Making my way up to Paris over the next few days. Seems like an appropriate time to make this pick.
For Team Slow Dance Song, I thought about going in a couple of different directions (but never once the Edith Piaf song my wife picked out for our wedding.) I'm a little more than a bit younger than Cap, so I missed out on the height of the slow dance era. The songs middle school me first slow danced to were late 80's hair metal ballads. I thought about honoring that, but then reconsidered because I wouldn't be caught dead dancing to any of that today. I almost went classic Motown and part of me still wants to, but then I thought about ultimately what the act of slow dancing really is, and what it represents and stands in for, and then it came to me.
Written by Sexpos-friendly French icon Serge Gainsbourg (who once infamously told a young Whitney Houston on live TV that he wanted to f*** her), after his then-lover Bridget Bardot challenged him to write a sincere love song, Je t'aime... moi non plus is a duet that translates to I love you...me neither. It caused a major scandal upon its release--being likely the first song to feature a woman climaxing as an integral part of the composition--but was also a major hit despite being banned in most countries around the world. The original version with Bardot wasn't released until 20 years later because her husband found out about it and issued an ultimatum. Gainsbourg then re-recorded the song with the great love of his life, the English model Jane Birkin, et voilà. By the way, the story goes that while Birkin's, uh, emoting? is simulated, Bardot's was not. Here's her version:
A decade later Gainsbourg wrote and directed Birkin in a film with the same title. I've never actually seen it, but here's the trailer, which indeed does feature an androgynous Birkin messily slow dancing to the title track:
I've had this lined up for quite a while, but in the interim Jane Birkin passed away. I think stateside she was most famous for having a handbag named after her, but she was a major figure in French pop culture and her death was a big deal.
brutemagnetics.com
