Mr. Trololo, Eduard Khil, dies at 77...

[Tom_Foolery]

Eduard Khil, known to most Western audiences as Internet star “Mr. Trololo,” died early Monday in St. Petersburg after suffering a stroke in April. He was 77.

Khil, a baritone who was popular in the 1960s and '70s in what was then the Soviet Union, received a number of awards during his career, including the People’s Artist of Russia honor, but it wasn’t until a 1976 TV performance surfaced online in late 2009 and hit big in early 2010 that he enjoyed international fame.

“The death of the exceptional singer, Eduard Khil, is an irretrievable loss to Russian culture,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Monday in a statement expressing his condolences. “He was truly a people's artist. Several generations of people loved his songs not only in this country but also abroad.”

That notorious TV clip -- described by the Ministry in 2010 as “the high-speed freeway chase of music videos” -- was uploaded to YouTube in November 2009 and later renamed “Mr. Trololo original upload,” according to the Know Your Meme website. The original upload has notched almost 12.5 million views, with copycats racking up millions more.


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/le-et-mg-eduard-khil-dies-trololo-singer-dead,0,2846975.story

[NYC_SKP]

1. Trolling Saruman...

[NYC_SKP]

2. Hitler finds out the Trololo Guy died...

[Tom_Foolery]

3. Funny stuff!! I'm sure Mr. Trololo would agree. n/t

[sakabatou]

4. LOL

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. He's no Fischer-Dieskau but he's still got a good voice.

Speaking of dead baritones....

[FloridaJudy]

6. It's not just the voice

It's the whole package: the tacky background, the plastic hair, the cheesy grin, the lack of anything resembling a lyric in any language. It's a complete WTF, like watching Lawrence Welk while tripping on bad acid. In Soviet Russia.

The fact that he really does have a decent voice and can sing just made it all the more baffling.

I think the Russians don't have a clue about why this was so popular. Being half-Russian, even I don't some of the time!

[regnaD kciN]

7. The only thing that's baffling...

...is that the Soviet censors thought that a love song about a cowboy and his wife was so dangerously pro-Western that they required him to perform it without lyrics.

But say he had performed the original song with lyrics on that TV show back in 1976. Would anyone except a few middle-aged-and-older people from the former Soviet Union remember him today?