Follow the Yelle tek road
It feels very retro to describe something as “the latest dance craze sweeping France” - I thought that dance crazes stopped sweeping nations at some point in the late eighties. But I was wrong – and here are some French tektonik dancers to prove it. Retro the phrasing may be, but tektoniks has spread in a truly modern fashion, from the clubs of Paris and out via the medium of YouTube and then further out as kids well below clubbing age congregate in the street for dance offs.
The dance is part vogue, part body-pop and partly a move I remember club kids pulling about ten years ago which we knew as ‘the bomp and twist.’ The music most of them seem to be using… well, it ain’t that great. It’s somewhere between old-skool electro and straight-out Europop, with the synths and asthmatic-whooping-cough ‘whoo-hey’ samples of hardcore rave and the out-and-out bangingness of hard house. And then there’s Yelle. I like Yelle.
Yelle is a French singer, somewhat in the mould of M.I.A. but with a fresh cheekiness and a poppier, more electro sound. So far she’s the biggest export to come out of the tektoniks scene. Her fame began to spread when she dissed rapper Cuizinier, responding to his many slights against the female sex by writing a song claiming that his gentlemanly charms were rather on the small side. eMusic recently got a Yelle single ‘A Cause Des Garcons’ via the French tastemaker label Kitsune. It’s worth a listen.
See the video here: Yelle - A Cuase Des Garcons
Anna, loving this track and the video! Nice one! Downloading today.
Great - gald you like it. I’ve had it stuck in my head for the last 24 hours, but I’m not annoyed yet. I think that’s a good sign.
Argh!!!! Tektonik! I can’t stand this, I saw the video and I really hated it. The remixes on the single sounds a little better based on the samples, but I didn’t like them that much. Then by curiosity I found the [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmLjZrH0VlY]original version[/url] and what a surprise, I liked it a lot, it’s a nice cover of a 80s french hit.
argh I used the wrong code, url of the original Yelle version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmLjZrH0VlY
I was actually wondering what you knew about it LemonEyes - possibly a good deal more than me anyway.
I can’t help it. Every time I watch this video, this pops into my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIf8y0h3lH0