Semi-Public Service

For me, language study is enhanced by the exploration of music.  I've been studying Romanian lately, and consequently this has been a summer of Romanian sounds.  There will undoubtedly be future posts on that topic, but as long-time readers of this blog know, Hungarian maintains a strong hold on me.  I'm studying Hungarian pretty much by accident because 3 years ago, my daughter found for me on the shelves of a used book store we were browsing in a $3 tome called Colloquial Hungarian by Arthur H. Whitney (Routledge, 1944).  So I'm keenly aware of how improbable it is that I know anything at all about Hungarian, let alone the Hungarian music scene.  And to know anything at all about the Hungarian music scene is, for me, to feel an intense anxiety and urgency about spreading the news to the non-Hungarian-speaking corners of the earth.

This week, the Hungarian band Stopsonic released a new video for the song Insane off of their 2016 EP, Jewel Hunter.  (To make it yours, you'll need to name your price for it in Forints on the bandcamp.com website. [Update: As of October, the EP is available on iTunes as well.])  As with many Hungarian bands who undoubtedly want to be heard beyond the borders of their landlocked country, Stopsonic sings in English.  The mood of the new song, and as it turns out the EP, is one I have a weakness for: a bit trancy, atmospheric, layered, sexy, with a beat you can dance to.  I was hooked immediately. As for the video filmed in an appropriately angsty black and white, it took me several hundred views to figure out that the drab and ordinary urban American setting was Honolulu.

But I wasn't prepared for the thrill I found in the video for the title track of the EP, screenshots of which illustrate this post.  If the song Insane and the video for it are right up my alley, the song and video for Jewel Hunter is up the alley, through the back door, up the secret passageway to the attic and implanted in my brain.

The video for Insane, as of this writing, 4 days into its release, already has almost 12,000 views (and only 20 of them are mine).   We're not talking the kind of splash that, say, a new Katy Perry tune makes these days-- even a substandard one if you can imagine that (frankly I can)-- but for a nation of 13 million people, 12,000 views for an alternative music track is portentous of big things.

The video for Jewel Hunter-- both videos are the work of a Mr. Frank Rizzo with a credit to the frontwoman of the band, Zsuzsa Varga-- has been out since April and as of this moment has exactly 1900 views (500 of them mine).   Hence my anxiety.  As a very small public (or whatever arena this forum is in) service then, I present to you, Jewel Hunter.  Enjoy responsibly: