Tyushtya goes industrial: does the Erzya language have modern music?

Erzya folk music is known across the whole Finno-Ugric world — we will devote a separate article to it. Today's question is different: does Erzya music exist beyond folklore — rock, rap, electronic and pop music in the Erzya language? The short answer: it exists, and it is more interesting than one might expect. The long answer is about why this music is so hard to find, and what separates individual artists from a real scene.

Begin with the map. Modern Erzya-language music arrived in waves: in 2005 came the art-folk group Mordens, which won a following among young listeners; in 2010 the group Merema appeared in Saransk; in 2011 the group OYME — the word means "soul" in Erzya — made its debut in Moscow. Alongside them stands a whole roster of performers singing contemporary songs in Erzya: Bakich Vidyay, Ezhevika Spirkina, Anna Panisheva, Andrei Bochkanov, Yevgeny Samarkin, Viktor Rautkin, Liyana Bakaykina. Names worth knowing — and nearly impossible to encounter in any chart.

The loudest story on this scene is OYME. The Moscow-based group with Erzya roots recorded the song "Vaya" in 2012 together with Éric Mouquet, leader of the world-famous project Deep Forest, and in 2017 released its first video for the song, featuring a former Cirque du Soleil soloist, Mario Forelli; by the evening of the day after its release the video had gathered more than 75,000 views. The approach chosen for the video was formulated by the singer Ezhevika Spirkina with rare clarity: not to bet on "narrowly local ethnography" — "the sure path to a broad audience lies only through universally understood cultural codes: earth, air, water, fire"; the Erzya element, in her words, is "already abundant in the costumes, in the language of the song, in the dance elements, in the melody and harmonies". Erzya here is not a museum exhibit but a full-fledged material of world pop culture, standing on a par with any other.

There is Erzya rap too — and its geography is unexpected. Back in 2014, a survey of Finno-Ugric hip-hop compiled by the Komi youth magazine Tvoya Parallel noted that on the Volga people rap not only in Russian but also "in the traditional languages", and the songs come out "lyrical, inspiring, and sometimes even danceable". The survey's most telling protagonist was a young rapper born in Perm, who had lived in Moscow and was studying in Yoshkar-Ola: he raps in Erzya, and it was a trip to Mordovia that inspired him to take up the study of his ancestral language. Note the direction of travel: not from the language to rap, but through rap — back to the language. For a generation whose reading biography, as we have written, breaks off in adolescence, music turns out to be a door leading back in.

And now a fact that would adorn the history of any major musical culture. In 2021, a song in the Erzya language was released by... Komu Vnyz, a rock band from Kyiv — veterans of the Ukrainian scene who have been playing what critics describe as gothic folk-industrial since 1988. The composition "An Address to Tyushtya" is set to verses by the Erzya poet Alina Podgornova, with music by the Erzya composer Olöš, and the video was published on the channel of Syres Bolyaen, the inyazor — the elected elder — of the Erzya people. Tyushtya is a hero of Erzya mythology, the son of the thunder god and an earthly maiden; the song calls on him to return and save the Erzya language. Consider the route this song travelled: verses from the Erzya world, music by an Erzya composer, arrangement and voice from Kyiv, audience worldwide. The modern Erzya song, like the dictionary, "The Little Prince" and the morphological analyser, is born in collaborations across borders — wherever hands can be found for it.

Now for the comparison this article was written for. Among the neighbours, modern music in the native language long ago became a nation's shop window: the Buranovo Grannies carried an Udmurt song onto the Eurovision 2012 stage and took second place before an audience of many millions; the Udmurt poet Bogdan Anfinogenov turned rap into a manifesto of young identity; Mari popular music is a long-established scene with its own stars and its own public. Against this background one sees what the Erzya lack: there are artists — there is no scene. There is no label that would release Erzya-language music; no festival of contemporary (as opposed to folkloric) song; no chart, not even a publicly available catalogue — a person who decided today to listen to Erzya rock would not find so much as a complete list of what has already been recorded. Every artist breaks through alone, and the loudest are those who, like OYME or Komu Vnyz, lean on infrastructure outside the Erzya world.

Our forecast is cautiously optimistic, and here is why. Music is the lowest-barrier entrance a language has into a teenager's ears: a song needs no print run, no publishing house and no ministerial stamp — it needs streaming and a repost. Three minutes of Erzya rap will do more for the language's prestige with a fifteen-year-old than a gala concert for Language Day — and, unlike the concert, they will stay in that teenager's playlist. Technically everything is in place: the artists exist, the platforms are free, the diaspora is online. What is missing is the connecting link — a label, a festival, or at the very least a shared catalogue — and who will undertake to create it remains an open question. Valks, for its part, will do what it knows how to do: follow the Erzya-language scene and tell its readers about notable releases — and if you know of recordings we ought to hear about, our door is open. Until the Erzya scene has a chart, let it at least have news.