30 August 2007
Content warning: self-harm.
Regular readers will recall me mentioning how I spent a good part of the ’00s and ’10s living in Paris. One of the novelties of French music radio and TV was that they’d air the sweary version of English-language hits uncensored. For instance, I’d be hunting-gathering in my local Monoprix and hear the piped cheery tones of Lily Allen singing “Fuck you very, very much!” or breakfasting along to a Saturday morning chart show playing the video for Mylène Farmer’s ‘Fuck Them All’. Yes, I got a kick out of those. The downside, though, was having to listen to the misogynistic epithets of well-known male US rappers, when I just wanted to enjoy coffee and people-watching in some local Paris street-corner brasserie. That was less pleasant.
Anyway, all that is to explain how you may remember Sean Kingston’s ‘Beautiful Girls’ for its chorus of “in denial, in denial” but I only know it in its original iteration of “suicidal, suicidal”. I’d overhear this on French radio and TV several times a day and just shake my head at how anyone could make such a dumb and tasteless hook for a pop song, especially one which is essentially proto-Meghan Trainor saccharine retro doo wop thickened with Ben E. King’s corn-syrup ‘Stand By Me’ and served with an added drizzle of watered-down reggae reggae sauce. And for Kingston those beautiful girls “only wanna do you dirt” so I’m not taken by the sexist thesis of the rest of his lyrics either. Fuck you very, very much.
