Tell us your terrible nightmares. The meaning of the ATL song “Marabou”

An eleventh-grader was called to the blackboard to recite a poem by Osip Mandelstam. The girl was not prepared for the lesson, but she memorized the lyrics of her favorite rapper Oxxxymiron. I read the passage. And the teacher gave it an “A”! Either for resourcefulness, or, indeed, she mistook the rapper’s text for the work of the famous poet. We decided to see if our readers could distinguish the poems of great authors from the recitatives of slightly less great rap artists.

1 Above the earth, above the sky in the Universe in the darkness, an endless ray shines for a billion years...

Correct answer: Of course, not Mayakovsky! This is Casta.

2 Be a lace, a stone, And become a web: The empty chest of the sky is cut with a thin needle.

Correct answer: Of course, not Basta. This is Osip Mandelstam, “I Hate the Light...”.

3 Look, it’s all scattered. Where is fate, where in some places we ourselves, intentionally.

Correct answer: Caspian Cargo ft. IZReal, “Melt”, naturally! Akhmatova does not have a poem with this title at all.

4 Change, life. Change at least from outside to dance halls, to the Opera, to the water.

Correct answer: No, there was no tinting involved. Joseph Brodsky, “Why are we changing places again...”

5 In an ice tomb in the white dresses of a nymph, I fell asleep in a grave with a trunk in my arms.

Correct answer: Pharaoh, “Black Siemens”, of course. Lermontov could not write such a thing. With what other “trunk in an embrace”?

6 The trembling piano will lick the foam from its lips. This nonsense will tear you down, knock you down.

Correct answer: Syava is a very funny stage name. But still, this is Boris Pasternak, “The trembling piano will lick the foam from its lips...”

7 Stork Marabou, tell us your terrible nightmares. Make me laugh to death with rusty jokes from time to time.

Correct answer: No, not White, he didn’t have any “Stork”. This is ATL, "Marabou Stork".

8 Powerless feelings are so strange, frozen thoughts are so clear, and your lips are not desired, although eternally beautiful.

Correct answer: Noize MC (aka Ivan Aleksandrovich Alekseev), of course, also chooses a rhyme well. But this is still Nikolai Gumilyov, “I dreamed.”

9 This is my philosophy, To live on benefits until the end of my days, And not to say that I especially thought that there was only one utopia around me.

Correct answer: Well, it's simple! AK-47, “Philosophy”, of course.

10 Here you are, man, you have cabbage in your mustache. Somewhere, half-eaten, half-eaten cabbage soup; Here you are, woman, you are covered in thick white, You look like an oyster from the shells of things.

Correct answer: Well, of course, Vladimir Mayakovsky

YOUR RESULT:
Not bad. But, apparently, you are not very keen on rap and poetry.

YOUR RESULT:
Good result! Do you wake up to Basta and fall asleep to Pushkin?

Marabou (lat. Leptoptilos) is a genus of birds from the stork family, which includes three species. The name is of Arabic origin: the word marabout in this language refers to a Muslim theologian. Thus, the Arabs revere the marabou as a wise bird. On the eve of the album's release, in order to somehow brighten up the anticipation, Sergei decided to post its title theme "MARABU" on October 27th. The track was recorded with production from Dark Faders, and the cover for it is the same as for the entire album of the same name, which is the creation of Lupercal. PREMIERE!!

Chorus:

Stork Marabou, lead us to the path.
Past the hemp field, closer to the warmth of the sun.
Something may shoot in the forehead, but a harpoon is stuck in the heart.
In the quiet jungle, in the morning, my brothers and I will start shooting.

Stork Marabou, tell us your terrible nightmares.
Make you laugh until you die with rusty jokes.
Let's become the title characters in this jungle book.
Let's leave a thousand bookmarks, squinting a sly look.

After all, this is the well of life, and you will drown yourself here.
The sheets are wrinkled - that's it Vesica Piscis.*
They will help me open my eyes to all this bullshit.
And I will drown in it all, like in primordial mucus.

There's only her - all naked, spliff and cola.
Either it will calm you down, or it will float like hell.
Here we are pursued: either by a wild beast or by creatures of the myths of the Congo.
I shouldn’t walk out the door, but I feel bad without them.

Chorus:
Stork Marabou, lead us to the path.
Past the hemp field, closer to the warmth of the sun.
Something may shoot in the forehead, but a harpoon is stuck in the heart.
In the quiet jungle, in the morning, my brothers and I will start shooting.

The Marabou stork went on a trip, this is my Deep Dream.
All alone, among thousands of these doctrines.
Rise like the dead, you, rise up, you slackers!
Let this damn papyrus rub blisters on his fingers.

This is a psychotropic potion.
The letters are links to an alternative dimension.
I am an intermediary between the finger and the bullet, the temple is the last.
I felt like I was grabbing the Ferris Wheel.

We are pouring handfuls of cosmic dust into black holes;
And this pile of books is my personal CPH-4.
Loughcraft and Irvine Welsh will eventually rub off my baldness.
Here's the whole Sun for you, and you - try it, eat it!

* Vesica Piscis- Vesica piscis - a figure formed by the intersection of two circles of equal radius, superimposed so that the circumference of one is at the center of the other. Translated from Latin it means fish bladder.

ATL - Marabou.
ALBUM "MARABU".
October, 2015.

There are people who look down on rap, saying that it is a genre for those who don’t know anything about good quality music. But, as in any direction, there are mediocrities and talents in hip-hop. Rap is no longer the music of black people and most likely it is the music of the next decade. But a musician should not be a big and complex poet. However, the genre has its own masters of words. We will talk about ATL and its track “Marabou”.

ATL's contribution to rap is impressive. For some, these words would have sounded comical a few years ago, but not today. Against the backdrop of what is happening in Russian rap now, ATL is a bar of gold. He personifies the real Chuvash rap, with magical rhymes, a unique interesting flow... It’s impossible to listen to the end of the track right away, you want to constantly rewind, trying to catch all the references and meaning. All these ethnic motifs and notes of shamanism seem to put you in a trance.

First verse

In the track “Marabou” the outlines of real life are barely visible under the system of images and metaphors. ATL presents the listener with Russian drama with the sauce of existentialism. There are literary references throughout the song. The Marabou stork is most often mentioned from the novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh “Nightmares of the Marabou Stork” (1995). In the novel, the image of the carrion stork Marabou appears in the hero’s nightmares and drives him crazy. The symbolic oxymoron of this image is obvious. If the stork in world culture is a symbol of family and prosperity, then Welsh, in the best traditions of postmodernism, gives it a negative and gloomy meaning, choosing as the hero not a stork familiar to everyone, but an eater of dead bodies. This species of stork got its name from the Arabic word for “sage” - marabout. This is how the writer turns philistine values upside down. Taking this mocking image as a basis, in the first verse ATL hints at his own fearlessness, “terrible nightmares” are funny to him. However, remembering Welsh's ending, he uses the phraseology "laugh yourself to death", which takes on new meanings in relation to the Marabou stork.

Stork Marabou, tell us your terrible nightmares.
Make me laugh to death with rusty jokes from time to time.

Next, the author talks about the geometric figure Vesica piscis, which is a symbol of the intersection of the world of spirit and the world of matter, as well as the beginning of creation. In his opinion, from birth you need to completely immerse yourself in the “well of life” and take everything from it, and books will help you figure out “all this crap.”

Second verse

The second verse is a kind of ode to books, writers, words. ATL skillfully veiled his love of literature in expressive means and explained that it is a “psychotropic potion” for him: “And this pile of books is my personal CPH-4.” CPH-4 is a mysterious substance that gradually activates absolutely all the capabilities of the brain (the film Lucy). The author compares literature with the Sun, hinting at the immensity and greatness of this type of art, which feeds life on Earth with its light.

There are situations after which you literally need to put yourself back together. And the track “Marabou” does not at all carry a motivating and positive attitude. Here, rather, it’s about the futility of being in the midst of a post-apocalypse, about the fact that things won’t get any better, and there’s no need, in principle. The text often contains plays on words, usually associated with a double meaning: their usual understanding is enriched with slang subtext, implying one or another mention of narcotic substances (“swallowed a Ferris wheel”; “let’s leave thousands of bookmarks, squinting a sly look”, etc.). This suggests that the author associates art with the highest pleasure, distorting the vulgar philistine reality. To accept this life, achieve harmony and merge with it, you don’t need to look for dubious bookmarks; it’s better to do them by reading books by outstanding science fiction writers, whose imagination is transmitted to you through taut nerves. Thus, the word will never die, books will live forever, and we can always turn to them to find our path. This is the meaning of the track.

Chorus:

ATL - Marabou.
ALBUM "MARABU".
October, 2015.