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today's Holy Grail of music,
Tuesday, April 15 2003
It was warm today - even hot. According to the weatherman (and he wasn't a type-cast weatherman suffering from mild retardation either) some places in Eastern New York experienced Chinook-type weather effects and their temperatures were as hot as any place in the East.
I spent the day writing about my recent South African experiences while simultaneously using KaZaA to illegally download as much Tatu as I could. Tatu is a Russian girl band fabricated by a savvy Russian promoter. I'd read about them in The New Yorker and had wanted to hear their music, so I was lucky to catch a piece about them on one of the radio channels during the British Airways flights back from South Africa. Tatu's big scandal is underage puppy-love lesbianism, marketing machinery masterstroke. Still, to the provincial & puritanical American mindset it's so extreme that Tatu probably won't enjoy much pop music success here, and this has predisposed me to believe that there's more to Tatu than would be possible from, say, the American music sausage factory. Indeed, the lyrics are much darker and angsty than anything you'll hear being sung by a former-Mousecateer. Furthermore, the music is built on a foundation of techno dance beats and thus belongs to a genre that has had little appeal to American pop enthusiasts. (This probably is a consequence of the high domestic price of MDMA.) To my ear, Tatu is a good attempt at today's Holy Grail of music, that sweet spot between monotonous dance music and the three minute pop song. I'd say it ranks up there with Filter and Lunar Event on that score. Still, it's ultimately unsatisfying stuff. I find myself preferring the Russian language versions of the songs as a way of somehow avoiding the unavoidable superficiality of lyrics sung by fresh-faced teenagers.
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