Listening to: Yelle "Pop Up"

These days it seems that the contemporary music I most often augment my steady diet of sixties pop of all flavors and nationalities with is electropop, which leads me to the question: for the love of christ, do I have any god damned edge left at all? Or could it be that this music is my equivalent of those mysterious Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass albums nestled in between Frank Sinatra and Patti Page in my parents' record collection? (All records, by the way, that I would--and often do--happily listen to today; I love me some "Lonely Bull".) To be honest, I think what draws me to music that's so synthesized, structured and rigid in its conventions is that it appeals, not only to my sweet tooth, but also to this infantile god complex of mine that makes me feel kinship with artists who are able to create completely enclosed worlds, the kind that conform to their own rules without risk of being compromised by the hazard and happenstance of the actual organic world beyond their totally made-up borders. (I guess in that sense it's a type of music that should be a suitable choice to accompany a Chor Yuen wuxia film... or an episode of Thunderbirds.)

Anyway, what I'm listening to now is "Pop Up" by Yelle, and compounding my humiliation is the fact that its U.S. release is being heavily promoted by MTV. I take comfort, however, in the knowledge that Yelle's lyrics are incredibly dirty, even though I have absolutely no idea what she's saying. Though there's definitely much to love here for fans of Annie, what Yelle's frothy French faux-eighties electropop most reminds me of is the frothy French actual-eighties electropop of Lio. (WARNING: by clicking on this link you are consenting to watch a film of a cute Belgian girl dancing badly while singing an extremely catchy yet very stupid song, accompanied by one of the laziest visual double-entendres in the history of music video).

Though the hardest truth I have ever had to face is that I will never realize my dream of representing the U.S. in the Eurovision Song Contest (because, honestly, even if America was part of Europe, they would have pried us off and set us sailing years ago), I at least have bloopy, incomprehensible la-la-la music like this to live vicariously through.

Video: Yelle "A Cause Des Garçons"