Cookie Monster goes to Anatolia

Proof positive that cookie-monster vocals sound exactly the same while barked in Turkish as they do in, oh, English, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian ...

Tha band is called "Hope Survive." My guess is the song title is something like "Woof. Woof woof woof. Woof woof."

Colonia is bustin' out all over!

It's Colonia, of "Hey Sexy Body" and "Tvojoj ne Streni Ngognog Ngogn" fame, with an out front video that turns melancholy into melons, and if you're as sick of my crappy puns as I am, you'll join me in traveling to Zagreb to investigate matters further. Perhaps we could all charter a plane, me and the one or two inebriated readers who stumbled into this place and can't figure out how to navigate away. The singer in Colonia here looks pretty zaftig, rather than cartoonish as she did in "Tvojoj ne Streni Axolotl Furshligginer Farshimeltiy," or Jazzercize-buff as she did in "Hey Sexy Body I Want Jump You Right Now and Ride You Like Bicycle to Dubrovnik." Nuthin' wrong with Reubenesque, mind you. Anyway, I like the "chart" they show in the vidclip:

VIP DJ Top Lista Sucka: 1) Robbie Williams. 2) Pussycat Dolls. 3) Coldplay. 4) Rolling Stones. 5) Colonia.

The comments at YouTube are pretty funny, too, when assembled into a narrative: "would ya?" "Why not :) Im not that picky!" "would i what???" "tko je ovo stavia...ajme meni...POLJUBIT CHEM GA ODMA :))" "o je hudba nie ako tie kokotiny americke!" "not bad for a Croatian." Not sure if I'd want to tko je ovo stavia her, or perform ajme meni, or even get down and poljubit chem ga odma, especially if my kokotiny americke isn't up to the task. But if I were still a drinkin' man, I probably might have woken up next to her at some point. Or maybe not.

The name of that song is "Najbolje Od Svega," in case you wondering. And in case you prefer Colonia's cartoon videos, here's a treat: "Svijet Voli Pobjednike."



You will enjoy.

Ah, those Moskva women ...

Dunno if chanteuse Valeria is Russian or Latvian, but from the context of this far northern Olivia Newton-John's song "Riga-Moskva," I'm guessing she's a Muscovite who fell in love with a Latvian, but it didn't work out and so she came up with this wistful song. I think her next hit should be "Sacramento-Moskva."

More of the great Zdob si Zdub

That one's called "Cucusor (The Cuckoo)." In the words of Ron Popeil: "But wait! There's more!"



That one's called "Nunta Extremala (Extreme Wedding)." Cue the Popeil quote again ...



...and that one's called "Everybody in the Casa Mare."

I really like this Moldovan band Zdob si Zdub, because they remind me of this band called Cake, from right here in Sacramento. Apparently the Dobbs have been around for a decade, and they have a pretty deep catalog, which I'm gonna try to track down.

All your czechno band are belong to us

In A.D. 2101. War was beginning. What happen? Somebody set up us the bomb. We get signal. What! Main screen turn on. It's You!! How are you gentlemen!! All your czechno band are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction. What you say!! You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha Ha Ha Ha …. Take off every "zig"!!! You know what you doing. Move "zig". For great justice.

It's our pals Colonia, of "Hey Sexy Body" fame, performing their smash Balkan hit "Na Tvojoj Strani Postelje." Paging Elroy and Judy Jetson, white courtesy telephone in the lobby of the Zagreb Hilton ...

I dreenk wotka. Den I womit like crazy

Some orthodox Jewish guys somewhere behind the old Iron Curtain talk a half-wit Russian kid into guzzling copious amounts of vodka, then laugh at him when he drinks it in reverse all over the ground and on himself. Rated "TD" for totally disgusting.

Why aren't our talk shows like this?

A talk-show host is interviewing what look to be survivors of some kind of calamity in front of a studio audience. When one of the victims starts recounting his experiences in a voice more suitable for a Sesame Street character than an actual human being, the host starts losing it. Subtitled, for non-Hrvatski speakers like you and me.

Monty Python enthusisats should enjoy this.

Lou Pearlman in Turkmenistan

You knew it had to come to this. Even former Soviet Central Asian Republics aren't immune to the boy-band virus. Even if it takes root a few years after it burned out in the West.

Mushrooms in the news

Researchers are rediscovering the significance of a roll in the hey hey hey with our old friend Amanita muscaria. What better way to enhance a shroom buzz than the shifting fabrics of this quite psychedelic example of Central Asian post-Communist propaganda? All hail Serdar Saparmurat Turkmenbashi the Great!

None dare call it Silverlake

Aside from the language, these Hrvatskis could be the next Ednaswap. They look like something some bad television casting director might cob together from drama departments around L.A., and the haphazard mix of styles and visual abominations say Silverlake hipster washout wih much elan. The band is Psihomodo Pop. Dunno if they're the bee's knees in downtown Zagreb, though.

Hrvatski Idol, anyone?

(On edit: The short-bus window lickers at the GOP Agitprop Agency, oops, I meant to say TASS, erm, Falafel Media, uh, um, Foxaganda, have disabled embedding, so bloggers like me can't make fun of their crappy programming. But you, dear reader, can circumvent this awful turn of events by clicking outside of the little "play" circle, which will take you directly to the video as it appears at YouTube.com.)

Yeppers, our Hrvatski friends have been sold the same bill of rotting donkey bollocks that we Americans have had shoveled on us by the foistmasters at Fox. Poor them. Poor us. There's no indication that the Croatians have their own version of our judges, though: Do they have an acerbic but essentially stupid Hungarian, an OxyContin-thwacked cheerleader turned disco dolly and a dense bass player (how do you say "What up dawg" in Srbo-Hrvatski, anyway?) to make contestants' lives miserable? Word has it that the Fox organization in Zagreb is still too busy searching for the Hrvatski equivalent to the words "loofah," "falafel" and "Yoo hoo Mr Bush, teabag me next, please!" to find the right combination of venal evil and profound incompetence to give Cowell, Abdul and Jackson a run for their money in the Balkans.



Ouch.



Ouch ouch.

Why can't the people coaching these clowns steer them toward some of Elvis' cooler tunes? You know, the hits: "Rock-a-Hula Baby," "(There's) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car," "Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce," "Queenie Wahine's Papaya," "Do the Clam" ... even "We're Coming in Loaded" would be an improvement over these threadbare stinkers.



"Sexy Cool" OK, I'll buy that. Croatian women are tha bomb.



"Moj Broj," which means ... um ... erm ... screw it. I went to the well, but the jokes just were not there. But Lidija Bacic makes me reasonably conscious of my heterosexuality, so all in all it's a square deal.

If anyone stumbles across Kamchatka Idol, please don't tell me, OK?

I have no idea what this is. Please help.

I'm pretty sure this is from Uzbekistan, probably from somewhere around Samarkand. It starts with some passionate drumming with three guys, one of which is either Jim Carrey, Will Farrell and Chris Cattan, or Russians who look like them (I don't as a rule watch anything with Carrey in it, so I wouldn't know) doing an update of Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin's old "wild and crazy guy" shtick in some bar, then it shifts to a variety show with a bunch of televisions onstage, then there's a fat woman dancing and some people who look like extras in a high-school production where they combined The King and I and Scheherezade to save a few rubles, plus shots of a little kid breakdancing. Then the action shifts to a woman singer who's probably big news in Tashkent or Almaty, who is singing a song that is spelled "Aziz" but sounds like "A Jeb Uh Jeb," and she's backed by one of the weirder sounding orchestras I've heard in a while and I've taken mushrooms and listened to some pretty offbeat stuff in my time; symphonies of kiddie bicycle horns, kazoos and various Rube Goldberg instruments involving kitchen spoons and rubber bands always make me feel slightly scribbled, dunno about you. This segment reminds me of an old Robert Crumb Weirdo comic about a guy named Etaoin Shrdlu who gets pulled into his TV set to dance with some voluptuous and exotic babe he found and got aroused by on a UHF channel late one night.

As a comment at YouTube where I found this put it: "Xaxa! Tak klassno v nachale tri komika tancuyut pod horezomskuyu (esli ne oshibayus) pesnyu tancuyut! I sama pesnya i ritm zastavlyaet golovoy shevelit kak v nachale troe tancuyut! Xaxa! Ne poverish,no ya toje vmeste s nimi plyasala!:))) Jalko tol'ko pesnya korotkaya prishlos povtoryat neskolko raz i tancevat poka ne nadoelo!:)))" Ahem. I really can't add to that, so I won't even try.

Thugz get the girl, even in Turkmenistan

Proof posi that it doesn't pay to be a square bear when there's girls involved, even in the dictatorship of far-off Turkmenistan on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Note how our well-scrubbed romantic ballad singer makes a strong case for connubial bliss in a choice concrete Soviet-era apartment complex, but when Mr. Cool rolls up in his Bimmer and represents like 50 Kopek with the hand gestures and thug veneer, all bets are off. Plus he probably has better drugs, but that's kind of hard to ascertain from the narrative, and my Turkmen is a little rusty these days so I coundn't tell if he was "rapping" about an 8-ball or dining-room furniture.

Polish hip-hop: No joke, please

Here's some party-down Polska hop to get that throwdown started. I'd figured the Poles were pretty much locked into prog, as years ago a friend in San Francisco had this roommate named Krzysztof or something like that, it was pronounced more like "Sheestoff," and he and his pals would get all messed up and play this album where on the last song everybody's supposed to light matches and then blow them out one by one, until one poor guy who's already knocked back way too many cold brews and, ahem, Polish dogs in the bleachers at the old 'Stick attempts valiantly to keep his match lit without a) setting fire to himself, or b) pissing his pants. Guess you had to be there. Anyway, good to see that Poland's gone all Def Jam on us.

Now that's what I call czechno!

What is a "dragslut pepper"? This low-budget vid for "Buble Gum Boy" by Lollobrigide has all the correct czechno ingredients. Cheesy Soft Cell keyboards? Czech! Wanky animation? Czech! Hilariously incoherent lyrics? Czech! You may ask me why I think these goofy records could be big in the West. I can't tell you. All I can say is that when Depeche Mode does it, it's the work of ham-fisted beatweenies, but when someone with a Boris Badenov accent does it, it's High Art. Czechno, by the way, in case you're too lazy to scroll down to read, is synth pop and techno dance music of eastern European origin. (And credit Countess Christsmasher of the Canadian duo Procon for that brilliant piece of nomenklatura, not me.)

Why aren't car commercials like this over here?

Part one ...



... and part two.

Dunno if you ever wanted a car that looks like what might happen if a Nash Ambassador impregnated a Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia, but I would love to get my hands one one of these rear-engined Czechoslovakian babies, especially if it handles as well as it does here. Dig the cool jazz soundtrack, too, and the overall Avengers vibe. I want my circa-1962 Tatra 603, now! And you?

Hir aj kam, hir aj go!

Yowsa! It's those wild and crazy Flamingosi guys again, partying down at a Zagreb backyard barbeque with a bevy of homina-homina Hrvatski hotties. Yep, I hate alliteration as much as you do, but who can resist this kind of action? Watch the two babes sharing a sausage toward the end of the video, which features the grill equivalent of Anton Chekhov's unfired gun hanging over the mantle: If there are uneaten sausages on the grill, you know that by the end of the video, they will be consumed in entertaining fashion. If the American record industry hadn't forgotten to make videos like these, it might be ... still ... um, uh ... well, no, it'd still be pretty much toast.

Natasha Fatale, après Rocky & Bullwinkle

Now we know what happened to Boris Badenov's old sidekick Natasha, after they returned to obscurity in Pottsylvania after a long career of espionage and related hijinks. Here's Natasha with her kickass band Moja Štikla, playing what the locals call "trbo-flyyk muzik." You will enjoy, or you will show us your papers please.

Did Courtney Love move to Croatia?

You make the call. To these eyes and ears, it would appear that the Widow Cobain has abandoned Tinseltown for the joys of slivovitz-fueled debauchery. Here she is partying with Balkan entertainer Bora Drljača, who literally sweeps her off her feet. Now, if we could talk Madonna into moving to Shqiperia, aka Albania, we might begin to get a handle on our obnoxious entertainer problem. Next: The Simpson sisters relocate to Ingushetia.

Balkan Scientologists invent "speed klezmer"

At least I think that's what's going on here. Dunno where this fusion band is from, but this is mighty entertaining if you like weird semi-orgasmic facial expressions, like on the keyboard player. Check out the "Korg" and "Casio" lettering on his keyboards, which are spelled correctly, but on the T-shirt worn by the guitar player in the background, the Roman lettering is flopped, or appears backward. Kinda like what this music does in your head. I should send this one to my pal at Verve/GRP in New York. Apparently the band is called Muzika, and the keyboard player is Amza Tairov.

Hey, sexy body!

Low budget? This is what I'm talking about. I'm not sure if the singer is a woman woman or an Ann Coulter Adam's apple do you know what I'm talking about and I think you do woman, but this is some highly entertaining czechno. It's one of the first videos I found when I started looking for the stuff.

"Unbeleeevable, eeet's eeencredible"

More fun from Hrvatska, aka Croatia. This is a genre my online pal Countess Christsmasher from the Canadian electronic group Procon calls "czechno." It's '80s dance music with an eastern Euro twist, with a rapping guy who's a Roman Polanski lookalike and yet another stunning Croatian woman. I have a real soft spot for this kind of stuff. This one has major-label production values, but some of the tings I've turned up, which I'll post down the road, are much cheesier and are quite low budget.

Two wild & crazee guys go pink in Hrvatska

Two wild and crazy skanky white guys (twins?) in matching pink suits with a bunch of really hot chicks, playing a catchy ska-like tune in what I presume is downtown Zagreb. If this is what Croatian women look like, um, uh, where's my plane ticket?

One of my favorites: Zdob si Zdub, from Moldova

Zdob si Zdub is a very cool band, much like a Scythian version of the California band Cake. This song "Bune Diminyatsa" (Good Morning) is pretty much gosh darn snappy, and the video employs a lot of old Soviet-era imagery, with the band riding around in an old Commie flatbed truck, interspersed with old propaganda film footage. I've had this song stuck in my head for a month. From my understanding, these guys have been around for about 10 years, and they're signed to Warner Music, although WMG only has them listed on its Hungarian division's site. Too bad Nonesuch Records isn't doing that Explorer Series anymore.

The singing policemen of Georgia!

OK, I'm reconfiguring this blog, which has been moribund, to feature all these great eastern Euro and central Asian music videos. Here's the start. Apparently, if you get busted in Tbilisi, you get serenaded on your way to the juzgado by constabularies with impeccable barbershop harmonies. American law enforcement could stand to learn a thing or two from this.