Melon Music

Melon Music-Musical Union.

Melon Music has more than ten people, including some of the most notable and sought-after rappers and producers of the last two years - OG Buda, Mayot, Seemee, Yungway, 163onmyneck, DooMee and others. All of them are from Tyumen, at one time the guys rallied after the death of a friend - 20-year-old rap enthusiast Lil Melon - and went from a makeshift studio in a fruit and vegetable stall in their hometown to millions of listens in te streaming services.

While Pharaoh and Skriptonit were thundering all over Russia, Tyumen in 2015-2016 was just beginning to get interested in new school rap. By that time, underground rap battles were already taking place in the city, but according to Melon Music participants, the Tyumen rap community was just forming, and the scene itself was lagging far behind. That's how Seemee (Alexey Stepanov) describes the Tyumen rap festivals of those years: "Guys came and discounted 100-150 rubles each, anybody could come up on stage and recite his track, and then the crowd determined the winner. But in general, everything was in a very embryonic state. There was already new music, but they were still reading old-school underground tracks. And there were no newer alternatives.

At one of these events, Seemee met another Melon Music artist, Yungway (Artur Shaburov). "In 2015-2016 it was like there was no rap scene in Tyumen at all. A couple of years before that, there were various festivals where we performed with Lekha [Seemee]: there people stood in a circle and stupidly waved their hands. Then everything went quiet, and the scene in the city didn't develop at all for a few years. People didn't accept the new school for quite a long time," Yungway recalls.

The family of another OG Buda mainman (Grigory Lyakhov) was forced to move to Budapest after Grisha's father was killed in May 1995. The rapper returned to his hometown in the mid-tens: "Musically, Tyumen was nothing back then. There were some crappy studios with lousy sound guys, and I didn't even want to go there because of that. There was basically no stage. Well, like, when it came to Tyumen, everyone used to bring up the rapper Elephant and say, well, Elephant and Kaje Oboima faked it. Like, that was the maximum level before Melon Music came along.

But new life appeared in the stingy musical landscape of Tyumen, and its source was the local rap-talent Lil Melon, who died at the age of 20 under strange circumstances, but before that he united several Tyumen artists and producers around him. Subsequently, they became members of Melon Music, and the association itself was named after a friend who had passed away.

Lil Melon (real name Daniel Tsarev) grew up in an intellectual family; his brother, Alexei Tsarev, is a music critic, a graduate student at the Philosophy Department of St. Petersburg State University, the scientific editor of the book "How to Read Rap" and co-author of the collection "New Criticism. Contexts and Meanings of Russian Pop Music. According to friends' recollections, Lil Melon was good at music. "What he did was always interesting. Danya and I used to listen to all kinds of shit from Soviet jazz, some experimental tracks, Yugoslavian wave on records. We were always picking up something from the "Europe Before the Rain" club, we were interested in post-punk. And it was all thanks to Dana. He knew how to pick up exactly the right track at every moment," - says Melon Music artist Alexey Q. Jay163 Zhulikov.

Lil Melon had an uncharacteristic image for Tyumen of those years: while other peers dressed "in street fashion," he "could tuck his jeans into his yellow socks." "Danya was a powerful creative unit. We all grew up in Tyumen, and we had a lot of prejudices: like conservatism in our blood, some guy's notions and rules. Lil Melon was a very free person, who didn't put himself into any of those frames. Both in the sense of creativity and in the sense of life. Tyumen is a pretty provincial town in terms of brains, and Danya was always dressed in a cool way and looked and talked freakishly enough. And at the same time he knew how to influence you in such a way that you perceived it normally," Seemee recalls.

Couldn't find another picture

What exactly happened to Lil Melon afterwards is unknown: for some reason he fell out the window. Whether the rapper was going to commit suicide, the friends do not know. Seemee told the show "Vpiska" that at the time of his death, the guys were waiting for Danya with an audio card. That's when they got a call from his girlfriend informing them that Lil Melon was dead. In the same issue of OG Buda recalled that he corresponded with Daniel that day and did not suspect anything unusual in his communication with him.

"He did all the production himself: and sang, and read, and danced, and stood on his hands, and **** he had a huge, I don't know. If Danka had a free day, he didn't do ***** anymore, except smoke and write tracks. I mean, he was always sitting in a pose, like on Seemee's tattoo on his neck. There's a laptop, there's a microphone, and he always sat like that with his knee tucked in. Like, I'd leave him at his place, I'd come back in the evening, he had five new demos. He had his own style, you couldn't confuse that sound with anybody else, he was like a unique guy. And I'm not just saying that to praise him. If you listen to his tracks, like "REEF", it feels like he was ahead of his time. It still sounds fresh now," says OG Buda.

"Unfortunately, I didn't know Danya personally, but he had a big influence on me. The guys were always talking about him, and I felt like everything around me was infused with his culture. I was generally greatly inspired that a man could leave such a huge mark behind him. Everything the guys did afterwards came out because of Lil Melon," shares producer and beatmaker DooMee (Donat Mustafin).

Shortly after Lil Melon's death, his mom gave his cohorts the money and equipment Danya had saved up. Three days after the funeral the guys opened a studio in a vegetable stall, naming it Melon Music - in honor of their deceased friend.

In 2018, the Local Tyumen Freshmans festival started in Tyumen, where local young rappers performed, including Seemee, Mayot, and Yungway. "When Melon Music appeared, there were festivals like Local Tyumen Freshmans, where they selected promising representatives of the new school from Tyumen. And we always went there and were there from the very beginning, like grandpas of some kind," says Seemee.

In May 2021 Mayot had a concert in Tyumen in support of the album "Ghetto Garden" - then all the members of the association and their friendly artists came to support the rapper, as the guys remember, they took a quarter of the plane. According to Yungway, it "lit some kind of a light in the city." "Well, we certainly created a stir in Tyumen. Slowly, little by little, some nuggets started to be born there," notes Seemee.

Mayot says that he feels that 70% of the rappers in Tyumen are making music that is similar to Melon Music. "We have a lot of different styles, and if we were developing any one style, then the imitators would immediately catch your eye. And our band has a lot of different styles, ranging from tinny to bawdy songs. And young people of different types and characters can be inspired by us musically. I myself used to be a young kid from Tyumen, who didn't have his own style and just took a little bit from everything. If you choose as a reference point one example to follow, it all comes down to one sound and you're accused of a byte. They say you stole someone else's style. But when you take the intonation of one performer, the lyrics and meanings of another, and add your own life realities, it all forms something unique," Mayot argues.

"The trend that everybody listens to hip-hop is probably going to change. But now all the genres are strongly intertwined, and we do both rap, R&B and electronic music. So we have totally different music, so we're not gonna be affected by the decline in rap music. In general, I think there's going to be new genres that we're going to ride, too," says DooMee.

The other members of the group agree that they shouldn't just be considered rappers: "We have a rap career, but we're musicians. We know how to make music, not just read with our mouths. Most of our dudes can mix, and Donat [DooMee] can make any kind of beats, he's one of the best sound engineers in Russia right now", says Seemee.

The members of Melon Music say that they are mainly interested in the Western rap scene and don't really follow what's going on in Russia. Among those who seem interesting to them as Russian-speaking rap artists, they name other members of the Cplus label: Soda Luv, Bushido Zho and Blago White, with whom Melon Music regularly feats. Many also praise Platinum and Skryptonite.

When asked why Melon Music is not worth comparing with YungRussia, the Melons say that almost all members of the Tyumen band have been friends since their teen years. Rappers from YungRussia met as adults, so their connections were originally less strong than those of the Melons.

OG Buda says he wasn't interested in YungRussia's music in 2015-2016 and doesn't know what kind of relationship its members had. But he also agrees that Melon Music is all about friendship: "First of all we are a family, very close people. I can say that I'm the richest one among the guys at the moment, but I've never felt envy when one of them, for example Mayot, started to "shoot". We are always genuinely happy for each other. And in general, I think that the circle of communication that I have now, it's exactly the people with whom I will communicate for the rest of my life, and our children will communicate. As a person where I am now, I feel most comfortable.

Alexey Rozhkov, who is responsible for the management of OG Buda, agrees that Melon Music is based on lasting friendships, and also sees the strength in the horizontal nature of this association: "The guys in Melon Music are originally friends. When people have friendship and the right thoughts - that's one thing, but when it's gathered around one person, it falls apart. YungRussia was gathered around two people, and Dead Dynasty was gathered around one person. In such situations, the artist realizes that he can take everything out on his own - and it's more profitable and probably more comfortable for him that way. There is a chance that Melon Music will break up, of course, but it's much less likely than in the aforementioned alliances.