R E P E T I T I O N R E P E T I T I O N

Every time I hear the opening hook to Sedokova's song "Сердце в бинтах" ("Serdtse v bintakh"/"Heart in Bandages"), I cannot help but hear the opening hook of Irina Dubtsova's megahit "О нём" ("O nem"/"About Him"), a song that was seemingly played in Russia thousands of times per day, every day from 2004 to 2005:

Dubtsova wrote the song herself , a fact that was apparently compulsory to mention in conjunction with uttering the song's title, either in official or social channels:  on the radio, "And now, Irina Dubtsova's 'O nem,' a song that she herself wrote"; among friends, "I love this song, 'O nem' - and did you know that she wrote it herself?"  Y   e   s.      I      k   n   o   w.    E  V  E  R  Y  O  N  E    O  N    T  H  E     P  L  A  N  E  T     K  N  O  W  S).  To be fair, it's actually a pretty good song (or at least it was until the 2,407th time you heard it).  And it was played so constantly that this hook cannot but have been imprinted in the social consciousness - and I'm absolutely certain that Sedokova's producer's knew this.

Dubtsova's certainly did/do - because, in an attempt at "auditory branding," her follow-up closed with the same hook; if you don't want to listen to it, skip to the last 15 seconds or so:

Eight years later, in 2013:

Ирина Дубцова и Брэндон Стоун, "Игра теней" (Irina Dubtsova and Brandon Stone, "Igra tenei"/"Game of Shadows")
Why mess with success.

Dubtsova, by the way, got her major start on and was the winner of the fourth season of Фабрика звёзд (Fabrika zvezd/Factory of Stars), an Idols-type talent competition that ran for years on Russian television.

The runner-up that season was Антон Зацепин (Anton Zatsepin) - whose "talent" was arguably his physiognomy, not his voice:

Nine years later, Anton releases this:

Hey, he was on Dubtsova's season, and he came in second place - it's his hook too, isn't it?

[Humor aside, these sorts of repetitions and borrowing are not uncommon in Russian pop, and if we listen to the homogeneity of vocal timbres, arrangements, and harmonic/melodic structures, it is clear that these musical reiterations warrant a culturally and historically grounded analysis - one that moves beyond an assumption of venality and profit-seeking, or aesthetic homogeneity as constructor of social passivity/docility/conformity, as the sole explanatory loci.]