Natasha-la-la gets all sunny when she hears Mitsou. Read her guest-post:
Back in 1988, I was into anything that was German and loud. My trendy Avenue Saint-Laurent loft in Montréal was temporarily storing hundreds of LPs that belonged to an industrial music record shop. When the street was closed off to traffic in the summer for street parties, Mitsou could be heard blaring at 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays through megaphone speakers, with one about three metres from my bedroom window.
Mitsou’s first single,
Bye Bye Mon Cowboy in 1988, became a major hit throughout Canada, a very rare feat for a francophone artist, since anything French was largely ignored by the rest of Canada, never mind the United States. Back then, female pop in Québec was led by local asexual Céline Dion, who was struggling with Berlitz English language courses in order to make it south of the border.
When Mitsou’s first album
El mundo came out - Mitsou was just 17 years ols -the media quickly dismissed her as all tits (‘Titsou’, we used to call her) and no talent. Although her singing was mediocre, she wasn’t a one-hit wonder: she racked up awards in Québec and in the rest of Canada. Mitsou’s pedigree was also impeccable: her grandfather was Gratien Gélinas, one of the most important French Canadian playwrights and actors in history.
A few years later, Mitsou enjoyed English Canadian and US censorship for her video
Dis-moi, dis-moi because she was nude - and so was everybody else. This was just a few months after the Anglo-Saxon world had censured Madonna’s
Justify My Love. As usual, Québec’s French video channel Musique Plus had much less of a problem airing these videos.
I met Mitsou years later during the summer working at a fashion show in Montreal as a sound technician and she was very nice.
Mitsou – Bye Bye Mon Cowboy
Mitsou – Les Chinois
Merci à Gaétan Nael for pointing me to the MySpace-site of electro-trio Dessous Chics. This young French band (from Rennes and Paris) make joyful popmusic that can be best described as the outcome if Lio had fronted Depeche Mode in the mid-eighties. The girlie voice of 24-year old Mme Hollywood (who e-mailed me that she makes an excellent chocolate cake, which is a talent I wish I had) is sooo sexy. Apart from the demo-songs on their MySpace-site, Dessous Chics have only one song out on a compilation - I sure hope that debut album will be ready (and signed to a nice label, Bella Union for instance, or Rabid) soon.
