Normil Hawaiians / From open access
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.)
One year before the release of the album Final Cut in 1983, an album on which Pink Floyd sang of Brezhnev taking Afghanistan, another, unfortunately much less famous, British band (and it would be more correct to call it a community) known as Normil Hawaiians also paid tribute to the Soviet intervention at the crossroads of central and south Asia.
Unlike Valery Obodzinsky's romantic hit of the same name, ‘Yellow Rain’ is a song by the post-punk collective Normil Hawaiians, and it was inspired by the rumors of the USSR using chemical weapons based on mushroom toxins that they had first used in Vietnam and Kampuchea and allegedly also in Afghanistan. In 1981, the US Secretary of State Alexander Haig made the allegations official, while the Soviets called them a complete lie, and biologist Matthew Meselson, in the course of an independent investigation, suggested that the chemical weapons were mistaken for traces of bee activity. There is still no clear evidence of the use of chemical weapons, but Normil Hawaiians’ song conveys the yellow fog of war in a very dizzying way.