And why should anyone care, at least more so than the “you” in any other 40 year old pop song?
I heard this on the soundtrack of “The Darjeeling Express” and remembered it vaguely from its first incarnation, and as I’ve been revisiting on youtube , I vacillate between thinking it a lovely, haunting, potentially profound piece of art and thinking of it as a pretentious piece of dreck. What do you think?
Why should anyone care who “Marie Claire” really is? More to the point, what is this song really about—that the writer knows a rich girl with no purpose to her life? If she’s a shallow twit, what’s he for caring so much about what she thinks? Is it a big deal that she stores her Rolling Stone records in her Paris apartment? Where’s she’s supposed to keep them—in her car, maybe? And what’s the point of noting that she also keeps “a friend of Sasha Distel” there? For the zeugma (of storing records and a human being)? Sometimes he’s clearly sarcastic, as in “The painting you stole from Picasso—your loveliness goes on and on, yes, it does,” which seems to pin her clearly as a thief, and her qualifications that she earned from the Sorbonne, which don’t have any negative connotation to them. Mostly, it’s the part at the end about the children begging in Naples (is she supposed to have been one of them, and the writer the other?) that seems portentous (and pretentious, both). What do you think this song’s about? (Other than “about four and a half minutes.”)
He does have a nice French accent—pronounces “Balmain” very well—and the street accordion sound is an unusual one for a pop song.
I loved this song for his voice, the melody, and the mysterious lyrics when I was a teenager. I think that the Wikipedia article on the song expresses what the song is about pretty well. The writer is reflecting on a friend from his impoverished youth who has become a jet-setter. The things that were mysterious when I first heard the song are clearer now, partially thanks to things like the Wiki article explaining some of the references. The overall emotion of the song was always clear to me: look at what you have become, and where you came from, are you happy?
I knew that this song was relatively obscure and old, but I was hoping that a few dopers would remember it and chime in. I was considered a bit of a weirdo by my friends for buying the single when I was a teenager. When I played and sang it in bars back in my troubadour days people sometimes asked if I had written it. It’s funny to me now to look at the actual lyrics, because I had to work them out for myself phonetically back then, and my knowledge of most of the references was non-existent.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about this pop song is the contrast between the
profundity and seriousness of the lyrics, and
the ineptitude of the lyrics.
I give it high points for being ABOUT something, and something that affects us–the pointlessness of life for people who’ve achieved a lot but then have no clue what to do with their days (and nights)–but SO many of the lyrics are SOOOO dumb or contradictory or confusing or just plain inept.
Take “lowly born tags,” which is the likeliest wording of the line–it doesn’t mean anything, really. Are poor people “tagged” in any way? Well, yes, in that there are markers of your origins (accent, hygiene habits, culinary practices, etc.) but ambitious people learn how to overcome these tags all the time. How are tags themselves, and not the poor people, “lowly born”, though? Probably what Sarstedt means by that phrase is a kind of loose poetic device (I think this one is called “metonymy”) that attaches the quality of the people to the emblem (“tags”) associated with them. If this were consistent (if metonymy were a device he used throughout the song) then it might be clever, but used only once it’s just confusing.
Then there’s the issue of concision: a lyric is supposed to be very tight but this one has all kinds of common filler. Take “don’t really care, or give a damn.” is there a difference between these two phrase? Not really, but it fits the rhythm of the line so that’s how it is. (Probably it’s also to get the swear word “damn” into a pop song which was slightly shocking even in 1969). The torture Sarstedt inflicts on his scansion is amazing considering the song’s lyrical qualities–what he must do to the word “millionaire” to get the line to come out right is practically ingenious. (Normally pronounced as a three syllable word, with the accent coming on the final syllable-- an anapest, in other words–Sarstedt tortures it into four, mill ee yon air, to get the line to come out “right.”) But the larger question of ineptitude has to do with the content of that stanza, and the logic–if she’s gone to great lengths to cover up her lowly origins, isn’t that because the people in her “jet set” DO care about that stuff, DO give a damn? If they don’t, then what’s the song about? That she’s deluded? Or that the song-writer’s confused?
I love this song, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a nightmare, lyrically. And what’s up with that hair-do on the 1969 TOTP clip? I thought he was wearing a hat at first, and one four sizes too big.
I was a very young teen when this song came out, and for me it hit all the right romantic/poignant/wistful notes. Loved the accordion.
When I saw the Darjeeling clip, that former time and place hit me like a ton of bricks, especially since one of my kids now lives in France.
The song probably is both portentous and pretentious–and I like it that way.
