My Favorite Pasttime

(these photos were all taken in Sumgayit in December but I didn't have an internet connection to post them then. Mostly stuff from our swearing-in ceremony, but in no way related to the post below. enjoy)

Well, after a week of insomnia, frequent guesting due to the holiday, and the general difficulties of living with a deaf father, an idiot brother and a country full of people who are thoroughly convinced that drinking cold liquids as deadly as radiation, I feel I need a catharsis for what I consider to be my most beloved and widely practiced activity: complaint. Where to begin...?

Firstly, as I mentioned in previous posts I am currently looking for a house of my own so that I can escape from my host family who, despite being nice and taking good care of me, are driving me to the point of murderous insanity. My host father, who is disabled and therefore at the house all day every day, is also deaf. He has a hearing aid, but he doesn't wear it. This means that he spends the majority of his day sitting 2 feet away from the TV with the volume turned all the way up, meaning that from 9am until 1am I get to hear every single thing that happens on Azeri or Russian television, the vast majority of which is absolute garbage. A variety of loud bombastic talk shows hosted by hideous old women with enough plastic surgery to make Michael Jackson jealous, call-in talk shows where sad Azeri women bemoan the pains of having a husband who doesn't care enough about them or a mother-in-law who doesn't like them, or, worst of all, Azeri music.

Azeri music is so bad it deserves its own paragraph. I know that those of you who are familiar with my musical tastes may feel that I am in no position to judge the music of an entire culture when I spend the majority of my time listening to blasting death metal, weird techno or uncategorizable insanity. You are wrong, and kindly shut up. As far as I can tell, Azeri music is broken into three categories, all of which are awful in their own special way. First is pop, which despite being crap due to the merits of merely being pop, is made especially awful by the fact that the music is largely produced from a synthesizer that could be bought at Sears circa 1983, as well as the unfortunate reality that apparently nobody in this country has ever heard of musical terms such as key, tone, meter or rythm. This fact bleeds over into the next genre, Azeri folk music, known as "mughan", which replaces the severely outdated synthesizer with traditional instruments such as saz, tar, accordian, etc. This would be all well and good if they didn't have to have someone come and start singing over it, thereby ruining any good qualities the music possessed beforehand. The skill of an Azeri singer is judged not by tonal quality or vocal range or any other things that are normally required for a person to be considered worthing of making noise with their mouth for the enjoyment of others. Instead, it is judged entirely by vibrato, or the ability for one to fluxuate the tone of one's voice as rapidly as possibly. Tone and key are thrown completely out the window here, and the rapidly warbling mess of noise that is the result sounds approximately like an eppileptic cat in heat tied to a drowning parrot on bad acid. The third and final genre is called "meyxana", and is as close an approximation to freestyle rap that drunk Azeri men sitting in chairs with microphones can get to. The problem is, instead of interesting lyrical rythms, humurous observations or other such qualities that make freestyle rap generally listenable and sometimes enjoyable, "meyxana" is an accordian, stone-age synthesizer and electronic drumset PLAYING THE SAME BEAT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER....ad infinitum. The last time I took a taxi from Sumgayit to Baku, the driver was listening to meyxana, and 1 track lasted 45 MINUTES, WITH THE SAME BEAT! Furthermore, the "singers", always two Azeri men sitting in recliners with microphones, don't actually sing, but talk, and say the same thing repeatedly because they either lack the ability to come up with creative rhyme schemes or are on the verge of falling asleep in their comfy lazy-boy.

Perhaps I wouldn't be so bitter towards Azeri music if it wasn't for the fact that everyone in this country seems to suffer from some sort of hearing loss, meaning that it is required to blast music at a volume roughly equivalent to the sound of a hippo being sucked into the engine of a jet liner. I consider my host father a special case, as he really is legitimately deaf, but I was awoken after 4 hours of poor sleep at 8am this morning to the sound of Azeri pop blasting out of our TV not from my father, but my brother, whose hearing is perfectly fine as far as I know. Every second of every day I am bombarded with it from every corner, and as of now I want nothing more than to go to my own house and sit in absolute silence for a week or so.

Anyways, now that I've got that off my chest I feel much better. I'll save Azeri traffic, pensioners, gypsys and being ripped off by sellers at the bazar for another post. Take care!

-K