Venus (Shocking Blue Song) - "Shizgarah", or "Venus" in Russian Urban Folklore

"Shizgarah", or "Venus" in Russian Urban Folklore

Despite the fact that the heavily controlled Soviet mass media totally ignored much of Western popular culture, the Shocking Blue song quickly become a popular hit in 1970s Russia, especially among street youth akin to Western hippie and "hooligan" subcultures. Due to the song's simple arrangement and danceable rhythm, "Venus" was adopted and performed by thousands of underground amateur performers, both those who accompanied themselves on acoustic guitar and full contemporary bands who performed it with electric guitar at dance parties. Thus, the English language song of a Dutch band become a prominent phenomenon of Russian urban folklore and was considered by many an unofficial "anthem of the generation".

The English language in the song, however, was only very loosely approximated, and the song was not even known by its title, "Venus". A countless number of variants of Russian lyrics existed for this song, but traditionally it was performed using gibberish or scat singing phonetically inspired by the sounds of original English lyrics which had become hardly intelligible after being passed along via repeated duplicate copying on cheap, low-end tape recorders. In the Russian variant, the first line of the chorus, "She's got it", was usually pronounced as "Shizgarah" ("Шизгáра"), and it was this word which became a commonly adopted name of the song in the U.S.S.R., even among those who could understand the original English text.

In modern times, few disco clubs and a musical show on Nashe Radio are named "Shizgarah" after this song.

Also, "Shizgarah" ("Шизгара") is a novel of Russian writer Sergey Soloukh portraying the life of young Soviet hippies in 1970's