Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Everything I Know About '70s Slavic Funk

Ok, what I do know is next to nothing. I don't even really know what the lyrics are about. They could be socialist propaganda. Everything I have learned, I learned from Wikipedia, and it's sparse.
To avoid sweeping generalizations, I'll only talk about this song in question and a brief intro for the singer. She is Aleksandra "Alya" Nikolayevna Pakhmutova and has a lot of songs for free online. Not all of it is funk, and to be honest this one sounds like a mainstream interpretation, but really what in the way of non-mainstream funk did they have back then? If you know the answer, holy crap, let me know.

The song itself sounds like something from the end of a Bruce Lee movie, or a similar type of crossover Kung-Fu movie from that era.
Imagine a lone Kung-Fu master in search of his brother who has emigrated to the country northwards for mysterious reasons. He wanders the land in search of his long lost kin and finds himself lost in a strange, foreign land where people speak in unfamiliar harsh sounds and write in redundant, simplistic letters.
During his travels he does good where he can. Never using a gun, his only weapons are his body, and the martial arts that he has studied his whole life under the tutelage of his strict and venerable grandfather.
The final scene of the movie takes place after a grueling battle pitting Chinese Kung-Fu against Russian Sambo, in which he defeats the head bodyguard of a ruthless KGB leader, the leader himself committing suicide when he realizes that his fate is sealed.
Still, our hero remains without what he was looking for. No brother to be found. No trace of him or any reason for his sudden disappearance. The pretty young girl that he saved, her family, and the rest of their remote village of herdsmen want him to stay and beg him to give up his impossible quest . . . but no. He must go on. He must find what happened to his estranged brother.
And so, he walks into the sunset to continue his search, until he finds the truth, or until his quest kills him.

Aleksandra "Alya" Nikolayevna Pakhmutova - Beloruss

2 Comments:

Blogger Laz said...

What is that picture? Is it Alya as a kid at some kind of socialist summer camp?

June 17, 2007 11:13 AM  
Blogger DJ said...

I have no idea I found it on her website and thought it worked well for the story

June 19, 2007 8:15 AM  

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