Vopos

It was one of those days when you are just so dissatisfied and so uninterested with the whole lot of music that you have that you’re willing to look for something new even in obscurity. An acquaintance had once suggested a classic progressive band- Camel. Obscure… but still new and yet unchecked. A search through the internet didn’t really yield anything about them and no surprises there. But persistence born out of boredom finally gave me some leads. But disappointment waited again, for most of the songs were mediocre and none of the ones I heard interested me much. But the boring persistence again and intriguing names of some of their songs pushed me into randomly picking and downloading songs.

So when all the deed was done, heard a few more tracks. By now I was prepared of what to expect. But, to my eternal surprise some of the tracks were worth becoming a regular fixation!!! I also realised that I liked Andrew Latimore: the lead singer/guitarist etc etc’s style. But the real discovery was their track called Vopos. Their ways are strange and strange were the ways they played with words. The song came from their 1985 album titled Stationary Traveller. To return to Vopos, the song fascinated me. I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the title and the OED didn’t help either. But that did not bother me much and I continued to play the song day in day out. I was simply enthralled with the dreamlike images that the song created. Its “atmospheric instrumentals” would create myriad detailed soundscapes in my mind. But for how long can one really ignore the lyrics? Words would only fill in the mental imagery of the song. So with the lyrics the song came anew to me, but with strangely harsher tones this time. The dreamlike images shifted and they sang on…...

“They woke you in the night
a glare from bright headlights.
Sentry's in a row……”

“Can it be a nightmare?
Will you wake and still be there?
So you try to run,
Frightened you're the one
Left inside.”

Images were more disturbing than ones I had imagined earlier. I was dying by now to know just what the words all meant, what the title signified. And this search took me back into history.
In 1952, The Times Magazine did an article on the Vopos and from there I realized that Vopos stood for Volkspolizei or People’s Police in German, a force of armed men from the East German region (when Berlin was divided), assigned to guard the Red Army’s (Communist) interests here. Most of them were unemployed young men, initially lured by the state into becoming a part of this army but later forced and threatened into joining it or face the possibilities of working in the dreaded uranium mines. Dressed in blue, this group of about 10,ooo soldiers of the Red brigade were trained in quite a few aspects of military activities like operating heavy machinery, platoon manoeuvres on field etc. They even boasted of a small scale naval and air force fleet. While former Nazi officials drilled them in the art of war, Red partisan veterans and their Russian counterparts (the Sovietniks) indoctrinated them and brought Communism to their midst.

Now the song grew more in meaning. It was more cohesive. The lyrics and the history that they hid within them now became more apparent. I could corroborate the song with all that I read in the article in the Times. And things became clearer still when I realized that the album itself was a concept album done by the band based on the division of Berlin and its subsequent political, emotional economic cultural impact on the people’s lives living at that time.


So between ignorance, boredom and dissatisfaction I chanced upon a piece of history within a song. The band and its work most often has been criticized owning to its failure to converge the lyrics and the music, and so pulling the listener in two different directions. I wonder if that’s what happened to me initially? No I don’t think there is any rationalisation of /to my ignorance. All said and done I am glad that they made this album, glad that at least someone was bothered enough to incorporate the sufferings of so many and transform it into a piece of art.

And for those who care to read more about the Vopos itself, well I also include the link to the article in the Times magazine here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,859786,00.html


J