That French tune from Mad Men

What on its surface read last night as sexy-but-awkward is perhaps producer Matt Weiner’s most cogent Mad Men comment yet. And it is available on vinyl!

On the season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men, Megan Draper (played by Jessica Paré) does her very best sex kitten delivery of “Zou Bisou Bisou” (rough translation: “Oh you, kiss kiss”) during a surprise birthday party for hubby Don (played by Jon Hamm). While the performance at the party goes over to mixed results (Megan’s promise to Peggy “everyone will be going home to have sex” doesn’t quite happen, most frustratingly for her), there’s no denying Paré’s spot-on Yé-Yé delivery of this 1960s original. In fact, the song is now available as an iTunes download and on limited edition 7″ single, available in both red and black vinyl, and backed by RJD2’s distinctive theme music. Ligature abuse on the picture sleeve is inexcusable, but nonetheless consistent with Mad Men’s cavalier approach to historical accuracy in typography. Honestly, how can a show about 1960s advertising have such terrible graphic design amidst such period-perfect art direction?

That minor quibble aside, producer Matt Weiner and his team clearly enjoyed their homework on this one. The song was originally performed in English by Sophia Loren in 1960 and later became a French chart hit for actress/YéYé girl Gillian Hills (star of the obscure early 60s teensploitation classic Beat Girl and later a cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s art-thriller Blow Up), produced by none other than George Martin. [Check out the promo clip below.]

a telling comment on Sterling Cooper Draper Price’s cultural cluelessness

The fact that she’s sexily delivering a 5+ year old disposable pre-Beatles pop song in a far more culturally aware 1966 is a sly comment on Megan Draper’s perceived cluelessness by Don’s friends/co-workers (“Don hates surprise parties!” “She doesn’t know Don at all!”), but in the larger sense a more telling comment about the behind-the-times cultural cluelessness of Sterling Cooper Draper Price [in my opinion, one of the more compelling aspects of the show]. While Megan’s coquettish performance shocked the party-goers and brought the generation gap between Megan and Don into sharp focus, it was still an old pop song delivered from a very safe place (Megan’s French-Canadian youth, perhaps?) and was therefore hopelessly out-of-date. The supposedly hip college-age band’s earnest backing seemed additionally incongruous.

By 1966, that type of innocuous manufactured Yé-Yé pop was long gone from even the French charts as more self-aware and turned-on artists as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones were making generation-defining album-length statements— Revolver, Smile, Blonde on Blonde, and Aftermath, respectively—both reflecting and creating the changing times. Not to be outdone, France’s own Serge Gainsbourg was now in full-on subversive songwriter mode, getting Yé-Yé ingenue France Gall to sing about fellatio (“Lollipop”) and LSD (“Teenie Weenie Boppy”).

It is the mid-sixties, revolution is brewing all around them and these self-involved characters are having stiff (no pun intended) cocktail parties while (scandal!) smoking a joint on the terrace, and wondering what to do about “the negros in the lobby.” I’m looking forward to seeing more of Sterling Cooper Draper Price come to terms with the world outside of advertising, while Megan Draper works through her daddy issues.

Megan’s Mad Men performance:

And Gillian Hills’ original version:

2 thoughts on “That French tune from Mad Men

  1. Ye-ye never really came over to North America so I think this was a poor choice of song. Also you’re wrong about Ye-ye not being popular by 1966, it stayed popular until around 1970. Baby Pop didn’t even come out until ’66. Also a personal opinion, but I think the best ye-ye came out in the mid to late 60s. An opinion generally shared by fellow French pop collectors. Sorry if my English is not so good.

    • Thanks for your comment, but yes M., your English is not so good. 🙂
      Because I *didn’t* say that Yé-Yé wasn’t popular in 1966. I had said that “that type of innocuous manufactured Yé-Yé pop was long gone from even the French charts […]” Yé-Yé was moving forward, as I’d alluded to. As a Yé-Yé collector, you know that the genre matured as the 60s marched on.

      Yes, France Gall’s ‘Baby Pop’ album didn’t come out until 1966, BUT that album was a leap forward for Ye-Ye pop, a more mature and musically varied album (reflecting the influence of British and American groups like the aforementioned Beatles and Beach Boys).

      Yé-Yé did indeed come to the North American continent; most prevalently in French-speaking Canada (an early 2000’s personal trip to Montreal supports this theory as the record stores were well-stocked with vintage French pop). Megan Draper grew up in Quebec, where she definitely would have heard French pop in the early 60s.

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