Dreamboat, The House Rumbles, Sad Samurai, etc. etc. The basics of the nineties, which are still available to everyone between the ages of 5 and 100, are indispensable elements of the nostalgia party playlists of the 30s and 40s generation, and the last refuge of village day retro discos and wedding DJs. These numbers are not goodsbut very much they are someand they hold their own as fixed stars in pop culture’s comet-filled sky (huh!) by giving us the same feeling every time we hear them.
What is this feeling?
The Hungarian nineties itself, when there was such a hopeful atmosphere at home (also) that even after the regime change, approx. one million jobs, the massacre in Srebrenica, the death of Princess Diana or the Bokros package could not break the general mood of the people. We bathed in the trash, who was old enough for it, we rocked in the Budapest Parade (or as Majka put it a little more discreetly, “everyone danced”), we wore terrible clothes, and we were not ashamed. This we want to relive the atmosphere for a few minutes when the hits of the era are played at 3 a.m. in a tent on our cousin’s loggia.
And this is exactly the mood that everyone who releases a wrinkle-sewn version of cult songs from the ’90s in the 2020s wants to take away from us. There have been a few terrible attempts to do this, but Kozsó (Zsolt Kocsor), one of the Hungarian pop music magicians of the era, would really know that there is no need for this. What’s more, he certainly knows, he just doesn’t care, since a few million forints could come in if, as Blikk, who announces the news, says, “his biggest hits return in a new publication, Szallj melem! titled”.
The first release of the much-anticipated album could be nothing else than the famous work of Kozsó’s main project (Ámokfutók), the re-arranged and turbocharged version of the Sad Samurai with all kinds of feats (Burai and Elza Danis). The Sad Samurai is perhaps the silliest song in Hungarian pop history, and that’s exactly what’s good about it:
“Where he was, where he wasn’t: a samurai lived!
A true storyteller!
Big is big, small is small!
Whoever believes it believes it!”
The re-arrangement of the new version is unnecessary and withering, but to its credit, at least the song has kept its main distinguishing feature: the newly inserted parts are no less ridiculously stupid than the original lyrics, just maybe a little smoother (brrr). The clip is almost unworthy of mention, the maximum excitement in it is that in the original the samurai was played by a male model, who has now been replaced by the 58-year-old Kozsó. Whoever has a birthday tomorrow, may God bless him.
Anyone who still wants to listen to the updated Sad Samurai can do so here:
