#tsentr

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I'm as confused as you are. 😂

Центр (Tsentr, 'Center') are... strange. I'm genuinely struggling to describe what their musical genre(s) are, indeed if they can be labeled under certain genres.

Begun by Vasily Shumov (b. 1960) in the late 70s, Tsentr has a long history both as a band and as part of Shumov's individual artistic endeavours. Like many groups of this era, their line-up has had musicians come and go (check out that graph!), and in the time period we're interested in - Tsentr's beginnings to the end of the USSR - they were famous in the underground rock scene. They were one of the early experimenters of electronica, and have written music for TV, film, and animation as well as their usual output.

But you're not here to read a general introduction. You want to know what the hell those lyrics are about. 🤪 This is actually the song that first introduced me to the band: it came on through an eclectic international radio station I'd had on in the background while working, and about eight lines through 'Алексеев' I started thinking surely not. This cannot be the actual lyrics to the song.

Lo and behold, it was. This is not an April Fool's joke. It is a list of people named Alekseev, yes, these lyrics are played completely straight, and yes, Tsentr's songs are just like that. This isn't the first time Vasily Shumov has done a song in list form, it's not even the first song to do that in this album. In at least one concert Tsentr was offering a free album to anybody with the surname Alekseev, before performing a variation of this song with about fifty Alekseevs on the list. (The official version ends at twenty.) It's a great structure they've got going - there are theoretically infinite Alekseevs out there with all manner of professions. This song could go on forever and remain fresh and new, no matter how many Alekseevs have been introduced up til that point.

I suppose the only thing to ask, then, would be... why?

If I was to describe Tsentr's 1980s output in one word, it would be deadpan. You never get the sense that they're fazed by anything, not within their sung universe nor outside of it. Many of their lyrics seem ridiculous at first, since the songs tend to have a bizarre narrative or no narrative at all. Shumov sings them, nevertheless, with a complete objectivity comparable to Kraftwerk's 'I'm the operator with my pocket calculator / I am adding / and subtracting'. Tsentr's vocabulary can be as simple:

Матрёшка. Балалайка. Волга. Изба. (Matryoshka. Balalaika. Volga. Log hut.) Борщ. Самовар. Спутник. Блины. (Borshch. Samovar. Sputnik. Pancakes.) Навсегда, навсегда. Всё наше навсегда. (Forever, forever. All that is ours, forever.) [From 'Навсегда' ('Forever'), 1989, linked above.]

Or it can be metaphorical and rambling, resembling detached spoken-word poetry more than anything else:

И когда в океанах любви поселились акулы секса (And when the sharks of sex settled into the oceans of love) Русалок нежные плавники стали похожи на пистолеты (The tender fins of the mermaids began looking a tad like pistols) [From 'Новая земля' ('New Land'), 1982]

This whole period, of course, comprises only about a fourth of Tsentr's output. They still making music today. Shumov is 65 this year and set to release an album commemorating this soon (В 65 вам сверхранняя электроника / At Sixty-Five You've Got Super-Early Electronics), according to the official site. [Note: As of 1st April 25, the album is now out!] Their lyrics become clearer and better explained past the 90s, although still somewhat bizarre.

But in terms of their Soviet-era output specifically, I think what they were trying to do was double-voicing. Repeating verbatim official (i.e. the government's) utterances, naming things that were culturally and stereotypically 'theirs', making lists of everyday people in their everyday professions devoid of all other context, in a deadpan and indifferent tone precisely in order to highlight the absurdities latent in those facts.

I don't want to say this was purely for the sake of sarcasm, or that criticism of Soviet society was the whole point, because I'm not convinced these are the most important facets of their work. I think Shumov was trying to demonstrate something broader about reality, the inadequacy of words in conveying the world around us: national identity becomes a simple checklist, people on all walks of life reduced to a census of Alekseevs, and (this is one of my other favourites) in one notable case, the natural world dryly transformed into a case for the moral and pragmatic relativism of the songbird:

С утра мешают спать нам крики вороны (In the mornings the cries of crows disturb our sleeping,) А ночью пугают в лесу пролетающие совы (And at night the owls flying by in the forest frighten us.) Много известно о птицах, как о переносчиках болезней (Much is known about birds as the carriers of diseases:) Поэтому польза и вред певчих птиц – понятия относительные (Thus the benefits and harms of the songbird are relative concepts.) [From 'Жалобы' ('Complaints'), 1989, linked above.]