Ah... YouTube: Jacques Brel with English subtitles!

In the bottomless pit of amazingly wonderful music video on YouTube are chestnuts of sublimely melodramatic pop music. Now, the foremost example of this sort of music is of course the gorgeous morsels of death-rock that populated American rock ’n’ roll in the early Sixties (“Teen Angel,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” etc.), but in the same vein of awesome, moving, and morose pop I must include the Belgian master, the late Monsieur Brel. Americans discovered his music through the translations of Mort Shuman and Eric Blau in the long-running cabaret show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (god, I do love those long Sixties/Seventies show/movie titles…).

The British, however, were introduced to Brel’s wonderfully emotionally overwrought works through through covers of the Shuman-Blau translations by Scott Walker (plum examples here and here. Also David Bowie (main example here).

Well, in the world of YouTube, we are now treated to the terrific sight of Brel himself, a simply incredible, incredible stage performer, singing his own tunes, for the first time ever with English subtitles translating his wrenching lyrics (I do believe Serge Gainsbourg was a more complex and innovative poet-lyricist, but there’s no arguing with the raw power of Brel’s work).

Here are three examples from YT, each of ’em a gem:
The song we know better (through a Rod McKuen translation, and later a perfectly depressing one hit wonder version by Terry Jacks) as “Seasons in the Sun.” I give you “Le Moribond” in English. It’s actually a pretty “up” song with the singer urging us to celebrate his death:


Here is Brel’s most wrenching song, “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (Don’t Leave Me) with English subs. There is a more amazingly raw performance of this by Brel with English subs up on YT, but the poster doesn’t allow for embeds on that one, so dig this subtitled version instead:


Here’s a little upbeat number, just so’s you don’t think ol’ Jacques was a downer. This one also appeared in “Live and Well…” It’s called “Brussels.”


And here, we have a good example of Brel’s stagecraft. Tell me one other singer (okay, Alice Cooper — but besides Alice, whom I also love) who has performed a song while wearing a noose onstage:

Ah... YouTube: part the first

As our friend Stephen has quite accurately remarked (and I and several friends have conveniently appropriated), YouTube is quite possibly the deepest single “rabbit hole” site on the Net, where one clicks on one clip, thinks of another, gets a sidesearch suggesting a third, and on and on, until you’ve lost a good two or three hours watching insanely rare material that violates copyright, but let’s be honest, who really gives a shit when it comes to the propagation of material that is never going to show up in another format (no cable network, DVD release, or iTunes downloads for these suckers, folks).

In that spirit I offer a Seventies one-hit wonder clip that was a pleasant surprise: the 2008 Deceased Artiste “Hurricane” Smith performing his big hit “Oh Babe, What Would You Say?” on The Tonight Show. I was extremely happy to see this up on YT, as a bunch of One Hit Wonder fans had been querying the posters of other OHW artists, asking for Hurricane doing his big number. Here we have not a lip-synch or a fully accurate version of the song, but a retooled rendition using the Tonight band. For those who don’t know who Hurricane was, he was Norman Smith, a sound engineer and record producer who engineered the Beatles work from ’63-’65, and produced the first two Pink Floyd albums as well as the landmark S.F. Sorrow album by the Pretty Things. Not a bad resume to add to full-fledged status as a One Hit Wonder.