The past, as they say, is a different country. They do things differently there. Much of what happened in the late-1970s popular culture has fallen victim to an Orwellian kind of amnesia, which is probably a good thing for the most part when you consider what our pop culture is like today and assume that we live in a mostly ordinary time. Youtube has done much to rehabilitate some of the more wonderful iconography of absurdity from this time, though, and I'd like to take a moment to highlight some of the memories that I'm glad to see rekindled.
First, something that's a bit less like the rest because it came from the other side of the Berlin Wall. In 1976 a baritone vocalist named Eduard Khil sang what was supposed to be the ballad "I am Glad, 'Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home" (as previously mentioned, the Russians have the best names for everything), but it came out as gibberish that would one day fuel an entire internet subculture of memes:
According to Wikipedia, the song originally featured lyrics such as:
I'm riding the prairie on my stallion, a mustang as such, and my sweetheart Mary now knits a stocking for me, a thousand miles away from here
Presumably something is lost in translation, but the fact that Khil would've been singing about riding "a mustang as such" had he stuck to the script just makes me fall in love even more.
Enjoy gibberish, but find Soviet nonsense too foreign and bleak? Perhaps this simulation (due to Adriano Celentano) of what English sounds like to non-English speakers will be more to your liking:
Listening to Celentano's lyrics feels a little like leaning over a precipice and never quite being able to fall. The phonemes and structure all seem to match the model of what English is supposed to sound like, but the puzzle pieces don't fit together in a way that makes sense. So I sit, always on the edge of an understanding that just eludes my grasp.
Sometimes I'm tempted to say things like this, and then I remember that "OLL RAIGTH!" is a more appropriate response.
To be honest, I don't have much clever to say about the next video other than "The Eurovision Song Contest is weird:"
In all fairness, I'm sure most Americans do seven things before breakfast equally baffling to those who tuned into the Eurovision '79 contest to see Dschinghis Khan's entry. Still...
Finally, here's Boney M., another band invented for Eurovision giving a surprisingly workable description of the bizarre final years of Grigori Rasputin's life:
Oh, those Russians.
