Weekend French Playlist #3
Silly Boy Blue, Vianney, Ysé, and Mika!
Welcome to the weekend.
Here’s a Spotify playlist of some recent top hits along with a few favorites thrown in for fun, and a couple of videos.
Featured this week is Ana Benabdelkarim, aka Silly Boy Blue. She describes her music as “pop rock emo” and popped onto my radar this week because she just released a new single, “Not A Friend.” (see video below).
Benabdelkarim released her first solo album, “Breakup Songs,” in 2021, which included the song “Teenager.” You may have heard the latter because it was featured in an episode of the Netflix show Plan Cœur (The Hookup Plan, which if you’re missing Emily in Paris, is a fun distraction).
According to her bio, Ana Benabdelkarim is a “25-year-old ex-journalist” (so I guess there is hope for me?) and later this year will release her next album, “Eternal Lover” which promises to bring music infused with a “brand-new heartbreak perspective, from the underground of the French capital.”
Benabdelkarim was previously in the group Pegase, and I’ve included on the playlist one of their singles, “Well Being.”
Meanwhile, in other random goofiness, meet Pierre Perret, the 88-year-old poet who just released a satirical single that made a big media splash. The topical (and somewhat reactionary) song is called Paris Saccagé (Paris Ransacked) and laments the dilapidated state of the nation’s capital.
The hashtag #saccageparis often trends here with people (often conservatives who hate Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo) complaining that the mayor has let the city fall apart and become filthy and unlivable. Perret is semi-humorously attempting to pick up that theme while also mixing in the recent garbage strike that left 10,000 tons of trash sitting along the city’s sidewalks.
He uses references and wordplay around French slang that are tough to translate, requiring someone with much more fluency in the language than me.
"In Paris, disgusting Paris, only rats are happy,” he sings, accompanied by cheesy French accordion music. “Here, they know that vegans, not stupid, only feed them organic.”
Along with complaining about migrant camps, he moans that bikes have taken over the city, lamenting that “rue de Rivoli has become rue de Ri-vélo”, that in public parks “the more a child plays, there are only syringes and no more nannies”, and that ecologists are, well, “skulls of smart sparrows who eat seeds at the town hall.”
Enjoy!
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq