Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The man who made Gaddafi popular

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Maker of viral spoof video showing Gaddafi rapping says: 'I never thought it would get this response'

For all the economic, sociological and philosophical pearls of wisdom he cast before the world in The Green Book, Muammar Gaddafi has always been remarkably tight-lipped about the revolutionary applications of a phat beat and some lyrical rhyming. But then, the colonel has really had very little to do with the spoof music video that has swept the internet.

The Zenga Zenga song, as it has been dubbed, is the brainchild of Noy Alooshe, a 32-year-old satirist, musician and journalist from Tel Aviv.

In February, Alooshe was watching a clip of Gaddafi vowing to crush the Libyan protesters when he found himself entranced by the colonel's cadences, idiosyncratic attire and enthusiastic fist-pumping.

So he ripped off the rather frightening audio – in which Gaddafi promises "House to house, room to room, alley to alley, person to person, we will disinfect the whole country from filth" – and laid it over the track Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor) by Pitbull and T-Pain.

The resulting video, which quickly became an online phenomenon, came to be known as the Zenga Zenga song in an apparent corruption of the Arabic word zanqa, meaning alleyway.

"I didn't think it would get this kind of response," Alooshe told the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "It was supposed to be for fun."

As the song went viral all along Arab Street, Alooshe, whose grandparents were from Tunisia, yielded to requests to remove the scantily clad dancing girl from the video.

In any case, she was hardly the reason people were watching.

"It's really strange that someone like Qaddafi made me a YouTube star," said Alooshe. "This is the real revolution."

Although the video has now been viewed more than 5m times, not everyone appears to appreciate its humorous intent. As the Guardian reported in April, the song was heard by foreign media as they emerged from a barnstorming speech in central Tripoli by Aisha Gaddafi, the Libyan leader's daughter.


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Josh Halliday 25 Aug, 2011


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/gaddafi-music-video
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