Boney M.--Sharing Music I Like

Okay, quick poll: Who out there has heard of Boney M.?  And how did you hear of Boney M.?

I never heard of Boney M. until I was in my mid-30s in Cambodia.  But I'm trying to figure out if that was just me, or if it's normal not to hear about this group.

Several years ago, when I lived in Cambodia, I started to hear the song Daddy Cool frequently.  

I had never heard the song before, so I assumed it was a new pop song.  (It does kind of have a timeless quality to it, doesn't it?  If you didn't know any better, you could kind of assume this was a 2010s pop song.)

Then, one night out at the bar, this song was playing, and I remarked about it to my Scottish friend "Oh, this is that new song I've been hearing lately."

And my Scottish friend said, "This is by Boney M.  This is an old song."

Ever since then, I've been trying to figure out if I just missed something when I was growing up, and I should have been familiar with this group, or if rather this group just never got a lot of play back in the United States.

First, some background.  According to Wikipedia:

Boney M. is a German reggae, funk and disco music group founded in 1974, who achieved popularity during the disco era of the second half of the 1970s.^[1] 

Incidently, the group was created by Frank Farian, who would later go onto create Milli Vanilli, and Boney M was like an early version of Milli Vanilli in that the performers that you saw on stage were lip syncing, and not actually the ones responsible for the vocals.  See this video here: Boney M: The Original Milli Vanilli

Although the performers certainly put on a show in concert.  See this video:

After I learned about Boney M, I started catching references to them everywhere.  (See: The Frequency Illusion), and this caused me to think that everyone had known about this group except me.

Or had they?

I started to notice my British co-workers at work making references to Boney M. songs. 

...but then, they were British.  And Boney M. was a European group, after all. Perhaps this group had gotten more play in Britain then in America?

I certainly don't remember hearing any Boney M. songs when I was young.  And although Boney M. was before my time, I grew up on classic rock and oldies stations, so I surely would have heard these songs, right?

...but then, Boney M. was disco music, and the classic rock stations didn't really play any disco.

I've also started to notice some of my favorite Youtubers referencing Boney M. music.  The Boney M. song Rasputin, for example, is referenced in this Contrapoints video, and in this extra history video.  And these were American channels, right?

...but on the other hand, maybe the Internet has made this European disco music more accessible to the younger generation than it was to mine.  

I don't know.  Let me know in the comments what your experience with Boney M. was.  I did a quick poll the other day of my sister and my brother-in-law, and they had never heard of Boney M.  But then, they're not always an accurate representation of what the average American knows.

Anyway, Boney M.'s music was popular both in Cambodia and Vietnam, so in my years living in those countries, I got a fair amount of exposure to their music.  And if you've never heard of this group before, I'd like to share their music with you.

It's not good music, per se, but it sure is catchy.  I challenge you, listen to the Daddy Cool videos I linked to above, and then see if you're not humming that song to yourself for the rest of the day.

And then there's the Rasputin song I mentioned above.  Also terribly catchy:

Bahama Mama was another popular song I heard all the time in Vietnam--although I do have to say it wasn't my particular favorite, but I did hear it a lot.  If you want to check it out, you can find it on Youtube here.

And then the other song that I heard frequently in Vietnam was Rivers of Babylon.  

The song, you might recognize, is based on Psalm 137 from the Bible--omitting, of course, the violent ending that is in the original.  (In her Introduction to the Old Testament lectures, Christine Hayes notes that people very often quote the opening lines to this psalm, but very seldom quote the ending lines.)

Anyway, as a Bible/History nerd, I always thought it was interesting when I heard this song playing in Vietnam, because most Vietnamese people had no idea about any of the history that this song was referencing.  And because I love explaining history to people, I would use it as an excuse to launch into an explanation of the history of Babylon and Judah.  (Most of the time people just ignored me.)  But still, I found it fascinating that this 2,500 year old history has been popularized on a contemporary pop song.