Brigitte Fontaine is mad Brigitte Fontaine is mad, it's not new, and it's even pretty old: 1970. I wasn't even born! But after what seemed like a century of oblivion, Brigitte made her big come back in the end of the nineties with her shaved head, and her mad delirium tremens song Le Nougat, telling the surrealist story of a woman who wakes up with an elephant in her bed asking for some nougat on Arabian gypsy dynamical tunes that would make you whether you want it or not make the belly button dance! A very addictive madness! She then became popular by being the only indecent insane presence on French television. Imagine a female Moondog, classy hobo of L'île Saint Louis, Paris, dressed in Issaye Miyake wandering on the TV show sets and mumbling in her corner, like drunkard, delivering criptic line on the other boring guests! It would be easy to reduce this hippie poetess to her fantasist world or to bury her in France under the banner French untranslatable music! but the gorgeous melodies of her husband, forever partner in crime and musician Areski Belkacem, her perfect taste for music, which made her quote, Bjork, Massive Attack, along with Gabriel Fauré in one her last opuses Kékéland and her collaboration with relatively exported French artists like M and late Noir Désir made her impossible to be ignored!..:
But let's use the time machine: back to early seventies because THIS album is now republished!
Of course without understanding French you would miss most of her madness. This is a woman who claims in Eternelle that she wants to be loved for who she is, but doesn't like when it's easy, so she doesn't want to be loved for her hair and wants men to loose their mind on her shaven cranium, then she says that it's too easy to love her body with its flesh on and that if you really love her you should love her skeleton. Or her song Rimbaud, where she takes all the faults of famous artists to try to excuse her own indulgences "I am dirty like Rimbaud, I am a coward like Villon, debauched like Hugo, Syphilitic like Baudelaire, but maybe after all you don't like poetry"!
Dommage Que Tu Sois Mort is quite a piece too " I would have loved to invited you, too bad you're dead!"
My personal favourite is her duet with Areski : Cet Enfant Que Je T'Avais Fait, (This Child That I Had Made For You), Deafs dialogue between a man who wants to know what happened to their child, and an oblivious woman who contemplate the beauty of this man! No logic in this love, serious matters like lost child and lost memories are becoming as light as cigarette smoke, and skin touch, the melody is sensual and ravishing!
Swing, hippie melodies,chanson realist, real background sound, Charleston, make it perfectly eligible for contemporaneous hip quiet dance floors. Some songs become quite addictive with their venomous poetic lazy beauty who reminds of a nineteenth century bohemia like Il se passé des choses. All in all this classic of underground French hippie music is sensual, naughty, and mischievous! If you want to amaze your friends with dark French references ( dark only on this side of the channel) after Gainsbourg, Brigitte Fontaine is the next big thing ;-) She claims to be in... inadequate!
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