Twenty years ago the king who never reigned died – The memory of Jimmy Zámbó

In our childhood and adolescence, we were used to the fact that in the environment of our urbanization, almost always only one person, a family, gave money for great things. One of the figures subscribed to the cable service, the other with the decoders pulled from the channels. Only one family originally bought a game for the console, the others played it. We copy CDs bought by others.

The only performer was an exception: although his album was released every year, everyone tried to buy the cassette, the CD. Although he was not favored by radios, he became the king of millions without them. He, unlike others, did not call himself king, but was raised to the throne by the Hungary of the poor, the marginalized. Jimmy Zimmon unworthy of his talent for twenty years, but based on his hedonistic, self-destructive and playful lifestyle, it cannot be said that he did not die fatally.

As good as the duma sounds, that the penitent men in the wish programs with the Zambó composition “A good woman forgives everything” praying at home for forgiveness are not so true. No one can seriously think that tens of thousands of adult men confess in broadcasts heard by their friends and family that others will not dare in their entire lives. Whoever said this could have happened en masse has little to do with life and its criminal nature.

The fact that Zambo had so much to do with life indicates that he had been at the top of the sales charts for a long time that commercial radios hardly played. This is because his songs, both lyrically and musically, could not be incorporated into commercial logic. The Zambó students were mainly our compatriots, who were not in demand by the cultural and media educators of the time in the mainstream public. After all, as we know, every change of epoch is very demanding. Mainly against others.

But by the middle of the first decade of regime change, the King had been accepted: By then, that already seemed like a good deal for both parties. His followers were loyal to him: if they no longer had the opportunity to rise, at least they had their own king.

Just look at the photos of the crowd that accompanied Zambó on his last trip: desperate men and women, often poorly dressed, standing in the cemetery. Those for whom “the little ones mattered” even when it was not yet a slogan.

They are the economic, and therefore cultural and political victims of regime change, for whom the worlds of side A and B of Zámbó were the livable reality.

In light of this, it was especially strange to hear when those who considered themselves culturally a lot began to talk about Zámbo “only recognizing his talent, but then his songs and lyrics, and his clothes.” This is notable primarily because Zámbo’s clothing and jewelry culture was not much different from that of his students. Because they were his medium.

In fact, their songs and lyrics are extreme exaggerations of sentimentality, which is why their emotional frames are very much like when someone is a fan of a soccer team. (It doesn’t belong here, but I don’t know when I broke as much as Sunderland until I die for the series. It also indicates that team membership is the deepest emotional community, love is relatively easy to describe).

Longing, broken relationships, a sense of life of “maybe now … no, not today”, small and big lies for us and others, love deceives us and we deceive love. Seek God (that is, affirm a purer life) and leave God (otherwise: be sinful, self-deceptive, weak or weak). The need to start, stay here as the only option. It is a trivial fight to evade destiny and an even more trivial impossibility. Struggle and helplessness, being loved, the inability to tie the emotions that flow to us.

Among other things, these are the moles of Zambó’s lyrics, and it was in these lyrics and soul situations that those who bought the new album every year and originally lived. Those who were equally trapped by a feeling, only for them that feeling was the total unity of the present, the past and the future, as well as Kulka János, who recalled a 1988 Zambo song (“Somewhere a sad song sounds”) when he was talking to the King on a morning show. He claimed to have listened to this song all summer. The actor, who belongs to the cultural elite in every way and deservedly, concluded by saying: “I am not ashamed.” It was an expression of appreciation, and if Kulcan had passed away, Zambo would have been accepted.

We have it, for example Péter Máté, who also received the respect of the elite and canonists. There is no question of his talent, just as it would be difficult to announce a winner in Matthew vs. Zambo competes in “sentimentality and kitsch culture in melodies and lyrics.” It’s not even a matter of taste, it’s a matter of insight, but “Hull is the yellowish print”, “I’m leaving”, “You’re standing there at the end of the road” is nothing more or more than “Fallen student”, “Trust me , it won’t be better elsewhere “or” It’s too late. ” Literally, at least by no means, and comparing it musically would be ahistorical. Similar figure Pál Szécsi who, in addition to his voice, could also enter the competition of the first with the sensitivity and pleasant childishness of his songs. Matthew and Szécsi, unlike Zámbo, were never ridiculed, especially not because the old-new canonists of the new world were still in love with them, disappointed, overwhelmed, and fallen. “Our kitsch is the other kitsch” is clear.

Zambo has been mourned for 20 years by those who have György Péter esthete Tibor Pintér In connection with the so-called musical “Jimmy – the legend of the king” of the National Equestrian Theater, he describes it as follows:

Imre Zambó, that is, Jimmy, the king, shot himself in the head at age forty-three, foolishly, by mistake, just as he lived. Even before his death, he was a hero of popular culture, but in the first half of the 2000s, his myth was a true drama for a minimum of hundreds of thousands. His art, as soon as his death, the affair of the outer districts remained, Jimmy never became a celebrity, nor one of the selfish, narcissistic, haughty and vain who entertained the various strata of the middle class, whose programs of TV, From Péter Hajdú to Gábor Bochkor they are all about themselves.

I have quoted here a little known writing of the university professor. A commentator might reasonably ask if it was some kind of troll, as the elite rarely (or rather never) speak in this way about Zambo’s cultural memory and audience, who “understood exactly what it was about them: and the hope that the King did not lie, not just working, not only earning money and offering a bath of experiences, but, like it or not, he tells the truth, that they (all) desperately need anyway.

Unlike the aforementioned interpreters, Zambó Jimmy’s memory does not have too many good years. On the one hand, because the suppression of the cultural representation of compatriots who deviate from desirable cultural norms remains a common game. On the other hand, they are also excluded from the left (we can’t even expect recognition from the right, thankfully). The emancipatory nature of the labor movement, which developed between the two world wars, can still be said and proclaimed without problems or consequences. That the (physical) worker can be an anti-alcoholic hiker, oriented to body culture, rejecting competitive sports, freeing himself in reading circles and classrooms, etc. In comparison, Zambo can easily be told that he hears, just dirt.

The latter is not, but the former is true. But it is also that within the labor movement, the community described by the characters described was not a significant subculture, and in addition to the enlightened character of contemporary work culture, it was also masculine and less abstract. We can be horrified that, after a period of exploitation (euphemistically “work”) without any security, the reading of Kassák and György Bálint journalistic analysis, but readers know exactly that the movement’s hundreds of thousands could not live like this. Not out of laziness or anti-progression, but because they didn’t have the strength to do it.

It was no different in the decade after regime change, and with its mass, neither the TGM nor the standard are pricked by the regime and the losers of reality today, because there is neither time nor strength to do so. It is also true that they no longer read and hear the pose of ramaty in Zámbo, but instead find themselves in cultural forms (from emotion rather than overheated youtubers of words to a wave of long-time retro bands to aesthetically confusing yawns in solo , alone, can be sparked by cultural creatives, regardless of side.

But still.

When I was a child, I didn’t listen to Zambó Jimmy, they listened to me. In our neighbor’s so-called “great room”, the ski box called the “hifi tower”, which most referred to only verbally, rang every Saturday during housework, so he couldn’t help but hear . The neighbor later worked as a cashier in a shopping center without any advantage. For him, Friday night was a metaphor for the end of robotics. And Zambo’s lyrics on Saturday morning became a comfort.

I am convinced that I am not alone in the impression that all my experiences of listening to Zámbó are related to situations in which the work society is thickening. I call these connection points friends, acquaintances, people who

they pulled and pushed work day by day so my mouth would sink if I asked them once: Tell me, how can you love Zimmo Jimmy?

Because we cannot speak of love, not even of the feelings that are alien to us, of our students, nor can we experience the concerns that we have experienced or the joy that we have experienced. Jimmy also reminds them of this, giving them this, as well as the painful power of love, the waves of nostalgia. Zambó himself undertook who he was for, he did not want to be a serious artist, only fun and comfort.

The King has been dead for 20 years, moving unstoppably away from us. Their respect was not built on the cultural canon, there were few gestures from Kulka for the presentation of the workers, the lower-middle class, to be part of the political reality in their own right and language.

And it still is.

On the one hand, they meet in the King, on the other the Zambó and his followers – and, of course, logically also in these lines – they only smile with arrogance. And there is also a gap between the two that separates the culturally looted from the culturally saturated.

The hole where a country falls into the deep.