Lip Synching is Now Illegal in Turkmenistan

Mr. Niayzov, sometimes I like to dance around my room and lip synch to Kelly Clarkson. Is that … illegal now? Say it ain’t so!!

I know it’s not really funny, because … the people who live in Turkmenistan have to deal with him being their leader. His rules that come down from on high are … they’re just funny. And his commentary:

“Don’t kill talents by using lip synching… Create our new culture.”

What?

Will there now be a lip synching underground? Boot-leg music videos smuggled into the country? Secret code-words to get into secret clubs, where people can let off steam, and lip synch to their heart’s content? “50 people were arrested last night, en masse, for holding a lip synching contest out in the woods. We will show no mercy towards such rebels.”

I wrote a long thing about Niyazov a while back. Every now and then, you hear word from Turkmenistan – and it’s always some nutso ruling like Niyazov’s latest.

Lip synchers: unite!! We will not allow ourselves to be discriminated against! We will stand up for what is right! We will not succumb!

Again, I know it’s not really funny, because a lunatic is in charge of an entire country … but I couldn’t help but laugh, in amazement, when I read this latest one. Lip synching has “a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art”, according to Niyazov. Lemme ask you something, dude: you outlawed opera last year. You also outlawed ballet. That also might have “a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art,” don’t you think?

But then again, maybe he has a point.

If you were to ask me, flat out, “What is wrong with America?” – I know that the very first thing that would come to my mind would be: “Too much damn lip synching.”

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61 Responses to Lip Synching is Now Illegal in Turkmenistan

  1. Shade's Aunt Reese says:

    Okay, lip-synching + religious leaders who call for the assassination of politicians + religious leaders who force scientists to teach the correct religious belief in their classrooms . . . could be Iran but no, it’s America.

  2. beth says:

    how freakin’ hilarious would this story be if it was written by kurt vonnegut?

  3. Except that Pat Robertson is widely considered a quack (the word idiotarian was coined to describe him) and is repudiated by the American government whereas a the religious leader in Iran would _be_ the government.

  4. On the bright side, Sheila, Turkmenistan will never suffer the tragic betrayal we faced in Milli Vanilli.

  5. Curtis says:

    I am not too proud to admit that my first concert was a milli vanilli concert.

  6. Shocking Admission

    Sheila O’Malley admits:sometimes I like to dance around my room and lip synch to Kelly Clarkson.The post is actually about the Stans, the former Soviet nations in central Asia. We oughtta get her and King together over a beer or…

  7. I can beat that Curtis, but I’m keeping mum.

  8. red says:

    I have barely recovered from the Milli Vanilli debacle. What a betrayal.

  9. red says:

    Shade’s Aunt Reese:

    Your comment is what I would call a hijack. It’s a humorless hijack. Which is even worse.

    Knock it off. I can’t stand that shit.

  10. red says:

    beth – hahahahaha I know, right??

  11. red says:

    curtis – really??? no way! You’re a part of history then!

    Ashlee Simpson’s SNL debacle was a long way in the future then … and look – she has pretty much had no repercussions for lip synching. hmmmm. how times change.

  12. John says:

    Sorry to derail the thread onto a serious note (although on topic), but Opera and Ballet are Russian arts in that part of the world. Even this dude’s name is Russified, so you can see the well from which this cultural patriotism springs. But it’s a deep, dark, xenophobic well.

    Turkmeni are just lucky this dude hasn’t yet found religion in radical Islam and outlawed music completely.

  13. red says:

    John – I was waiting for you to show up! :)

  14. Curtis says:

    I am now going to hijack this post into a milli vanilli only post. Acceptable posts are: Favorite songs, Favorite albums (were there more than one?), Favorite lip syncer Milli? Or Vanilli?. etc.

    Posts about Kurt Vonnegut will no longer be accepted.

    :-)

  15. Curtis says:

    At least with Ashlee Simpson (as far as we know) she was lip syncing to her own music. I can, more or less, forgive a singer that lip syncs to their own stuff sometimes. But the milli vanilli debacle was a whole other level of duplicity.

  16. red says:

    curtis – HAHAHAHAHAHA

    Okay, so here are my rules about hijacking:

    Any hijacking that involves derailments into pop culture are a-okay. Like: I write about Iraq and suddenly we’re talking about Pretty in Pink. I love derailments like that.

    But Shade’s little hijack is an example of what I don’t tolerate.

    I write about Lauren Bacall and suddenly some bozo starts ranting about the evils of liberalism (which actually happened once). Or I write about Renee Zellweger and suddenly someone starts ranting about Bush lied, people died.

    Nope. Take that shit somewhere else.

  17. red says:

    curtis –

    hahahahaha Oh my God. Ashlee Simpson.

    Yes – isn’t there some bit of trivia that it was the only time in music history that a music group was removed from the record label’s catalog? Erased completely, like: “this never happened”.

  18. Curtis says:

    Really? You mean they deleted all reference of Milli Vanilli from the catalog? That is too funny! I wonder if I can find milli vanilli on iTunes.. That would be the coolest.

  19. red says:

    So John – from what I understand, he is trying to create (or impose?) a completely original culture. Therefore, outside influences are banned. Even though … history has shown that that never works, and … artistic expression in one culture is most always influenced by the art of other cultures … There’s crossover.

    You can’t just INVENT a culture from scratch.

  20. red says:

    curtis – It was a Trivial Pursuit question, which is the only reason I know it.

    Here’s another Trivial Pursuit question:

    Which musician has had a song on the Top 40 every single year from 1976 to 1996?

    (The dates may be one or two years off … but you get the picture. Spanning from early 70s – it might have been 1974, now that I think of it – until 1996 – this musician ALWAYS was on the top 40 countdown. Pretty amazing.)

    Who was it?

  21. Curtis says:

    No idea… aerosmith? Billy Joel?

  22. red says:

    curtis – you’re closer to the mark with Billy Joel.

  23. Curtis says:

    Man, I suck at this. Elton John?

  24. red says:

    “dave” – NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

    I needs me some karaoke!!!

  25. red says:

    Curtis – yup – elton john!

  26. Curtis says:

    I was always better at the Science and Nature category on trivial pursuit…

  27. John says:

    Well, I lived in the USSR, but not that part of the USSR, so take my observations with a grain of salt and go see what the Argus has to say. But from what I understood from my Russian friends who hailed from Uzbekistan, Stalin erased a heck of a lot of Central Asian culture, and they were left with incomplete memories of it. Now they are trying to fill in the holes, and the conservatives want to keep those holes Russian-free. So it’s not as if they are creating a new culture, it’s more as if they are taping together a picture that was deliberately ripped to shreds.

    The resurrection of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian languages is another case in point. At one time, Stalin outlawed the teaching of Ukrainian. The languages are pretty similar in any case, so modern Ukrainian is littered with Russian phraseology. Keeping Ukrainian pure would require a totalitarian project of unimaginable proportions.

  28. red says:

    Scott – you say “you’re keeping mum” about something … come on: spill the beans!

  29. red says:

    John – Ah, I see. Trying to re-create what was lost.

    The whole language issue has always been a fascination of mine – maybe because of what happened to the Irish language. Now the signs there are all bilingual – and although you still hear people speaking Irish out in the West, and there are gaelic radio stations – it’s obviously an English-speaking country.

    And … I guess it makes me sad. But to FORCE everyone to speak Irish would, like you said, be a project that would require totalitarianism of some kind … and so you just have to let it go. Gaelic was wiped out. It’s over. Any of you Irish people who read me want to comment? It’s your country, after all … this is just an outsider’s opinion. I know my Irish friends all kind of scoffed at their Irish language classes in school, and thought they were boring as hell.

  30. red says:

    Speaking of Stalin – I am 3/4 of the way through Children of the Arbat, John.

    I have thought often about the production you described to me – the one saw in Russia of this book. I so wonder how they did it. It’s such a sweeping book, with 5,000 main characters. Did they just focus in on Sasha’s journey – or was it mainly about Stalin?

    Wonderful book – when I’m done with it, I’ll post a bunch about it.

  31. Lisa says:

    Milli Vanilli = earth-shattering tragedy

    C+C Music Factory = brillant dance song loved my millions

    What’s wrong with this picture!?

  32. red says:

    “earth-shattering tragedy”.

    Lisa, will you please be my best friend?

    :)

  33. JFH says:

    Wait, you’re telling me C & C Music Factory wasn’t real? Next you’ll tell me that the Partridge Family wasn’t really a family and that the Monkees didn’t really play their instruments!

  34. Bryan says:

    Sheila,

    It’s funny that the topic of Irish Gaelic should come up, because I had been thinking recently about Joyce’s attitude toward the subject, which has always puzzled me because Ulysses presents a sympathetic attitude in places toward the Irish Gaelic movement and even quotes a strong argument for it, yet English is the choice that Joyce very clearly made, and he personally seems to have regarded the Irish Gaelic movement as backwards. The passages I have in mind are first from “Telemachus” in which the Englishman Haines speaks Gaelic to the Irish milkwoman, and she cannot understand it. Then in “Aeolus” there is the quoted speech in which Ireland’s relationship to England is compared to the Israelites under Moses leaving Egypt, and Gaelic is compared to the Hebrew tribal tongue while English is compared to the Egyptian language of high civilization. In the same episode England is compared to Rome (“What was her empire? Vast I grant you, but vile…”) while Ireland is Greece, and Latin/English are dismissed as carrying a cloacal obsession while Greek/Gaelic are languages of the mind.

    Yet that is not the choice Joyce himself made, and in Ulysses at least we never are told explicitly why. All the arguments presented are on the other side.

    Bryan’s inevitable James Joyce hijack :)

  35. Lisa says:

    Exactly, JFH.

    When the whole Milli Vanilli thing hit the fan, I wondered why everybody was in such a snit. My guess is that it was because Rob and Fab (Why yes, I know their names!) were in the dark too.

    But really, were we supposed to be THAT outraged? I mean, did NO ONE watch American Bandstand? Their amps weren’t even plugged in!

  36. Lisa says:

    Where else on earth can you find Stalin, Irish Gaelic/James Joyce, AND Milli Vanilli discussed SIMULTANEOUSLY?

    Nowhere, I say.

    (And in an added note, I am now singing “Blame It On The Rain” in my head. Thanks a lot.)

  37. Bryan says:

    Lisa,

    “Where else on earth can you find Stalin, Irish Gaelic/James Joyce, AND Milli Vanilli discussed SIMULTANEOUSLY?”

    I was also going to say something about Vladimir Nabokov and Charlie Chaplin as they relate to this lip-synching issue, but I thought that might be excessive.

  38. ricki says:

    I guess this news story is one of those “either you can laugh or you can cry” things.

    How does the old saying go? about people who feel looking at the world and crying, and people who think looking at the world and laughing?

    Seriously, based on some of the stuff I’ve heard in the news these past couple days, I wonder if somehow stupid juice has got mixed into the water in a lot of different parts of the world…

    I wonder if, forty years hence, when this Turkmen totalitarian is just a name in the history books, if there will be a movie, not unlike “Footloose” in its way, about a band of renegade teenage Turkmenis who have secret karaoke lip-synching parties against the disapproval of their parents…

  39. red says:

    ricki – hahahahah Oh, I SO want to see that movie!!

  40. Rob says:

    My first concert was at The Warehouse in New Orleans. It was Mott the Hoople. Their warm-up band, Queen, wasn’t bad, either. Can’t imagine what Niyazov would make of those two groups but I’m rather certain it would be much like what my mother would make of them if she ever finds out. She’d probably ground me.

  41. red says:

    My first concert was Huey Lewis and the News. The “heart of rock and roll” tour.

    It was amazing.

  42. Just1Beth says:

    My first concet was U2-it was 1985. The next week I went to Phil Collins “No Jacket Required” and then about 8 weeks later I went to Sting. Very bizarre mix.

  43. Emily says:

    JFH – actually, the Monkees did play their instruments and were actually very talented musicians. They just weren’t allowed by the producers of the television show to utilized their talents.

    When I worked at this deli while I was in college, we had this customer who was a raging Monkees fan. And I mean RAGING. Every time he would visit, he would go ON AND ON about the Monkees. It was totally random and weird. I’m only telling you this because I felt it necessary to explain why I know all this about the Monkees. Seriously, ask me anything. Courtesy of crazy fan boy (he was in his forties, with kids), I know the answer to any question you could possible come up with about the Monkees.

  44. Lisa says:

    Years ago, the Monkees came to Little Rock for one of those baby-boomers-recapture-their-childhood tours, and my lovely husband, after hearing for years of my childhood crush on Peter Tork, got us tickets.

    I got to meet him backstage and proceeded to act like a blithering idiot, alternating between stammering and shrieking. My husband was totally embarrassed, but Peter was very nice.

    And my first concert was Rick Springfield at the DuQuoin (IL) State Fair, 1983.

  45. red says:

    “I’m only telling you this because I felt it necessary to explain why I know all this about the Monkees”

    hahahahahaha

    I loved Davy Jones. Not as much as Lance Kerwin, but i did love Davy Jones.

  46. Stevie says:

    I saw Milli (or was it Vanilli) at the Viper Room in LA once. This was post-deacle, and I think Milli (or Vanilli) had already committed suicide. Anyway, Vanilli (or Milli) performed and he was good, but not memorable. I remember his name now: Fabrice Morfan – is that right?

  47. Stevie says:

    post-debacle, that is.

  48. Doug Sundseth says:

    “On the bright side, Sheila, Turkmenistan will never suffer the tragic betrayal we faced in Milli Vanilli.”

    First, let me categorically deny any specific knowledge about the prevalance of lip-synching in Turkmenistan. I have never lip-synched in Turkmenistan and you can’t prove that I did.

    OK, that unpleasant but necessary task out of the way, I will note that historians often treat the existence of laws as evidence for the need for the law. That is, if there weren’t a problem, no one would bother to make a law. (If you see the same law enacted many different times, there’s almost certainly a persistent problem. There’s also pretty good evidence that a law was a poor choice of a way to address the problem, but there you go.)

    So: Are you sure that neither Rob nor Fab* is a Turkmeni (Turkman?)? (If you say “yes”, have you ever seen either of them in a room with a Turkmeni? Are you sure?) After all, we know that those show-biz folks often obscure their pasts and change their names.

    Perhaps this is just the long-delayed fallout of that artistic cataclysm from the past. Red’s mention of the attempted erasure of Milli Vanilli from history would be just more evidence of this; after all, such erasures are a notable feature of the USSR, and by extension of its component pieces.

    I’m just saying….

    * I didn’t know their names previously, but knowledge is knowledge and nothing to be ashamed of.**

    ** OK, so maybe I’ll make an exception and be ashamed in just this one case.

  49. red says:

    Doug – I just admitted I loved Lance Kerwin. Your shame can’t be any worse than mine.

  50. Emily says:

    I own a Partridge Family Christmas album. Beat that for shame.

  51. Lisa says:

    Oh, please.

    I used own the soundtrack to A Star Is Born starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson on album AND 8-track and when I finally got a CD player it was one of the first CDs I bought. Through Columbia House.

    I know every word to every song. And I will sing them. Beware.

  52. Cullen says:

    As I admitted elsewhere, Manhattan Transfer was a childhood favorite. I still have some tapes, somewhere.

  53. Shade's Aunt Reese says:

    I’m sorry. I like your blog. I wouldn’t hijack it for the world.

  54. red says:

    Shade’s:

    I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I am overly sensitive to political stuff on this blog. I just am.

    I just finished a rather amusing (to me) post about my contradictory “comments policy”. :)

  55. Just1Beth says:

    Emily- Not only do I own the Partridge Family Christmas Album, but it was created for me and the rest of my siblings by my little sister. You see, we had that album (green speckled cover) and every year it was our family Christmas tradition to decorate our fake Christmas tree while that album spun in the background. (“To you and all your family.. and all your something something…may peace and love surround you…blah blah blah”) Now THAT is a shameful holiday family tradition. And my sister made four copies of that album so we could continue shaming ourselves.

  56. Candace says:

    Bay City Rollers… that HAS to top the Partridge Family.

  57. Just1Beth says:

    Candace- my husband still listens to Bay City Rollers ON PURPOSE!!! He knows the words to the songs and not just “S-a-t-u-r-day Night”. But then again, he also thinks Hall and Oates are still cool. Thank God I love him.

  58. red says:

    “Pri-ivate eyes-” (clap clap)
    “are watching you” (clap clap)
    “They see your e-veree move …
    They see your private eyes” (clap clap)
    “Are watching you” (clap clap)
    “They see your e-v-ery move …”

  59. “Scott – you say “you’re keeping mum” about something … come on: spill the beans!”

    My first concert was Air Supply. Oh, the shame!

  60. Just1Beth says:

    Sheila- HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHHAHHAHHA! The “clap clap” kills me!!!!

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