Vids › The Weirdness, Part 4

Otava Yo – Pro Ivana (The Tale of Ivan Groove)

2012 · Directed by Alexey Belkin

354K Likes

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Best comments

1.“From Finland, I need to transmit this message to our eastern brothers and sisters: our planet needs more wonderful Slavic insanity. Shine your potato and keep playing. Please.”

More comments

2.“'What kind of music do you listen to?' 'It's complicated...'”
3.“I'm sitting here in Texas with my son Ivan. We found this video by accident, loved the tone... and suddenly I see the lyrics are about an Ivan. My son smiled. He is 7.”

The story

Otava Yo started on the streets of St. Petersburg. Four buskers met there in 2003, played Celtic punk for a while, then turned to Russian village music and named themselves after otava – the grass that grows back in the same spot weeks after it's been cut. Bagpipes, gusli, fiddle, a big bass drum and a straight face that keeps slipping.

This was their second official video. Band leader Alexey Belkin directed it, and they shot it on the road during their summer 2011 tour through Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Estonia and Karelia, with thanks to the ethnographic museum in Węgorzewo, Poland, for letting them film. The YouTube title bills it as Russian gothic R'n'B, which tells you how seriously to take it. The song is a very old kind of excuse: Ivan never made it to his sweetheart's place, because he was out in the street sawing away on his fiddle until morning.

It went to number one on World Music Network's video chart in October 2012. A few years later their Sumetskaya video, full of Russian fist fighters, went properly viral. Folk music that refuses to sit still in the museum, even when it's filmed in one.

In my playlists

The Weirdness, Part 4 · #111

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