Virginia Slims Rap II (1963-1980): The James Baldwin of Feminist Pop

206. LESLEY GORE, "You Don't Own Me"
Written by John Madara & Dave White Tricker; produced by Quincy Jones
Mercury 72206 1963 Billboard: # 2

207. IRENE CARA, "Out Here On My Own"
Written by Michael Gore & Lesley Gore; produced by Michael Gore & Gil Askey
RSO 1048 1980 Billboard: # 19

In my last post, I referred to Sheila Weller's wonderful book Girls like Us, which uses the parallel lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon (not to mention many of their friends) to tell the story of feminism's adoption and transformation by a whole generation of American women during the last four decades of the twentieth century. It's an absorbing book and one that I have few quarrels with. On reflection, though, I wonder what Weller might have made of Lesley Gore. Catch me in the right moment and I might be tempted to call Gore the James Baldwin of Feminist Pop.


Let me explain. For many, Lesley Gore is a punchline, of course, merely typical of the manufactured teen sweethearts of the supposedly dead years in [white] American pop, the years between Elvis' induction into the United States Army and the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. (You will note, of course, that those two presumed benchmarks stress the departure and arrival of male performers.) Gore's songs, we are told, are treacle, crying about parties and singing about lollipops and such.

But at least on the strength of its subject matter, I would defend "You Don't Own Me" as an important song for its historical moment. If we measure it against two other prominent 1963 releases featuring female vocals, well then, yes, "You Don't Own Me" may not be as bold a song as "Don't Make Me Over," Bacharach & David's valentine to Dionne Warwick's refusal to be remade for pop success, but it's no the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" either. How many other songs that year granted such a challenging and empowering voice to a seventeen year old girl? In this case, the song is more radical because the singer is a girl and not a woman: she's asserting her independence from boys even before she understands the importance of securing independence from men. And I would point out that she is doing so in the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique is first published.

Like most of Gore's best work, this track is produced by Quincy Jones. While it's not necessarily one of his most complex productions, the eerie tone he lends the verses grants a little more depth through shadow to the triumphant singalongs on the choruses. When Joan Jett covered the song almost twenty years later on her first album with the Blackhearts, she essentially duplicated this arrangement, transposing it from a pre-British Invasion pop orchestra to a post-garage band rock and roll outfit.

Why the analogy to James Baldwin, though? Well, the 1960s as they unfolded were not necessarily kind to James Baldwin, much in the way that they were not necessarily that kind to Lesley Gore. Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a critical and popular success in 1953, but his second novel, the exquisite Giovanni's Room, met with bewilderment in most quarters when it appeared in 1956. Why? Because Go Tell It on the Mountain was an autobiographical novel about the role of religion in African American life, while Giovanni's Room was about a doomed love affair in Paris--between two white men. From his first published story, Baldwin was classified as a "black" writer, and "black" writers are supposed to write about "black" subjects. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, as the Civil Rights era gave way to the moment of Black Power's ascendance, Baldwin also started to be rejected by a number of prominent African Americans. Some movement leaders questioned whether Baldwin was too "accomodationist," "white," or "effeminate" to represent black manhood to white America. To most such challenges, Baldwin's response had been that, like most of the novelists he respected and emulated, the only thing that he was trying to represent in his fiction was humanity.

Still don't see the connection to Lesley Gore? Just wait a decade or two. During the 1980s, both Baldwin and Gore went through something of a renaissance, and it's not too much of a stretch to say that the sudden interest in both artists had to do with a much freer discussion within popular culture of same-sex relationships. For Lesley Gore was lesbian, as James Baldwin was gay, but a pop music star's sexual preferences had been even more closely guarded during the early 1960s than an esteemed novelist's would have been. But suddenly in the 1980s, when Gore's sexual preference was now more widely known, her songs were being covered on record by Joan Jett and she was being interviewed for Ms. by k d lang. No longer solely viewed as an embarrassing stereotypical throwback, she came to be seen by many as a trailblazing pioneer in female pop.

This reappreciation of Gore surely reached its apotheosis in Grace of My Heart, Alison Anders' wonderful 1996 fictional film about a woman songwriter in the 1960s and 1970s whose narrative journey through those years very closely follows the life story of Carole King. At one point, the film's protagonist (Ileana Douglas) and another songwriter of whom she may be jealous (Patsy Kensit) are forced to collaborate on a song for a squeaky clean early 60s teen pop star named Kelly Porter (Bridget Fonda). They're stuck for a subject, until they overhear the popstar having an argument with her girlfriend. They end up writing a song for Porter called "My Secret Love," which allows her to proudly but covertly pay tribute to the same lover that industry publicity demands she must hide from her adoring public.

Of course, Douglas and Kensit didn't really write "My Secret Love," but do you want to guess who did? That's right: Lesley Gore, in collaboration with, among others, David Baerwald of David + David. At the age of forty-five, she helped write the song that everyone now wished she had sung at seventeen, with a chorus that is an almost direct steal from "You Don't Own Me."

You may notice, though, that that's not the second song I've listed here. Instead, I've paired Gore's greatest single with a song she didn't sing on record, a single from Fame that most viewers of the film probably didn't connect with the pretty blonde from almost two decades before who sang "It's My Party" and did a guest shot on Batman. But Gore, who actually cowrote the lyrics for the song to her brother Michael's music, saw "Out Here on My Own" as a sequel to "You Don't Own Me" (which she didn't write) and frequently performed the two songs together as a medley during her comeback concerts of the 1980s.

It's easy to see why. If "You Don't Own Me" is a girl's wouldbe grownup declaration of independence, "Out Here on My Own" is a young woman's more knowing acknowledgement that, even if freedom is both real and vital, independence in its literal sense is pretty much impossible. Gore's lyrics may at first glance seem generic, but in a way that's part of their beauty. Within the movie, they comment on a romantic relationship, but they could just as well be part of a conversation between friends. This song isn't about sex, gay or straight. It's about the fact that, once you've worked hard to win the freedom of full adulthood, it's even harder to give up part of it to someone else. When you're raised to feel incomplete in and of yourself, to feel like an accessory, mature love and trust often feel like backsliding.

A bold cry for freedom, and the confusion of realizing that you can't do everything alone--with two songs, Lesley Gore bookends the initial triumph and continuing challenges posed by modern American feminism. But I'm not sure she'd ever get credit for it.

Virginia Slims Rap I (1966-1971): Strings and Women's Souls

204. RONETTES, "I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine"
Produced by Phil Spector; written by Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich
Philles Records--Recorded in 1966; unreleased until 1991

205. CARLY SIMON, "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be"
Produced by Jerry Brandt; written by Jacob Brackman & Carly Simon
Elektra 45724 1971 Billboard: # 10

How fast did second wave feminism take hold? In social terms, it may never have fully done so, at least not enough. In cultural terms, the reversal in just a few years was striking.

Take these two songs: both fairly sad; both co-written by a man and a woman; both still based in that post-Broadway/Leiber & Stoller belief that deeply felt emotion requires strings if not a full orchestra to attain full expression.

But the earlier song is clearly one that was given to the singer. It's a song for a girl, getting over a crush, even though Veronica Bennett (soon to be Ronnie Spector) was twenty-three when she recorded it. Many feel that this track contains her best vocal ever, but it is almost drowned out by all the instruments that Ronnie's soon-to-be husband feels he needs to pile on top of it. On a song like "Be My Baby" or "Baby I Love You, that had worked, but here it feels as if Ronnie is desperately trying to sing her way out of Phil's oppressive arrangement--or maybe I'm just reading their future marriage back into this earlier single. In any case, when this song resurfaced on Spector's 1991 Back to Mono set, many people were bowled over by it, most notably Beth Orton, who sang a beautifully stripped-down version of the song on her album Trailer Park four years later that put the narrator's emotions front and center. The revolution that made Orton's recording possible, though, began almost twenty-five years earlier, with 1970s artists like Carly Simon.

It's often forgotten now but when Simon first emerged on the scene, she was taken by many for a lightweight bimbo too--an upper-class bimbo even, too rich to be political and too pretty to be intelligent. Not yet attached to James Taylor, she was nevertheless often viewed in the shadow of her male collaborators, in this case Jacob Brackman, who cowrote several songs on the album.

Sheila Weller details the full story of how this particular song was written in her wonderful book Girls Like Us, but even without reading it, could anyone seriously think that a man had dreamed up this scenario? Particularly in 1971, when there were no Women's Studies courses on most college's campuses in which young men could have their consciousnesses raised? (I don't know: maybe he had a sister???)

This is the story of a young woman's fear of marriage and every word of it rings true and fatalistic. But my real point here, as usual, is to listen to the music as well as the words. Here the strings capture the bittersweet nature of the singer's emotion. By contrast, the strings on the Spector track are the idea of a man who thinks he knows what the woman he idealizes is thinking. In the earlier case, they drown out a woman's voice with male projection; in the later case, they amplify the woman's voice and make it loud enough to be heard. That's a revolution--forty five per minute actually--in just five years.

Liar

687. NIRVANA, "Come As You Are"
Produced by Butch Vig; written by Kurt Cobain
DGC 19120 1992 Billboard: # 32

Actually, Kurt, you did have a gun. That was part of the problem.

Actually, Mr. Lipton . . .

456, SOPHIE B. HAWKINS, "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"
Written by Sophie B. Hawkins; produced by Ralph Shuckett
Columbia 74164 1992 Billboard: # 5

457. KEYSHIA COLE ft/MISSY ELLIOTT & LIL KIM, "Let It Go"
Produced by Keyshia Cole, Ron Fair, and Manny Halley; written by Keyshia Cole, Missy Elliott, Kim Jones, Jack Knight, Canion Lamb, and James Mtume
Geffen 000997611 2007 Billboard: # 7

Okay, I have no idea what I want God to say when I get to the gates of Heaven, but if I ever do appear on a resurrected form of either Inside the Actor's Studio or Apostrophe, I am more than ready to declare my favorite curse word. It's damn.

Yes, my best friend would certainly hold a brief for "fuck," and Peter O'Toole's extended riff on the correct way to utter "sonofabitch" (not to mention its importance for modern cosmology) in the neglected sex-and-cloning comedy Creator is awfully compelling, but for me "damn" is the true aloha/shalom of the lot. Emphasize or extend any of the sounds and you communicate a slightly different meaning. Feeling cheated? Hit the D as hard as you can. Thunderstruck by a truly gobstopping aesthetic wonder? Stretch the A out and make it slightly nasal. I could go on and on, but I'm sure grasp the point: damn is the utility expletive.

Here I just pluck out two handy instances: a white one and a black one, as it turns out. Sophie B. is mad as hell but knows she's in a losing fight, while Missy (no disrespect, but did anyone buy the single for Keyshia?) dispenses with the nominal topic of the song and advises us to just surrender to the groove. In both cases, in order to truly communicate, all the singers had to do was kick out the damns.

"Shoot" I have no respect for, but "dang" I'll get to further on up the road.

The Subtle, the Blatant, and the Purple

762. CHARLENE, "I've Never Been To Me"
Written by Ken Hirsch & Ron Miller
Prodigal 0636 1977 Billboard: # 97
Motown 1611 1982 Billboard: # 3

763. REBA MCENTIRE, "Fancy"
Produced by; Tony Brown written by Bobbie Gentry
MCA 54042 1991 Did not make pop charts

Like a lot of people I know, I first started paying attention to Barack Obama after his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It wasn't just that he was a great public speaker. It was that, unlike the speeches of so many politicians who tried to inspire me, the moving words Obama spoke actually seemed to describe the country that I thought I lived in. We worship a mighty God in the Blue States, he told the partisan faithful at the convention, and we don't like the government poking into our libraries in the Red States. Even back then, that was the America I knew: conservatives in Massachusetts and liberals in Missouri, not one America ("the real America") or two (Red and Blue), but a dizzying number of semi-interlocking subgroups. It was beyond ethnicity or even ideology. It only seemed to simplify around election time, when the press-politician feedback loop made sure that all those many groups were reduced to just two, two easy actants that even the most casual audience member could follow.

Once can make facile analogies to McCarthyism, to Henry Ford's war on New York City, even to the bimetallist Populists of the 1890s, who saw England and the Eastern United States in cahoots to rob the West blind. But the electoral map of red and blue that seemed so clear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s really goes back to 1968, to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and (especially) Roger Ailes, who figured out a way to break up the loose coalition that had helped Democrats win the Presidency in all but two elections over almost four decades. The rise of cultural conservatism in post-Nixon Republicanism only made this tie stronger. By 1980, battle lines were drawn, and every American needed to decide which side of the internecine barricades s/he was on.

Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me" is a fascinating artifact of that cultural transformation. The single barely made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, when it was first released (the year before the Moral Majority was founded). Yet it rose all the way to # 3 when it was re-released five years later, after influential d.j. Scott Shannon had taken to playing it repeatedly on his show. In terms of production, it is obviously a 1970s song, so why did it have to be rereleased in the early 1980s to be popular? Reaganism, obviously: just say no; antisex conservatism. Case closed.

Maybe.

"I've Never Been to Me" is musically obvious throughout and lyrically clunky at points, nowhere more so than in the spoken word section toward the end. Admittedly, spoken word in the midst of a sung performance is very hard to pull off on record, as even an established pro like Kenny Rogers could tell you (cf. 1979's "Coward of the County"). There are some cute stretches in this lyric, though, particularly in the internal rhymes in many of the verses, which double the words' impact but must have been hell on Hirsch & Miller's copy of Clement Wood. As anyone who has attempted this song at karaoke can probably tell you, "I moved like Harlow/Through Monte Carlo/And showed 'em what I've got" flows particularly well. Those words can be as much fun to sing on top of those notes as the events they describe were supposed to have been for the narrator back in the day.

And then there's the one internal rhyme that really drives the song home, a better conveyor of its would-be message than the clunky reference to "unborn children" a few lines earlier: "I've spent my life exploring/The subtle whoring/That costs too much to be free." Vulgarity is much more common in pop now than it was thirty years ago. If you weren't around back then, you can't really appreciate the impact of the word "whoring" in a song that otherwise sounded so inoffensive and gentle. It's almost the reverse of Joey Ramone singing that he wants to be your boyfriend over dissonant punk guitars. In any case, the first time you heard those three lines, it hit you like a sledgehammer.

Okay, so there's a little bit of craft in the songwriting. It's still part of a conservative plot to brainwash women, right? The real author of the song has to be Phyllis Schlafly. To which I say, have you seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? A lipsynched performance of this song by drag queens opens the movie. Yes, yes, I know, "camp"--as if slapping that one word on a cultural artifact allows us to avoid all further critical thought. For the entirety of the movie, though, this song almost functions as a sort of thesis statement, emphasizing the way in which one can be oversated with sensation. In truth, what fails about the song, even in Charlene's rendition, is not its delineation of the narrator's problem, but rather the solutions that it offers to it. We don't know how much of a jerk the husband of the woman she's talking to really is, or how much of a strain it is to raise her bratty children. But that still doesn't mean that the narrator's weltschmertz isn't very real.

Indeed, one of the reasons why this song might work better as a drag number is that a man can identify with its narrator without politically letting down his gender. (Rearrange that last clause any way you like--I assure you each meaning is intended.) This isn't a song about turning back from feminism to femininity but rather one about growing weary of compulsive sensation and consumption, a feeling that was certainly very apt in the early 1980s. And if that is a wholly "conservative" emotion, then Charles Baudelaire was a pioneer of Reaganism. Just take another look at his address to his "hypocrite lecteur" at the beginning of Les Fleurs des Mal.

Alright, I hear you say, but you're stretching the point: any anticonsumption weariness in the early 1980s was sucked up by the rising tide of cultural conservatism and then walked in lockstep with the platforms of the Republican Party, which promoted even higher levels of consumption than almost any other organization in our society. I admit you may have a point there, one captured in the ideological contradictions embodied in the antiselfishness/procapitalism acceptance speech that Bob Dole gave at the 1996 Republican Convention. Charlene's single, you could claim, succeeded because it was coopted on the occasion of its re-release and only its antifeminist message remained. As Chuck D most assuredly didn't say, Red States win again.

Which brings me to 1991's "Fancy." This isn't a rereleased single, but rather a rerecorded one. Bobbie Gentry wrote this song back in the late 1960s, but Gentry's arrangement of it almost makes the song come off as a smarmy dirty joke. This is not quite the right approach for a story about an impoverished girl whose mother "turns her out," as the lyric bluntly puts it, pushing her into a life of prostitution. Gentry's original rendition features kicky horns (once again, the continuing curse of Herb Alpert), but while horns may have worked on Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man," they don't work there. Neither does Gentry's vocal, which is too distanced to convey the song's true roach-populated horror.
Logically, Gentry's rendition should be the more feminist version of the song--she's in the thick of the 1960s and crosses over more to rock. Reba McEntire, by contrast, is firmly in the Country camp. After Reagan, Tennessee is as Red a State as you can get.

Nevertheless, McEntire's version of "Fancy" is a revelation, beginning with the electric guitar that rightfully replace's Gentry's popping horns. There's also no distance to McEntire's vocal, which is both tortured and sly in turns, and both at exactly the right places: screaming for momma on one verse and taking the pathetic rich johns in stride on the next. In McEntire's hands, this is an unabashed song about the worst kind of female empowerment, one that balances the agency that its narrator gains with the heavy price that she had to pay for it.

Could you construct an argument that this record is conservative rather than liberal? Sure, if it's really that much more important to you whether you live in New York or Indiana. But whether you're Red or Blue, this is a song about the world of poor, uneducated women, the ways in which they may attempt to form cross-generational ties, and the ways in which they are commodified by a male-dominated world.

Because, my fellow citizens, there is no Red America, and no Blue America. We can grow sated with our consumption, our amusement, our pleasures in the Blue States; and we can feel righteous anger at the way rich men exploit both women and the poor in the Red ones. E pluribus popu[lu]m!

Swanky

781. LUPE FIASCO, "Kick Push"
Produced and written by Lupe Fiasco and Soundtrakk
Atlantic 0243 2006 Did not make pop charts

Not only a great smooth rap; not only a fairly egalitarian, non misogynistic depiction of a male-female relationship in hiphop; but quite simply the greatest song ever written about the education of an avid skateboarder. Damn.

What They Were Really Born to Sing

248. U2, "Hallelujah Here She Comes"
Written by U2: produced by JImmy Iovine
Island 99250 1988 Billboard: # 3 (as B-side of "Desire")

I made that comment some posts back about fun early U2 B-sides, and their new album just came out and it's even duller than the last one (no "Vertigo"), so I think it's time to briefly take note of this song, which isn't even available on Rhapsody so I can't give you a link off the title. "Hallelujah, Here She Comes" is one of several dozen songs that U2 recorded during the Rattle & Hum period. More than any other of the band's projects, the process of selection on this one was fascinating. Some performances ended up in the film, some ended up on the album, some ended up as B-sides, and some have only shown up on bootlegs, and I'm by no means the only person who would have shuffled the available tracks in their places around had he gotten the chance. During this period, in the wake of the enormous global success of The Joshua Tree, U2 self-consciously embraced American music--and when you say "self-conscious" in relation to Bono, you're obviously talking really self-conscious. They recorded a song with B. B. King in Sun Studios; they sang a song about hearing Billie Holiday on the radio in Harlem; they had Bob Dylan play organ on a track whose lyrics were almost incomprehensible (even though it had been neophyte Al Kooper who had famously played organ on "Like a Rolling Stone").

Predictably, the best songs for the project were the less self-conscious ones. The ElvisQuoteaRama "A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel" in particular is a sad little mishmosh, just begging to be matched to footage from Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train a few years later to make a true YouTube classic. By contrast, "All I Want Is You," which seems to have no clear musical referent, is probably one of the band's best ballads, right down to Bono's last-minute entry in the Roger Daltrey/Bruce Springsteen Sustained Classic Rock Scream Sweepstakes.

"Hallelujah Here She Comes" isn't that classic, but it's a lovely little gem just the same. "Desire," the A-side of this single, is a good song, but it's as clear a Bo Diddley homage as Springsteen's "She's the One." The beat on this song, however, is all its own, propulsive, vaguely cowboyish, but really just Larry and Adam laying down a beat for their mate Paul Hewson to goof around on. Not only does it have an unpompous call-and-response on the Hallelujahs, but the simple lyrics here are less portentously witty than many of Bono's. "I see you're dressed in black/I guess I'm not coming back" is no "How long/Will we sing this song," but it's certainly worth repeating.

Never Trust a Hustler

520. STEPHEN STILLS, "Love The One You're With"
Produced by Bill Halverson & Stephen Stills; written by Stephen Stills
Atlantic 2778 1970 Billboard: # 14

521. RYAN ADAMS, "New York, New York"
Produced by Ethan Johns; written by Ryan Adams
Mercury 177242 2002 Did not make pop charts

You're probably tired of hearing me say this by now, but so often it's the music--and, more than anything, the arrangement--that tells the real story of a single. Lyrics are just text, but music is subtext.

Take these two songs. Lyrically, they're very distinct. Both sum up eras: California in the Age of Free Love; NYC just before 9/11. Stills' song, along with Jackson Browne's collaboration with Glenn Frey on "Take It Easy" the following year, is the ultimate expression of the (male) ethos of free love. Supposedly, Stills heard Billy Preston utter the phrase at a party and took it from there. Adams, by contrast, is singing about his struggling days as a musician in Alphabet City during the 1990s. Prominently featured on his first album with a major label, this song is very much his self-conscious farewell to his starving artist days. The fact that the title character of the song gathered a great deal of symbolic resonance between the time Adams recorded it and when it was released, however, made audiences hear it in a very different way.

The thing is, though, for all their lyrical differences, musically, these two tracks are amazingly similar. Yes, Stills has more star power (Crosby, Nash, Rita Coolidge, and Mama Cass on backing vocals, maybe Booker T on organ--on his side, Adams may have had Adam Duritz on backing vocals). Yes, there are slight instrumental differences (the reeds at the end of Adams' track, the amazing turn by Stills on steel drums on his).

But listen. Basically--and I am using that word almost in its literal sense here--both tracks are the same rhythm section and organ layered on top of that same acoustic guitar with the same strumming pattern.

Why? Because it's the same song: a hustler justifies his abandonment of one object of desire for another. In one case, it's a woman; in the other, it's a cultural center. In both cases, these singer-songwriters are making sure the music moves fast enough that the listener won't catch up with their lapses in logic. Musically and personally, they feel, it's simply time to move on.

Was Adams thinking of Stills' song when he recorded his? Maybe. He probably knows the song at least. All I know is, whenever I hear that chord progression played in that specific strumming pattern, I think of the one time that Stills' song hit me hardest: on a subway platform in Boston with my college roommate as he waited for a train to take him to the airport to pick up his hometown girlfriend whom he hadn't yet told about his college girlfriend. We had been talking, but when he realized the exact song that the busker was playing, he broke out in embarrassed laughter. Neither of us said a word about it, but both of us knew that he had been busted: the gods had decided to throw down a song cue.

So yeah, songs like those, I don't care about the words. Those chords in that strumming pattern? For me, that is the exact accompaniment of erotic rationalization.

The One That Got Away

835. PLASTIC BERTRAND, "Jacques Cousteau"
Written by Phillippe Claes, Lillo Nicosia, and Plastic Bertrand
1980 Did not make pop charts

Okay, this is one of the ones for which I can't give you a link. You just have to trust me.

For at least fifteen years, I though I had hallucinated this song. I heard it once at a Halloween party at the Graduate School of Design when I was in college and--with one huge exception, which I'll get to later--I pretty much retained it whole ever since.

Admittedly, it's not a hard song to retain. The guitar is undisguised Chuck Berry, and the bass player and drummer seem to be on autopilot. Musically, it's the kind of a song that one almost receives in a pre-heard state. But the vocal is wonderfully childish, and the lyric is a great goofy bounce. By the time I heard it, the assumption was that a song wasn't Punk if you didn't offend someone, so a song as inoffensive as this would have gotten rather automatically classified as New Wave.

Flash forward to the late 90s when I was going Kazaa crazy, just plugging in every song I could think of and seeing if I could get a hit. Tried this one on a lark, found it right away. Same chords, same bassdrop vocals, same Chuck Berry guitar . . .

But I didn't remember it being in French. I had a whole set of English lyrics in my head: Jacques Jacques Jacques Cousteau, How low can you go? etc.

Neither the sound system in the GSD that night nor my French was good enough for me to have heard the lyrics in enough detail to translate them on the spot. Also it was late, I was um distracted, etc. Were all the Eurotrash and Fashionable Ones around me singing along in their own spontaneous translation that night so that's what I remembered? Maybe, but not likely--the fact that the song was in French would have made it cooler for them.

Which leaves me leaning toward one last possible explanation: there was an Anglophone cover of the song out by that point and that was the song I heard. That means there's another single out there that I still have to find . . .