web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Category: Pop Rock International

  • Big in Europe (Actually Big Everywhere Except Here): Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP “We No Speak Americano”

    Back when I was in high school, there was this British dj collective called Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers who scored a Top 20 hit called “Swing the Mood” by basically taking a bunch of hits from the 40s and 50s – incongruously matching the Glenn Miller Band with the Everly Brothers, among others – and mashing them all together into a single track fit for school dances and wedding receptions. Urgh. For awhile there, “Swing the Mood” was inescapable although thankfully it never reached the achieved the sort of cultural saturation the “Macarena” would half a decade later.

    Now, storming charts all across Europe – around the world, in fact – is the Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool (named for a Tarantino quote) who teamed up with producer DCUP for a single called “We No Speak Americano”, which is essentially a 21st century house music puree of a 1956 performance by Italian pop singer Renato Carosone called “Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano”. In addition to going Top 10 in the duo’s home country and New Zealand, “We No Speak Americano” has so far topped the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, and, yes, Romania. Congressional Republicans may have much of the country convinced that the single greatest threat to the American way of life is creeping socialism. I beg to differ. Creeping socialism has nothing on the creeping ubiquity of this song – little more than a musical gimmick writ large, albeit one with an adorably silly (and expertly executed) “silent movie” video.

    And if you’re curious, here’s some pretty awesome video of Renato Carosone’s original. I could totally party with these guys!

  • Big in the UK: “Bang Bang Bang” by Mark Ronson and the Business Intl

    American listeners may not know the name (or they may confuse it with that of the late glam guitar icon Mick), but Mark Ronson was the producer behind one of the hottest musical messes of the last decade, Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album, not to mention albums and tracks by an impressive cross-genre pantheon of artists as disparate as pop diva Christina Aguilera, British rockers Kaiser Chiefs, and rapper Wale. His signature sound rejected Autotune and all sorts of other sonic CGI in favor of gritty R&B horn sections (no samples please), real life drum sets, and actual singing. The results could be thrilling, but they could also come off sounding unbecomingly gimmicky – a hazard underlined by his 2007 collection of covers called Version. Though that record did yield his biggest hit yet – a cover of the Smiths’ classic “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before” with Daniel Merriweather on vocals – it was not without a few spectacular duds, like his tedious take on Radiohead’s “Just”, which could only have been worse if he’d recruited Paul Anka or Pat Boone to deliver it.

    For his latest album called Record Collection, he’s billing himself as Mark Ronson and the Business Intl. The record’s first single features guest rapper Q-Tip and singer Amanda Warner of the California techno-pop duo MNDR – it’s called “Bang Bang Bang” and re-embraces electronics, albeit in a similarly retro way, building a sleak 80s-inspired sci-fi dance epic out of the disassembled bits of the French children’s song “Alouette”. While as a producer Ronson has been storming the U.S. charts for the last ten years, he hasn’t had an American hit in his own right. This song, as groovy as it is (seriously, it’s been ages since Q-Tip has been this much fun) isn’t likely to change that. But it’s already a Top 10 hit overseas.

  • Big in France: “Allez! Ola! Olé!” by Jessy Matador (On a Boat)

    So, in a previous “Big In…” episode, I posted a video by Germany’s currently reigning Idol-equivalent champion Mehrzad Marashi and the same show’s most successful alumnus Mark Medlock, doing a pretty horrible dance song together… on a boat. Not to be outdone is one Jessy Matador, the 27-year-old Zairian-French singer-and-dancer who represented France in this year’s Eurovision song competition with “Allez! Ola! Olé!” and gave the country its best showing in years. (France last won the competition in 1977. The last time it placed as a runner-up was in 1991.) The song may only have placed 12th in the Eurovision competition but it’s currently shaking its ass at the top of the French pop chart, and it’s formed a gigantic conga line all over Europe going Top 20 in Germany, and Top 10 in Belgium, Norway (who as 2009’s Eurovision winners hosted this year’s competition) and Finland (suck on that, Dark Metal). It even nicked the U.S. club charts.

    And why not? Its infectious Afro-Carribean beats feel both instantly familiar and alluringly exotic – it’s a song in search of a Bacardi ad campaign, basically. When Jessy Matador calls out “Tout le monde!”, he means, “Everybody!”. But the literal translation of the French is “All the world!” and that applies here too. The song’s got a chorus that blithely defies language barriers by defying language itself. Allez Ola Ole? A two-year-old from Mongolia could sing along to it! The first time I heard this, I just thought it was a goofy song (the video doesn’t help that impression – see about 3:08 in the video for the dorkiest temper tantrum ever) that I figured I’d forget before I had time to close the internet browser. But its infuriatingly simple hooks have proven as relentless as Jaws, and I’ll be damned if I’ve gone a day the last couple weeks without going back to it at least once before heading out on my morning commute.