Hello again! I am back with a slightly lighter topic than last week. We are back to pop music!
This week, I took a look at TopHit.ru’s charts for YouTube and radio and there has been movement! Number 1 is “Штрихи” by Burito, #2 is Loboda’s “Парень”, and #3 is Polina Gagarina’s “Обезоружена”. I have already written about all of those but the #4 song is “Слеза” (Tears) by Егор Крид (Egor Kreed)!
This is an artist I haven’t written about before on this blog, so I am excited to do a little research on him to help introduce him to you. He has a pretty interesting story!
According to his Wikipedia page, Egor Kreed is about 23 years old and has been involved in the music business since 2011 when he self-released his first music video for the song “Любовь в сети”. The following year, he entered a contest on Вконтакте (basically Russian Facebook) and was nominated for best hip-hop project. After that, he signed with the music label Black Star Inc. and it seems like he’s enjoyed a lot of success since then!
The oldest song of his that I remember being aware of is “Самая самая” which was released in 2014. It could just be the way YouTube makes playlists but over the past couple of years I heard a lot of his collaboration with Timati from 2016 called “Где ты, где я” as well as another collaboration he had with Molly from Serebro called “Если ты меня не любишь”. This guy has some connections with established acts in Russia.
New vocabulary from the song
Since Kreed seems quite popular, it was very easy to find the lyrics to this song on the site that I have normally used to see a side-by-side translation. There were four words or phrases that I either wasn’t sure about or didn’t know before. Let’s take a look:
Кофта – a light jacket
This word is in the first line of the first verse: “Чувствую запах твой на моей кофте” which I translate as “I smell your scent on my jacket”.
Не на той ноте – in a bad way, not on good terms
When I read this line in the lyrics, I could figure out by context what it meant but it was something I hadn’t heard or read before. So, it was good to just go check it out. Anyway, here’s the line also from the first verse: “Мы попрощались с тобой не на той ноте” which can be translated as “We said good bye on bad terms”.
What a lovely rhyme with “кофте”!
Стереть – to erase, clean, wash
I did know this word from the first couple of Russian classes I took but I think I knew the imperfect version (стирать) so, it was confusing when I saw: “я снова растерян и снова пишу, но сотру сообщения” which can be translated as “I am confused again and write again, but I’ll erase the messages.”
Вничью – a tie or draw in a game
I found this word towards the end of the song in the line: “а конец у игры постоянно вничью” which I translated as “And the end of the game is always a tie”. I’ll say more about what I think about a line like this is my review.
Review of the song and music video
I am going to start with something I really like about the song and music video and that is the fact that it feels like the music video really follows the subject matter of the song. That is really cool and doesn’t always happen, so I enjoyed that a lot.
One other thing I really liked about the music video specifically is that, at the beginning, you maybe think that Egor Kreed and the woman are a couple that is breaking up. Towards the end, the reality is that they are having an affair and he saves her from a super abusive dude. So, that’s an interesting twist.
I also generally like the visuals in the music video. They have some good use of slow motion to help you get into the destruction she’s wreaking on his stuff. Man, I am so glad I never dated a woman with that kind of personality!
Now, on to some things that I didn’t particularly like. The first one I will mention is that the beginning scene takes way too long. Maybe I’m just picky about music videos but I would prefer they didn’t have all this bad acting at the beginning. I took a look at the time and the actual music for the music video doesn’t even start until 1:13 in the music video. So, you have a music video that is 4 minutes and 36 seconds, when it could just be 3 minutes and 23 seconds. That’s a significant amount of time, like a quarter of the music video just is dumb filler.
Personally, I found the song itself to be pretty unremarkable. The subject matter is something I can’t really relate to – some kind of an on again off again relationship where you both love and hate the other person. That’s never been an experience I have had, but it does seem to be very popular in certain cultures, not just Russia.
There is a line in the breakdown (before the last chorus) which I kind of liked “Я тебя себе выдумал / или себя тебе выдумал”. I translate this similarly to the way it is on the lyrics website I linked above “I made you up for myself / or I made myself up for you”. It’s kind of an interesting way to look at being in love.
So, overall, the song isn’t bad. It’s just not that good either. I would grade it “middle of the road” or “meh”. What do you think? Please leave a comment. I would be interested to see what others think about this song. Maybe we can have a discussion.
Media Language Learning 