I’ve been asked about a few updates to the dual citizenship project that was called about a year ago by outgoing president Valdas Adamkus. The idea was to figure out a way to grant dual citizenship to emigrants, whose foreign born babies would be dual citizens, without going afoul of the Constitutional Court’s decision back in 2006. This was the decision that struck down the previous dual citizenship law as being, among other things, not restrictive enough regarding who could get citizenship.
This restriction clause, reading the phrase from the Constitution “atskirus atvejus” as meaning “rare,” has dogged the dual citizenship project since 2006. So today I can mention that last month, a new approach was adopted by liberal MP Gediminas Navaitis. Drawing inspiration, he says, from the Israeli and Polish attitudes, he thinks Lithuania should simply ignore / be agnostic about a citizen’s non-Lithuanian citizenship. Any connection to another nation is considered the Lithuanian dual citizen’s private business and of no interest to the state.
Or, as he says (also here):
Įtvirtinama aiški ir gana paprasta pozicija – Lietuvos pilietį, kuris kartu yra ir kitos valstybės pilietis, Lietuvos valstybė laiko tik Lietuvos piliečiu. (…) Siekiama numatyti, kad Lietuva ignoruoja bet kokius Lietuvos piliečio santykius su kitomis valstybėmis, nes tokie santykiai traktuojami kaip privatus Lietuvos piliečio reikalas.
The only officially recognized dual citizens would be those who are granted citizenship by the President, maintaining the “rare” test.
This is an interesting move, and it’s one I’ve never heard of or considered before, so I’m not ready to opine on it.
Furthermore, there is movement to expand the pool of dual citizenship to include, wait for it, Russian and Belarusian citizens. I’m surprised that this is getting support, since the atavistic response I’ve gotten from Professional Lithuanians In Diaspora is that blanket dual citizenship is to be avoided precisely because Russia may use protecting its citizens as a pretext to invade Lithuania. Although there is a bit of a crucial twist, if one reads the article carefully:
Svarstant įstatymą Seimo posėdyje pritarta dar vienam siūlymui – leisti du pasus turėti lietuvių kilmės asmenims, tradiciškai gyvenantiems valstybėje, su kuria Lietuvą skiria valstybės siena, tad į dvigubą pilietybę galės pretenduoti ir Baltarusijoje bei Rusijoje gyvenantys lietuviai.
This would then go against the “no discrimination based on ethnic origin” clause of the Constitution that the Court used to strike down the ethnic claim to dual citizenship in 2006.
So as it stands, and if I’m reading everything correctly, the project is waiting a final vote for legislation that will look something like this:
Lithuanians will be entitled to dual citizenship under all the old criteria, plus those who left Lithuania after 1991 and obtained citizenship in an EU or NATO nation.
Discussions continue regarding Switzerland, non-EU Schengen nations, and Australia.
Tags: Belarus, Delfi, dual citizenship, EU, Gediminas Navaitis, NATO, Russia
What’s there to say? InCulto went to Eurovision, performed a top three song for their group (in sheer terms of energy and quality), but lost out to the usual, boring Eurovision pop. The actual performance felt a bit weird to me, but my ability to approach the song with fresh eyes (or ears) has been more or less permanently ruined.
One of Eurovision’s supposed charms is its bizarre and everchanging voting system; every year, successful songs have to be considered within the context of that year’s strange voting paradigm. This year, “experts” voted for 50% of the points, and countries were blocked from voting on off nights (so French telephones, like mine–or other Baltic phones–were unable to vote for InCulto until the final, should they have advanced). Would InCulto have fared better if all of Europe were voting for them? If these dubious experts didn’t have a say? Who knows. For now, until next year.
Tags: eurovision, inCulto
The old version of Lithchat (the mailing list) used to sponsor NCAA tournaments. That role has been overtaken by the various March Madness software packages available all over the web. The FIFA 2010 Men’s World Cup Finals, however, seem untouched by such software, so Lithchat is offering its own World Cup Challenge:
Lithchat 2010 World Cup Challenge
Sign up today using a quick, brand new login, not Facebook or anything else!
Then login and start trash talking (under “My Competition”) with your friends while also sagely predicting the results of the first round (and the second round, once it is finalized!). The scoring system and rules and regulations are all on the Challenge page (under “The Rules”).
The site might be a little creaky, since it uses a lot of programming techniques that are about a decade old (I haven’t learned much since I wrote those old March Madness scripts in perl in the 1990s!). But it should be plenty amusing for you and your friends, so spread the word!
Other versions: VO [no subtitles] | YouTube | YouTube (VO) | Facebook | Soundcloud (Radio Edit) [mp3]
After watching each permutation of the “East European Funk” video several times in order to write about the song in the lead up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, I was rather infected by the song’s catchiness.1 So I considered making a small gesture of appreciation for the earworm: rip the audio and edit together a fan video of friends dancing in Paris. Clearly, from that idea to the video above was a medium-sized step, and encouragement along the way came from watching updates of InCulto’s impressive guerrilla European tour, a tour that did not, sadly, include a stop in France (see note below).2
If The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay taught us anything, it’s that collaboration is important and rewarding. I knew there’d be no way to record the song alone while having fun and making a movie alone is pretty much the most impossible thing in the world if you don’t want the camera stolen right off the tripod. So Linas joined up on the creative side from Chicago (Postal Service 2010 style), and we were able to recruit people in Paris, Mannheim, Figueira da Foz, etc. to help–on both sides of the camera. I’d like, then, to thank everyone who was involved, reserving a little extra love for Sébastien, Brent, Nida, and Karl, who each wielded the Eye of Judgment for a spell.
The submerged sentiment of the original song ends up getting a sharper edge in this video–largely since Parisians don’t want to get up and dance–but it’s also rather fitting that it turned out this way, with the putative Eastern European workers rendered invisible (or the source of spite) in quotidian neoliberal Western Europe.3 The clip suggests a solution (as it were) that would encourage pan-European interaction through (commodity) consumption, but it’s a sort of accidental one. Finally, my setting as a deadline for the project la Fête des travailleurs adds further pleasant irony.
So I hope you like the video and show it to your friends, and I hope you don’t judge our fun as harshly as my voice came out after two weeks of being sick.
More importantly, I hope you don’t forget to get up and vote for the “East European Funk,” and most importantly, I hope this clip helps you remember to pursue creative activities simply because doing so is pretty awesome!
Note: Unfortunately, France (hence, me as well as the putative audience of this video) will not be voting in the semi-final in which InCulto is performing–the second semi-final on May 27th–which probably explains a large part of why InCulto didn’t come to this corner of Europe during their guerrilla tour. Countries can only vote for other countries competing in the same semi-final. Hence, people in Georgia, Denmark, The Netherlands, etc., can vote for InCulto, because those countries will all perform on the same night. As a Big Four nation (that is, along with the UK, Germany, and Spain, it skips the semi-final), France has its night to vote determined by chance, and though they originally were selected to vote on the night of the 27th, broadcaster France 3 cited a scheduling conflict in asking to have France’s semi-final voting moved from the second night to the first. Yes, Eurovision is confusing; it’s part of the charm.
As a result, the above video is rather presumptuous in hoping that InCulto will advance to the final–but it’s the only way I can vote for them! My own fandom is held a bit in check when I consider that InCulto are, at this writing, longshots (11/8) to advance, so maybe I should’ve shot the video in Geneva. The Swiss, after all, can give 12 points to InCulto in the semifinal! Oh well. On the other hand, as a resident of the US, Linas is totally ineligible to vote.4
- Apparently, the official title as reported on Eurovision’s page has dropped the “ern” from the first word. [↩]
- “Sadly?” Maybe luckily! Had they stopped in Paris, I probably would have scrapped this whole project! [↩]
- This pursuing of invisibility also forced us to toss lots and lots of more engaging footage. [↩]
- I’m going to save criticism of the rest of the songs in the second semi-final for another time. The short version, though, is that at least half of them are totally unlistenable ballads–so, basically, Eurovision gold–and even among the songs with a bit more pep, they’re all somehow not terribly interesting. Still, the least awful are Holland‘s, Turkey‘s, and Romania‘s entries, I think. Slovenia‘s effort makes me cringe in its over-obvious kitsch explosion. France’s song for the final (remember, they skip the semis), on the other hand, I find pretty infectious and delightful. [↩]
Tags: eurovision, France, inCulto, neoliberalism
I don’t usually use this space to advertise things I’m doing, mostly since I tend not to do things that I think deserve attention. But since this project is closely related to some recent posts on this site, and since, well, this is my site, I think I can tease it here:
The reveal from Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on Vimeo.
Tags: eurovision
Today the news reported that the Vilnius municipal government, under pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is renaming K. Sirvydo gatvė after Lech Kaczyński, who now everyone knows perished over the weekend in a surprising plane crash outside of Smolensk on the way to a memorial service of the Polish officers who were killed in Katyn Forest in 1940.
At the same time, Kaczyński has been front-page news here in France since the accident, too, and, well, frankly, I simply don’t get it. The death of a national leader is always news, of course, but it feels like the tragic accident has been rather over-mourned. Perhaps this is in relation to the pretext of the trip, the aforementioned murder of Polish officers attributed (despite a lack of clear evidence) to NKVD officers. Tragedy on top of tragedy, like Air Force One plunging into the English Channel on the way to a V-Day commemoration.
But I wonder if part of the mourning is not attached to what Kaczyński, as a right-wing nationalist president who was both a Euroskeptic and anti-Russian, inhabited a sort of political ground that is very appealing both to Americans in general (passively anti-Russian and Euroskeptical). As a result, Kaczyński’s politics, on issues like lustration, despite the problems regarding Polish minority rights in Lithuania, resonated with the conservative Lithuanian crowd.
Furthermore, considering Katyn’s role as “proof” of the horrific equivalence of Soviet violence with Nazi violence, the mess further highlights the current tugging over official equivalence of all forms of “totalitarianism,” a move I’ve been pushing against for years now, most recently in terms of efforts to change the meaning of the word “genocide.”
But all the same, this move to change the name of K. Sirvydo gatvė feels rushed in some fundamental way. Alta reports that usually bodies have to be well cold in the ground before the names attached to them get attached to streets. Furthermore, the goodwill engendered among the Polish minority by naming the street after Kaczyński might be tempered somewhat as “Kaczyński” becomes rendered as “Kačinskis” or whatever. So the move gets seen as part of the endless game of trying to outmaneuver the Russians, holding them accountable for what happened at Katyn (in both 1940 and 2010, if only suggestively), and showing permanent support for the dead president’s efforts to destabilize the Russian sphere of influence.
So on the same day that I read about protests in France over naming a square after Joseph Ben-Gurion, a divisive nationalist himself, I read about the (personally) more troubling move over in Vilnius. Let’s slow things down a bit and get some perspective back, ok?
Tags: alfa, anti-communism, Katyn, Lech Kaczyński, nationlism, NKVD, Poland
Jurgis Rudkus, conquering hero. (click to enlarge)
As the European Broadcast Union determines whether “Eastern European Funk,” in suggesting inequality between eastern and western Europeans, suffers from having political content, Lietuvos Rytas yesterday published an article by Andrius Užkalnis that argues a similar point of inequality, but from the entirely opposite direction.
Užkalnis, the most famous Lithuanian living in England now that John Gielgud is dead, takes as the occasion for his perplexing piece the news in England that Forza, a major meat supplier for supermarket chain Asda, recently looked to hire workers but insisted that the workers be fluent in Polish. At first, I imagined (despite the headline of the piece) that I was about to read some tales of some serious Jungle-style exploitation of foreign workers in the meat packing industry. I was wrong to expect that. Why is it, Užkalnis asks instead, that Lithuanians (and Poles) manage to always find work in the UK, while the English complain about unemployment?
The English, Užkalnis asserts, citing anecdotal evidence gleaned through a few pints at a hoteliers’ convention, are more inclined to hire foreigners than local English. They prefer the Eastern European job ethic, they admit behind closed doors, in comparison to the English one, ravaged by three generations of government-assisted sloth. Užkalnis even defines a “congenitally unemployed” Englishman who, having never seen anyone around him work a steady job, has no clue how to behave at work, himself.1
In any case, Užkalnis ups the ante for his piece, indicting Western Europe as a whole, lulled into such decadent laziness by the hardworking Americans who funded the Marshall Plan that it can’t even build up the energy to procreate. I’ve heard many explanations for ZPG in my day, but sloth was never one of them. Finally–and you knew where this was going as soon as I used the words “decadent” and “sloth”–he compares Western Europe to Rome. “We Eastern Europeans are the new barbarians,” Užkalnis proclaims, “armed not with weapons, but with uninsured autos and close-cropped hair.” He concludes by asking his readers to be proud of their position in this storming of the gates.
Considering the British history of waves of people who came from across the water, conquered the locals, then stayed and integrated/inflicted their culture with/upon what was already on the ground, there’s something to be said here.
But the reliance on anecdotal evidence and essentializing moves (both those made by Užkalnis himself and recreated uncritically when asserted by others) notwithstanding, there’s one short paragraph over halfway through the Lietuvos Rytas article that troubles me quite a bit. It is, unfortunately, the fulcrum of the argument:
Dar kartą pabrėšiu: užsieniečius čia samdo ne todėl, kad jie pigiau kainuoja. Jiems dažniausiai moka tiek pat, kiek ir vietiniams. Bet vietiniai nebetinka.
I’ll underscore this again [presumably from other articles]: foreigners are not hired [in England] because they are paid less. Most of the time, they earn as much as the locals do. But the locals are no longer a good fit.
Now, I have never been involved in hiring decisions (thank god). Nor have I ever lived in England (thank god). But this sentence goes against everything I have ever heard about migrant labor, either in Europe or in the US. No one would ever make the claim in the US that migrants get the jobs “because they work harder.” People would not even assert that in private. The whole point of migrant labor is that one can pay less for it, both in terms of the workers’ take-home and, often, in terms of tax responsiblity to the government.
Furthermore, the migrant labor population has a reputation for docility: the unskilled nature of the work that highlights the precarity of employment, combined with fear of deportation (which is not applicable in this case, necessarily), further enhanced by ignorance of workers’ rights, topped by issues of communication make an intensely potent cocktail of straight-up old-timey exploitation. In fact, even if it’s empirically demonstrable that Poles make better meat-packers than the English, one can’t dismiss the role of the precarity of the Poles’ position in England in incentivizing the worker. Consider, again, the example from The Jungle, where paranoia over termination causes workers to quite literally work themselves to death.2
Sure, sure. England in 2010 is not the US in 1906. Or, well, even the US in 2010, with its own acute migrant labor issues. And, after all, I already admitted above to not being on the ground regarding English employment. But though Užkalnis draws heavily from the Daily Mail article about the situation at Forza, he completely ignores much of the first quarter of journalist Nick Craven’s piece.
Before his article degenerates into the crypto-xenophobia that one expects in a conservative rag like the Daily Mail, Craven makes reference to a recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK on, wait for it, “mistreatment and exploitation of migrant and agency workers” in, wait for it, the meat and poultry industry. I won’t even quote the press release on the report, since Craven makes the point clearly in his own article:
But Forza – a major supplier of Asda supermarkets – was last night accused of anti-British discrimination because of the adverts, which came after an official report detailed how unscrupulous employers prefer to hire migrants because they are cheap and less inclined to answer back…
Forza’s advertisement came as the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report condemned the ‘mistreatment and exploitation’ of foreign workers, who are often too afraid to raise concerns for fear of being sacked.
The commission said it uncovered ‘widespread evidence’ of physical and verbal abuse and lack of proper health and safety protection, while workers often have little knowledge of their rights.
It is also reported that British workers had spoken of difficulty in registering with employment agencies that supply mainly East European workers.
Netikėk lengvu uždarbiu užsienyje.
This report, which sounds like it describes 1906 Chicago after all, goes completely unremarked in Užkalnis’s retelling of the tale for the Lithuanian audience of Lietuvos Rytas. Instead, again, “[užsieniečiams] dažniausiai moka tiek pat, kiek ir vietiniams.” I don’t get it.
Certainly, there’s a middle ground to be struck between “streets paved of gold” and “Tave parduos kaip lėlę.” but the tack Užkalnis takes, even if true in general, is specifically not true in the particular case that gives cause to his writing the article in the first place: why would Forza want to hire only Poles? The government says it’s because they can be easily exploited. Užkalnis, on the other hand, suggests it’s because English make such terrible workers that perhaps Forza has just had it with their uselessness. I know whom I trust here, bestseller or no.
In “Eastern European Funk,” Jurgis Didžiulis makes a case for taking a perverse (in the many senses of the word) pride in the role of exploited. It’s a bit bitter, a bit vengeful, but it’s also mixed with enough sugar and smile to give the situation the complex texture that it demands. In his piece for Lietuvos Rytas, however, Užkalnis has managed to flatten this texture in a bewildering way.
And so while the larger, demographic thrust of the article I see with no difficulty (and I buy it, in much the same way that I respond with a big “so?” when Lithuanians complain to me about Ukranians getting “all the jobs” in Lithuania), I can’t imagine the meat-packing industry ever creating a lemonade quite as sweet as the one Užkalnis is peddling.
[Originally posted, with proper formatting, to Lithchat]
- It’s interesting, of course, that the “congenitally unemployable” class of person was thought to exist in the Soviet Union. By eradicating the free market and private enterprise, our anti-communist indoctrination explained, the USSR had generated generations of permanently crippled workers with no initiative or drive, eager to wait for their government handouts and no more. How the Lithuanians and Poles got so lucky to escape this Lamarckian spiral while the English could not is a bit beyond me. [↩]
- Despite the efforts by Užkalnis to bring into his “barbarians at the gate” fold Lithuanian professionals as well as unskilled laborers, I somehow suspect that as compensation grows, disparities in ethic begin to disappear. It’s notable that Užkalnis includes not a single white-collar gig in his tales of exasperation with lazy English. [↩]
Tags: Andrius Užkalnis, exploitation, inCulto, Lietuvos rytas, migrant labor, The Jungle
Well, the wheels seem to be in motion. The European Broadcast Union, the people behind Eurovision, is “investigating” the lyrical content of Lithuania’s entry to the song contest, InCulto’s “Eastern European Funk,” to see if it’s “political” in nature. Though I’m certain that my 3000-word meandering on the political content of the song over the weekend in no way tipped off the EBU, I’m still sad that they’re going through this bit of kabuki theater.
By Monday, the head of the Lithuanian delegation, Andrius Giržadas, had already responded to letters that complained about the political content by explaining that the response could be generated by the song’s being a deviation from the usual love ballads that make up most Eurovision fare. This is inarguable, and it is also much to InCulto’s (and the Lithuanian televoting population’s) credit to have still had the song reach this level. Giržadas further argues that the lyrics don’t denigrate any specific group and reference historical facts that are commonly discussed in the European Union. Finally, he speculates that the whole thing is little more than a possible prank.
But what the EBU fails to realize is that their own show is a political undertaking–the way the competition is set up reinforces the very economic issues brought up by InCulto’s song, as the “Big Four” (Germany, UK, France, and Spain) have bought their way straight into the finals each year, avoiding the shame of having to pass the hat for televotes twice in one week.1
Furthermore, the contest relies on the structure of the European nation-state to provide it with competitors. I don’t know what the history is of national minorities having their voices heard at Eurovision, but the deck is, to be polite, stacked heavily against them. It encourages national unity (in the name of a fantasy of European unity) which doesn’t feel political only since it has been so normativized. So trying to decide what, lyrically, counts as “political” is a rather useless exercise.
The letter Giržadas received referred specifically to the lines about having “survived the Reds and two world wars” and about how “we’re” not “equal” despite both being in the “EU.” The first line is ridiculous, referring to a historical fact, and I like the S/M tones it takes on in the song as a whole, as I explained over the weekend. If that line is grounds for disqualification, then Abba should have their award rescinded for “Waterloo.” The second line is also obviously a fact, depending on how one measures equality. If the EBU insists on some kind of fuzzy “we’re all just people, man” sense of equality, then the whole contest is a sham, since some people (French performers, who skip the semis) are clearly more equal than others.
On the other hand, maybe a future Eurovision sung entirely in Vonlenska might not be such a bad idea. Then we get to the politics of music itself, divorced of lyrical content. Oh boy…
[Originally posted, with proper formatting, to Lithchat.]
- PIGSy Spain is, of course, in this case an outlier, but, as Almodóvar showed in a brilliant parodic TV commercial embedded in ¡Átame!, the Spanish will always find the money for aesthetic pleasure now and put off saving for later. [↩]
Tags: 15min, Abba, eurovision, Giržadas, inCulto
Because of the victory in Eurovision 2008 by the Timbaland-produced “Believe” (video of Dima Bilan’s semi-final performance, featuring ice skating by Evgenij Pljushchenko), the 2009 edition of the European Song Contest was hosted by Russia (the victor each year hosts the following year’s competition). Georgia, who had, of course, recently fought a brief war with Russia, submitted as their candidate song Stephane & 3G’s “We Don’t Wanna Put In,” provided, here, with lyrics:
Derivative disco, sure, with a still not entirely uncatchy groove. Yet the chorus of the song, “We don’t wanna put in / The negative move / Is killing the groove / I’m a-tryin’ to shoot in / Some disco tonight,” fell afoul of the Eurovision officials. See, Eurovision is perhaps more regulated than any enterprise in the world. In fact, over half of the Treaty of Lisbon is devoted to regulations regarding song entries into Eurovision. Some regulations are very well known: songs can’t be longer than three minutes (which makes writing about Eurovision very easy). Others come up in weird cases, like with LT United’s 2006 entry, where they, apparently inappropriately, used the word “Eurovision” in their song.1
Stephane & 3G’s transgression, however, was to ignore the Eurovision rule regarding “No lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature.” They refused to change the lyrics of the chorus, which were interpreted as anti-Putin, so the song was disqualified, and Georgia refused to send an alternate song. Disco continues to scandalize into the 21st Century! Of course, the politico-historical background of the 1974 winners was apparently more subtle than that of the Georgians.
Fill our heart with your national desire.
The desire to present an aesthetic without political commitments, pace Jameson, emerges, I suspect, out of the unifying desire of the paradox of the Eurovision project itself. Its current logo itself presents this paradox: it’s a stylized rendering of the name with a large heart taking the place of the “v.” But this heart is then filled in with the flag of whatever nation is competing or hosting at the time, suggesting a sort of innate, interior quality to national feeling that is embedded in each performer’s heart. So, since we all have an innate national feeling, a property claim on a slice of the Volksgeist, the theory goes, we’re all united in being different, a sort of neoliberal justification for the competition itself. And for those whose flags never get to be represented at Eurovision? Sorry.
In fact, Eurovision becomes a sort of neoliberal competition sans pareil, based as it is on the ideas of competition, on a fundamental human equality expressed in pluralism. Into the aesthetic European marketplace, unfettered by varying tariff schedules or import regulations, each song stands an equal chance of winning. Well, an equal chance except of course, for the “Big Four,” who bought their way out of having to compete at the semi-final level. But neoliberalism’s genius is, of course, its willingness to be ideologically inconsistent (here undemocratic) when money is at stake.
Next, each commodity is graded in part by the demos (televoting) and by expert bureaucrats (the national juries, which presumably can appreciate the quality of Eurovision better than the demos). We have the fantasy of democracy and equality, yet also the obscured structure of support (aesthetic firewalls, buying your way to the finals) to maintain a level of order, so capital is not put at too great a risk.
LT United’s entry in 2006 played up (unconsciously, I suspect) this neoliberal fantasy, and I bought in. The main reason I preferred it to InCulto’s beloved runner-up, “Welcome (to Lithuania)” was because of two lines Vee sings midway through the song that illustrate its commitment to pluralistic neoliberalism: “De Vilnius city à Paris” and “Chantons la même chanson.” So first we have the unifying move of the band itself, which took its name from the football tradition, imagining itself as a “national selection”–the best the nation had to offer and send to international competitions, just like in the World Cup. Lithuania is united behind the song “We Are the Winners.” But then lyrically, the song encourages a geographical and performative unity. The locus of winners stretches from Vilnius to Paris, and it involves everyone singing the song (a list that would include the actual winners that year, Lordi, and Robbie Williams). If this seems a bit confusing, it’s because it’s paradoxical: competition brings us together, and out of choosing a winner, we will be united. This ironic skimming between was missed by the throaty audience in Athens, eager to boo LT United as they made their way to a Lithuania-best 6th place performance. We can all sing the song, the message was, but we’re still LT United, and there can still be only one set of winners in this marketplace. But as long as no one’s feelings are hurt…
“Welcome (to Lithuania),” on the other hand, I found to be exceptionalist (and this conclusion was greatly influenced by the aesthetic moves made by PetPunk in their nevertheless enjoyable video for the song). So it’s interesting that InCulto has moved beyond the borders of Lithuania with their new song, “Eastern European Funk,” Lithuania’s representative in the 2010 edition of the Eurovision contest. First, here’s the televised final performance, so the reader can both see the Eurovision logo in action as well as get an aural appreciation of the lyrical content of the song:
Second is a version from much earlier this year, performed in studio (minus Auris on bass, who is in the other room) for RadioCentras. Notable in this performance is how the radio personality Vytenis manages to mess up the title of the song, uncertain if it’s “punk” or “funk.” Though I doubt he had Dr. Green’s “East Europe Ska” on the mind, as I’ll show later, InCulto owes more, generically, to punk tradition in this song than funk:
These two versions can then be compared against the two versions (though three clips) I posted earlier this week.
So first, let’s get the funk out of the way (I’ve had friends ask what, precisely, is “funky” about this song). Unlike “jazz,” whose very etymology is euphemistically tied to sex, “funk”‘s euphemistic power to obscure sex is retrofitted. Taking a classic lyric like “Make my funk the P-funk / I wants to get funked up,” it’s taking advantage of uncertainty over the etymology of the term “funk,” including using its phonetic proximity to “fuck.” Musically, funk is supposed to lope around, vamping with a driving bass on just a chord or two, giving an undulating motion, and, well, this song doesn’t really do that. But what it cedes musically, it reclaims lyrically, despite a certain amount of variance in the lyrics over the course of the song’s evolution in the YouTube clips online.2 The first verse sexualizes the bloody past of Eastern Europe during the 20th Century. “We’ve had it pretty tough / But that’s ok, we like it rough” sings Didžiulis, turning “Survived the Reds and two world wars” from a defiant move of political strength to a 70-year tantric orgy enjoyed by the masochists of Eastern Europe. Yet there’s an implicit threat in the first verse, too, as Didžiulis sings that “We’ll settle the score,” presumably not with the previous oppressors, but with those who refuse to “give us a chance.”
The second verse, then, is the interesting one, and it’s the one that serves as a (revolutionary) critique of neoliberalism and of the very structure of contemporary Europe and Eurovision. Didžiulis pits Eastern Europe and its suffering against the relative material success of the West, arguing that there are neoliberal fictions of equality codified by the EU, but these fictions filter down to the ground level only as shadows of their idealized selves, their corners cut by concessions to capital. The verse is worth quoting in full, with my potential errors in transcription asserted beforehand:
Yes sir, we are legal, we are But we're not as legal as you No sir, we're not equal Though we're both from the EU We build your home, we wash your dishes Keep your hands all squeaky clean Someday you'll come to realize Eastern Europe's in your genes/jeans!
Being unified in the EU has not granted full equality, in fact, and, in making moving as an undocumented worker even easier, it has fostered, in its own neoliberal way, even more massive income inequality. The release of travel restrictions to the West has created a gigantic exodus of Lithuanians from Lithuania (along with other Eastern Europeans from their homes), such that, for example, when I was walking down a street in London and saw a bunch of men building a home, I would have been more startled if they had not been speaking Lithuanian.
But the ascendance of the Eastern European into the underclass of Western Europe (thereby competing with the underclass from Asia and Africa in urban environments like Paris) comes despite the fact that Eastern Europe has gotten the “democracy” and “freedom” that it “wanted.” It gets to participate in Eurovision now with its nationalist, not communist, flags inside the little Euro♡ision. You are, after all, now equal, no? Oh wait, you wanted something resembling economic equality as well? Clearly you’re not actually ready to join us, let’s have you run up some debt with the IMF first.
The point here is that the second verse starts skating toward lyrics “of a political or similar nature.” Not that I think the song should be disqualified: it’s to its benefit that it carries a revolutionary subtext, rising to its climax, as it were, in the closing line, with an implicit threat of occluded miscegenation. Perhaps the homebuilder or dishwasher is your true, biological father or mother, masked and obscured to prevent class shame. Or perhaps the dishwasher has sabotaged your dishes, leaving his own genetic material on the plate in quiet revolt against your terrible wages. This is, of course, the revenge for the sextourism critiqued in “Welcome.” Further, read as “jeans,” the last line is a reminder of the role of the Eastern European in the process of production even in Western Europe, suggesting that it’s probably not a good idea to keep stomping on the underclass.
This revolutionary current, then, explains how I see the generic ancestry of InCulto’s entry not in the funk ethos of sexual expression, but in the punk ethos of (sexual) revolution, despite the eagerness to pigeonhole InCulto into a nationalist revolutionary sentiment. For the latter, take a song like “Sally,” by Gogol Bordello, a band with certain aesthetic affinities with InCulto:
There is a similar thread of defiance (“But by the accident of some kind divine dispensation /
I ended up being walking United Nation / And I survived even fucking radiation”–though messed up in the live version above, these are the lyrics of the album recording) as with the “we like it rough,” but the force of “Sally” comes before, in the narrative of cultural revolution. “Gypsies” come by and drop “something,” and right there, the revolution begins.
But it’s uncertain to me what, precisely, Hütz has in mind with this cultural revolution, which is how Didžiulis manages to move past it. Hütz’s lack of clarity over revolution, in fact, is a persistent problem for me with Gogol Bordello, since, unlike InCulto’s ironic twisting of the pluralist screw, Gogol Bordello seems to be eager to relish it.3 “They always were afraid that I was a schizophrenic,” Hütz sings, continuing with “They always were afraid что я родину продал” (that I sold out the nation). In reality, though, “я был просто маленький медведик / Сёл на велосипедик и всё на хуй проебал”(I was simply a little bearcub / Seated on a little bike and fucking losing everything). I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work through these lines.4 What they seem to encourage is a continued presence of a national spirit. The cultural revolution, or the performance, did not ruin the national identity, and the nation was not sold out. What, then, is the actual result of the revolution called for here?5
The nationalized cultural revolutions Gogol Bordello imagines play right into the neoliberal playbook. The band fancies itself as subversive, “smuggling” ethnic musical tropes into the US like Gogol “smuggled” Ukrainian culture into Russian culture. But the result is just an enhanced cultural particularization. In making such a big deal of its multiethnic composition, Gogol Bordello banishes itself to its own ghetto.6
Didžiulis, on the other hand, with his threats of miscegenation, shows that the cultural revolution will come as interior sensibilities of national identity become illegible, replaced, instead, with models of practice and performance–expressivities of identity that by definition have a material component.7 In other words, the fantasy of equality through pluralism (with its resonances with “separate but equal” in the US) is now challenged on the stage in Oslo, during Eurovision, perhaps the grandest stage for perpetuating that very fantasy. Elsewhere Didžiulis has commented on the kitsch nature of Eurovision, but considering kitsch’s complicated relationship to national expression, it does not unhinge the subversion of the lyrical content of the song.
LT United promised a certain kind of imagined unity in all voting for the winners and in singing their song from Vilnius to Paris, but it’s ephemeral; it’s the cover for increasing economic destruction. “Eastern European Funk,” to me, calls for for a different kind of European Unity.
So that all said, what are the song’s chances in Oslo? One of the great moves by writing a song about Eastern Europe as a whole is that it might shake up the blocs that tend to vote for each other in Eurovision. The Baltic states tend to vote with the Scandinavians, leaving the Slavs to split themselves further into two groups, the Western-European Slavic axis and the South Slavic axis. The political claims Didžiulis makes, in English, the master’s language, are understood as well in Russia as in Poland as in Bulgaria as in Ukraine as in Bosnia (whose population has felt the thumb of democracy in their eye in denying them the right to build minarets in Switzerland). Centuries-old neighborly antagonisms don’t change the fact that everyone in the east is not as legal (or as equal) as those in the west.
I’ve read a few criticisms of the song for being, in its all-male constitution and self-consciously kitschy approach, far too reminiscent (and hence derivative) of the four year old performance by LT United. For me, that comparison makes no sense whatsoever–especially given how each year about 80% of the songs are interchangeable lovesong pop and, thus, derivative of each other, one after the other–but for a person just tuning in to the semi-finals in May, there may indeed be a lot of resonance, which probably goes to InCulto’s detriment. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that we have seen the final version of the band’s stage performance, so they may have some tricks tucked away in their sequined briefs.
Sadly, since I’ll be in the US during the semi-finals and finals, I suspect I won’t be able to vote for InCulto from France, but I still support their bid.
[Originally posted, with proper formatting, footnotes, and embedded video, to Lithchat.]
- I can’t find references to this situation, but I recall reading in 2006 that LT United was going to not be allowed to use the word “Eurovision” in their performance. They did, of course. [↩]
- When referring to lyrics, I’m referring to the RadioCentras version, which is new and clear. The same lyrics are used in the Maxima performance, and there isn’t significant deviation from the televised performance from the other day. [↩]
- Someday I’ll write my review of InCulto’s much maligned second album and start a process of recuperation of it as a brilliant, persistent critique of the nationalist project informing about 95% of contemporary Lithuanian political life. [↩]
- This time spent is in part since I have little confidence in my translation of “всё на хуй проебал,” but advanced cursing isn’t part of the third-year Russian syllabus. [↩]
- A song like their “Immigrant Punk” is even more frustratingly illegible as far as an actual political call to action. It seems to get its lyrical energy simply out of celebrating difference. Zzzzz. [↩]
- Trimmed from this piece is an extended discussion of the fiction of cultural particularization as highlighted in Joann Sfar’s fantastic series Klezmer. I did go through the effort of uploading the images I was going to use as evidence, which you can view here. [↩]
- Another way to see how “Eastern Europe is in your genes/jeans” is a Lamarckian way: take those jeans to the dance floor, dance to the Eastern European funk, and find that the practice of your dancing jeans embeds itself in your genes. [↩]
Tags: Abba, Delfi, Dima Bilan, eurovision, Evgenij Pljushchenko, exceptionalism, Georgia, Gogol Bordello, inCulto, Lordi, nationalism, neoliberalism, PetPunk, Robbie Williams, Russia, Stephane & 3G
Alita. (karikatura.lt)
After a meeting at work this week, we had our usual pause to drink some wine. For some reason, we were especially thirsty and quickly bored through our two-bottle ration. Wanting more, we tried to have the ration increased, but, instead, the suggestion was that we raid our own private stocks. I happen to have a private stock of wine at work, and it consists of one bottle of Alita sparkling wine that I brought back from Lithuania in January.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a big fan of Alita. In fact, the bulk of my exposure to it probably came at Kunigaikščių užeiga, once they took their two Soviet sparkling wines, Советское Шампанское and Советское Мускатное off the menu.1 The move to champagne mid-way through the meal was a well-exercised pro move, but once Alita became the only show in town, the interest faded away.
In either case, we were down to just the bottle of Alita, and so out it came. I had given the wine about a 5% chance of being legitimately liked, a 15% chance of being politely liked, and an 80% chance of being disliked to various degrees. I was about right.
One taster asked the crowd what the antimalarial medicine is that’s sprayed, since that’s what Alita smelled like. Another remarked that now one knew the flavor of anti-freeze. Several offered to pour their portions back into my cup after I explained that I was not going to throw the contents out (in general, the room was very anti-finishing the bottle). But the best was the progression taken by one taster:
Smelling the bouquet: “Odd, it smells of apples.”
Sipping: “OK.”
Aftertaste: “Oh, this is not good.”
Then: “This is truly not good” (C’est vraiment pas bien).
A half-minute later: “C’est dégueulasse!”
And that was that. The anti-malarial anti-freeze cupful of filthy ickiness was ostracized, and the rest of the crowd managed to find two more bottles to continue the evening’s chatter.
[Originally posted, with proper formatting, to Lithchat.]
- I found a bottle of the Мускатное this week for sale for 9€ at the Russian deli Гастрономь, about a kilometer’s walk from where I live. I was shocked to find out that it is “produced and bottled” in Latvia, but I guess the brand has been distributed around the former USSR. I’m pretty certain that previous versions of the stuff I drank were bottled in Ukraine. Now that I know its Latvian provenance, I’m very scared to see how it is. [↩]
Tags: Alita, champagne, Kunigaikščių užeiga
