Songs as Poetry: 'Us' by Regina Spektor

Tuesday, 25 May 2010 09:00 Ren Aguila

Regina Spektor is a Jewish Russian musician who was born in the former Soviet Union, but as a young girl migrated with her family to the United States. She is mostly identified with the “anti-folk” movement, which had its roots in a group of musicians shut out from the “established” New York folk scene, and her earliest albums were self-released. “Us” is a track from her 2003 album Soviet Kitsch, and was the first of her songs to come with a music video. While it has gained some popularity in Europe, the song gained renewed fame thanks to its use in the 2009 film (500) Days of Summer.

The song’s structure is thus: two verses, a chorus, another verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, and coda. To begin, it is interesting to ask what exactly she wants to say:

“They made a statue of us and put it on a mountaintop

Now tourists come and stare at us, blow bubbles with their gum

Take photographs of fun, have fun.”

Then she goes on to where a glimpse of the song’s possible meaning lies:

“They’ll name a city after us, and later say it’s all our fault…”

Is she speaking of the way people prematurely canonize other people?

The refrain then goes on in a tone of (what I sense is) lament:

“We’re living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages,

We’re living in a den of thieves, and it’s contagious…”

Then the second verse goes on, in a more whimsical vein:

“We wear our scarves just like a noose, but not ‘cause we want eternal sleep
and though our parts are slightly used, new ones are slave labor you can keep.”

And the bridge goes on, after the second chorus, with a tone of resignation:

“They made a statue of us… the tourists come and stare at us… the sculptor’s momma sends regards… our noses have begun to rust.”

The second verse is what makes this song a little hard to pin down. While it is easy at first to think that this has to do with the way society behaves towards its heroes, or how history is often one process of reinterpretation after another, the second verse suggests that the persona laments some kind of slavery that is glorified.

I have come to think that one of the hermeneutical keys to this song is the album’s title, “Soviet Kitsch.” It is most likely (and charitably) a slight misreading of a line from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, which talks about “communist kitsch” as something Sabina, one of the characters, rebels against. The notion of kitsch is really about a kind of vacuousness that hides, as blogger David Barker would so bluntly put it, sh*t:

“‘Kitsch’ is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of sh*t, in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”(Kundera, 1984, my emphasis)

It is appropriate then that the song before “Us” on Soviet Kitsch is about the way memories and indeed literature itself are censored, thrown out, forgotten. The result is the kind of continual writing, rewriting, whitewashing of history that “Us” seems to portray.

The song “Us” is available on Regina Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch album, but as it is no longer available locally, the soundtrack to (500) Days of Summer is your best bet for finding the song.

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