Mark Lanegan / Alamy
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
The late American composer Mark Lanegan, the singer of ghosts, whiskey, and ketamine, spent his entire life working in a genre that Joseph Brodsky once called ‘the song of a lonely veranda’. However, the theme of ‘Night Flight to Kabul’, from his penultimate album of 2019, makes one think of Alexander Prokhanov, not to mention his tree in the centre of Kabul. It's a solid, catchy blues-rock song with ideas and burdens. At that time, Afghanistan was a popular theme with famous rock and roll artists; for example, P.J. Harvey shot a documentary there. Lanegan's song can hardly be called political—‘Night Flight to Kabul’ serves instead as a symbol of an abstract journey to the edge of the night, in which his desperate baritone maniacally repeats the phrase ‘Is there gold in Kabul?’ As a matter of interest, though, there is gold in Afghanistan—the gold of Bactria was discovered by a joint Soviet-Afghan expedition in 1978.