"Ra, ra, Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen..."

I've already written about Øyvind Thorsby's kind of cruddy-looking but absolutely brilliant web comic Hitmen for Destiny, but if you still haven't checked it out you should click on over there right now.

In his latest strip Thorsby has Anette, the lovable savior of worlds/increasingly unstable serial killer, walking along singing a song to herself: "Run, run, Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen. Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra ta-ra-ra-ra." Thorsby drops a lot of funny little details into his strips (I love his sensationalistic newspaper headlines. "TOO SEXY, FIRED!!!" "BOOB SHOCK!!!") and at first I thought Anette's Rasputin song was just Thorsby's weird parody of Run Rudolph Run. But something inspired me to Google the lyrics, and I discovered Anette is actually singing a slightly off version of a real song by Boney M.

Boney M. was a bizarre German '70s pop-disco group, three ladies and a dude, who were brought together by producer Frank Farian as one of the packaged groups of the post-Monkees and pre-Milli Vanilli era. They had a busy, high-energy, international sound and an unforgettable visual style, as you'll see in the clip below.



While they were apparently quite popular in parts of Europe, they never broke through in a big way in America and they're pretty obscure here today. This clip is so goofy, weird and wonderful that you'll end up like Anette, wandering down the street and singing it to yourself with a goofy grin on your face. (Although hopefully, unlike Anette you won't be on your way home from a bloody battle with a demon swordsman made of snakes.)


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