{"id":15654,"date":"2010-11-29T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2010-11-29T18:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=15654"},"modified":"2010-11-29T10:55:33","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T16:55:33","slug":"todays-earworm-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=15654","title":{"rendered":"Today’s Earworm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know.\u00a0 It’s French.\u00a0 Although since Sarkozy took office, that’s not been anywhere nearly as derogatory as it was for much of our adult lives.<\/p>\n

And not only is it among the most aggressively bloodthirsty national anthems in the world (the choruses end “To arms, citizens!\u00a0 Form your battalions!\u00a0 We’ll march!\u00a0 We’ll march, and water our fields with the blood of the impure!”), but it is a living artifact the French Revolution, a time when “liberal” populism was co-opted by “A Better France”<\/span> into an epic horror, of show trials and pseudo-judicial mass-murder in the name of rule by men, not laws, of a type that served as a model for every blood-sucking tyrant, singular or group, that ever followed.<\/p>\n

Still, this version of France’s national hymn, “La Marseillaise” (which is apparently French for “Yes, We Can!”) by Mireille Mathieu – “the Sparrow of Avignon” – has been my non-stop earworm for the past week.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

And it’s a wonderful version of that vainglorious, blood-soaked tune for so many reasons.<\/p>\n

Golly<\/strong>: It was recorded at the height of Charles DeGaulle’s Gallocentric era, when France may have marched to the beat of its own percussionniste<\/em>, but in marched with a purpose.\u00a0 It was a time when the French – including pop-culteur<\/em> icons like Mathieu – could sing unabashedly patriotic music without slathering it with post-modern irony.<\/p>\n

Rdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrd<\/strong> – I never took French.\u00a0 Oh, I hitchiked around France, getting by on my year each of high-school Latin and Spanish, my German accent, and my lack of fear of looking like an idiot in a foreign language.\u00a0\u00a0I could read things pretty well, and when I tried to speak, people at best figured out what I was saying, and at worst heard my fluent German accent and at least figured I wasn’t a Yanque, <\/em>so they cut me a break.\u00a0 But real speakers of French have always tittered at my accent, especially since I roll my “r”s in a way that people who learn Parisian French – which is most of vous<\/em> – do not.<\/p>\n

So listen to Matheiu wrap that Avignon accent ardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdround the song, and rdrdrdrdrdrdroll those Rs.\u00a0“Mardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdchons!\u00a0 Mardrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdchons<\/em>! She sounds like a six-barreled minigun!\u00a0 Glordrdrdrdrdrdrdrieuse!<\/em><\/p>\n

Frappe-O-Licious!<\/strong>: The more world politics I see, the more I realize the sheer worth of enlightened self-interest, both for individuals and nations.\u00a0 And yeah, I know – “enlightened” and “French” aren’t usually in the same Zip code.\u00a0 But bonne golly<\/em>, this is a version that’d make a gallic Chuck Norris or Jack Bauer or Audie Murphy sit up at attention, and jump-start the cold, post-ironic heart of the most cynical Sorbonne academic trash.\u00a0 It makes me marginally less ashamed of my family’s own partly Quebecois <\/em>roots.<\/p>\n

It was the first time I’d seen this song delivered outside of\u00a0a fundamentally American context<\/a> – which I can also not stop humming, by the way, although I guess that’s fairly obvious, since it’s the same song…<\/p>\n

Anyway – Vive le cul-coups de pied<\/em>!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know.\u00a0 It’s French.\u00a0 Although since Sarkozy took office, that’s not been anywhere nearly as derogatory as it was for much of our adult lives. And not only is it among the most aggressively bloodthirsty national anthems in the world (the choruses end “To arms, citizens!\u00a0 Form your battalions!\u00a0 We’ll march!\u00a0 We’ll march, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,14,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-music","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15654"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15663,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15654\/revisions\/15663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}