Posted by Marie Le Conte

https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/a-spirited-defence-of-the-humble

Hello!

Hi! Some of my phone friends spent the weekend making their own version of Desert Island Discs, to amuse themselves I guess, and I thought that sounded fun so I decided to do the same thing. Somehow I’d never really thought about it before so it was quite tough, but I did try to keep in mind the purpose of the show - namely that it’s not just about your favourite songs, but about songs that remind you of things.

Here are my picks:

1. 1, 2, 3 Soleils - Abdel Kader (1998)

Extremely hard to explain this to a non-French person but, in a nutshell: in the 1990’s the country went mad for raï, a genre of occasionally very syrupy but mostly very lively pop music from Algerian singers. To be clear: it’s a lot more than that, as a genre, but that’s what we got back then. In 1998, three of the biggest raï stars in the world did this massive gig in Paris then released a live album from it, and my mum listened to little else for what felt like decades after that. I still know every single beat of that album by heart. It tastes like my childhood. Also: impossible to be or remain sad while listening to Abdel Kader.

2. Britney Spears - Overprotected (2001)

God it was impossible to pick a Britney song. I don’t even want to talk about it. There were at least thirteen I could have gone for. Point is, though: I just really loved Britney Spears when I was a kid. I thought she was perfect. In my early twenties, when I was writing my dissertation at the end of my degree, I convinced myself that I had to listen to her Best Of from beginning to end before starting to write every single morning. Even now I reckon I rarely manage to go through a month without listening to at least one of her songs. Britney Spears I will always love you.

3. Lhasa de Sela - Con Toda Palabra (2003)

So I spent some time debating whether to put this or Portishead’s Wandering Star but ultimately I went for Lhasa. Those two songs are basically imprinted on my bones because we often listened to them for warm-up at the dance and circus school I went to between the ages of 10 and 13. Before that I’d been a weirdo with no real purpose, and even fewer friends, but somehow finding myself surrounded by quite literal circus freaks basically turned my life around. Spending time there felt like spending time in a bubble that for once, felt nice and safe and comfortable. Pretty funny that I was an 11-year-old who got insanely into Portishead but also: probably not hugely surprising?

4. Arctic Monkeys - A Certain Romance (2005)

What can I say! I’m a millenial! They were my first ever gig! That I would put a song from WPSIATWIN in this was never in doubt - it just took me a while to pick the specific one. This is the longest one and I mean, I’ll have a lot of time on my hands on that island, so.

5. Black Lips - Bad Kids (2007)

I spent basically every hour of my free time between 10 and 13 at the circus school and basically every hour of my free time between 15 and 17 at this bar in Nantes, one of precisely two “cool” ones in town at the time. My friends and I got to know the owner and the staff and I wasn’t allowed to have naps on weekends at home so often I’d arrive there an hour before opening time on Saturdays and they’d let me nap on the couch for a bit while they cleaned up the place. To say it was a second home would be underselling it, somehow. God, the things that bar saw. Anyway: the main guy who worked there got super into the Black Lips in 2007 and he played Good, Bad, Not Evil every single day for months. I still listen to it all the time. Perfect stupid album.

6. Magazine - Shot By Both Sides (1978)

Important note: must be the single version, not the album version. Do not even mention the 2007 remaster to me, I won’t acknowledge it. More seriously: what a song! I spent so much of my teenage years listening to random and mostly obscure bands from the 60’s and the 70’s and I think that was a pretty important stage for me, building-of-the-self wise. Other options for this slot also included The Gun Club’s Sex Beat, or maybe something by X-Ray Spex, or Gang of Four? God! Or Richard Hell, my great love. I shouldn’t have opened the floodgates. I will now be closing them again. You get the gist. I was really annoying.

7. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (2009)

It took me a while to pick a Gaga song not merely because I love her - though I do - but because I guess I’ve had two big periods of time when she mattered to me a lot. The most recent one was lockdown, and I nearly went for 9-1-1 because I really did spend those horrible months listening to Chromatica obsessively, compulsively, and it felt so cruelly fitting that it was an album that sounded happy from afar but was actually thoroughly miserable. Still, I think you get to choose the memories you focus on, so instead I’m going for my first big Gaga era, when I’d just moved to London and everything was thrilling and whenever a new song of hers would come out you just knew you’d be dancing to it every night for weeks on end. Fun!

8. La Femme - Sphynx (2016)

In some ways I should have gone for Ou Va Le Monde? because it’s a generationally good song and the one that made me get into La Femme, but in others: eh. I listened to them a lot - a lot, a lot, a lot - in 2022 when I spent those two months in Venice and I was actually just quite miserable, for a whole bunch of reasons. I remember one specific sunny day - I think I was walking to the stadium to watch the football? - crossing Venice in a bit of a rush and listening to Sphynx as I went through San Marco, barely noticing the beauty of it, and that made me laugh a bit. You really do get used to everything.

Book:

Oh I am absolutely going for In Search Of Lost Time, because it’s so long and I’ve never read it and I know it, deep in my heart, I know I’ll just never read it. Maybe I would actually get there on a desert island though. That could be the one silver lining. I’d finally get there.

Luxury item:

A magical pack of blue Gauloises that somehow never runs out of cigarettes, and also a lighter that never runs out of fuel. I still miss smoking so much. That would be the second silver lining. Finally I would live out my dream: to be a two-pack-a-day smoker. I only ever managed one-and-a-half in my twenties, but I think that with enough training I could go further. I could win at smoking.

A column

In the summer of 2005 I started listening to rock’n’roll so I decided to dress like it. I bought big boots and jeans whose sole purpose was to get ripped to shreds before being worn, and I had this backpack I was getting ready to cover in all sorts of sharpied logos. This sartorial era lasted for around three months, maybe four.

As discussed in newsletters passim, my tastes turned to the indie reasonably quickly. I liked my boys with guitars but I needed them to be lithe and at least seem to be clever, and actually I enjoyed it when they looked nice. The sound could be loud and dirty but the boys? They had to be pretty and clean. Well. Clean-ish.

Soon enough, I got into the Strokes and the Libertines and a bunch of French bands which are now lost to history. I realised that it just wasn’t the done thing to be a punk anymore. If you wanted to be cool and hip, you had to dress like it was the 1960’s. Because I was in my early teens, I politely obliged.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do in provincial France but I still gave it a proper shot. I practically harassed the two charity shops we had in town and, very occasionally, on my birthday and at Christmas, I’d get my grandmother to bring me to that one fancy shop that sold clothes from small Parisian designers. Mostly though, I spent hours and hours on eBay, trying to make my pocket money stretch as far as it could.

Obviously the music was the most important thing to me in those years, but being an indie music fan in the 2010’s was all-encompassing. I felt I had to keep discovering bands, both tiny new unsigned ones and increasingly obscure ones from the 60’s and the 70’s. I also needed my style to be as unique as possible; both identifying me as one of a certain tribe, yet allowing me to stand out entirely as an individual.

Sadly, there are few pictures remaining from that era, but I still remember some of the clothes like I wore them yesterday. There was this tiny little green dress with puffy sleeves and an empire waistline, which had definitely been meant for someone shorter than me as it sat at the very top of my thighs. The pattern was floral and practically neon, and the fabric so synthetic it would have burst into flames if shown a picture of a lighter.

There was the antique doctor’s briefcase which I used as a handbag when I was 15, in a caramel-brown leather. There were the tiny little 80’s red pumps with the triangle heel which actually were an instrument of torture. On the other end of my person, there was the haircut I insisted on getting - a perfect, smooth bowl - in 2007, which led to my high school nickname becoming “the foreskin”.

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https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/a-spirited-defence-of-the-humble