2024-05-06 17:23:38
A scene like a Renaissance painting opens Vladimír Merta’s new album. The old master, on the border between wakefulness and sleep, dilutes his wine in a glass with water in his afternoon slumber. The 78-year-old singer really doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore and can take a nap after lunch, he’s done. Merta is a legend. A musician and lyricist who, as the critic Pavel Klusák put it, pushed the song to the point of an essay.
Fifty-five years after the release of his debut Ballades de Prague, it makes no sense to list the history of the Šafrán songwriting association, to which Merta belonged with Vlastimil Třešňák, Jaroslav Hutka or Zuzana Homolova. Not even telegraphically recapitulating the career of the creator, who was banned under communism, in November 1989 he played from the Melantrich balcony on Wenceslas Square in Prague to hundreds of thousands of protesters, after which he entered the hall of fame of the Anděl awards in 2018.
For creators whose talents may have manifested themselves during a journey as long and adventurous as Mert’s, there are still reasons to spin the narrative from the present moment. The most up-to-date one is represented by a record called České sny – Nejisté ijstoty 1, which was just released by the Galén publishing house.
On it, Merta plays with the image of someone who can do a lot, but doesn’t need anything anymore. Fortunately, his latest work doesn’t give the impression of a possible sleepiness. When, after many vicissitudes with a lost text, he finally published his Dustbin novel in 2021, a sort of “talking blues” about how former dissidents, maniacs, swaggers and estebbes settled down after November, the judges of the Magnesia Litera prize chose the book as one of the best prose of the year. They stated that Merta is funny, subversive and refuses to become a tobacconist of his own reputation.
Last month, the Vltava station broadcast his fate, which was filmed with him by the writer Ivana Myšková. The temptation to erect a monument to the singer as the “conscience of the nation” was torpedoed here by the author with a sarcastic laugh.
Like his favorites Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, Vladimír Merta is more of a dancing satyr, alchemist and demiurge than a man of the system. The master of reincarnation, who turns into a desperate person in the song Demagog, who is not on the side of the winners in the new circumstances – and on top of that, covid arrived. Or in the dumka Song of a prisoner in a Russian soldier of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Vladimír Merta will present the new album on June 26 at a concert in Prague’s Malostranská beseda. | Photo: CTK
Merta doesn’t lie to herself that the singer-songwriter in today’s Czech Republic means more than the memory of conspiratorial islands in the midst of communist chaos. He is apparently reconciled to the fact that the man with the guitar no longer represents the artistic and moral guarantee as in the past. “I should serve my country, but I don’t feel like it,” he sings, adding that “she doesn’t feel like it either.”
Nevertheless, it is probably hard for him when his past as a singer becomes the subject of dealing with power. “If he was still here / they would have given the metal to Kryl / But now everyone will conspire / and go against poor Nohavic,” he remarks bitingly to the address of the herd in the blues I Know It So Far.
Apparently, Mert’s displeasure was aroused by the willingness of singers Jaroslav Hutka and Václav Koubek from 2021 to play for seniors on the pre-election bus of Starostů and Pirátů. He doesn’t sound resigned or particularly angry; with the new record, Merta reaffirms his saying that the craft of a songwriter lies in the way he deals with reality. That it is an observational talent, and therefore an interest in the world. A single detail can illuminate so much that the shadows extend beyond the horizon of shared space and time. And the only fear he admits to on the record stems from the fact that he won’t be able to think of anything new.
Mert’s Ashtray novel, radio memories and finally the album Česká sny all point in the same direction in different ways: to the reflection of the world and its most difficult part, namely coming to terms with oneself.
At the same time, the recapitulation is about a lot, maybe everything. Looking back on what we have done, we also necessarily think about what we could have done but didn’t do. Merta brings up the topic right at the beginning of the Old Tapes album, when he notes that “he won’t rewind the unrecorded tapes anymore”.
“I won’t rewind the unrecorded tapes anymore,” sings Vladimír Merta right at the beginning of the record in the composition Staré pásky. | Video: Galen
What happened can be relived in memory, as here in the tender love songs of Fifty Ways or It’s So Long Ago. What hasn’t happened will hardly happen with eighty in sight. Subtle gaps in tuning and approximations in intonation can be taken as part of the old master’s charm. Hand and voice may shake slightly, but they are guided by the sovereignty of experience.
And one last time, let’s mention the present, Mert’s and ours. Such a charming, layered and, in a good sense, touching song, such as his Mávači, has no comparison in today’s works sung in Czech. In three and a half minutes, the discontinuous universes of several characters seem to collide, two Roma children on a highway bridge, cottagers rushing along the highway in search of Sunday peace, and a singer looking at his own poster the morning after a concert.
This is probably what Merta means by songwriting as grasping reality. It is precisely this magic that makes music a work of art.
“Own and stolen / heard and unheard,” he tries to describe himself on the record, while whistling in a boyish way. The listener is very happy to be there when Merta plays with words and melodies.
Album
Vladimír Merta: Czech dreams – Uncertain certainties 1
Galen 2024