2023-09-16 06:30:00
The life of a song and its sometimes astonishing rewritings.
Carly Simon (1982)
A bit like her colleagues Steely Dan or her ex-spouse, the musician James Taylor, also natives of the east coast of the United States, the pioneer singer of the “revenge song”, long before Miley Cyrus, with her You’re so Vain (a priori in the face of his former companion, the actor Warren Beatty) is nevertheless assimilated to Californian pop music of the seventies. Which is not the genre of this haunting track, inhabited by a funny reggae sway floating on a big disco bass. A very fascinating song, it must be said, taken from the film Soup for One, a series Z turnip but with a high-flying soundtrack imagined and produced by Chic, bassist Bernard Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers. For the record, the title track Soup for One would later be sampled by Modjo for the maxi hit French touch Lady. Despite the masterful alliance between the Chic tandem and the flamboyant singer, success will be entirely relative for this Why. But why ?
Stella (2022)
Exactly forty years later (pure chance or birthday party, the mystery remains unsolved to this day) a young Parisian singer exiled in Berlin, unearths the song in a French adaptation translating almost word for word the English text. If it is not inhabited by the confusion of the original version by erasing the rough edges and accentuating the reggae side, this interpretation innovates for the better with at times a rather successful “spoken-sung” style, but also gets lost in a few solos quite dripping whether they are bass or guitar. It’s not Nile and Bernie who wants. Not a big hit either, but the one who is also the daughter of journalist Bernard Zekri (Actuel, Nova, Les Inrocks) has other strings to her bow like that of DJ, an art that she practices assiduously in European clubs and in a wide range from hip-hop to house to disco and even, um, trance. But why ?
#Carly #Simon #Stella #Libération