During the nine-year tenure of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the pop charts have been an open battleground between those loyal to him and his policies, and his intractable foes, the Independent reports.
1. Misha Magaria. This song, called simply Misha is Cool, was written and produced by Goga Khachidze, a boy band star turned politician. It features flag waving kiddies prancing through the newly restored showpiece mountain town of Sighnaghi and was released just as the petals were falling off the Rose Revolution in 2007.
2. By late 2007 public discontent with Saakashvili had grown, and a rag tag bunch of opposition parties set out to challenge him with large-scale street protests. This lavish production, timed to coincide with the start of the rallies, is by Utsnobi, Georgia’s best-known rapper. Utsnobi just happened to be the brother of Levan Gachechiladze, better known by his nickname Buckwheat, a protest leader who would go onto to lose to Saakashvili in the presidential elections of January 2008. The song is named Deda Ena, or mother tongue, which was the first ever Georgian schoolbook, and according to the Independent, can be seen being thrown into the fire by Nero/Saakashvili at the start of the video.
3. The conflict in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia is a constant source of grief for many Georgians, not least the 250,000 that were ethnically cleansed from there in 1993 by Russian-backed separatists. Here the song ‘Hello Abkhazia’ appeared.
4. Georgia’s other breakaway region, South Ossetia, erupted into war in 2008. In the months before, the Saakashvili government had invested heavily in a group of pro-Georgian Ossetian politicians who sought to oust the thuggish boss of the territory, former bouncer Eduard Kokoity, Independent informs. Though the project as a whole might have been successful were it not for the war, this crude effort is what it will be best remembered for. The song is called Kokoity Fandarast, which is meant to mean ‘Goodbye, Kokoity’ in Ossetian. Though, goodbye in Ossetian is actually fandarastu, they changed it so it sounded like Kokoity Pederast…
5. This is the video for Georgia’s Eurovision entry that year. Entitled We don’t Wanna Put In, the chorus is a laboured pun on the surname of the Russian leader, “We don’t wanna put in/the negative mood is killing the groove/I just wanna shoot in/some disco tonight.” Eurovision officials banned it on account of its political message.
6. Bednieri Eri. The post war ennui of 2009, which saw yet more street protests staged by hapless opposition leaders, is brilliantly encapsulated by this little number by Anri Jokhadze. Borrowing its chorus from a poem by the great Ilia Chavchavadze, the song rhetorically asks ‘can there be any nation on earth as happy as us?’ The video is a tour de force, starting with the suicide of Georgia’s first president and lampooning almost every major political figure since then, it also parodies songs 2, 3 and 5 on this list and find the time to tip its hat to the classic 1984 film Repentance.
7. Police Clip 3—Child Cops. The video features children performing various different crime fighting roles, all in their own mini-uniforms.
8. According to the Independent, by 2012, Saakashvili’s popularity, and that of his party the United National Movement had seriously waned. The opposition, led by billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, had finally got itself together. However, had it not been for the release of videos showing sickening abuse of prisoners in the country’s notorious jails then Misha’s party might have scraped through the October 1st parliamentary elections with a majority. As it was they lost badly. This video shows the sense of outrage felt by most people in Georgia. It is collaboration between the most popular rock and electro acts in Tbilisi and is simply entitled The System Must be Destroyed, it was released three days after the scandal broke. The lyrics are angry. Referring to the videos in which inmates appear to have been raped with brooms, they shout “I can’t close my eyes, I can’t stand aside, when the system systematically shits on our head. Come to your senses! What else has to happen?! All of this has to end now. If you try to avoid it, don’t be surprised to get a broom up your arse.” Also, memorably, “I piss on your epaulettes.”
9. Here is Bidzina Ivanishvili’s son, Bera performing Georgian Dream, the theme song of his father’s coalition, which also happens to be called Georgian Dream.
10. Now that the elections are over and Saakashvili is gracefully seeing out his term while his party is in opposition it is probably time for tempers to cool in Georgia, the Independent notes. With that in mind, follow the link to see the Georgian Song “Suliko” Performed by the Chinese People’s Police.