I'm the Okean

I'm not here to tell you a song can stop an incoming Russian missile, because it can't, but I am here to tell you the song is stronger than the missile in every other way. "Boat, oh my little boat," Ukrainian rock singer, activist and politician SLAVA VAKARCHUK sang with two members of his band, OKEAN ELZY, to a small crowd on Kyiv's Glass Bridge a month ago today as Russian troops prepared to cross the border. "It will overcome the wave / It will overcome the shallow / It will survive the storm." (I'm relying on the internet for my translations here.) Preserved on YouTube, it's a great performance—three men with two acoustic guitars on a pedestrian bridge, performing with a passion and a presence and an unwavering faith in the power of their own music that could translate to MADISON SQUARE GARDEN with little trouble. Here's more from the same afternoon, a singalong with an OASIS-like chorus that appears to translate to "Everything will be fine."

Okean Elzy, which has been together for nearly 30 years, has an outsize presence in Ukraine. The band and the country "have grown up together," ALEX W. PALMER wrote in the New Yorker in 2015. "Okean Elzy may be the closest thing Ukraine has to an enduring national institution." OE was the first major Ukrainian act to break through in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and made it "cool to sing in Ukrainian, and cool to wave the flag."

Okean Elzy also may have helped topple a government. The band's concert on Independence Square in Kyiv during the anti-government Euromaidan protests in December 2013 attracted "tens of thousands of fans who abandoned a rival, pro-government event to attend [Okean Elzy's] show instead," the New York Times reported. "With that, many said at the time, momentum on the street shifted decisively to the opposition." Two months later, President VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH was gone in Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity.

Slava Vakarchuk has an electric presence onstage, but fronting a rock band was far from his only option. He has a Ph.D. in particle physics. He served in Ukraine's parliament briefly, in 2008, but quit to protest corruption. There was talk of him running for president in 2018—the year another popular entertainer, VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, ended up being elected. But he imagined a different role for himself. "I'm not a politician," he had told a wounded soldier in 2015. "I'll fight with my words and my music."

And that's exactly what he's doing in wartime—while "working as a truck driver, bringing children and women to safety, going back and forth," as he told a reporter for the Indian current affairs magazine Open three weeks ago. He's also been bringing food and medicine to cities on the front lines of the war. Along the way, he's still stepping out to perform wherever he feels music is needed. Music is its own kind of food and medicine. Here he is in a Kharkiv subway station, leading a singalong of the Ukrainian folk song "CHERVONA RUTA" for the people sheltering inside. Here's an impromptu performance for people trying to escape to Poland, at a Lviv train station.

Vakarchuk wrote a poem in his car, he told NPR last week. It's about the hatred he feels now and that he's never felt before. "It's toxic," he said. "I want to get rid of it. But the only way to get rid of it now is to win the war."

It's Tuesday

And it's the sixth anniversary of PHIFE DAWG's death—a day that's being honored with the release of the A TRIBE CALLED QUEST rapper's first posthumous album, FOREVER. It was executive produced by Phife's manager and touring DJ, DION LIVERPOOL, with the help of notebooks Phife left behind filled with "a lot of blueprints and clues... like, these intricate notes of producers he would want, features he’d want, liner notes—everything was just oddly laid out.” Phife worked on the title track three days before he died, Liverpool tells the New Yorker, and one of his last requests was for how the song, and the album, should end: "Affect my voice like it’s going into eternity.”

Rest in Peace

Gospel singer/songwriter LASHUN PACE, who started out with her family group, the Anointed Pace Sisters, and moved on to a solo career marked by indelible moments like this... Contemporary classical composer LYELL CRESSWELL, a New Zealander who spent most of his working life in Scotland.