This Is Happening

It’s weird being a musician and also a philosophy and politics professor. Rarely do the two worlds ever intersect, and the contrast is often jarring; I finish giving a talk on Kantian Ethics to a group of polite, sleepy eggheads, and two hours later I am screaming “CIDER!! CIDER!!!” to a bunch of insane drunks in a mosh pit. It’s weird.

But the two worlds came together most clearly with Foreign Skies, a folkpunk concept album entirely focused on the insanity and tragedy of the First World War. I took my reading in history and social philosophy and tried to recreate the themes of that time by writing a diverse set of songs from the perspective of a wide variety of people; Gavrilo Princip, the Suffragettes, the German Soldier in Belgium, the executed deserter. We got a lot of questions about whether this was a “political” album; it wasn’t, unless bearing witness to horror, tragedy and evil is political. The only “message” was: this happened.

And so today, watching the horror, tragedy and evil unfold in Ukraine, I just want to join the chorus of voices saying: this is happening, we must bear witness to it, and in particular we must exercise maximum vigilance in order to end the illegal and preposterous invasion, minimize civilian losses and prevent all of this from spiraling out of control, just as it did in 1914.

I am also beset by a strange sense of shame and humility. Why? Because so much of the Dreadnoughts material is either inspired by or directly features melodies from both Russia and Ukraine. I was inspired to start the band by listening to the Red Army Choir. The main melody of “Elizabeth” is copied directly from the Russian Military March В путь!(“Let’s Go”), a march which is certainly being played in Russian barracks as we speak. The tune at the end of “Amsterdam” is a Ukrainian Kolomeyka. Our forthcoming album features both a Ukrainian patriotic dirge and a dance straight from Ukrainian folk history. And in “Polka Time”, we even played a medley of two Russian songs, one of which is the sublime and haunting Katyusha.

We play these melodies, we love them, but there is a sense in which we have no fucking idea what any of this music is actually about. We are pretenders, appropriating a musical tradition that comes out of a history that is drenched in blood, and about which we know almost nothing. The history of Russia and the Ukraine is insanely violent. Safely cocooned in a North American context, we in the Dreadnoughts lack the cultural memory and intergenerational trauma that Ukrainians and Russians carry with them every day, and which often finds its voice in music.

Some of the rockets raining down on Kiev right now are direct descendants of the Katyusha missile system, used in WWII and named directly after the military-themed folk song. For us, this song can just be a bouncy little polka. For a Russian who knows the words, it’s an entirely different thing. For the Ukrainian citizen who is watching a Russian missile hit an apartment building, it’s… profoundly different. So yeah, I sort of want to go back in time to 2005, grab myself by the collar and say: “Hey asshole… Red Army Choir. Army.”

I’m not saying it’s wrong that we’ve taken this music, sometimes even selling it back to the communities we took it from. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done it. It’s just that there is a larger lesson here: today, and right now, I think each of us who is not directly involved in Eastern Europe could stand to ask themselves what we really understand about living in a part of the world with a history like this. I know what’s in some of the history books, but in a deeper sense I know nothing.

At the 2010 Stare Misto Festival in Lviv, Ukraine, we signed autographs for these kids:

I remember it as one of the most heartwarming parts of the tour, when all the silly pretend-to-be-rock-star nonsense faded away and we just got to talk directly to young people about their lives and their musical tastes. They were wonderful, excited, happy to meet us. And now each of these kids are military age, and who knows where they are, but the idea that some of them might be heading East to potentially die in the face of a warmongerer’s preposterous invasion is chilling and awful. I look now, through the screen into these cheerful eyes, and think: sorry kids; all the history and theory and politics won’t protect you from this, the world is going let you down. Sorry.

This is happening. Bear witness to evil, gather your resources, listen to the voices of suffering, and try to help. And remember that unless you are a very special person, there are forces at work much older and deeper than you and your meagre experience can comprehend.