The song starts conventionally enough placing Raspution in his historical context and presenting a physical description, but when we reach the fourth line we realise that the words are already searching for something deeper.
There lived a certain man in Russia long ago
He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow
Most people looked at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear
At first this seems like a pathetic attempt to end on the word ‘dear’ so that it will rhyme with ‘fear’ but this is to drastically underestimate what is being proposed here. The word ‘chicks’ for example appears to anachronistic, but think deeper – what are chicks? - small chickens, or birds. What are they doing in the urban context of Moscow? Perhaps the ‘chicks’ are the symbols of the earliest stages of the revolution – post-egg, but pre-chicken.
Why refer to Rasputin as a ‘lovely dear’ when we know he was neither lovely nor a dear? But wait - a ‘dear’ is another small animal – another metaphor for the growing revolutionary fervour perhaps. Similarly, ‘lovely’ is a word with no real resonance, it’s emptiness and irrelevance in mock-juxtaposition to the reality of Rasputin as a smelly monk with a stupid beard.
Of course it is in the chorus that the lyric reaches its most insightful. Remember that ‘Chor’ is latin for ‘attractive female’ and Russ is the name of the glinty-toothed English pianist. Even in the name ‘chorus’ the author is pointing us in an entirely unexpected direction.
Ra ra rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Notice, in this line, the return of the animal motif, but not this time a
young animal - a kitten - but rather a fully grown cat. The revolution is
progressing. What do we know about ‘cats’? – They are supposed to have nine
lives, as of course, did Raspution, as his enemies tried to kill him first by
poisoning him, then shooting him, then strangling him, then throwing him in
the river, then pulling him out again and running over him with a steamroller
and finally pummelling him to death with a carpet beaters.
This ‘cat’ quite evidently did have nine lives, which is why the use of the ‘word’ cat is so crucial to our understanding of Rasputin and his historical connect. It is not, as some have suggested, a word overused by gits with pointy beards hanging about in coffee bars and listening to Acker Bilk.
And not only that – this cat was ’gone’. Where had he gone? Gone to London to see the queen, we might say colloquially, but in Rasputin’s case it would be to see the Russian queen, would it not? The women who trusted the life of her son to a man to whom soap was a stranger and deodorant was a distant undiscovered land.
Once again we see how what might at first appear to be to outpourings of a semi-literate moron – ‘There was a cat that really was gone.’ – turns into a revealing metaphor for Rasputin and the fin de siecle empire that was dissolving before the ‘flaming glow’ of his eyes
Now we move on to the stuttering chorus line ‘Ra Ra Rasputin., The repetition is deliberate here and not just an attempt to make the lyric fit the tune. Again this is a symbol of the forthcoming revolution stuttering to life, initially lacking in confidence but finally arriving in full glory. There is also an implicit reference to the English nursery rhyme ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’ – a distant echo of the animal motif that peppers the lyric.
Then we hear that he was ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’ – the choice of words giving us a cornucopia of potential meaning. Why was he a machine? A machine is mechanical, pre-Soviet Russia hierarchical society could be described as mechanical, but then to make this line oxymoronic he is a ‘love’ machine – emotional and yet at the same time mechanical; sexual and at the same time dildolical.
As we ‘zoom’ in to each verse, lines that at first appear to be meaningless gibberish, reveal a deep insight into both the man and his age:
He ruled the Russian land and never mind the czar
But the kasachok he danced really wunderbar
What, we wonder, is the German word wunderbar doing at the end of
the line. Why use an adjective when an adverb might be more appropriate?
Was it merely because they couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with Czar?
Once again we are seduced by the faux naiveté of the lyric. He may have
ruled the Russian land but he danced to the tune of Germany, or more
precisely, to Karl Marx whose theories would fuel the very same revolution
that Rasputin fermented.
Sometimes the metre and rhythm can seem clumsy to the untrained eye. Critics have suggested that the first line in the following couplet works reasonably well but the second line is only an approximation to the English language.
In all affairs of state he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
But the closer you look, the more the ‘real’ meanings emerge into focus. Notice the use of the apparently redundant ‘real’ here, as if the word had been placed in here randomly in order to make the line a bit longer. Nothing in the lyrics of Boney M is ever accidental. ‘real’ means ‘actual’. He was not just ‘great’, he was ‘real great’. He had achieved ‘real’ greatness as opposed to unreal greatness.
And notice the use of the word ‘squeeze’ emphasising his physical strength tempered with gentleness. Squeeze is the only word that could possibly be used to end this line. The fact that it rhymes with please is merely a bonus.
In the poignant final choruses we learn the fate of Rasputin at the hands of ‘some men of higher standing.’ – tall Cossacks perhaps:
They put some poison into his wine
He drank it all and he said I feel fine
They didn’t quit, they wanted his head
And so they shot him till he was dead
Why, it must be asked, did they want his head. Was it destined for a bottle in the biology lab of Moscow University? These were cruel men in cruel times. Not only did they shoot him, they shot him till he was dead, the fiends. But this is history and we must, as Boney M did, remain objective.
Just as ‘I’ve got a Brand New Combine Harvester’ by the Wurzels exposed the full tragic consequences of agri-business hegemony on the farming community and ‘Grandad’ by Clive Dunn, the failure of Western Democracies to develop meaningful policies to deal with aging populations so ‘Rasputin’ by Boney M gave a new perspective of the way we view pre-revolutionary Russia and one of the most notorious of its many colourful characters; R.R.Rasputin.
Finally to disperse any lingering doubt as to the genius of Boney M, we find in this song, not only a re-evaluation of the past, but a glimpse of the future. Why did they sing ‘Ra Ra Rasputin’. Remove the repeated Ras and the last piece of the jigsaw falls into place. We are left with the name – Putin* – another individual with a future of Russia in his hands.
* Ok it’s actually Sputin, but they had to dance as well as sing you know.
NEXT WEEK
Brown Girl in the Ring: A post-modernist anthem to feminism and an implicit critique of anarcho-syndicalism? Or just bollocks? You decide.
D’you Wanna be in my Gang. Gary Glitter presents a searing sociological analysis of the ‘gang’ mentality in the socially excluded and marginalized youth in modern Western Democracies.