If for no other reason, this video must be seen for what takes place at about the 2:30 mark.
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Nathan Hamm – author of 2040 posts on Registan.net.
Nathan founded Registan.net in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural factors shape risks and opportunities. Follow him on Twitter or drop him a line.
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On another Central Asian music related note (forgive the pun), BBC Radio Three featured a few items of mountain music from Kyrgyzstan on its Late Junction slot. The programme will probably be up until Thursday evening British time, so make sure to listen before then. This is the playlist, which as you will see intersperses Kyrgyz music with some other items:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/pip/sxw82/
The link to the stream is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?radio3/latejunction_thu
What an outrageous rip off of UK Band ‘Blue’ and their ‘All Rise’ song from a few years back! I think the rap bits from that track were even lifted from the original – scandal!
P.S I am in no way a fan of Blue or any other lame boy bands!
To be fair, I think the song is probably a direct lift from the aforementioned Blue band of which you speak. This is quite standard practice in Central Asia, where the bullying practices of meddling Western lawsuit-happy ambulance-chasers are virtually unknown.
However, on some further investigation, more details emerge. If I read the opening credit of the Turkmen version of this song correctly, it unclearly states that the song dates back to 2000. This would puts its publication one year before the release of Blue’s album, All Rise, (released on July 17, 2001, according to AllMusic) the title track of which you have cited in your claim of plagiarism. Of course, this does not invalidate the whole thorny debate over copyright infringement (or something), but the question is about who copied whom. You are right to suggest an eerie similarity between the two songs, which I have established after a brief cross-textual musicological analysis, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that the facts point squarely to Blue’s culpability in the case. Or, to be more precise, to the guilt of Tor Erik Hermansen, Rustan Hallgeir, SE Mikkel, and Samuel Webbe; this being the inordinately large assembley of composers that it took to put together this offensively humdrum pop melody.
Stick to Kyrgyz mountain folk music would be my advice.
My housemate is cousins with Lee from Blue.