The fate of the epochal personality This is a very difficult art - pop. In the opera, the singer is easy to hide behind the brilliant music of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Tchaikovsky - only sing beautifully, according to notes, according to the canons, keep your voice apparatus in shape. Everything is written for you, just reproduce it. It's a craft. And in the song you can not hide for anyone: it must still be found, created, arranged, come up with a performing image, find a manner, the right intonation, sing - so that it was fresh, and melodic, and beautiful, and with meaning. Here you need to be a Personality (of course, I mean only the highest samples of the genre). Therefore, probably, the great pop singers are much less than the great opera singers.
But if they appear on the pop horizon of superstar level personalities, they are remembered for a long time. This is how you begin to talk about Pugacheva, the heyday of which this film is dedicated, and think: what an amazing, fantastic fate! Forty years she has been singing, singing and doing everything! Long time ago! Everyone talks and talks and talks about it. They argue and argue and argue. And there's no end to it! It would seem that everything has already been said, discussed, re-disputed, muzzled, but Pugachev has not given anyone peace for so many years! Look: she is not Karl Marx, not Lenin, not Sigmund Freud, not Nietzsche, not the executioner Stalin, but her work and contribution to the art, culture, mentality, way of life and life of a great country are endlessly reinterpreted, overgrown with new discoveries, conjectures, conjectures, lamentations, sobs, humiliations and curses. This is the fate of a great man. Remember, in Abuladze’s Repentance, he was able to turn enemies into friends and friends into enemies. The lot of the elect.
Pugacheva sang everything she could, reached such artistic heights in pop art, to which no one had risen before her (when it seemed that the stage in principle is not capable of conquering such peaks). She not only conveyed to us the vocal beauty and enchanting passion of the most exquisite melodies (many of which she wrote herself) and returned to the erased words their original, unobtrusive meaning, but – and this is quite incredible – revealed to us in her songs the hidden corners of our own soul. And suddenly I realized that everything - the channel has dried up, and how much can I?! To die on the stage!
Pugacheva, perhaps, is today in a period of such... complacency, when everything is already sung, when all the songs-masterpieces are already sung. She sang "When I'm going far, far away." This brilliant song was written in the 80th year. And, by the way, with the song "When I'm gone" usually singers end their career. And she sang in '80, a song that still plays in her program. But then she was at the peak of time, at the peak of some kind of musical opposition. Because then no one could afford to shake his hair so lush and hooded and sing with such a Jericho voice, so bold, bright, unique. There were great singers, but they were more academic. Academic pop, if I may say so. This is the same Rotaru, and Muslim Magomayev, and Edita Pieha. And Pugacheva blew up this academicism and showed that you can be a first-grader, you can be a wizard-undergraduate, you can be a buffetress broken, you can be a peasant girl who “sit, we will poke” etc. All of Pugacheva’s work is autobiographical through and through, even in those moments from which you least expect it. This is one of the mysteries that this amazing woman leaves behind.
She treats her fans very indifferently. Sometimes it's a little mean. She is not fair to them for the most part, well, maybe she was burned here on those rabid fans of terrible, whom she initially trusted, and they turned out to be just disturbers of peace and public order. By the way, the paradox: the more Pugacheva pushes away fans and says: 'Go away, what are you doing here? Do not create a crowd at the entrance!, the more her fans.
She never talks about giving money to anyone. She thinks it's not beautiful. She's just helping the individual people she thinks she needs to help, and I don't know what the circle is, but I know she does. Pugacheva does not like pumps at all, she does not like to tell about herself that she is there, she is here. She knows how to conduct programs beautifully, she knows how to make great shows, she can be brilliant, she can be bright, but to say that I did this, this, I’m somewhere in the charts. And she has something to be proud of, she has prizes like this, she has things that nobody knows about. And songs that no one has ever heard.
Now for the sad. Unfortunately, Pugacheva has long lost not only her former voice, but also her once inherent sense of humor, self-irony, common sense and even, it seems, orientation in space. Almost everything she shows today from the screen and printed pages is unheard of fanabery, complaints about “poverty”, endless reproaches at all possible addresses, increasing creative helplessness and... barely veiled malice. Everyone owes it – television, the public, journalists, concert organizers, son-in-law and grandchildren, presidents, business, and the entire supreme power – in general, the whole country, and perhaps the whole world. That's how she behaves. I recall a completely anomalous episode from the New Year’s program “Big Difference” on the First, where Pugacheva tore and metal and was ready to destroy the parodyist, who made a stunningly accurate caricature on her. Pugacheva was literally boiling with malice, red spots seemed to come out through makeup, his face was already skewed.
As it turned out, she is going on a new concert tour. From next year, she is preparing a big concert program, a lot of new songs. I recently accidentally heard her new song ‘Don’t Call’ on one of the radio stations, and, you know, this is not the Pugacheva. It's not the music, it's nothing. There are no pectoral notes of Pugachev, no power. The voice sounds flat. True, a very fashionable, cool arrangement with computer samples, sounds stylish, at the forefront of fashion. But this is not Pugacheva, there is no thought! I don't know why Alla has such compositions. I was very upset. You need to come out with a new, big, powerful, cool material. "Don't Call" can't compare to "Arlequino" or "Call Me With You." It won't be a hit.