(via 45cat.com)
Welcome to another edition of Rich Karski’s A SONG I HEARD TODAY: the only online music review column that is required course material at all for-profit universities.
Where do we go from here? We’ve explored love. We’ve explored hate. We’ve explored several instances of attempted statutory rape. Is it time for me to pack it in and finally write the great American novel about a cantaloupe that comes to life and starts smoking cigarettes and biting people?
No, not yet. The world isn’t ready for me to hold that dirty mirror up to society. Instead I will forge ahead, and today I opted to do so by bringing some culture into your filthy parasitic lives.
Where do we find culture anyway? Does it even exist anymore? They put it in books, right? It’s in the books? But like, the long ones that are usually covered in dirt and don’t have pictures of the movie adaptation on the cover? Yes, but culture can also be found in many other places. And most of those places, as the internet has lead me to believe, are France.
In the past two decades of American jingoism, France has gotten a bad rap around these parts because its people smell like cheese and everything is closed all the time because nobody likes having jobs there so at some point they just stopped doing work altogether. At one point they even tried to change the name of French Fries because fried carbohydrates are what separates this great nation from all of those other countries where people are allowed to enjoy sex.
But France is known for producing beautiful expressions of art, such as The Eiffel Tower, the sex act known as The Eiffel Tower, Pepe LePew, and those movies where people smoke and drive cars while the editor jump cuts the thing into oblivion and you get a headache but you keep watching and pretending it is great because you really want the people in your film class to think you’re smart about movies even though you mostly just watch Die Hard.
So what piece of orchestral French beauty did I choose for today’s song?
I decided to go with the only song I knew that was French which is Plastic Bertrand- Ca Plane Pour Moi. Let’s try to figure out what the hell that means, together.
Not matter how hard you try, you’ll never be David Bowie, Monsieur Bertrand. (via 2or3lines.blogspot.com)
Plastic Bertrand is a band named after either a plastic monkey from an old fable or a sunken steamboat which is made out of plastic, according to a brief Wikipedia search. They kind of sound like the Beach Boys had sex with the Ramones which makes sense because the Ramones are the Beach Boys of punk rock and the Beach Boys are the Picasso of fucking the Ramones.
The singer on the album cover is wearing eyeliner and a weird lace scarf, which is to say he looks French as hell. You can’t see them in the picture but I assume his feet are purple from crushing grapes.
When you listen to the song for the first time, it’s like “Wow, that’s a lot of French. Almost too much French. And all of it at once. It’s coming at me so fast! I don’t think that’s how French is supposed to work!” But that’s exactly how French works. There’s also horns, and the horns are loud, so you know they’re good. Now we get to the lyrics. Bear in mind that I am not fluent in French, but I did take it in the 4th and 5th grades so I’m assuming I’ll be pretty close.
Wham! Bam! Mon chat Splash/Git sur mon lit/A bouffe sa langue
So as we start out, the singer’s cat, who goes by the name of Splash seems to be getting his friend high at the buffet and using language, which is pretty impressive for a cat but might just be a product of the guy being high. Or maybe in France cats are allowed to talk? There are a surprising amount of hits on Google for “talking French cat” but upon inspection none of them seem to be legitimate. The jury is still out on this one.
Le meow.(suchaschame.wordpress.com)
En bouvant mon whiskey quand moi/Peu dormir vide et brime/Ou j’ai eu un flash/Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou!/En quatre couleurs
Now, I believe he’s talking about how the cat steals his whiskey while he’s sleeping and wiggles his cat dick at him, taunting him with “Hou Hou Hou Hou” which is French for “Meow” I think. “Meow, Meow Meow, Meow, I’m flashing my dick at you while you sleep” the cat seems to be saying. He then puts the whiskey in four coolers, which is a lot of whiskey for a cat but I’m not one to judge anybody else’s alcoholism. Still, this cat seems like a bastard.
Allez hop! Un matin une louloute est venue chez-moi/Poupee de Cellophane cheveux chinois/Un sparadrap un gueule de bois
He is telling everyone to hop because he found a loud, loud venue for a cheese matinee, which is like brunch in France only they just eat cheese and then nap, which is mostly just what they do all the time when they aren’t carrying large loaves of bread in undersized paper bags. But then disaster strikes as someone placed some cellophane over the toilet and he ruins his chinos with his poo and pee.
Luckily, he was able to spare a drop for one of his boys. While this may seem disgusting to most, we need to realize the French are a different culture with different customs, so handing out drops of your waste may be a sign of affection. I would be more concerned about who cellophaned the toilet. It was probably that rude drunk cat.
A bu ma biere dans un grand verre en caoutchouc/Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou!/Comme indien dans son igloo
So now he’s drinking a beer on his good friend Dan’s couch (which I’m assuming is very fancy because of all those extra letters) when that damn cat comes back to taunt him. But that’s the least of their worries, because a communist indian has infiltrated Dan’s son’s igloo! How will they get him out?!
Ca plane pour moi
Never mind, he wants to tell us about his plane.
Ca plane pour moi/Ca plane pour moi moi moi moi moi/Ca plane pour moi/Hou Hou Hou Hou/Ca plane pour moi
“That plane’s for me. That plane’s for me me me me me/That plane’s for me. Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow/That plane’s for me.” We get it, you wanna fuck the plane.
Allez hop! La nana quelle panard/Quelle vibration/De s’envoyeur
I think he’s telling everyone to get up so they can spy on a masturbating grandmother? I don’t know what panard is but I’m sure it’s filthy. This has taken a disturbing turn. Where the hell did that drunk cat go?
Sur le paillasson lime, ruine, vide, comble/You are the king of the divan/Quelle me dit en passant/Hou! Hou! Hou! Hou!/I am the king of the divan
Apparently, now his palace has been ruined by limes, videos, and combs, which are to the French as garlic is to vampires. Then Splash makes his triumphant return (presumably he was the one to ruin the palace) and declares himself king of the couch in English (because that is the dominant language) after telling the owner that he has the dick of a peasant. Basically, this drunk cat fucking rules and is unstoppable and his idiot owner can do nothing but bend to Splash’s will or risk being assaulted with more limes. Splash the cat is a fucking hero and deserves a medal.
There are a lot more words in this song but they are also in French…
The gist of those seems to be that the owner needs to move out of his own home for fear of the world’s most badass cat, and now he lives in a tree and gives manicures for alcohol, continuing the time-honored French traditions of surrender and retreat. If the Nazis had an army of Splashes they would have drunkenly conquered the world and we would all be speaking in Hous and having to shit on plastic.
Heil Mon Chat Splash!
This song gets a B+ because while the singer is a pathetic husk of a man he relays the story of a cat who had a dream.
And that dream was to get real turnt and usurp his owner’s palace and couch, leaving him and his awful peasant dick destitute. It loses some points because we never figure out what happened to that Indian in Dan’s kid’s igloo, but we can presume that Dan’s kid is dead. RIP Dan’s idiot kid: murdered by a cold Bolshevik Indian.
