In paragraph 2, Cecil makes clear reference to this song as “LaBelle’s 1975 disco hit”, but then in paragraph 3 he references lyrics that aren’t in that song, but do appear in the 2001 cover version (which admittedly is probably the one “kandy” was asking about).
In the original, Marmalade is from New Orleans, not Moulon Rouge. And there is nothing about “independent women” being mistaken for whores.
Although it does seem to be a popular belief that the lady the song describes was a prostitute, when the only support for that in the song is the lyric “struttin’ her stuff on the street”.
I find it interesting that when I put “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir” into Google Translate, it asked if I wanted to translate from Haitian Creole. (If you choose Haitian Creole instead of French, the result is garbage, but …)
In section 2, Cecil is pretty clearly being facetious in saying this is Iroquois. It is pretty obviously some kind of pigeon or slang. Or nonsense.
I can understand why he’d be reluctant to put a real “translation” in a family newspaper. Breaking it down:
My father, who turned 40 the year the song came out and spoke fluent French, often referred to “getting your ya-yas” in the way that folks today might say “whatever gets you off”. So maybe it was an idiom he’d picked up.
“Da-Da” is something babies say before they learn “daddy”. I’ll not get into psychoanalyzing why people think a woman who isn’t your relative calling you “Daddy” is sexy, and just note that it’s pretty common.
Oh, and the line makes a bit more sense if you realize she’s saying “mocha chocalata”, not “Mocca choca lata”.
So what we have is:
“Get your ya-yas, Daddy. Get your ya-yas here. Mocha chocolate ya-yas. Creole Lady Marmalade.”
Still, it was probably the French part that had “kandy” stumped.
That column is a bit of a mess, I agree, and it does muddle up two different versions of the song.
Without looking up the lyrics or other material, I’ll offer up my own fairly mundane interpretation: It’s about a mixed-race prostitute in New Orleans soliciting a man on the street and then “entertaining” him in a hotel room. Later he goes back to his normal life but thinks longingly back on the encounter.
So “Gitchie, gitchie ya-ya, da da” is an invitation for the man (“da da”) to “get” some “ya-ya” “here” (the exact definition of “ya-ya” is unclear but it’s either a body part reference or an action to be done with the prostitute). The “ya-ya” is, or is with someone who is Creole and light brown in color, so presumably Afro-Creole.
If the chorus isn’t clear enough, the verses are much moreso: the song starts out
*He met Marmalade down in old New Orleans
Struttin’ her stuff on the street
She said “Hello,
Hey Joe, you wanna give it a go?” *
I suppose one could argue that since payment isn’t specified, Lady Marmalade was simply a sexually-aggressive woman propositioning an attractive stranger but it seems unlikely. Either way, it’s not exactly rocket science.
The song is about a white businessman who visits New Orleans, and encounters a mulatto prostitute who calls herself Lady Marmalade. She propositions passersby in French (“Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?”), while simultaneously telling them “Get your ya ya” (with means “get your sexual jollies,” just as it did when the Rolling Stones told us “Get your yayas out!”). And, alluding to the color of her skin, she advertises “mocha chocolate” ya ya (though later the song says her skin is more like the color of cafe au lait).
The white businessman has a night of frenzied sex with her. Now, MUCH later, he’s back at home living a normal life with his family… but he can’t stop thinking about the fantastic sex he had that night.
As a matter of usage, it’s unlikely in the extreme for a prostitute to say “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.” They would use the familiar form of “you”: “Veut-tu coucher avec moi ce soir.”
It’s a bit of poetic license – the correct form doesn’t scan – but as written it’s as if an English-speaking hooker approached a client saying, “Excuse me, sir.”
Yes, I know that "vous’ is used with strangers, but hookers usually address johns as close friends.
Actually, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?”, with formal “vous”, has been the normal quoted form in English at least since 1920. I can’t speak to what one might actually hear in the streets of New Orleans (or Montréal or Paris), but writers who know much more about Francophone cities than I do seem to favor “vous”.
I asked about which pronoun was appropriate for the song in middle school French class, 1975. Well, the teacher played the 45 over the language learning headphones…
agreed. Cecil was clearly off the mark on that one; we can only hope he did it deliberately for the sake of the Iroquois joke.
“chocolat” in French would normally sound more like “shock oh la” which wouldn’t fit so well with “mocha” but they changed the pronunciation just a bit for the sake of rhythm and rhyme and it sounds like “moke a choke a lot o’ ya ya” but we all know she’s talking about mocha chocolate yayas. I suspect the songwriters really wanted to say “mocha chocolate tatas” but that would have been a bit too obvious.
Just for grins, I put “mocha chocolate yayas” into Google image search and I gotta say there were surprisingly few brown boobs in the search results. The internet failed to live up to its reputation this time.
You may be right that run-of-the-mill prostitutes would use the familiar rather than the formal but that only serves to underscore the fact that the singer is high-class.