Weird Music Wednesdays

Years ago, YEARS ago, I loaded up my backpack, bought a 2-month ticket to France and filled my pockets with courage and adrenaline... My trip had 2 goals: to join a wine harvesting team and to promote French-Canadian artists to producers in France.

One of my favorite artists, self proclaimed Yvan the Terrible, gave me a video. This was a beta PAL video, what European TV companies used. Because of it's format I couldn't preview the clip. He told me it was great. His stuff was really cool, upbeat, funky, so I trusted him. And I knew the song, so I agreed to show it over there. (Kinda reminds me of the time I agreed to bring a trunk-full of my sister's wrapped wedding gifts across the boarder, that was fun!)

France, at this time, had very few channels, like 5 or 6. Total. One of these was a music channel like MTV (used to be). Spice Girls was the IT band. If you wanna be my lover invaded the airwaves. Knowing what I knew of Yvan, I contacted the channel's program director. Surprisingly he agreed to see me! Sitting in his office, with a huge window on the Eiffel fucking tower (this guy was obviously big shit, not many people have a huge window of opportunity right smack in front of THE tower).

Immediately he slaps that vid in his player. I'm watching this. It's funky. It's bold. But it's so NOT for the Posh Spice audience! I've got more stuff in my bag. But, he wanted to start with this. THIS. At the end of the vid, I'm still staring at the screen wondering what to do next. Talk about poor choices. I turn to him. He's speechless. So am I.

I tell him about the band. How they're really upbeat, mod, fun, top 40s, etc. But the first impression is forever stamped in his mind. To this day, France's top guy in TV music programming is convinced Canadians are all cross-dressers.

Fun song though!  ツ