I was looking at the stack of sources for this
deep dive, and I honestly thought I had opened,
like, three different browser tabs by mistake.
Yeah, it's a pretty eclectic mix today, isn't
it? Eclectic is putting it mildly. I mean, I
had to double -check that these documents all
actually belong to the same folder. Right, because
on one hand you're looking at, what, a dusty
old poem about a cow shed. A cow shed, exactly.
And then on the other, we have these official
government decrees from the Russian Space Agency.
Oh, and it pivots to a... violent 2023 video
game about killer robots. Yes. And somehow we
end up with a deep fake of Elon Musk singing
in Russian. It sounds like a fever dream or,
you know, one of those conspiracy boards with
the red string connecting random photos. Right.
But the crazy thing is there is actually a single
red thread tying all of this together. It's one
song. Just one song. A song from 1983 called
Grass by the Home, or in the original Russian,
Trava Udoma. Which, I mean, if you just hear
the title without knowing the context, it sounds
like it should be a folk song about landscaping.
Or maybe a gardening tip. Yeah, exactly. But
the mission for this deep dive is to figure out
how that song, which literally started as a poem
about a farm, became the actual official anthem
of space travel. Right. We're talking about the
track that real cosmonauts listen to while they're
strapped into a rocket just waiting for the countdown.
And that journey. from the soil to the stars
is honestly one of the weirdest case studies
in culture I've ever seen. Oh, absolutely. Because
it's not just music history. It's a really fascinating
look at human psychology. It forces us to ask
a pretty heady question. Like when we surround
ourselves with the absolute peak of high technology
rockets, space stations, AI, what is it that
we actually miss? Well, spoiler alert, it's not
more technology. Definitely not. So let's unpack
this. We need to set the scene. The year is 1983.
We are in the Soviet Union. And a group called
Zemlyan releases this track. Yes. First off,
just for those who don't speak Russian, who are
Zemlyan. So Zemlyan. Basically translates to
earthlings. That is a very convenient name for
a band singing about space. Was that intentional?
It was, but they weren't just a gimmick. They
were actually quite a popular rock band at the
time. They weren't some obscure folk duo. This
was big, synth -heavy rock. Okay, that classic
early 80s sound. Exactly. And the music for this
specific track was written by Vladimir Maguia,
and the lyrics were by Anatoly Poporekny. OK,
so we have the earthlings singing grass by the
home. Now, if you look at the lyrics described
in our sources, what is the actual narrative
here? Because when I think of a space anthem,
I'm thinking of, you know, ground control to
Major Tom or Elton John. Right. But it's almost
the inverse of those. The narrative here is very
specific. The song puts us in the perspective
of cosmonauts who are deep in space. OK. They're
looking at the porthole, presumably at the SARS
or the void of the universe. Yeah. But the lyrics
make a very specific point about their attention.
They aren't thinking about the rockets. They
aren't thinking about the mission or the glory
of the Soviet space program. So they're distracted.
They're longing. They're longing for Earth. And
not just Earth as a planet, you know, not that
same as the Blue Marble photo we all know. Right.
They are missing specifically their homes and
the grass. The imagery creates this massive deliberate
contrast. You have the cold, infinite. black
vacuum of space on one side. And on the other,
you have this very small, fragile green image
of grass growing by a house. Exactly. It's a
grounding image, pun intended. Everyone knows
what grass feels like. Everyone knows what that
specific green looks like. It strikes me as a
very vulnerable thing to sing about. Usually
when we think of space anthems, especially from
the Cold War era, we think of triumph. power,
conquering the unknown, planting the flag. Yeah,
the eagle has landed, all that. It's usually
about the achievement. But this song flips that
script entirely. It's about the cost of that
achievement. Interesting. It's admitting that
we are biological creatures who belong on the
ground, not in the sky. It suggests that space
travel is inherently lonely. So it celebrates
the cosmonaut, but by focusing on what the cosmonaut
is missing. Which is a very Russian approach
to storytelling, if you think about it. Highlighting
the melancholy within the heroism. It's not,
we are the champions, it's we are heroes, but
we are sad about it. Huh, wow. Now, here is where
it gets really interesting. You'd assume a song
like this was carefully crafted in the laboratory
to be the perfect space ballad. Like the Ministry
of Culture sat down and said, we need a song
to humanize the space program. You would think
so. It feels completely engineered to be an anthem,
but the origin story is totally different and
honestly much funnier. This is the part that
got me. The source material reveals that the
lyrics are based on an original poem. also titled
Grass by the Home. But in that original poem,
there was zero mention of space. None. No rockets,
no orbits, no cosmonauts. It was purely a poem
about nostalgia, specifically a person in the
city longing for their parents' home in the countryside.
And the details that were cut are hilarious when
you think about them ending up in a space song.
The original poem featured imagery like, and
I'm quoting here, cow's eyes and a shed. Can
you imagine? You're blasting off from the Baconer
Cosmodrome. The engines are roaring. You're leaving
the atmosphere. And the song in your headphones
is talking about looking into the eyes of a cow.
Houston, we have a cow. Huh. Yeah, it doesn't
quite work. It breaks the spell. Right. But this
is where the genius of the adaptation comes in.
And it really is a master class in editing. Tell
me about the pivot. Well, the composer, Vladimir
Magulia, decided he wanted to write a song specifically
for Cosmonautics Day in 1982. Which is a major
holiday, right? Yuri Gagarin and all that. Huge.
So he needs a hit. He gets together with the
poet, Anatoly Paparekny, and they have a discussion.
Magulia effectively says, look, I love the poem.
But I need a space song. So they have to pivot
hard. They pivot very hard. They decide to take
this existing structure of rural nostalgia and
simply elevate it. They strip out the cow's eyes.
They remove the shed. They take out all the specific
farm elements that are just too terrestrial.
But, and this is the key to the whole thing,
they keep the grass. That is the brilliant creative
leap right there. They realized that the emotion
of a person in the city missing their village
home is the exact same emotion as a person in
orbit missing the planet. The scale is different,
but the feeling is identical. It's displacement.
So they replaced the cow with the cosmos, but
kept the grass to anchor it. If we connect this
to the bigger picture of songwriting or even
storytelling, it shows that specificity is what
makes things universal. If they had just written
a song about, oh, Earth is great, we miss oxygen,
it would be clinical. It would be boring. Right.
But grass by the home, that is tactile. You can
smell it. And clearly that pivot worked. Because
the song didn't just do well, the sources say
it became a massive cultural juggernaut. Oh,
it was everywhere. The source notes that it was
a finalist in the 1983 edition of Song of the
Year. In the Soviet Union, that wasn't just a
Spotify playlist. That was the Super Bowl of
pop music. And it permeated pop culture in other
ways, too. I was reading here that it showed
up in, well, just you wait, New Pagode, in 1984.
Now, I didn't grow up with this, but I looked
it up. This is basically the Soviet Tom and Jerry,
right? Pretty much. Wolf chases hair, chaos ensues.
But it was massively popular. It's hard to overstate
how ubiquitous that cartoon was. Having your
song in the 14th episode of New Pagode meant
that everyone from toddlers to grandparents heard
it. Wow. It cemented the song in the cultural
consciousness of an entire generation. So you
have the kids listening to it in a cartoon and
the adults listening to it on the radio. But
the highest honor came much later. And this is
the part that really blows my mind. We are talking
decades later. Yes. In 2009. 2009. That's 26
years after the song came out. The Soviet Union
doesn't even exist anymore. The space program
does. And in 2009. Roscosmos, the Russian Federal
Space Agency, officially named grass by the home
the anthem of Russian cosmonauts. Official, like
stamped, signed government McCree. Think about
how strange that is compared to the American
approach. NASA doesn't have an official pop song.
You don't see a press release from NASA saying,
by the way, Rocketman by Elton John is now mandatory
listening for all employees. Or space oddity.
Exactly. NASA culture is very engineering focused.
But the Russian space program has always been
deeply ritualistic. They have traditions that
go all the way back to Gagarin. They pee on the
tire of the bus before launch. They watch the
movie White Son of the Desert the night before.
And they listen to this song. They listen to
this song as they walk out of the hotel to the
bus. It's part of the liturgy of launch. It institutionalizes
that nostalgia we talked about. It acknowledges
that the people in those suits are, well, people.
They aren't just operating machines. They are
living out that story of longing for the grass.
It's amazing because it implies that to leave
Earth successfully, you have to acknowledge how
much you miss it. Precisely. You can't just pretend
you were a robot. So up to this point, we have
a fairly linear story. 80s hit becomes government
anthem, a nice historical factoid. But the story
doesn't end there because culture never stops
recycling things. And this brings us to the Internet
age. And specifically. The strange, uncanny valley
world of deep fakes. Okay, so fast forward to
May 31st, 2020. This is a historic day. The first
crewed launch of a SpaceX spacecraft. The Crew
Dragon Demo 2. This is big news for Elon Musk,
big news for America, big news for space. And
naturally, the Russian internet responded. With
a video. A modified video of the group Zemlyan
performing Grass by the Home, but instead of
the lead singer, Sergei Sekskov. It was a deep
fake of Elon Musk's face. Blinging the song.
In Russian. It is such a bizarre collision of
eras. You have a Soviet song from 1983, a modern
American tech billionaire who is essentially
the face of the privatization of space and AI
technology all matching together. They went viral,
obviously. Obviously. It's the perfect storm
of meme potential. But what I found fascinating
was the reaction. You might expect the original
band to be offended. You know, why is this American
CEO singing our song? Or... This is disrespectful
to our legacy. That happens a lot with deepfakes.
Artists get protective. But according to the
source, Sergei Skachkov, the actual singer, spoke
to a radio station, Moscow Speaks, and he was
totally into it. He liked it. He spoke positively
about it. He even said he wished for everyone
to sing the song. Chinese people, Japanese people.
He saw it as a bridge. That is surprisingly wholesome.
It validates the song's message, doesn't it?
Space is for everyone, and missing home is for
everyone. It doesn't matter if you were a Soviet
cosmonaut in 1983 or Elon Musk in a deepfake
video in 2020. The sentiment holds up. It also
speaks to the song's status as a cult classic.
It's unkillable. Speaking of the song going global,
the sources mentioned some really interesting
translations that I didn't see coming. Yes. This
highlights that bridge -building aspect perfectly.
There was a Japanese translation announced by
an unregistered political party, the VKPB, in
2020. And then, even more surprisingly, in 2021,
a newspaper called Birobidziner Stern published
a Yiddish translation. A Yiddish version of a
Soviet space rock anthem. Complete with a video.
It just shows how adaptable the melody and the
theme are. The idea of home translates into every
language. And we can't ignore the video game
connection because this is how a whole new generation
is finding this track. The outline mentions the
game Atomic Heart, which came out in 2023. Right.
If you aren't a gamer, Atomic Heart is a big
budget sci -fi game set in an alternate 1950s
Soviet Union. It's full of robots, futuristic
tech, and this very specific Soviet punk aesthetic.
And the soundtrack is killer. It is. They use
a modernized remix of Grass by The Home. alongside
other Soviet -era songs. It fits perfectly there,
doesn't it? That game is all about the mix of
Soviet aesthetics and futuristic horror. It is.
But it also introduces the song to people who
have zero connection to 1983 Russia. You have
gamers who might be 15 or 20 years old, living
in the U .S. or Europe, who have never heard
of Zemlyan. Suddenly, they are fighting mutant
robots while listening to a remix of a song about
cosmonauts missing the grass. It's the circle
of life. Or the circle of content. It really
demonstrates how art survives. It survives by
being repurposed. It started as a poem about
a cow shed, became a pop song, then a cartoon
soundtrack, then an official government anthem,
then an internet meme with Elon Musk, and finally
a video game soundtrack. It's like the song itself
is a traveler. It is. And each generation finds
something new in it. So let's zoom out. What
does this all mean? When we step back and look
at this journey from the cow shed to the video
game console, what is the takeaway here? I think
it tells us that as humans, we need anchors.
The further we push out, whether that is physically
into space or technologically into AI and deepfakes,
the more we crave something simple and organic,
the grass. We can build the most advanced space
station in history. We can go to Mars. But if
you ask the person living on that station what
they dream about, they won't dream of the titanium
bulkheads. They won't dream of the recycling
systems. They will dream of the smell of rain
on dirt. Or the sound of wind in the trees. That
is a really powerful thought. We spend all this
effort trying to leave, but the art we create
is all about looking back. Precisely. And the
fact that the song changed from being about a
shed to being about Earth proves that the specific
object doesn't matter as much as the feeling.
The shed was the poet's anchor. The Earth is
the cosmonaut's anchor. It makes you wonder what
the anthem will be when we actually go to Mars.
Will we still be listening to Grass by the Home?
Or will we have moved on to something else? I
wouldn't bet against Grass by the Home. It survived
40 years of radical change. It survived the fall
of the Soviet Union. It might survive the trip
to Mars. Although by then, maybe it'll be a deepfake
of a deepfake. Huh, probably. You know, going
through this, I'm struck by how a simple creative
decision, that conversation between Magulia and
Paparekny changed history. If they had kept the
cow's eyes, this song might have just been a
forgotten folk tune. It would be a footnote.
Absolutely. It was that decision to elevate the
theme, to take the rustic and make it cosmic,
that gave it longevity. They bridged the gap
between the past, the village, and the future,
the rocket. That is a very hard thing to do in
art. Usually you have to pick one. You're either
traditional or you are futuristic. This song
manages to be both simultaneously. And that is
why it works in Atomic Heart, and that is why
it works for Roscosmos. It's the bridge. And
it's why the imagery of the green grass is so
potent. In Russian culture specifically, there's
a deep connection to the land, to the soil. Taking
that soil into the stars is the ultimate expression
of identity. It's not just I miss my house, it's
I miss the land itself. Exactly. It's elemental.
We are coming up on the end here, and I think
we've successfully connected the dots from the
cow shed to the cosmos. It's been a wild ride.
It certainly has. Before we go, I want to bring
it back to the listener, because we always say
that these deep dives aren't just trivia. They
are about how we see the world. Right. And I
want to leave you with a question. We've talked
about how these cosmonauts, surrounded by the
marvels of the universe, just wanted to see the
grass near their home. So the question is...
If you were out there... If you were on a three
-year mission to Mars, surrounded by metal and
plastic and screens, what is the one simple earthly
thing you would miss the most? What is your grass?
Oh, man, it's a tough one. Is it the sound of
traffic? The taste of a fresh apple? The feeling
of a dog's fur? Because I think the answer tells
you a lot about what actually matters to you
right now. That is a great question. For me,
it might be the smell of coffee brewing. You
can't really simulate that in a vacuum. Or maybe
just the sound of rain against a window. See?
It's the little things. That's what grounds us.
Well, on that note, we encourage you to go look
up the song, search for Trevo Doma, or just grasp
by the home, watch the video, maybe even find
the deepfake if you want to laugh. It's worth
a listen. It's a catchy tune, even if you don't
speak Russian. The synth hook alone is worth
it. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.
We'll see you on the next one.