Rasputin (song)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1978 · Boney M. single, 1978; revived as a dance trend on TikTok around 2020 · Also known as Ra Ra Rasputin; Rasputin dance; Rasputin TikTok trend; Majestic x Boney M. Rasputin remix

What it is

"Rasputin" is a disco song released in 1978 by Boney M., a pop group put together in West Germany by the producer Frank Farian. It tells the story of Grigori Rasputin, the mystic who gained influence over the family of the last Russian Tsar and was murdered in 1916. Over forty years later, people online used it as the music for short dance videos, remixes and jokes about how much history they'd picked up from a disco record.

Where it came from

The song was a hit in 1978. It reached number one in West Germany, Austria and Australia, number two in Britain, and was popular in the Soviet Union. It stayed around at parties and turned up in the dance video game Just Dance 2 in 2010. Around 2020 it took off on TikTok, an app where people post short videos set to music, as the soundtrack to a dance trend. A remix by the British producer Majestic followed in 2021 and put the song back in the British charts.

Why it mattered

It's a catchy song with a ridiculous subject: a cheerful disco number about a Siberian holy man, court gossip and an assassination. That mismatch was the joke. Many of the people using it were born decades after 1978, and for a lot of them it really was where they first heard of Rasputin, so the line about it being their only Russian history lesson was half true. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore even called it a good introduction to Russian court politics.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People online didn't care how old a song was. A 1978 record about a 1916 murder became current again because it was catchy, a bit absurd and easy to dance to in fifteen seconds, and people treated it as a history lesson partly as a joke and partly in earnest.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.