Afghanistan's first girl group

The Burka Band.

Nargiz started the Burka Band when she met a German music producer in Kabul in late 2002. The producer was teaching Afghans to play modern music, and Nargiz learned to play the drums. One day she wondered why all the burkas in Kabul were blue, and together with two friends she wrote the song "Burka Blue" which is about burkas and the way you feel when you wear them. The song was recorded in Kabul with help from the German producers. The band would rehearse behind locked doors, so nobody would find out that the women were playing music. The burka also helped hide who the bandmembers really were.

- Of course it was a joke to sing in the burkas, but it was also necessary to wear them. If people in Afghanistan knew who the members of the Burka Band were, we could be attacked or killed because there are still a lot of religious fanatics here, says Nargiz, who hasn't told any of her friends that she has played in the Burka Band.

In 2003 the German record label Ata Tak released the song in Germany and the song became a hit in German clubs after it had been remixed by a german DJ. The Burka Band even performed at a big concert in Köln during a trip to Germany . Unfortunately, Nargiz couldn't join the band in Köln because she had to work, but she followed all the hype from her home in Kabul.

More here.

I love how it became a hit in Germany. Here's the video, which everyone probably already saw on LGF.

I will always love you

Mark Steyn has a great piece on Whitney Houston's version of "I will always love you," which Saddam Hussein used as his campaign song during his last "election."

Whitney Houston had managed to transform a blameless country song into the mother of all power ballads. Within a year of its release, the number was every other Lite FM listener’s all-time favorite love song. The theory seemed to be that the louder you bellowed it the more romantic it got. In Britain, people began requesting it for funerals, which is marginally less ridiculous than, as many others did, requesting it for weddings – even though it’s a song about parting:

If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I’ll go
But I know
I’ll think of you ev’ry step of the way…

Not exactly "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". But, by that stage, it was just the ultimate all-purpose romantic ballad, and the fact that doing it Whitney-style made it all but impossible for most folks to sing only added to its karaoke klassik status. It’s the archetype of the Houston-we-have-a-problem approach: a crazed melismatic pile-up in which the object seems to be to make the one-letter word “I” into a world-record polysyllable: “And I-I-I-I-I-I…”

As Steyn says: "Truly a terrifying Weapon of Mass Destruction." And you gotta ask: What is it about Whitney Houston and murderous Arab megalomaniacs?

The original dreamgirls

The Supremes



Diana and the girls brought glamor to girl groups.

Under the dictatorial watch of Berry Gordy, the legendary hitmaker and chief of Motown Records, the group polished its image, setting a standard for sophistication and dazzle that still holds up, even among all the overly handled, hyper-invented stars of today. To this day, it is rarely rivaled on the concert stage.

Gordy’s objective “was to transcend what every other previous girl group had been,” by conceiving a signature style for the group, said Howard Kramer, the curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which did a retrospective of Supremes costumes two years ago.

“Before the Supremes, the look was smart and simple, like the Shirelles; sassy and sexy like the Ronettes, or tomboyish and provocative like the Shangri-Las,” Mr. Kramer said. “But no one had ever done cocktail classy or set out to utilize certain visual signifiers that made them palatable to a white audience.”