The acoustics of May in Poland
May in Poland has its own acoustics. A metal climbing frame struck by a child, the first motorbike beneath the block, a radio playing from the kitchen windowsill, children returning home only when it is properly dark, which in practice means never.
Piechotą do lata comes from exactly that world.
Many people hear nostalgia in the song now, perhaps even sadness. That may be a side effect of growing older. After thirty, a person hears a refrain about summer and automatically adds an existential commentary. The body makes its own emotional remaster. Yet Piechotą do lata is primarily a song of excitement, about the part of the year when the body wakes faster in the morning than good sense does.
May always returns
The lilac returns with May. There is no drama in that image, only a cycle and certainty. May comes back, and with it the tension beneath the skin when people begin living outdoors more than inside. A jacket suddenly feels too heavy, sleep too short and the evening too beautiful for an early return.
The image of dreams made too short is one of the most brilliant and misunderstood in Polish pop. This is not a broken heart. These are late-spring nights at Poland's latitude. At nine in the evening, daylight remains. Somebody is beside a river, on a bench, beneath the block or on a balcony. There are only a few hours of darkness, and at three the dawn appears again. Sleep is shortened by light and life.
That is why the song is so physical: clothes too light for the temperature, the madness of storms, the idea of walking all the way to summer. No metaphysics, only organism, skin, air and the end of May in Poland, which has affected people for decades like a legal psychoactive substance.
A television song before the great drama
Musically, it is closer to light entertainment than new wave, somewhere between the vocal group Alibabki and a summer festival broadcast by television back when television still attempted to manufacture collective good spirits. Bajm at the end of the 1970s retained youthful ease and a smile, before later decades brought greater drama and larger emotions.
That is why the association with Mr Koracz's fictional song about health, a line from the absurd Polish film world of Stanisław Bareja, feels strangely accurate. The quotation has acquired a life of its own, like Piechotą do lata. It is apparently a light and banal song. Yet several seconds of the chorus reveal one exact quality of light.
About 20:47.
May.
The tarmac is still warm.
And suddenly one really wants to live a little more.
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