30 June 2001
Moulin Rouge was the movie hit of 2001. I remember being duly impressed by its opulent spectacle—the trademark of its director and former Irish number one act Baz Luhrmann—and its playful postmodernism. Less impressive was its reliance on the tired old plotline of a lead female character as male sexual possession, male artistic muse and (spoiler alert) final-act corpse. What does that mean for this tie-in cover version of ‘Lady Marmalade’, whose equally extravagant video casts four successful pop-R&B women as stylised lingerie-clad Belle Époque burlesque courtesans? You can probably tell from my weary air that I detect the usual patriarchal pop-culture paradigm of limiting female self-expression to something as close as possible to male-gaze objectification, with added ’00s lads-mag pressure. Others are better placed than I to discuss that further.
The original by Labelle is smart, playful and soulful. This cover, though, despite the varying degrees of R&B in its participants, is surprisingly soft-rock—all guitar fuzz and rinky dink cowbell—and therefore something of a bore. Even the All Saints version is better. Pink and Mya dispatch their verses with all the energy of contractual obligation. Christina Aguilera goes full post-Mariah power diva: showy melisma and piercing top notes. Missy Elliott, at this time creating a new US electronic R&B sound in her collaborations with Timbaland, is a producer here but on the track itself just has a bit at the top to introduce the track and at the end to say all the names. Only Lil’ Kim, with her witty and salty rap, makes a good impression.
Whatever its real or storied past, today the actual Moulin Rouge in Paris is a tourist-trap cabaret that makes a killing off gullible punters. Maybe this flashy, perfunctory record is really the theme to that.
