Last month, at Bar Freda in Brooklyn, I saw Hanna Datsko perform a phenomenal cover of this song with Barva, a friend’s Ukrainian rock cover band. There was a lot of great music that night but I really liked this song in particular.
(Sixth slide, sorry, for whatever reason Instagram doesn't provide a way to embed just one video from a multipost.)
As I don’t speak Ukrainian, it took me ages to find the name and artist of the original so I could find a recording on YouTube. It’s the 2021 viral indie pop hit “вечорниці” (Vechornitsi) by Tember Blanche, it is gorgeous, and after reading multiple English translations of the lyrics by both machines and humans I still have no clue what any of it means.
Something about boys ignoring girls at a party, and showing up with your head washed?
There’s an even more popular hip-hop version of this song that’s a collab with Kalush, the Ukrainian rap group who won Eurovision last year.
One of the members of Kalush is currently on hiatus because he is busy serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces to fight the Russian invasion. I cannot emphasize enough how utterly insane Putin’s war is.
(edit) I have found a recording of Tember Blanche performing this song two weeks ago at the Na Chasi Festival of Contemporary Culture in Kyiv, two years later now that everyone in Ukraine knows the words. It is so absolutely, thoroughly, comprehensively lit.
It occurred to me that this was likely one of the last songs salient in the pop culture zeitgeist in Ukraine just before the 2022 invasion, a vivid and not-so-long-ago memory of the relative peace and prosperity Ukraine had and is fighting to have again, and that is the energy Tember Blanche is bringing into this performance.