding of the general public, and even on the contrary, they are in constant dialogue with her. All this largely applies to the Belarusian duo LSP, who make conceptual music at the intersection of electronics, rock and rhythm and blues.

Over the course of several years, LSP created their own separate musical universe, where there is a cute girl Sasha, there is a landfill where bullets are looking for boyfriends, there is a strip club, a brothel, a bar, cruel cocktails, brunettes, brown-haired women - everything the current lyrical hero needs to isolate himself from the rest of the world and forget. All these characters and locations remind themselves again and again and grow and change along with their author and his views on life. “Tragic City,” as you might guess from the title, is a continuation of the ideas and history of “Magic City,” so the same questions are asked on the new album, but Oleg answers them in a completely different way. The hero understands that it is impossible to run far from the past, and money is not a panacea for all problems and it is impossible to patch up all the holes with it, just like with alcohol, which is why the author’s apathy and idiosyncrasy towards life become more and more tangible in the lyrics from project to project, and the most positive and “bright” song in terms of sound is dedicated to death and the end of the world.

Acid synths and sparse hi-hats, combined with live electric guitar and saxophone parts, give the project a special charm. Synthwave influences and a jazz background allow you to create very colorful arrangements that complement and exaggerate the overall message of the tracks, and the use of overdriven guitar helps to give the compositions additional tension. The symbiosis of retrowave, jazz saxophone and pop-rock groove, painstaking, literally filigree work on sound, bold experiments - all this takes LSP music to a fundamentally new level and alienates it from the general rap movement in the country.

Less than two years have passed, but a lot has changed. A quarrel with Twitter essayist Stepan Karma, who voiced the intro to the previous album, a loud scandal with Booking Machine and Oksimiron - all this now has no meaning and does not have particularly negative consequences, this is only part of the story that helped the group reach a new level, much more rethink and record the best album in your discography. Any magic is followed by an inevitable tragedy, and if “Magic City” is “music for strip clubs, where it will never play,” then “Tragic City” is music for sobering-up stations, where it will never save anyone.

Our editor performs an unusual experiment when listening to “Magic City” and shares his impressions of the album

How are album reviews usually written? The first time I listened, I seemed to understand everything, created a “new text”, turned on, at best, the same album for the background, in a little worse – jazz radio in iTunes, and sit there, tapping out.

For some reason it didn’t work out that way with “Magic City,” and I decided to strike with cavalry from the flank, namely: to devote one day to each track from the album. You can’t listen to it all day long, of course, but you can’t turn on anything else - you listen, you think, you type in notes, these are the rules. So, 11 days = 11 tracks.

How do I see the lyrical hero of this album? He is in a foreign city, he has a minimum of money, so, some crumpled and greasy fifty dollars in the pocket of jeans drenched in coffee from a gas station on the highway. He didn’t sleep for a long time, ate whatever he could, but this practically doesn’t bother him - but where to go, and, most importantly, why is not entirely clear.

And suddenly he hears this “Hey, guy! Hey Hey!". The owner of this voice is a sort of Stan Shunpike from Harry Potter, a bus conductor for wizards in trouble. It seems like you were just sitting on the curb, I beg your pardon, the curb, of course, and had absolutely no idea where to go - and then the meaning itself finds you. If for the young wizard the meaning was in the Leaky Cauldron bar, where some dirty Minister of Magic was waiting for him, then for our hero all the most secret things are hidden behind the doors of Magic City. Let's follow him, please.

The center of attention of any strip club is definitely The Pole. I can't help but notice the truly wonderful entomological parallels: crickets, bees and drones dance around a pole that rubs the rough work calluses on her hands. The track could fit into the outline of the plot I proposed (of course, it won’t be possible to cram all the songs into it) as a kind of afterword shown at the beginning - here he is, the hero, who has fallen in love with this beauty, lies in a rented apartment, which she pays for, and eats that what she brings home.

The lyrical hero of the album, as for me, has a rather cool attitude towards material things - no, if they give you a lot of money, he takes it with pleasure, because it can be exchanged for a bunch of cool things: booze, girls, pills, throw it under a pole, in the end! Put it into an account and live off the interest? Perfect! But that very “Something else,” which most likely still means some intangible benefits, worries the hero much more. What is this dignity? Honor? Principles?

It’s a pity that, as the classic wrote, “Principles are the kind of thing that cannot be fried in butter and served with mashed potatoes.” Probably, if a person who had never listened to LSP asked me to explain in one track what kind of music this is, I would choose “Something Else”.

The world of this album is not gloomy hopelessness, there is no grave cold here, there is no need to call Bombadil. Perhaps there are not many options for spending leisure time, perhaps those who should like you cannot stand you. A car, a wedding, tables arranged in the letter “P” - why would the hero do such things, out of respect for the third volume of Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary, or what?

The beat beats hard, friends are nearby, the arrows are spinning in circles, which means “everything is OK with me” - I predict that the audience will shout this entire text, and not just the choruses.

“Magic City” is the same American music made in Russian, and not done in a shameful or naive manner.”

I’ll try to explain: very often, when domestic performers try to do the notorious “Americanism”, it turns out somehow pathetic - KVN, not music. Here, perhaps, first of all, due to the theme, you believe the artist - yes, this is really his life, what surrounds him, he just presents it with a sauce of irony, sarcasm and self-confidence. By the way, about her - how do you like the thinly veiled comparison of your own penis with one of the wonders of the world: “And I invite you to the promenade in my hanging garden”?

Oh, well, yes, something needs to be said about the disadvantages! Not about the instrumentals - you need to talk about them with the beatmakers who made this album - but about what you didn’t like about the release.

Well, okay, let's say this: although the album is listenable, in principle, as a whole (said by a person who listened to the track for 11 days, ahem, yes, you can take it at his word), but sometimes it is mainly the artist’s charm that makes you listen to the end. What else? Okay, let's compare it to "Hangman" if you want - maybe "Magic City" is inferior to it. OK, I can give a rather strange argument in defense of my today’s ward: “Hangman” includes only 8 tracks - throw out 3 songs from “Magic City” that you don’t like (I won’t scrape more together even if I wanted to), and you won’t get less potent release. Yes, that’s right, I’m provoking and I want to argue with you, I won’t hide it. On the other hand, I can add that 11 songs on a disc is almost an ideal album formula, as proven by “Boombox”. Well, I’m simply not interested in pounding the waters in a mortar once again on the topic “LSP=Future”, sorry, I’ll leave this to the experts, especially since Oleg was inspired by more than one Future, that’s obvious.

My favorite track of the 11 is “Biggie”, the day I listened to it I was filled with energy, vigor and glee. In general, one gets the feeling that on almost the entire album Oleg reads/sings with a mockingly condescending smile, as if hinting that you still won’t fully understand all of me. And in “Biggie,” I hear him explain this condescension: “I listened to Marley, I read books, I wrote rhymes, I listened to Biggie,” while his peers were interested in “bottles” and bottles. That is why the author is smart, well-read, erudite, developed and has the right to look at the world a little down.

The song has a samurai detachment and readiness for death (Did you also remember “Ghost Dog”?), and this is really captivating.

The world of LSP is at the same time hopeless, crazy, and charming. Lies, Passions, Vices. I would consider it a crime not to paraphrase Nabokov here, therefore: “L.S.P. - the tongue takes three steps, then hitting the palate, then resting on the teeth, then rising up again.”

Since we all heard “Madness” earlier, and I put it off until last, a million views were already putting a nice dent in my pocket; a “decision, decision-ee” was made to go to a nearby tavern and try everything there that sprite is involved in the preparation.

Drunk bartenders woke me up.