The beauty. Zemfira.


Zemfira is the most beautiful music ever created during this period of russian pop. Others may arise you, entertain you, she enthralled you. She purify your mind, until the only thing that stays is a still spirit, warm and translucent. “What a stillness, I am alone, Rain goes on, the bubles on a pavement, I`m adding them, and I don`t know you any more always”. It is lyric from the song Krasota (Beauty), that`s the all lyric in this song, but like an impressionist`s painting with minimal means it creates the perfect picture.

That`s the highest aesthetic of the time. The feelings of ethereal creature, if the geist have had a soul. So it reflects not the veriest people which live this time but rather men and women living in an platonic world of ideal forms counterparts of themselves. The nearest approximation is a protagonist she-hero of her songs, e.g. “Girl, living in the net” from the track Web-girl.

I`m reading what I`ve wrote and it might create a wrong impression that she was completely detached from real life. But the thing is that that she was a real life for a long time. We felt the things in her way of feeling them. “Litle Ann asked to take off the tanks” (Maechki). That`s the feeling of an infinite beaty “Drunking macho is making love and crying that because he knows how so perfectly good when this befalls us” (Macho).

Her songs were not optimistic, rare bright, not sensual, it`s really hard to catch the mood, there can be a compare with casting of a spell, but they were clearer than a dew drop. Listen full albums from the first 1998 Zemphira to the last 2005 Vendetta. The last one is perfect you may push a repeat button and fall in love with every track one after another.

She compose not a dance music. But it fit very well in a huge stadium concert atmosphere, when light goes off and attendees lit up a thousands of little personal device`s diods, it makes a celestial firmament on earth with miriads of blinking stars. It`s not a punk madness, it is a rapture, that brings an experience of revelation to the concert crowd. Imagine all this while listening a track Ne otpuskai menya. “Eternal and youthful / just behind the dune / awaiting you sailboat / one that I dreamed of”.

The current situation in country, what can be said. She barely noticed it in the begining. What is the little turmoils for the eternity, she was speaking with. But the end zoom in very quickly in the last years. It was decided without us that here will be no future. No future means the end of an infinity. So it has brought about almost physically percieved retching feelings. She did must issue the two albums after Vendetta, and she did it in late 2007 and 2009. You may see by their content that they were made by a genius, but they are empty, they are practically posthumonous. Time has stoped, but we still alive. Very few artists can get across this idea.

But let return to the core years. The main audience of her songs was well educated youth of big cities. It is a common mistake to attribute the cinicism to the higher level of society. Remaining at the same time for the bottom levels the purity of a simple life. It is right in a completely opposite mode. Higher education aquired, more property possesed, higher level of a culture absorbed the better a man or a woman will be. She raised the bar, elevated the level of discussion between her and the audience. It wasn`t only an entertainment, she gave a new emotions, which her listeners may feel the first time in their lifes, they could adopt them, made them their own, some kind of emotional intelligence was rised in the youth. These were subtle emotions a slight movements of souls toward beauty.