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Sign upVideos, fashion, cinema, sleeves, TV - Italo Disco as part of the era.
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23 June 2022. Yura Shatunov dies. Over 30 years of solo career - eight albums, a rights trial and "Song of the Year". We break down the solo repertoire: "Detstvo" with three versions of authorship, "Klyanus", "A leto tsveta".
Grandparents, parents and friends share one dance floor, and each generation has its own music. How to write the must-play and do-not-play lists, how to order the dance blocks, and why every lyric should be checked before the day.
1989. The music video for "Belye rozy" (White Roses) airs on the TV programme Utrennyaya pochta (Morning Post) on Central Television - and within months Laskovyy Mai becomes a national sensation. Twenty years later, in 2009, a biographical film "Laskovyy Mai" will reignite interest in the songs.
1988, Orenburg. Sergei Kuznetsov, the music circle leader at Boarding School No. 2, brings several cassettes to the railway station kiosk - recordings of his pupil, 14-year-old Yura Shatunov. Among six songs on the tape is "Sedaya noch" (Grey Night), the sixth track of the album "Belye rozy" (White Roses), 6 minutes 14 seconds long.
Three routes to a forgotten song: by the words, by humming and by a recording that is playing. We tested lyric search on five songs from different decades and audio recognition on four reworks: what worked, where services stay silent and what to do next.
28 August 1978: the German group Boney M releases the single “Rasputin” - from the album “Nightflight to Venus”. Written by Frank Farian, George Reyam and Fred Jay. The song about Grigori Rasputin rises to №1 in Germany, Austria and Australia, №2 in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The melody sparked a debate: critics pointed to its similarity with the Turkish song “Kâtibim”, but the band denied borrowing.
29 October 2019: the streaming service Deezer releases Spleeter into open source - a TensorFlow library that splits a finished recording into vocals, drums, bass and “other”. In its first week the GitHub repository collects over 5,000 stars.
14 February 1967. Aretha Franklin records “Respect” in a New York session that continued work begun at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Two years earlier the same song had been released by Otis Redding - a man's plea for “respect” when he comes home from work. Franklin's version became her breakout hit and signature song, and Redding himself later folded her ideas into his own performances with the Bar-Kays.
November 1987. Mikhail Boyarsky records “Zelenoglazoe Taxi” for a Melodiya long-play. The song was written by composer Oleg Kvasha to lyrics by Valery Panfilov and originally performed by Kvasha himself - but in mass memory it attached itself to Boyarsky. This is a case where a cover outgrew the original: the performer's version became the face of the song, while the author's version stayed with a narrow circle.
12 December 2007. Alexander Pushny posts a cover of “Zelenoglazoe Taxi” - in the style of Rammstein, with a German lyric “Du Taxi mit den Augen grün”. The song he is covering was written by composer Oleg Kvasha to lyrics by Valery Panfilov in 1987 and originally performed by Kvasha himself. In twenty years one Soviet эстрада piece gathered at least nine documented versions, from a disco remix to an English-language pop cover.
November 3, 1992. Whitney Houston releases “I Will Always Love You”, a pop ballad for the film The Bodyguard; the soundtrack and the single ship on the same day. The song will sit at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for fourteen weeks, earn a diamond RIAA certification, top the charts of 34 countries and sell more than 25 million copies - the year's best-seller and the biggest-selling single by a female solo artist in history.
The Technics SL-1200 arrived in October 1972. The Pioneer CDJ-500 - in 1994. Between these two models lies the boundary that separated the 80s disco from the 90s: vinyl gave way to CD, the analog synthesizer to the sequencer, the live MC to the DJ set. The key "disco 80s 90s" is searched 131,196 times a month - but the difference is not in "mood", it is in technology, carriers and the format of the evening.
1988, Saratov. Former OBKhSS officer Alexander Shishinin and composer Vitaliy Okorokov assemble a female group called Kombinaciya - inspired by a Mirage concert. A year later "Russian Girls" will sound across the country, and by 1992 "Dva kusocheka kolbaski" ("Two Little Slices of Sausage") will become a signature of the Russian 90s disco.
September 1989. Belgian project Technotronic, created by producer Jo Bogaert back in 1987, releases "Pump Up the Jam" - a single that will reach #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and set the tempo for the entire following decade. The 90s disco does not begin on 1 January 1991, but right here: when the four-on-the-floor kick and synth bass from Frankfurt and Brussels studios hit dancefloors across Europe - and then, with a delay, Russia.
Italo Disco lyrics were often written by non-native English speakers, so literal translation rarely works. We explain how to preserve rhythm, image and mood, and give tips for anyone who wants to translate.
1992-1996. Eurodance videos set the visual code of the decade: chroma key, aerobics, neon, dancers in bright costumes. 20 international videos that explain it best.
1983: ZYX releases “The Best of Italo Disco”. Discomagic presses thousands of singles but only a handful of albums. Italo Disco lived on 12-inch maxi-singles and compilations. The “Italo Boot Mix”, “Italo Maxi-Hits”, “I Love ZYX” series. How to tell an album from a compilation.
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