Maanam

"żądza pieniądza" opens with a unison rhythm-section riffs that builds into an acceleration, before launching into a long guitar solo that this time comes before the vocals. Kora sounds even more aggressive, helped along by lyrics stripped down to the bone and made up of a handful of punchy phrases, complete with onomatopoeia and key words hammered home through repetition. This technique was common to many of the nowa fala bands, including the aforementioned Perfect and Republika, but also to commercially less dominant names, albeit with a considerable following of their own, such as Brygada Kryzys and Klaus Mitffoch.

While it's not clear who adopted it first (many of the bands in question went through a long apprenticeship before finding a record deal), it's certain that the first group to officially flaunt it were Maanam, marking a sharp break from the verses influenced by traditional poetry that had typified Polish rock up to that point.

In this specific case, the lyrics are a series of slogans against materialism (“Desire for money, keeps me up at night, I've got a strongbox at home, the strongbox is empty”), but they allow plenty of room for Kora's theatrical flair, letting her manipulate words and sounds at will, between strangled high notes, spasms and vibrato games.

In June 1980, the eighteenth edition of the Opole Festival takes place, the most important music event in Poland. Maanam manage to perform there on two days, the 26th and the 29th, playing both songs from the single. The interest they generate, especially among younger audiences, is immediate: the intellectual edge of the lyrics, the charismatic figure of Kora, with her cropped hair, theatrical makeup, tight clothing and androgynous bearing, the energy and dynamism of the sound. Those performances mark a turning point in the history of local popular music.

The festival opens the doors of the record industry to them. Between August 25 and September 10 of that same year, the band travels to Lublin to record their debut album, at the national radio's studio. This time the project enjoys the financial backing of Wifon, a newly formed state-controlled label, as well as the support of two producers of the caliber of Andrzej Poniatowski and Włodzimierz Kowalczyk (the former a former drummer of Klan, one of the most important Polish rock bands of the Seventies — already covered on these pages in the feature “L'altro prog“; the latter behind the mixing desk for the first time, but destined to produce many of the following years' masterpieces of the nowa fala, including another OndaRock milestone: “Nowa Aleksandria” by Siekiera).

With the chance to give shape to their own ambitions, the quartet presents seven new songs and shows every intention of re-recording the two from the single ex novo. In the middle of the sessions, for reasons never made public, Kupidura leaves the band and is replaced by Paweł Markowski: they end up playing four songs each. Bass duties are once again handed to Olesiński's brother, though he is credited among the guests (once the sessions are wrapped up, but before the album's release, the band will hire Bogdan Kowalewski as full-time bassist).

With the work wrapped up in little more than two weeks, all that's left is to wait for the album's release, which arrives on April 4, 1981, seven months later (anyone wanting a clearer picture of the glacial pace of the Polish record industry under the communist regime is invited to read the monograph dedicated to Republika).

Opening the record is “Stoję, stoję, czuję się świetnie”, an anthem to nonconformity once again built on a handful of repeated slogans (“Everyone tells me, lie down, sit down, but I don't have to, I really don't want to” [...] “I'm standing, I feel great”), riding a funky groove that puts Jackowski's obsessive rhythm guitar in perfect contrast with Olesiński's intricate flourishes, which combine sequences of high notes with the use of the chorus effect, deliberately creating a sense of slight dissonance.

The new version of “Boskie Buenos” (faithful to the original, though the sound is now fuller and more mature) is followed by “Biegnij razem ze mną” — an unprecedented hybrid of jangle pop and jazz-rock, blending the former's typical guitar arpeggios with a long alto sax solo, played by Zbigniew Namysłowski, one of the masters of Poland's rich jazz scene — and the instrumental “Miłość jest cudowna”, a calm sequence of reflected sounds produced by the two guitarists with heavy use of chorus and delay.

Closing the first side of the vinyl is the new version of “Żądza pieniądza”, so violent it borders on hard rock, as does the track that opens the second side, “Karuzela marzeń”, whose lyrics are a perfect portrait of life in communist Poland (though it manages to dodge censorship by staying metaphorical and never leveling explicit accusations):

The frenzy is no accident, since the lyrics are about a colony of rats: the typical swarming of rodents is conveyed both through the flood of words, the relentless bassline, and an electronic sound effect that mimics their squeaking. The rats are an obvious metaphor for dissidents in communist Poland, who move symbolically underground, causing headaches for the authorities (whose evocation, in the form of a guillotine, makes clear which side Maanam stood on):

Here too, the lyrics mirror the music's flow, describing the chastened life and the forced calm imposed on the Polish people:

Maanam no longer exist today: Jackowski passed away in 2013 from a heart attack, and Kora in 2018 from ovarian cancer, at 66 and 67 years old respectively. Their deaths put an end to any attempt by others to carry on the band's name. Not, however, to the echo of their music, as shown by the covers produced over the decades by successive generations of musicians. The most notable, over the last fifteen years or so, have been those repeatedly performed by the Męskie Granie Orkiestra, an open collective featuring all the biggest names — at least in the pop-rock field — of today's Polish music industry: after all, they're all, in a sense, heirs to Kora, Jackowski and the rest of the band.

Trivia: the artwork – The cover photo was taken by Jacek Szmuc, a Kraków photographer linked to the "Grupa robocza" (Working Group) movement, heavily influenced by avant-garde theatre and bohemian aesthetics. The band poses in front of the van they used at the time to tour the country together with their manager, Krzysztof Kownacki, who was very close to the local hippy movement. These are two figures whose association with Maanam clearly highlights the band's distance from the punk '77 mentality, which viewed both bohemian and hippy culture in a strongly negative light.

On the translations – In order to render the meaning of the lyrics as faithfully as possible, a poetic/interpretative approach was avoided, and the flood of repeated words was trimmed. Some nuances were nonetheless lost: for example, in the ending of "Szare miraże," the Italian version features an inelegant repetition of the term "grey door," which does not actually occur in Polish, due to the different declensions of the two words ("szarymi drzwiami" and "szarych drzwi"). Quite by chance, however, the happy alliteration found in "Oddech szczura" was preserved: "szumi, szura i szeleści" ("it rustles, shuffles and slides").