Posts tagged French

Jean Yanne - Coit

Deadly Death: Little Deaths is as much about dying as it is about doin’ it. In fact, the ‘Little Deaths’ suffix comes from the French Term ‘La Petite Mort’, a term often used by those conniving and lascvious Frenchmen to describe the transcendance of orgasm. I, for one, have always appreciated their directness. In my house, by which I mean the motel I’ve moved into, the knives usually come out after sex. But enough about work and my protective but violent employer.

Ever feel like you were born in the wrong country? ‘Coit’, or colloqiually en Englais, ‘Fuckin’, moves quickly to the top of the smelly, sweaty pile of songs seemingly built for showcasing on a site dedicated to corpulance, coitus, and cadavers, and has me trading in my toque for.. oh wait, toque is French. Anyhow, I’m gonna throw on a scarf then.

The first verse? Perhaps I’m prone to hyperbole, perhaps it’s the Veuve I’m drinking out of a coffee mug, but: it’s pretty great. If you don’t speak French, which is totally ok, bro, here comes a turtlenecked, windblown-haired eyeball-to-eyeball fuck poem from a gallic playboy:

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know where you came from.
I don’t know your name.
I don’t know anything about about you.
I met you an hour ago.
And now, for an hour, with this music,
We will practice coitus.

Sometimes, the English language just falls short. I’m no lothario, but I can honestly say that girls don’t like it when you say ‘coitus’ to them, no matter how many times you wink. Sorry about that, Tyler. This gem undoubtedly got many a besmocked and beret-ed (?) jeune fille back to the [second location] in its time, and is funkier than blue cheese in a gym sock. Brilliantly juxtaposing the sound of an orgasm with a funereal church choral (‘Ahhhh, Ouuuiiiiiii’), with a bit of mildly menacing instructional direction from Jean Yanne (probably wearing a leather mask, FYI), what we’ve got here is sex, religion, dirty old men and the bass guitar tied up in a tidy, 2:57 package. Which, incidentally, is how I’m often described. I’m available, ladies!

Fig 1.1: Right???

Claudine Longet - Jealous Guy / Don’t Let Me Down

Now, I’ve romanced one or two firecrackers in my time, but none of them hold a candle (yet) to Claudine Longet. French chanteuse, actress, and high-profile socialite, Longet charted many a Beatles cover, starred in the 60’s classic The Party, hobnobbed with Bobby Kennedy, and married Andy Williams, who she met by the side of the road after having car trouble. I saw a movie that started that way incidentally. It was a shocking, bare-all documentary about love called Runaway Tush 4.

This cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy becomes eerily ironic when you factor in that on March 21st, 1976, in Aspen, her boyfriend, skier Vladimir ‘Spider’ Sabich was fatally shot in his chalet. Being named ‘Spider’ is generally a good clue that you’re going to meet a bad end, but that’s neither here nor there. Longet’s story was that Spider was showing her the gun when it went off, which would make a lot more sense were he not half naked in the bathroom, having just returned from a ski. Beyond the fact that the physics of the gunshot didn’t make sense, Longet was found to have cocaine in her system, suspect entries in her diary, and a song in her heart ample motive for the murder. In the end, it appeared that  her relationship with Sabich was dissolving, and this final argument was likely fueled by his plans to leave her. I hate it when chicks wave a gun in my face just because things aren’t working out. You know I love you baby, but there’s a whole world out there.

Due to a few key police mistakes, she ultimately got off with 30 days in jail. She then married her defense attorney, never performed again, and to this day still lives in Aspen, the scene of the crime as it were. The moral of the story? Don’t cross French chicks / bitches be crazy.

Claudine Longet - French; pensive; slightly smug.

Françoise Hardy - Réve

It’s hard not to get daydreamy listening to France’s (yep, again) Françoise Hardy, as this album sounds like sepia sunlight coming through sheer blinds in a lightly dusty farmhouse. In my private reveries, Françoise and I carry a grocery bag with sundry delicacies and a baguette peeking out the top as we stroll down a narrow Montmartre street. I am wearing a really rad scarf. She wrinkles her nose and gaily dismisses my discussions of dread and salvation as she bites into an apple. Quelle Réve!

‘Réve’ (‘Dream’) is an odd intersection of that good ol’ gallic saccharine and Western flavours that closes off Françoise’s 1971 album ‘La Question’. ‘La Question’ sees Françoise mostly accompanied by only guitar and light stringwork - this being one of the only two ‘fully’ arranged songs on ‘La Question’; the album’s opener ‘Viens’ (also great!) and closer, ‘Réve’. Françoise reportedly can sing in 5 different languages, but as far as I can tell she sings all her songs in bonerese.

Alain Goraguer - Deshominisation (I)

Imagine, if you will, that in 1969 Algiers, shadowy figures slipped a hit of acid into Steve McQueen’s tumbler of bourbon, and he embarked on a vision quest following a tufted lynx voiced by Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright, and woke up wearing a snakeskin headband and covered in goat’s blood. Not really related to this song, but pretty cool, eh? Imagination is like a movie, but inside your head!

‘Deshominisation’ comes from the soundtrack to the 1973 French sci-fi classic ‘La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)’ - a thoroughly surreal and tripped-out film about a race of enormous blue alien creatures who capture humans and use them as pets… or worse. The film itself has gone on to become quite a cult classic since its release, and the soundtrack was a highly sought-after rarity before its re-release in 1996. The songs are laid-back, smooth yet slightly menacing, and Goraguer deserves credit for not needing a whiny synthesizer lead to indicate the fact that this is sci-fi - whereas I suspect many other composers for science fiction cinema were hired in the following fashion:

Film Director: “We want the score to use inorganic sounds to subtly suggest man’s disconnection from humanity and the alienation of technological progress.”

French Guy: “This, the machines, does the sounds like WWWWEEEEEEEIR-WOOOOO-WWEEEEEPRBBBLT”.

Film Director: “You’re hired.”

Alain Goraguer did compose other minor scores, but is best known for his work as an arranger for Serge Gainsbourg, who frankly is getting way too much airtime here and is now under strict embargo until further notice.

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot - Initials B.B.

Few women have done as much to champion the cause of sweet, sweet tits as actress, model, and chanteuse Brigitte Bardot. Among her many acts of mammary activism are her bringing of the bikini to the mainstream, the plunging neckline (aka ‘The Bardot Neckline’), a mode of dress in which both shoulders are exposed, and, perhaps less directly, the ‘choucroute’ hairstyle in which the hair is lifted in a quasi-beehive style, better exposing her B.B.’s for reverent ogling.

Brigitte’s activism wasn’t limited to the freeing of the twins however - a fervent animal rights activist, Bardot railed against the traditional slaughter of sheep in Muslim ceremonies, causing her to be fined several times by the government of France for making racially and religulously provocative statements - though her widely advertised views on Muslims and foreigners in general were far from moderate. In fact, Bardot has, to date, been convicted 5 times for ‘inciting racial hatred’. She also once, while babysitting a neighbour’s donkey (yeah, you read that right) had it castrated because it was ‘sexually harassing’ her donkey, and to add to the outrage, also sexually harassing her horse. I think I speak for all of us when I say ‘holy fucking shit’. Her neighbour subsequently took her to court, perhaps under some French law relating to donkey balls, but at press time there’s no indication of whether the donkey’s danglers were returned to their rightful owner.

Brigitte’s dabbling in pop music was mostly at the hands of Serge Gainsbourg, who obviously was railing her with French abandon, but also put together some great music to back her sultry cooing - including this song, ‘Initials B.B.’, which is of course about Bardot herself, and comes from the album ‘Initials B.B.’ (1968). It’s a wondrous, moebius strip of a moment as the chorus hits, in which she sings about herself, on a song named after her, from an album of the same name. This meta-tastic, circular self-referencing stretches both the fabric of space-time and her sweater, not to mention the stitches of these suddenly confining khaki Dockers.

Pictured: Brigitte Bardot and her BBs.