With all the new and exciting stuff coming to the Taiko musical universe in recent times, it's often refreshing to step back and feature some exclusive tracks from Taiko gaming's eldest installments.
For today's case, we have a really elusive, arcade-exclusive track from the 1st arcade generation!
Genghis Khan (ジンギスカン(GENGHIS KHAN))| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x2 (151) | x3 (199) | x4 (361) | x6 (461) |
Taiko 4
142
Dance (Variety)
???As we've already seen in the past, the early Taiko games' licensed musical library tried to cater the general public with both popular Japanese hits and Western songs that got high recognition in Japan as well. For the latter category, there's also the German pop/disco song Dschinghis Khan (translated in 'Genghis Khan' for the Japanese release), most famously performed by the eponymous German band in 1979.
The song made its debut for the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest, as West Germany's representative song. Composed by Ralph Siegel and lyricised by Bernd Meinunger, the song (whose title is a direct German translation of Genghis Khan) puts into song praises to the titular Mongol warrior's military and sexual prowess, being staged live with representations of drunk-looking Mongol dancers and a caricature of Genghis Khan himself. The unit who performed the song was made of six members -Wolfgang and Henriette Heichel, Edina Pop, Leslie Mandoki, Louis Potgieter and Karl-Heinz "Steve" Bender- who formed an actual band (again, named as the performed track's title) after the aforementioned song contest performance.
Despite the Dschinghis Khan song missing the Eurovision '79 podium by a finch (ranking 4th place with 86 points), it warranted a high popularity enough for cover versions of any sorts from around the world, mostly from Europe (Finland, Spain, Sweden) and Asian performers from Thailand, Hong Kong and Korea. The highest popularity peak in the East was from Japan, where the Dschinghis Khan band's breakthrough single managed to sell over 100.000 copies from its digital release in Japan, warranting the Gold status in 2014. In Japan, the song received a cover version by Japanese idol group Berryz Kobo (Berryz工房) in 2008, and later in the same year it was released the Dschinghis Kan Tartar Mix, merging the talents of both the Berryz Kobo unit and the surviving members of the German Dschinghis Khan band.
The 4th Taiko arcade game received a cover version of the original songs, with notecharts fro all modes provided by Sasaoka (ササオカ). For the time being, the 6-starred Donderful mode proved itself to be a worthy challenge for Taiko trainees back in the day, due to the high density of both even and odd-numbered note clusters along the way which -while mostly being mono colored- put to test the player's skills of following the song's rhythm in different ways.
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If you're hungry for more modern Taiko song action, we've updated our latest 'SotW future peek feature' with I my moko's video!
Updated/new pages for the latest Taiko titles are still in the works, don't worry! We'll try to make all the related pages online as fast as possible, together with a little something else...
