Bienvenue à French Bandstand! This is where I adopt the motto established by Dick Clark on “American Bandstand” and introduce you to French music that’s “got a good beat and you can dance to.”
I have a Best Songs Ever playlist that’s very hard to get into. The songs must be evocative of a specific moment or time in my life as well as being able to make me happy (without fail) every time they come on. There are great sad songs, but they’re on a separate playlist because I don’t want them to come up in the rotation much due to their inherent lack of fun.
Anyway, it’s so tough to get on the list that the most recent track is from 2011. (The oldest one is “Tighten Up,” from 1968.) Today’s artist is a guy who is Lebanese and American and grew up in Paris and London but this is his first single complètement en français.
Voici, je vous présente Mika’s “Elle me dit”
Learn something
The song is called “She tells me” and is about a mother who chastises her son about how he’s wasting his life away in silly pursuits. It starts with her saying that he should write a happy song and become a millionaire and not end up like his father or his brother. (Ouch.)
The chorus, which is pretty great, begins
Elle me dit “c’est ta vie / She tells me, “It’s your life
fais ce que tu veux tant pis / do what you want, I don’t care
un jour tu comprendras / one day you’ll understand
un jour tu t’en voudras” / one day you’ll wish you had.”
And then it goes into the super jumpy dance part with repeats of “pourquoi tu gâches ta vie?” [“Why are you wasting your life?”] This is where I learned gacher [:waste, squander] which is a helluva word.
Le cul entre les deux chaises 
June 14, 2013 at 5:22 am
This song is still stuck in my head. How do you turn it off?
June 14, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Why would you want to turn it off? Boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom, boom-boom, HEY!