The frequently whimsical, though percussive,\u00a0 instrumentation contrasted with Vysotsky’s heavy vocals in interesting ways. Artistically, Vysotsky seems to lean into the roughness of his voice as he sings. This makes songs like “Morning exercises” rather humorous, since Vysotsky\u00a0 pronounces bits such as “tri, chetyre” with a jocular sort of bounce. It almost sounds like he’s reciting some kind of nursery rhyme, which is wonderfully entertaining.<\/p>\n
The lyrics of “Morning exercises” were very interesting to me because they were describing a very common scene in daily life of a person. And yet, they describe the events with a suprising amount of gusto and excitement, and Vysotsky sings them with a similar sense of flamboyance. In fact, many of his lyrics describe common events in the lives of common people, and all paint these happenings as not mundane, but as epic and sometimes even a bit heroic.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, Vysotsky’s work is paying respect to the lives of average, or proletariat, people. His style and subject matter both seem\u00a0 ooze commonality as much as the ooze character. I recall in some previous class discussions that Russian poetry in the soviet age began to move towards a form more reflective of the Russian proletariat, away from lofty subject matters glorifying the natural world. Perhaps, Vysotsky’s work partakes in this movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The frequently whimsical, though percussive,\u00a0 instrumentation contrasted with Vysotsky’s heavy vocals in interesting ways. Artistically, Vysotsky seems to lean into the roughness of his voice as he sings. This makes songs like “Morning exercises” rather humorous, since Vysotsky\u00a0 pronounces bits such as “tri, chetyre” with a jocular sort of bounce. It almost sounds like he’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-11-stalinism-thaw-and-stagnation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1022"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}