first round
(1) Kylie Minogue, “Can't Get You Out of my head”
stuffed
(16) Yelle, “Je Veux Te Voir”
159-100
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/24.
The Art of Bouncing Back: Diane Shipley on kylie minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
Who starts like that?
Not with a bang or a whimper, a call to action or a statement of intent but with the solitary note on the diatonic scale Julie Andrews’ Sound of Music character didn’t assign a descriptor, shrugging it off as simply “a note to follow so.”
And not just one. Thirty-two of them, in a breathy, insouciant row:
La la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la.
The iconic beginning of Kylie Minogue’s 2001 megahit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” sounds more like a bridge than an introduction, as if it represented an ongoing conversation rather than an opening gambit.
For many of us, it did.
As a Gen-X Brit weaned on Australian soap operas, the first time I saw Kylie (the only person who merits the mononym, Ms Jenner’s legal efforts notwithstanding) wasn’t when she imitated a cyborg in a sideboob-baring jumpsuit, pout a vermilion slick. Nor was it years earlier, in fevered tabloid coverage of her ill-fated fling with INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, or when she modeled a mullet to mimic a steam train in the video for her previous US chart success, 1987 Little Eva cover “The Loco-Motion.”
No, like most people of my age and background, my first encounter with Kylie was when she played apprentice car mechanic Charlene Mitchell in Neighbours, a character who—with her STEM career and embrace of overalls—was considered progressive for the time. A twice-daily fixture of terrestrial television from 1986 until 2022, the show was popular in Australia but a phenomenon in the UK. When Charlene married her star-crossed lover Scott Robinson, played by Kylie’s real-life boyfriend Jason Donovan, more than two-thirds of the country tuned in to witness these teenagers pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. I watched the soft-focus scenes from my friend Janice’s couch, sinking into the cushions as my throat constricted from claustrophobia, but I sensed from the way she and her mum swooned that I was supposed to see a working-class couple getting hitched when they were barely old enough to vote as the epitome of romance.
Kylie had other ambitions, carving time out from the show to pursue pop stardom with pre-eminent British producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman, known for their work with Dead or Alive, Bananarama and Rick Astley. According to Pete Waterman’s self-mythologizing memoir, I Wish I Was Me, they were so busy that when his writing partner Mike Stock told him a post-“Loco-Motion” Kylie was waiting in reception for them to compose her a single, he quipped, “She should be so lucky.” Within an hour, they’d bashed out “I Should Be So Lucky,” the poppiest paean to unrequited love ever pressed to vinyl, and she recorded it that afternoon. It topped the charts in Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia and the UK, making Kylie a crucial component of the company’s “hit factory.”
Her simple lyrics, halo of curls and youthful exuberance (plus the fact we’d seen her on TV) meant she appealed to a young audience and I was as fanatical as the next newly permed pre-tween. Perhaps more so, given the hometown pride I felt at having been born in Brisbane, a mere 854 miles from Kylie’s native Melbourne, in the brief window when my parents convinced themselves they could live with flying cockroaches and 80-degree heat before they admitted defeat and bolted back to sodden South Yorkshire. In 1988, I turned nine, their marriage crumbled and Kylie parted ways with Neighbours to pursue singing full time, a gamble that’s seen thousands of performers fade into obscurity. In her case, it launched one of the most enduring and spectacular careers in the history of pop music.
Although she’s mostly been a footnote on the US charts, in the rest of the world, she’s an idol—nowhere more so than Britain, where she spent three decades and earned national treasure status. Here, she’s had thirty-five top-ten hits, is the only woman to score a number one studio album in five consecutive decades and sells a bottle of her branded wine every 1.5 seconds. When the late Queen Elizabeth II celebrated turning 92, she called on Kylie to perform and last year, the BBC kicked off its musical documentary podcast Eras with a season on the Aussie singer, ahead of The Beatles. We’ve so thoroughly embraced her, it’s a surprise her perma-smiling face hasn’t been stitched into the Union Flag.
The question it seems almost rude to ask is… why?
Why did she so thoroughly infiltrate our culture, why has she reached a level of success unmatched by artists with arguably more talent and why does she keep bouncing back into our heads, hearts and charts?
On paper, she shouldn’t stand out. Her small, thin soprano prompted early reviewers to ungenerously compare her to a chipmunk and a parakeet. She can’t belt like Adele, command the stage like Beyoncé or spark fan frenzies with her cryptic compositions and penchant for jocks, à la Taylor Swift. Sure, she’s conventionally attractive, can hold a tune and move in time but those characteristics alone don’t catapult someone into the stratosphere. Asked mid-career by patrician chat show host Michael Parkinson, “Why didn’t you become disposable?” she appeared unfazed by the implication, shrugging, “I’m more comfortable not knowing.” Whether natural or cultivated, this consistent, insistent humility has always been part of her draw, especially in the UK, where self-deprecation is practically a religion.
Trying to discern her star-making quality, I pored over interviews and profiles, most of which praise her likability, work ethic and determination, while YouTube commenters gush that she’s “a class act,” “goddess” and “an actual real-life angel.” When I asked friends, family and acquaintances to explain her allure, even the most Kylie-agnostic uttered the phrase “X factor,” suggesting she possesses an ineffable, indefinable charisma it’s impossible to pin down or resist. In an interview for Eras, singer-songwriter Jack Savoretti makes the astute observation that she’s an “eccentric” artist who loves to experiment, meaning she’s a great fit for the fast-moving British cultural climate, where reinvention is the norm.
Of course, the danger of changing direction is that others might not follow. In the mid-‘90s, Kylie renunciated her ringlets and teenybopper past in an effort to be taken seriously, crooning sultry ballads such as “Confide in Me” and “Put Yourself in My Place” as she adopted a sensual new persona cult magazine The Face archly christened “SexKylie.” The trip-poppy tracks were hummable, if anemic compared to Madonna’s boundary-pushing Erotica, but her image seemed so try-hard as to be laughable. Even my grandma joined the backlash, holding up a double-page spread showing the singer in full-body fishnets and tsking, “What is she playing at?”
Undeterred by sexagenarian scorn, the singer plunged into her alternative phase (working with Manic Street Preachers; the morbid yet popular Nick Cave duet “Where the Wild Roses Grow,”) but sulking and dying her hair red came across as contrived, a pale imitation of Shirley Manson’s alt-rock originality. This period of indie experimentation culminated in the 1997 album Impossible Princess, a commercial and critical failure that saw Kylie’s songs banned by one of the UK’s largest radio stations as part of a mean-spirited ad campaign.
While she agonized over her next move, I juggled the demands of university study, my first serious relationship and the incipient signs of disabling illness. Dressed in thrifted flares and Fred Perry jackets, I wandered campus perfecting my Justine Frischmann snarl as I blared Blur, Suede and Sleeper on my Discman in an effort to stay awake. The answer for both of us, it turned out, was to return home. I hauled a suitcase of books and clothes to my mum’s house for a two-week leave of absence that extended into more than two decades and Kylie took Nick Cave’s simple but incisive advice: “Go back to pop.”
She kicked off the new millennium with “Spinning Around,” a high-energy, zeitgeist-capturing return to form from her seventh studio album Light Years in which she self-referentially resolves: “I’m through with the past/ain’t no point in looking back.” It went straight to number one in her adopted homeland, confirming her dancefloor domination (and triggering bizarre on-air debates about whether 32 is too old to wear hotpants). Keen to capitalize on this triumph, the singer and her team searched for the lead single for her follow-up album, Fever.
It needed to be special. Magical. The kind of song an artist could be associated with forever, that listeners would find hard to shake from their skulls.
One that thrums, throbs and pulsates with post-Y2K, pre-9/11 optimism.
Bonus points for lots of “La”s.
The “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” demo took less than 20 seconds to win Kylie over though she’s never been able to articulate why, telling The Quietus, “it just... did something.” The first collaboration between ‘90s three-hit wonder Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis from ‘70s glam rock band Mud, the duo differ on whether it was written with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in mind. Either way, they pulled it together in an afternoon, inspired by the downbeat rock of New Order, electronica of Kraftwerk and the pounding bass of “It’s Like That” by Run-D.M.C. The “La”s were a last-minute inclusion, added after what Dennis told the BBC is an essential part of her creative process: a pee break, when she determined the song needed an extra hook that wasn’t a chorus or verse.
Fuelled by smoked salmon and recorded in Davis’s suburban garage, the result is sharply edited, slickly produced and unbelievably, almost annoyingly, catchy. In the US, it reminded an indifferent public of the petite Australian’s charms, propelling her into the top 10 for the first time in decades. Worldwide, it sold more than five million copies and was number one in 40 countries including the UK, where it won Brit, ARIA and Ivor Novello awards. It also led an artist formerly dismissed as camp and lightweight to be rightfully lauded by music critics, who used phrases like “mirror-ball classic,” “Arctic-blue minimalism,” and “truly wonderful bit of pop.”
In some ways a conventional synth-filled disco beat, the minor key ensures an undercurrent of melancholy, amplified by a video that shows Kylie driving through a deserted A.I cityscape before dancing with stiff-legged androgynes and helmet-wearing humanoids. Later, she slips into that unforgettable Grace Jones-inspired jumpsuit with waist-length slits—a far cry from her high-necked Neighbours wedding dress. In the career retrospective-slash-fan bible they co-authored (called, naturally, La La La), Kylie’s creative partner William Baker commends video director Dawn Shadforth for portraying Kylie as in control, unconcerned with appealing to the male gaze. Rather than averting her eyes as she strips or peeking up mid-bath, like in earlier videos, “CGYOOMH” depicts her as looking down on us, demonstrating her dominance.
In the same time period that Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and their wannabes gasped and warbled their way through flirtatious refrains and teen empowerment anthems, Kylie’s extra decade of experience infused her song with maturity and depth. More innovative and complex than the rest of Fever, it was a risky departure for a performer whose biggest successes had channeled her sunny character but its tongue-in-cheek sensibility and conflicted emotions paired with a rousing beat won over jaded new fans and former aficionados alike.
I first heard it in a hotel room in Scotland with my university boyfriend, four years into our relationship. He lay on the bed watching TV as I got dressed for a wedding where I’d try to find polite new ways to communicate to acquaintances that we wouldn’t “be next.” In our early twenties, we were older than his parents, my parents and Kylie’s parents when they all plighted their troths and two out of three of those relationships had lasted. But the thought of such a permanent commitment still made my throat constrict. It wasn’t just because of my parents’ divorce, it was how other couples made marriage look: like a stifling, mind-deadening drudge.
Fatigued from showering thanks to the post-viral illness that had stopped me from resuming my degree, I was struggling into a pair of tights when Kylie beamed into the room, strutting across a talk show set in a silver minidress, more radiant than I’d ever seen her. My first instinct was envy, thinking, It’s all right for her, I bet she can pull up her tights without wheezing. My second was shock that she’d released such a fun and idiosyncratic song. Eventually I settled on the kind of vicarious joy you feel when watching an old friend rally after a series of setbacks.
Which in a way, I was.
One reason “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” captivated so many of us who’d grown up with Kylie is that it played with her good-girl image, eschewing yet winking at her ingénue past in a way that resonated with her newly adult audience. In contrast with the innocent infatuation of her first singles or the toxic dynamics implied by early ‘90s songs like “Better the Devil You Know” (“Say you won’t leave me no more/I’ll take you back again”), it re-affirmed the self-assurance she first articulated in “Spinning Around,” when she sang: “I’ve found a new direction/and it leads back to me.”
Having completed two-and-a-half semesters of an English degree and heard the term “death of the author” on more than one podcast, I feel confident interpreting “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” as not just about an all-consuming infatuation but the urge to escape it. The lyrics swing between passion and indifference but the moment that strikes me as the most intense and desperate is the repeated plea, “Set me free.” The more I listen, the more convinced I am that the “dark secret in me” means that, for the subject of the song, a monogamous commitment isn’t the pinnacle of her aspirations.
That’s still a subversive sentiment in our romance obsessed society, especially when it’s expressed by someone who shot to fame as part of a beloved on- and off-screen couple and whose liaisons with a succession of brooding models and performers have been subjected to an Aniston-level of scrutiny since. Kylie has largely remained schtum about tabloid speculation over when or whether she’ll get married and have children, aside from commenting to Vogue Australia that it feels “slightly disproportionate.”
In 2016, it looked like she was about to give the gossip rags what they wanted after she got engaged to actor Joshua Sasse, describing herself as “on cloud nine” but she crashed back to earth a few months later when they separated. She went on to tell a British magazine that she’d been temporarily seduced by the prospect of marriage, despite never believing it was for her, thinking: “Maybe I should do what most of the world do. It works for them,” before realizing she needed to trust her instincts.
I read that interview in 2023, shortly after Kylie broke up with her magazine executive boyfriend Paul Solomons and two decades since my first and only long-term relationship ended. I’m chronically ill and she’s a megastar so our lives look very different but I related to the subtext of what she was saying: that it’s confusing and alienating when the life you have doesn’t align with the one society says you should want. There’s a loneliness to not conforming that’s alleviated somewhat when such a high-profile person bucks against convention, even in small or performative ways.
Last summer, 36 years into her singing career, Kylie completed her lyrical journey from adorer to adored. In her unexpected club smash “Padam Padam,” she referenced and reversed the concept of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” boasting: “I can tell you how this ends/I’ll be in your head all weekend.” After more than a decade of albums with little cultural impact, she found herself back in the UK top 10 and number one on the US dance chart, hyped by everyone from VP Kamala Harris to Gen-Z TikTokkers who made viral remix videos in which they labeled her MOTHER, their quintessential all-caps compliment.
Her surprise return to prominence proved once again that you can’t write Kylie off but in spite of what I once assumed in a Scottish hotel room, she hasn’t made it through life unscathed. She was clearly grief-stricken by Michael Hutchence’s death, stung by the reception to Impossible Princess and admitted to the BBC that media intrusion at the height of her fame led to “my version of a breakdown.” Worst of all, in 2005, riding high from her early-aughts revival as she prepared to headline Glastonbury, a breast cancer diagnosis forced her into an extended hiatus. In keeping with her warm but guarded public image, she’s shared minimal details about that terrible time, repeating vague truisms like “I learned a lot about being human,” presenting a simulacrum of vulnerability that allows her to keep her life private while fans project their assumptions and expectations onto her.
Kylie devotees now view her as a survivor, not just of cancer but a regressive music industry (the initial exclusion of “Padam” from radio playlists on apparent age and gender grounds caused a public outcry and was quickly reversed) and her long-running LGBTQIA+ allyship has positioned her as a low-key social justice activist. She’s living proof that hard work, kindness and—let’s be honest—being a tiny white woman from a high-income industrialized nation can get you far, that you don’t need to compromise who you are to fit in, and that commercial failures, periods of semi-obscurity and personal difficulties don’t have to hold you back (as she’ll remind an interviewer at the slightest provocation, the name “Kylie” means “boomerang.”)
There’s still time for her to have a hit that’s bigger and better than “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” but as the decades pass, it seems less and less likely. Last year, radio listeners voted it “the ultimate Kylie song” and people expect her to perform it during every public appearance but if she’s weary of this inextricable association, she doesn’t let on. It was the centerpiece of her set when she finally played Glastonbury in 2019 (in the “Legends” slot) and attracted the most TV viewers in the festival’s history. I watched at my desk on a break from a remote writing shift, slumped over in sweats as, zipped into a scarlet jumpsuit, she scampered across the stage singing a stripped-down, acoustic rendition, accompanied by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and a word-perfect 100,000-strong crowd.
Halfway through, she held out her microphone to the audience, inviting them to serenade her with a lyric that, isolated from the nuances of the rest of the track, doubled as a supplication to the singer they adore: “Stay forever/and ever/and ever/and ever.”
That appears to be the plan. Last month, after scooping the inaugural Best Pop Dance Recording Grammy for “Padam Padam,” she made it clear that—irrespective of her Las Vegas residency—she’s not content to be seen as a legacy act. Speaking to Laverne Cox on the red carpet, she thanked her queer fans for all of their support and confirmed her desire to keep innovating, calling her win “the start of the next era.”
Logic and our current understanding of mortality dictate that at some point, far into the future, her career will wind down and she’ll hang up her mic for good but it’s never paid off to underestimate the Australian pop princess. It seems equally plausible that for as long as she lives and possibly beyond, Kylie Minogue will keep coming back to entice listeners with another huge hit that for some ineffable, indefinable reason, we’ll find ourselves powerless to resist.
Diane Shipley was born in Australia and raised in the UK. She has an MA in creative nonfiction from Manchester Metropolitan University and her bylines include Literary Hub, The Guardian, and Longreads. She enjoys podcasts where no one gets murdered and photos of miniature dachshunds.
matthew lawrence on yelle’s “je veux te voir”
The French language sucked me in as a teen and spit me out in my early forties. Yelle released the single “Je Veux Te Voir” at the midpoint of this long, doomed affair. To this day it remains the only French-language song that I’ve ever heard at a club in the United States. I mean, at least if we’re talking about clubs with complicated lights and big sound systems and real DJ booths, not just dimly lit bars where grumpy middle-aged men with suits and skinny ties sometimes spin 45s of foreign-language Rolling Stones and Nancy Sinatra covers.
The falling in love happened easily. I was a nascent movie snob, for one thing, and France in the mid-1990s kept cranking out all kinds of Serious Cinema that coincidentally also catered to teenaged boys, at least those of us who didn’t mind reading subtitles. La Haine was gritty! Irma Vep was sexy! The City of Lost Children was creepy yet hard to follow! Anyone living near a halfway decent video store could become a Francophile, just like that.
By my freshman year of college I managed to read a couple of short novels in French, delivered a presentation about New Wave cinema, even rang the bells during a French production of Eugene Ionesco’s bell-heavy play The Bald Soprano. On Friday afternoons I went to “la table française” for lunch and conversational French with the professors. It was the highlight of an otherwise rocky school year.
Money reasons forced me to transfer back home, to an underfunded state school with one lone French professor. I spent a whole semester watching her struggle to make a VCR work, fighting a three-front battle against the machine, the remote control, and the young AV techs that she called in for assistance week after week so that we could watch episodes of the instructional video series French in Action.
After going dormant for two decades, my French education ended once and for all in 2022, when I found myself trapped in the elevator of a fifteen-story university building in Montreal. I was coming from an after-class conference with Tomek, the boisterous leader of my Intermediate French for Business Communication class. Tomek encouraged me to give it a little more effort, but the forty minutes I spent between the fifth floor and sixth floor of that stupid office building convinced me that my attempts were doomed. I texted Tomek en français to warn him that he should take the stairs even if it was fourteen stories down, but he was kind enough to wait for my eventual release. We embraced quickly and then I fled the building. I may have been shaking a little. I ultimately got a B- in the class, which I took to mean that I was a failure but scored a couple of sympathy points. My affair with French was officially over.
When I describe my relationship as an affair, it reminds me of a particularly uncomfortable episode of The Tyra Banks Show from 2009. In it, the supermodel turned daytime personality interviews a woman named Erika who married the Eiffel Tower and changed her last name to Eiffel. In the episode, Erika tears up thinking about her previous relationship with a bridge, one that washed away during a storm when she was seventeen. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever seen on TV, down to when Banks starts nitpicking Mrs. Eiffel’s choice to refer to her spouse with she/her pronouns. Eiffel makes a valiant attempt to explain that towers are feminine in the French language. It’s La tour Eiffel, not Le tour Eiffel. Tyra responds by asking Eiffel whether she considers herself a lesbian.
But my relationship to the French language was like a bad affair, in some ways: a one-sided pining filled with disappointment and awkward embarrassments where I failed to redeem myself over and over and over again.
*
In late 1994, just months before I started high school, the American DJ duo 20 Fingers released their debut single “Short Dick Man,” with vocals provided by a receptionist named Gillette who came from New Jersey but lived in Berwyn, Illinois. The song’s lyrics were too dirty for radio but the song became a global hit anyway, its infectiously buzzing, booty-awakening low end contrasting with Gillette’s blunt delivery on throwaway lines about an “itty bitty teeny weeny shriveled little short dick man.” The French loved it, bless them, and the song spent three weeks at number one, dethroning Elton John’s Lion King ballad “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”.
A decade later, “Short Dick Man” was sampled by the Breton act Yelle for a song they called “Short Dick Cuizi,” the title alluding to the original 20 Fingers song, which everyone in France would have remembered at that point, but also the misogynist French rapper Cuizinier. Sometimes a duo, sometimes a trio, Yelle is often referred to by she/her pronouns because the outfit’s only public facing member is singer Julie Budet, whose playful eyes and lightly taunting smile were matched only by the garish clubwear and severe bangs that were so omnipresent in music videos of that era. I have to say, I did like her black and yellow top that had a smiley face in front but bumblebee stripes in the back.
Yelle’s song became a sensation in Francophone corners of MySpace, the last social media platform to take music very seriously before TikTok came along. After a while, the song was beefed up and eventually it appeared on Yelle’s album Pop-Up, released in Europe in late 2007 and a few months later in the United States. A new video was made for the song, now called “Je Veux Te Voir,” which featured Budet working out and then driving a fluorescent yellow Hummer to go clubbing with her friends. The drum machine stabs that punctuate the song’s big finish are rendered rather disappointingly in the video by a wall of incandescent lights that don’t fade quickly enough to achieve the intended impact. In videos from their 2008 tour, Budet’s collaborator Grand Marnier played the drum parts live.
Lyrically, “Je Veux Te Voir” is a sort of high energy diss track so infectious that it crossed over to clubs and blogs–let’s not forget blogs–in the English speaking world despite the fact that no one in the English-speaking world had ever heard of Cuizinier, the rapper with whom this perky young woman took so much umbrage. It didn’t matter. She sounded like she was having fun and it was hard not to have fun when the song came on. The final 57 seconds are a wordless blast of joy. Geriatric millennials like me ate it up.
*A note about dicks: short ones are fine! Long ones are fine, too. Medium ones: also fine. As a homosexual of a certain age I’ve seen all shapes and sizes of them and my expert opinion is that they’re basically all fine. I just want to be clear on this.
*
The 2003 film Party Monster features a late night scene in a marginally unbranded Dunkin Donuts where club kid James St. James (Seth Green) teaches young, awkward Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin) the rules of how to work a club: arrive with someone, circling the room together and saying hello to everyone there, even—no, especially—if you don’t know them already. Wait a bit and circle the room again, this time alone, telling everyone that you can’t find your friend. Reunite dramatically. Then circle a third time, together, telling everyone not to worry because you found your friend. Then leave the party. Stay no more than ninety minutes. Do that once a night for three months, St. James says, and you’ll be the toast of the town.
Party Monster takes place in nineties New York, but my memories of going out a decade later still focus on people dizzily circling around one another, like eels from around the world partying together in the Sargasso Sea, hoping to mate just one single time before dying. The club had very little dancing, just a lot of people rushing thither and yon as if they had someone important to meet, and then someone else to meet, and then still another person to meet. People drank cosmos and vodka red bulls and, depending on which state you were in, they smoked cigarettes on the dance floor and did drugs in the bathroom. (I did not do drugs in the bathroom because no one ever offered me any and I was too shy to ask.) The iPhone had not been introduced yet, but the more tech savvy people texted one another on flip phones or Blackberries.
Did I hear “Je Veux Te Voir” every time I went out that spring or do I just wish that I had? Was I still even going out every week at that point? My boyfriend and I had been together for a few years already so there was no romantic urge to go dancing. My finances were precarious. Was I going out monthly? A few times a year? No, no, I do remember dancing to Yelle with friends in Providence and Portland. Maybe New York, too? Probably New York.
2008 was a big year for me. I quit a job that paid twelve something an hour but which came with health insurance and a 401k. I watched a whole Eurovision Song Contest for the first time, while sitting at my desk at that job. I went back to college radio, DJing a weekly Sunday morning Top 40 countdown that I completely fabricated from week to week. I broke up with my best friend/roommate, for reasons entirely unrelated to Barack Obama getting elected but coincidentally occurring on Election Day that year. By December I was doing data entry for a friend’s company and dog sitting for other friends and trying to pitch a whole book about George Michael’s Faith album. I started a spicy Tumblr. I was totally broke and very, very unhappy with life. “Je Veux Te Voir” placed seventh on my annual countdown of the year’s best songs.
*
“Short Dick Man” doesn’t actually have very many words, but “Je Veux Te Voir” has oodles of them. English speakers struggling to comprehend anything might catch the references to Chippendale’s and Magic Johnson, or maybe lyrics about “un film pornographique” or “ta position favorite.” The gist is that Budet is humiliating Cuizinier by saying that no one wants to see him naked but then demanding to see that very thing and asking for details of his sex life, from his favorite sex toys to his favorite positions. She wants to see his sex tape, even. The song actually opens with a line about his small dick and his red pubes and how she can’t believe that he thinks anyone wants to be with him. It’s all a bit contradictory, I suppose, and I don’t know why she calls out the redness of his pubic hair specifically, unless she’s alluding to something he rapped about himself. Other details are very specific. About his penile girth she asks: “forme potatoes ou bien frites?” This is a reference to two the different fry shapes available at French McDonald’s restaurants. (I learned this just now from Reddit user loulan and It sounds plausible enough that I’m not fact checking any further.) Other wordplay makes more sense to me, like when Budet alludes to the song’s source material by saying she can count the number of people at Cuizi’s show on her 10 fingers.
*
Shortly before the French language left me in a ditch to die, I found myself at my roommate’s birthday party. This was in early 2022 and the spread of COVID’s Omicron variant had led Quebec to partially shut down a second time. Stores were closed on Sundays and households were forbidden to have more than a few guests at a time. By the time Simon’s birthday rolled around in February the household capacity was raised to ten, and I was unclear until the last minute whether I was to be counted amongst the group. Everything felt like the setup for a locked room mystery.
I was living in Montreal, a city where most people speak French but real language immersion never actually happens because most people also speak fluent English. I tried to pass as a Francophone in record stores, bakeries, and the gay bars where I loitered, all to no avail. On Friday nights I made a weekly pilgrimage to a bar where I conversed regularly with an older guy who communicated with me exclusively by typing his thoughts into Google Translate. I could understand half of what he said but none of my words meant anything to him. (He liked my beard, though.) Simon, my roommate, was a fully bilingual Francophone, but he declined to speak French with me because his ex-husband also spoke terrible French and it conjured bad memories.
This birthday party was my first real Francophone event and I was very, very nervous even though I had met almost everyone casually already and really no one cared about me because I was just the strange roommate from the US. At best I might make for a funny story or two in a few years, which is all any short-term roommate can really hope for. But I drank too many cocktails at the party and tried to make small talk by explaining the insanity of primary elections in the United States, periodically sneaking off to my bedroom to drink whiskey from the bottle because I was so terribly anxious. At one point someone recounted a second- or third-hand story about how Alanis Morissette is a terrible and reckless driver, just like in the “Ironic” video. Everyone at the party was roughly the same age so everyone at the party went bananas when “Je Veux Te Voir” came on.
The whole party started singing along, me included, though within seconds I realized I barely knew the words, despite hearing the song hundreds of times. The melody, yes, some of the vowel sounds, sure, but the words? Not at all. Even the hook eluded me. “Je! Veux! Te! Voir! Dans un film pornographique! Something something something eek! Something something olympique!” I’m sure no one was paying attention to me but I wanted to cry.
When someone decided to play the song a second time I collected myself and went to the kitchen. Later in the evening, when the opening buzz began a third time, I snuck off to bed, drunk and terribly defeated.
Matthew Lawrence lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he co-edits the art journal Headmaster. He is currently making a documentary musical about the 1919 Newport Navy Sex Scandal. He has not had a paid day off since 2008.