Hearing Voices

If you were an aspiring pop singer-songwriter in Soviet Russia of the 1960s, 70s or 80s, and

you were a woman, inspiring female role models were hard to come by – it was a man’s world. Although the rare group showcased high-profile, even flamboyant, female singers, like The Jolly Guys’ Alla Pugacheva, the big pop and rock singer-songwriters – Time Machine’s Andrei Makarevich, Aquarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov and Nautilus’ Vyacheslav Butusov – were all men. It was not until the mid-1990s that Russian female pop-rock singer-songwriters began to come onto the scene – and into their own – in a big way. Zemfira Ramazanova, Julia Chicherina, and Vika Voronina, who lead the groups Zemfira, Chicherina, and Propaganda, respectively, are the brightest female stars in today’s constellation of Russian pop/rock performing songwriters. These three women, whose songs’ emotional and psychological intensity is expanding the lyrical boundaries of contemporary Russian pop, have not just broken popular music’s singing and writing gender barrier. They are showing Russia’s young women what it means to be a strong, independent, successful career woman in today’s music world.

Take a look at Zemfira Ramazanova’s website (zemfira.ru), and you’ll see that this 27-year-old from Ufa focuses on her music, not on self-promotion or conforming to a glitzy pop image. Slim, with a fashionably messy, layered bob and a pierced eyebrow, but no discernible makeup, Zemfira often tenders a slight, mischievous smile. The website features photos of Zemfira performing, of her guitar, and candids of her in various sites across the globe, dressed in what you might call cool chic: muted colors, clean lines, leather and jeans.

Revealing glamour shots are de rigeur on many Russian pop stars’ sites, but, when we spoke last May, Zemfira said, “The girls who show their breasts don’t have anything else to promote themselves with.” So, she prefers to showcase not her physical assets, but her extensive music school training and its results – the songs she sings with her group.

Unlike the fluffy pop ditties currently flooding Russia’s airwaves, Zemfira’s lyrics are rich in metaphor and focus on her intimate relationship with the world around her. Her song, “I Searched” expresses the burst of anguish, devotion and love the singer feels upon finding a lover again after a long search, while “Traffic” uses traffic jams as a metaphor for conflicts with a partner. In “Infinity”, Zemfira sings about exploring life’s mysteries and of the need to share her thoughts: “I die when I see what I see and there’s no one to sing it to. I’m so afraid I won’t have enough time, enough time to sing at least something.” (“Ya umirayu kogda vizhu to, shto vizhu i nekomu spet. Ya tak boyus ne uspet, khotya by shto-to uspet.”) In the end, she announces, “I figured out the infinity sign.” (“Ya razgadala znak beskonechnost.”) All of this is a far cry from the clichéd imagery and simplistic “I love you, so how could you leave me?” lyrics that so many of Russia’s singers croon today. Zemfira treats life’s most enduring and compelling topics in a more sophisticated, poetic, and even philosophical, way than nearly any other Russian singer-songwriter today. But when I suggested that she is something of a philosopher, Zemfira balked: “Every person, at some point in his or her life,” she replied, “is forced to be a philosopher, in the course of events.”

In person, Zemfira seems less outwardly emotional than her lyrics and vocal delivery would lead you to expect. She does not give a lot of visual clues, and her conversational manner is reserved, but the emotion bubbles beneath her deceptively calm surface. Zemfira describes herself as a choleric, and that seems right – she doesn’t pull any punches. Social issues really get her fired up. We met the day after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Golden Lion award at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2004. As I sat down opposite her at the table, she gave my hand a hearty shake: “Congratulations on Michael Moore’s winning!” she said, smiling broadly. And in an email last fall, she warned: “Make sure you do the right thing in the election in November!”

But, in Zemfira’s case, social consciousness does not necessarily translate into a desire to be an activist. When I suggested that Russian female singers might be positive role models for today’s young women, she joked, “Oh, do you think I should run for Parliament?” Joking aside, Zemfira seems clear about what role she should be playing in her fans’ lives, and the answer is – none. “I’m against the idea of someone standing up on a tribunal and instructing other people,” she explained, adding that she does not correspond with her fans. Zemfira has this hands-off policy not because she is indifferent – she’s not. She just feels protective of her listeners: “A lot of the people who write to me are at such a tender age,” she explained. “They might take something I say as law, take hope from it, and that’s not right. I’m for everyone taking responsibility and developing on their own.” But when I asked how she would feel if a fan wrote and said that she’d inspired him to become a musician, she smiled. “Of course that would be pleasant. That’s when you know you’re doing something good.”

Doing something good. That is what motivates Zemfira: making a contribution, socially and musically. She is also devoted to polishing her musical skills and trying new approaches, rather than resting on her considerable laurels. Of her new album, Vendetta, released in January, she said, “It’s a rather bold move, really. I’ve done three albums all in a similar vein, and it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same old thing. So for my new album, I’m doing electronic music. I wanted to see how my songs would sound in an electronic format.” So Zemfira has both a social and a professional conscience: rather than sticking conservatively to the tried and true successful formula of her previous albums, she is exploring uncharted territory.

Another way Zemfira preserves her freedom is by not buying into the whole celebrity lifestyle. She lives modestly, she said, “so if my financial situation changes, I won’t feel deprived.” (That is a sensible strategy, given the fact that Russian singers get most of their income from sales of concert tickets, not CDs. Music piracy is rampant in Russia, and the music industry estimates that five to eight pirated discs are sold for every legal copy.) Zemfira also protects her privacy. “I try not to be out in the world,” she said. “That way you don’t have to constantly be explaining your actions.” Shunning both the paparazzi and the public’s demands allows Zemfira to focus on her music and have time left over for a personal life.  “I’ve never allowed work to take over my life,” she said.

Although Zemfira insists that she does not want to serve as a role model for her fans, maybe she should reconsider: a top rated singer-songwriter who rejects the celebrity lifestyle, cares about social causes and concentrates on her craft without being consumed by it? She really may have solved one of life’s mysteries, after all!

If Zemfira is trying to figure out the meaning of existence, then Julia Chicherina (chicherina.net) prefers to embrace what she sees as life’s inherent chaos and draw inspiration from the ever-changing world around her. “Why try to orchestrate life?” she mused one afternoon over hot dogs and Turkish coffee at her apartment. “Why try to force things to turn out this way or that? Just go with the flow.”

That approach got her where she is today. As a teenager enrolled in Yekaterinburg’s Library Science Institute (which appeased her parents) she secretly took courses in the singing performance department (which upset her parents, when they found out). She also hung out with student musicians from the Architecture Institute, helped them record albums, sang some backup vocals for them, and learned to play the guitar. Little by little, Julia and her friends began writing and performing their own songs, and the group came together. In the past eight years, Julia’s success has all but eclipsed memories of her grade school choral director, who had so little faith in Julia’s voice that she let Julia into the choir only if she promised to lip synch and not scream out the songs in performances the way she did in class.

Julia seems to apply this focused but relaxed approach to both her career and her personal life. Consider the following: Julia and her group (which will celebrate its eighth anniversary in June) now produce themselves, after splitting from their producer and record company last year over creative differences; they do not cater to the Russian music industry’s strict pop or rock categories, instead writing in whatever genre strikes them at the moment; Julia’s former record company asked her to grow out her closely-cropped hair, and she refused. Add to all this the fact that Chicherina and her architect husband Sukhrab spent last winter living outside Moscow in a dacha in the woods, returning to the city only in May, when anyone in the capital who could was moving out for the summer. And take the apartment they moved to: an ordinary, modest two-room apartment in a regular neighborhood. No celebrity compound for them. And even in Moscow, Julia and Sukhrab treated me to hot dogs cooked on a tiny electric grill, explaining that they were used to cooking on an open fire all winter.

Clearly, conforming to the music industry’s cookie-cutter pop star image is not important to Julia. When I asked what is important to her, both professionally and personally, she replied, “Being a good person. Being true to yourself. Being the person you are and not trying to be something you’re not.” This is not any easy row to hoe in the world of popular music, but this is the path Julia has chosen, even at the risk of having her career suffer. For now, the gamble seems to have paid off: Chicherina is currently recording a new album and their performing schedule includes gigs in Russia and abroad.

Just as Julia resists others’ attempts to force her into adopting a given image, she does not tell her fans how to view her or her songs. Asked to describe herself as a person, she demurred: “I wouldn’t want to describe myself. People will make up the way they want to think of me, anyway.” Then she added, “I’m not into self-analysis. I’m happy with myself. That’s what’s important.” Julia will not analyze her songs either, and her reasoning reflects her view of life as ever-changing. “In the process of recording a song, I listen to it maybe a thousand times,” she explained. “One time I listen to it, it seems as if it’s about one thing. The next time I listen to it, I think it’s about something else entirely. The third time, I decide it’s about some third thing.” Not surprisingly, then, Julia isn’t interested in serving as a role model for her listeners. She thinks for herself and, like Zemfira, wants other people to do the same, rather than looking to her for guidance.

Julia might not embrace any one interpretation for her songs, but listening to them can certainly provide clues to what she is all about. She does not write all the group’s songs (some are co-written with band members Alexander Alexandrov or Azat Mukhametov or fellow musician Maxim Mitenkov), but in every song she sings you hear a young woman bursting with energy and feeling. Her songs’ personae are strong, independent, and, whether it is a lyrical musing about a troubled relationship or an upbeat rumination on life, Julia bowls you over with her powerful delivery. Julia says she has always been that way, even back in grade school, when she would scream out the words to any song they happened to be singing. She has fine-tuned her singing voice since then, but, luckily, the intensity has remained.

Fond as she is of going with the flow, Julia pens lyrics that are sparkling glimpses of a scene or a fleeting feeling. Like Zemfira, she wants to share what she has seen. But Julia does not analyze – she leaves that to us. In “Firemen,” her imagery is so sharp that you not only see the physical surroundings, but hear the sounds and smell the smells: “The fridge is empty. The bathroom is dark. A good smell comes through the window: firemen are making soup under the window.” (“V kholodilnike pusto. V tualete temno. Iz okna vkusno pakhnet. Varyat sup pod oknom pozharnye.”) And in “I Was,” one of Julia’s favorite songs from last year’s album Off/On, you believe her when she describes this scene during a plane flight: “I sang beautifully and loud, making the passengers uncomfortable.” (“Ya gromko pela krasivo, smushchala, passazhirov.”) Songs like these have a palpability and immediacy in their picture of the everyday life of everyday people that harkens back to early Soviet rock groups like Television. But rather than existing as ethnographic snapshots of gritty reality, Julia’s urban landscapes are infused with a very personal element; we remember them because, for her, they are tied to an important moment in her emotional life, whether it is realizing she loves someone or fixing in her mind the moment when a relationship fell apart. What makes Julia’s songs so effective is the combination of these words with powerfully optimistic music and Julia’s energetic delivery, which temper the despair we sense at the heart of some lyrics.

Talk to Julia in a non-performance setting, and she seems slightly reserved, in a blasé, cool way, her face graced by a small, slightly ironic smile as she puffs on a cigarette. But the emotion and energy you sense in her songs floats just below the surface. Julia seems in a constant battle to keep it in check, to sit still. As her husband, Sukhrab, said of her, “Julia needs space to roll around in.” Preferably in as deserted a spot as possible, since Julia has very little patience with the whole adoring fan scene.  As she said one day, “People. It would be better if they just didn’t exist.” When asked how she would feel if an ecstatic listener wrote to say Julia had inspired him to become a musician, she shrugged: “I wouldn’t care.” They are more trouble than they are worth, those fans: they make vacations pure torture, Julia said. She dreams of buying an uninhabited island and living there with her family. “I’d sit on the beach and make pottery and paint,” she said wistfully.

  But Julia’s fans are always finding ways to show their devotion: Chicherina’s fan club throws the group a yearly birthday party, and one night, shortly after Julia and Sukhrab had moved into their Moscow apartment, a chorus of drunken male voices serenaded her from the courtyard below, screaming out the words to her first big hit, “Tu lu la.”

The uninhabited island was probably really appealing at that moment. But, since such spots don’t come cheap, Julia will have to keep writing and singing, to finance the move. (That pesky problem of not being able to count on large CD revenues comes into play here, too, although Chicherina has been known to do endorsements for products like Pepsi.) Luckily, performing does not seem like a trial for her at all. Despite her self-professed misanthropy, when Julia comes out onstage, she sheds her blasé exterior and comes alive, showing the same independence and strength as her lyric heroines.

Waiting backstage at the Moscow nightclub B-2 one night last summer, Julia bounced back and forth from one foot to the other. Leaning over to one of her guitarists, a mischievous look in her eye, she whispered conspiratorially, “Let’s just go out, right now, without any introduction. Let’s just go out and start playing!” But then, when I noted that she seemed excited about performing, she slipped back into her cool persona: “The sooner you go on, the sooner you get out.”

But moments later, as her warbling filled the room, Julia’s irrepressible enthusiasm bubbled up from beneath her studied, cool indifference. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who claimed not to care about her fans. Or maybe she was smiling because doing this concert would bring her one step closer to that deserted island? One thing is clear: Julia’s drive to sing cannot be squelched – not in the schoolgirl who screamed out the songs at the top of her lungs, and not in the 26-year-old woman who rushes to get onstage.

Twenty-two-year-old Vika Voronina has not been performing as long as Zemfira or Chicherina – her group Propaganda debuted in 2001. But lately her career has shifted into high gear. Her song “Quanto Costa,” from Propaganda’s 2004 album Super Kid, was honored as “Song of the Year 2004,” and the song “I-I” garnered a 2004 Golden Gramophone award, similar to a Grammy. How did she get there? “I decided I wanted to become a singer,” she told me, “and I became one.” She seemed to think that explained everything. At first, I thought she was holding out on me, but by the time we had finished talking, I understood what she meant.

Vika’s path to success has been a meandering one. In the past four years, Propaganda has changed both personnel and clothes, as Vika herself has grown from a teenager with a taste for hip hop music and styles to an adult with a flair for fashion. Propaganda’s first album (Kids) featured three teenagers in flannel shirts, kerchiefs and sneakers. But when the group’s 2003 album, So Be It came out, two of the group’s singers had been replaced, and the new group had a new look that is sexier, but still quirky: their latest video, for “Maria Fell In Love With Juan,” features an Old West set and costumes. Vika says the image change wasn’t a marketing decision: it resulted from an inner awakening: “I woke up one morning,” she explained, “and felt that I wanted to be a girl. As a consequence, I began to dress differently.” The Russian press questioned the sincerity of Vika’s actions, but I decided to take her at her word and asked her what being a girl means to her. She replied, “Being loved.”

It is not surprising, then, that emotion infuses Vika’s compositions. In fact, a constant in her songs, despite the shift in her outward appearance, is their emotional power, or what Vika describes as their “intimacy.” Like Zemfira and Chicherina, Voronina is not afraid to express complex, sincere feelings in her lyrics, rather than catering to the pop music market’s demand for clichéd love songs. Vika’s lyrics are both impressionistically cryptic on the psychological level and rich in snapshot detail, vividly setting a physical scene. They seem to fix, in riveting detail, what the singer is seeing as she shares her innermost feelings and thoughts on the conflicts of life and love. In “I-I,” she sings, “She looked out the window. Everything with you is settled. The windowpanes shuddered. The clock was fast. There was a subway under the building.”  (“Ona smotrela v okno. S toboyu vsyo resheno. Drozhali styokla. Speshili chasy. Pod domom bylo metro.”)

You see this same attention to detail when Vika talks about her life: about walking through the woods to watch the squirrels and birds, instead of riding in a limousine, or about holding her young niece and sensing in her a connection to the Cosmos, or about her disillusionment with friends who have been unsupportive in times of need. Indeed, when asked what sets the songs on her latest album apart from earlier ones, Vika replied, “Their boldness. I write things in my songs that I might not have the nerve to say in real life.”

In person, Vika’s words are more guarded than her soul-baring lyrics, but her emotion and her belief in what she is saying comes through loud and clear in her fixed gaze and the urgency of her tone. Even so, like Vika the songwriter, Vika the person sometimes seems to speak in shorthand, leaving her listener to fill in the gaps.

“How would you describe herself as a person?”

“A light bulb,” Vika replies, matter-of-factly.

“You mean you used to be in the dark?”

“Yes, before.”

“What became clear to you?”

“It’s just that I’m sure that life is the most wonderful thing that a person has,” Voronina said. “Within each person, in his center, there is love. No matter what people say about difficulties with love or personal problems, you have to keep believing.”

“In love?”

“In love. In yourself.”

Vika truly believes that the power of her own will and confidence made her success possible. Sure, she credits her producer, Sergei Izotov, whom she calls “my guardian angel,” but her faith in herself is key. That does not mean, however, that Vika’s life flows on without incident. Quite the contrary. She wrote the songs from Propaganda’s first album, a blend of rap and extremely personal songs about adolescent turmoil, at a particularly difficult time in her life. “When I think about that period,” she said, “sometimes I just want to erase it.” Even now, four years later, Vika says that life is difficult for her, because she’s such an emotional person: “Sometimes I just want to turn myself off, or erase my memory or go to sleep for four days and wake up, well, not in twenty years, but… But then I understand that every second, that every minute of my life is unique.” And she turns the torment into poetry and music.

That music is very personal. “I write songs not to influence people,” Vika says, “but because I cannot not write.” Like Zemfira, who will not make decisions for her listeners, and Chicherina, who grants her listeners the right to understand a song in their own way, Vika does not focus on trying to get a message across. “Let people listen to my songs,” she mused. “Let them glimpse for themselves, with their own eyes, the everyday things around them. Let them touch them with their hands and begin to sense life with every fiber of their souls, and not just let them pass by unnoticed, like sand through your fingers.” When pressed, Vika admitted that, if she were to serve as a role model, it would most likely be “through my faith, because I have a great deal of faith in myself, in my dreams. It’s probably the only thing that saves me and motivates me.”

This faith inspires her fans, one of whom wrote to her, “Propaganda is the wisdom and conscience of the Russian stage.” Vika shrugged off the praise, but said she does hope the people who listen to her music will benefit: “I would like people to feel something when they listen to my songs. I would like for something inside them to open up. So that they find something. Something for themselves. All they need to do is believe. Simply believe.”   RL