L'amour à la plage

More 10s from my Top 10 continued - "L'amour à la plage" ("Love on the beach") by French pop group Niagara (1986).

I've had a thing for French pop for some time, both French pop from Europe but also Québec and other parts of the world. Where and when did this begin for a little North Carolina po' white trash boy born in the 1960s? It could have been all those years ago, listening to Radio Canada International on shortwave radio as long ago as the early 1970s. It could have been the first time I heard "Soldat" by Vanessa Paradis playing in a shop in San Francisco in 1990. It could be after I read a review of Mylene Farmer's songs, "Je t'aime, mélancolie" and "Désenchantée," in the Village Voice in 1991 or so. It could have been when I heard "Marcia baila" by Les Rita Mitsouko, another group I remember hearing in San Francisco in the early '90s--but one that was always a bit too cool for me. I like my pop pure and unaffected--although it's hard not to appreciate "Marcia baila" all these years later).

Or it could be when I lived in Washington, DC, the center of the universe (hardy har har) in the 1980s. There was a radio station, WHFS I think, known for its new wave and "alternative" music but which on Sundays turned the broadcast over to international language and music programming for the expat communities in the DC area. There was a program that played great pop music from France, and because I didn't know a word of French at the time (and some might argue I still don't), I had no idea what was being played and by whom.

Sometime in the early 1990s, the Express clothing store chain released a French pop compilation cassette, which I bought on a whim to play in my Walkman. And funnily enough, it featured some of the songs I remembered from a few years before on WHFS. That was likely the moment when the connection formed between the musical memory and the practicality of titles and artists.

One of my favorites on that cassette--and one that I remembered from years before--was "L'amour à la plage" by Niagara. "C'est l'amour à la plage (aouu cha cha cha), mes yeux dans tes yeux (aou aouuu)."

It's the tail end of winter here in Toronto. As I write this, I'm staring out at Lake Ontario, catching a glimpse of a marina and possibly one of Toronto's beaches in the distance, listening to this song, and trying to imagine that my French pop fantasy-scape is just ahead on the horizon, just out of reach, but only a few sunny days away ....

And that's what I like about French pop: Hope for sunny days ahead tempered by a twist of winter's melancholia and life's disenchantment.