It will be the 30th anniversary of Boney M's immortal tune Rasputin.

I have it on iTunes. It just kicked earlier this evening in after Tennessee, a Bob Sinclar tune.

For some reason, I Googled Rasputin and saw that Rasputin was released in 1978 -- and it has been part of the wedding DJ's canon ever since. And in many ways, it's a fine, if cheesy, song -- even if part of the melody actually comes from an old Turkish folk song.

At Mark MacKinnon's blog this fall, I was amazed to see evidence the group*, such as it is, still exists and performs! From his Oct. 13 post:

* West German producer Frankie Farian created the group. Another one of his efforts, Milli Vanilli, would become notorious in the early 1990s after a lip-synching scandal. Some of the Boney M performers lip-synched too, but people were less touchy about these things in the disco era. Any-hoo ...

Oh, to be in Tamarasheni today. The South Ossetian village, one of the few in the breakaway republic that is still under the Georgian government's control, is the site of a remarkable concert today by 80s disco stars Boney M (pictured).

Yep, the musical geniuses behind such hits as "Rasputin" (which while a hazy memory in the West is still a big hit across much of the former Soviet Union) have somehow found their way to a pokey village on the edge of a conflict zone.

Believe it or not, the show is part of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's efforts to win over the "hearts and minds" of South Ossetians. Word is that the music will be cranked up loud enough to be heard in the rebel capital, Tskhinvali.

The message, distilled: See, you silly Ossetians, life really is better over here in the rest of Georgia. So good that we have time for disco dancing. When was the last time you got your groove on? Drop all this silly separatism and we can all dance together.

According to the Boney M Wikipedia entry, the "group" toured the Soviet Union in 1978, a time when the Cold War was still pretty damned frigid despite the warming efforts of detente. This apparently bought them some goodwill there that lasts to this day. However, they couldn't actually perform Rasputin in the Soviet Union as it was officially banned at that time.

On one small six-degrees-of-separation note, I went to Russia on a high-school tour in March 1977. We ended up catching a classical music performance in the Moika Palace -- the very place where the actual mad monk met his violent end on Dec. 16, 1916.

I vaguely remember looking into the dark waters of the icy Neva River where Rasputin's reportedly shot, poisoned body had been dumped by his enemies more than 60 years before and thinking, "hey, being in this place at this time is kinda cool!" :)