Виски и кокаин [Viski i kokain] [English translation]

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

(Smokey Mo):

I salute the risk brothers!

If the world doesn’t change, find the freedom to change it!

I salute those who have risen up from nothing,

By risking, by bending the city’s sadness to their will!

Yo! So I got sick.

I have no enemies, only a heap of envious reptiles!

Fear is in our minds! It’s not easy to stake everything you have …

But I am one of the ones who’ve done it – and I haven’t lost out!

Risk has a distinctive taste – you don’t forget it!

So I can’t cool down now, all right?!

I can’t cool down now! From the reserves bench

I’ve got up and left them having a smoke!

For victory talent alone is not enough.

I call my team “The Family”.

I unleash a volley of words into the auditorium, like an automatic;

Yeah, I’m fine now, but I rhyme like a crazy desperado!

Thank God, now that business is sorted!

The area I grew up has stayed with me in nostalgic stills.

I think life still doesn’t seem so sweet there.

Even a rain of anti-depressants won’t help them!

In that situation, I had little choice.

It didn’t take me long to choose between rap and a life of crime!

I remember who I started out with – there’s a few of them left!

I used to live, still live, and will continue to live, la vida loca1!

I salute the risk brothers!

If the world doesn’t change, find the freedom to change it!

I salute those who have risen up from nothing,

By risking, by bending the city’s sadness to their will!

(Zhenya Milkovsky, ‘Nerves’):

Shot! I’m playing All-In! I load my barrels with thoughts!

Thoughts not the same as they have!

Risk gets me high and gets me drunk, like whisky and cocaine!

Shot! I’m playing All-In! I load my barrels with thoughts!

Thoughts not the same as they have!

Risk gets me high and gets me drunk, like whisky and cocaine!

Whisky and cocaine!

(Basta):

Just like a surrealist scene from a Sorokin2, magpie 3soup for the homeland –

A candy Kremlin, a cold war. Where are you now, Thaw4?

I’m not arguing, the reboot process is too irksome.

The very time to slap them, and not to clap them at the congresses5.

The politics of rot is for the élite. I’m walking round with the wrong address,

That’s where a light steam gets you, Hyppolite!6

The exit and the entrance are the same, so you can’t get out of the maze.

An illusion of a path – a knot made out of turnings and ploughing on.

Some are pro-Putin, some de-putin’7,

Some wish him ill and don’t forget their morning prayers.

Some eat fucking dirt8, some of us get lobster.

Some have too little sun, some have their own island.

The sirens yell evilly, the bolts slide to.

Some shut themselves off from the world, knock themselves out at home on sleeping pills.

Some have fallen out with fate – bet against fate,

And got sent down for a long stretch in the sanatorium.

The brothers’ souls are in heaven like they’re letting off a flare.

And in their memory, the RAP deals with us 9

It’s a take-away game! So, since you won’t address us respectively10.

I’m switching to the familiar form myself – a hell of an adrenaline rush!

Hope is on the run and been circulated on the wanted list.

Some will change the Fatherland, having poked their finger into the unpacked globe.

Hey! Who can tell what the truth is to its face? Who will tell to truth to our faces,

When Tsoi11 finishes singing his own?

We’re like chessmen boxed into a corner. It’s Zeitnot! 12

But when you’re boxed into a corner, you’ll stake everything and risk it!

Out of the frying pan into the fire13. Cyclone onto cyclone! A grim tsunami.

Troubled times are coming, at what a cost to me! Phew!

[Zhenya Milkovsky, 'Nerves']:

Shot! I’m playing All-In! I load my barrels with thoughts!

Thoughts not the same as they have!

Risk gets me high and gets me drunk, like whisky and cocaine!

Shot! I’m playing All-In! I load my barrels with thoughts!

Thoughts not the same as they have!

Risk gets me high and gets me drunk, like whisky and cocaine!

Whisky and cocaine!

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Dying doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Doesn’t scare us, living this way is what scares us.

Living this way is what scares us.

Living this way is what scares us.

Living this way is what scares us.

1. ‘crazy life’ in Spanish, the title of a 1999 song by Ricky Martin2. Vladimir3. the novelist Sorokin’s name sounds like the Russian word for a magpie4. an easing of relations between superpowers during the Cold War5. perhaps Soviet-era party congresses6. reference to a 1976 comedy The Irony Of Fate, which opens in a sauna7. literally, Putin’s deputy, which sounds almost like the previous phrase, ‘pro-Putin’, in Russian8. an obscene phrase for extreme poverty, literally ‘eating cock with salt’9. the initials of the Russian Academy of Justice (I think!) of course sound like Basta’s chosen musical genre of rap10. Russian has two words for ‘you’, and it can feel like being ‘talked down to’ to someone you don’t know well makes a point of using the familiar form 11. Viktor, a singer who died tragically young in 199012. aka ‘Time trouble’, a chess players’ term13. literally ‘the sandbank on to the rock’, said of two evenly matched opponents reaching a stalemate

• Artist:Basta