Segue Fever: No Rock Please, We’re French

There are many good things that come from France. Rock and roll is not one of them.

Times Union blogger Chuck Miller tried to convince me I was wrong, and even posted a bunch of examples of French rock on his blog. Thank you for proving my point, Mr. Miller, thank you.

Anyway, the only good French language rock song is “Ça Plane Pour Moi” — and that doesn’t actually count as French, because it’s from Belgium. Bands like Sonic Youth and Vampire Weekend have also taken a swing at it, making it the only rock song in French anyone’s ever bothered covering. We won’t get into the whole  “Jet Boy, Jet Girl” thing here.

In what has to be the world’s most obvious segue, the best accompaniment for this song is Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” Taken together it’s a pogofest!

7 thoughts on “Segue Fever: No Rock Please, We’re French

  1. Oh now that was FUN! If I didn’t have a migraine and I were still in a basement apartment, I would have been bouncing around!

    I worked in a radio station in my late teens/early 20’s and we played “People Who Died” during the limited times rock was in the format. I wanted to use it as the open/close for the obituary reports.

    Probably would have led to an increase in obituary reports.

    1. You had an obituary report! Whatever happened to local radio?

      We had a lot of freedom at the college radio station and would routinely do tasteless things — like play “Freebird” and mix in plane crash sound effects. Me and my friends were harshly critical of mainstream AOR — and it was before I understood that Lynyrd Skynyrd was cool.

  2. No discussion of French rock is complete without mention of Christian Vander and Magma, who in the hurly-burly days of fusion in the ’70s decided that they needed to create their own language (called Kobaiian) to communicate their important musical messages.

    Vander was normally the drummer, and the band was usually thunderous and atonal (their “Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh” album is a masterpiece), but sometimes he would step to the mic, and deliver gotta see/hear it to believe it moments like this one . . .

    Christian Vander of Magma sings “Otis”

  3. I always thought the French should embrace Cheap trick a lot more- I mean they DO have a song called “Surrender”..

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