“Al-Ghazala Raika” .. Is the melody of the song Russian?

Shaima Ahmed Farouk


Posted on: Monday, January 3, 2022 – 5:35 PM | Last update: Monday, January 3, 2022 – 5:35 PM

At the end of December 2021, the song “Al-Ghazala Raika” was released, which is part of the propaganda carried out by the makers of the movie “For Zico”, which is expected to be shown on January 5, and the song has achieved great success, and since its publication on electronic platforms, it has harvested more than 7 million Watch so far.

But with the increase in people talking regarding the song, some pages on the Facebook platform circulated a post that the song makers stole its tune from a famous Russian song called “Wild lioness/ Дикая львица” by the duo ALEX & RUS, and this news spread among Facebook users, but is the tune really true? Quote from another song?

“Al-Shorouk” contacted the music critic Amjad Jamal, to clarify the matter, and he said: “There is indeed a similarity between the two songs, but the congruence does not occur in most of the melody, but only in the first two lines at the beginning of the song – the deer is cool. The Russian, which is one musical sentence that is repeated with the melody as a whole in the Egyptian song, and therefore we can say that there is an inspiration from the Russian melody.”

Amjad explained: “By the laws of the French Composers Association, 4 complete mawazir must be transferred so that we can say that this melody is stolen from another melody, and the mazora is a basic temporal unit associated with the tempo of the song and the division of rhythms, and determining it needs specialists.”

He pointed out that there are two schools in dealing with this case. The first indicates that the entire melodic sentence must be transferred so that we can say that the melody is stolen, and the second indicates that it is sufficient to resemble the personality of the two melodies or to be close to each other so that we can say that it is stolen, i.e. the part responsible for The success of the melody is quoted, continuing: “In my personal opinion, there is a clear influence on the beginning of the Russian melody, but the composer added his own touch to the rest of the melodic sentence, that is, he built on something old, and there is creativity in what he did.”

The song Al-Ghazala is free, written by Menna Al-Qai’i, composed by Ihab Abdel Wahed, musically distributed by Ahmed Tariq Yahya, and the movie “For Zico” starring Menna Shalaby, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Amr Abdel Jalil, Mahmoud Hafez, Mohamed Mahmoud, written by Mostafa Hamdi and directed by Peter Mimi.

The work deals with the story of a simple family whose young son Zico wins the opportunity to participate in the competition of the smartest child in Egypt.