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C'EST CHIC
French Pop Music Finally Gets Hip
"Vive la révolution!" shouts a sampled funkateer at the beginning of Ernest Saint Laurent's "Moogie," a knockout cut on the excellent new French dance-music compilation, SOURCE MATERIAL. The revolution in question is the seemingly endless invasion of house, techno, and lounge sounds emanating from the land of flaky bread and stinky cheese. Challenging France's long-standing reputation as a pop music wasteland, a slew of artists -- from dance-lite sensations Air to house crews like Cassius and Stardust -- are dominating dance floors. Here, barnesandnoble.com's funky Francophile Jon Dolan catalogues the hot sounds from Paris.
HOMEWORK, the rave-tested, critic-approved 1997 debut from the delirious Daft Punk. Powered by the mercilessly silly single "Around the World," the duo created gorgeous fin de siècle funk out of the booty-loosening grooves of early-'80s Chicago house and Hot Butter's cheesy disco classic "Popcorn." Daft Punk's new album is due out sometime this year, so you might want to try out the new house-y release from Cassius, 1999, while you wait. Riding the driving, robo-pulse of Detroit techno, 1999 mutates like coiling DNA, and the soulful new single, "Feeling for You," is a strong floor filler.

While Daft Punk and Cassius dig deep into house and techno, DJ Dimitri from Paris takes a trip back to the glory days of Studio 54 with his remix of Stardust's "Music Sounds Better with You," the highlight of PARIS IS SLEEPING: RESPECT IS BURNING, VOL. 2. A disco-diva ballad no Donna Summer fan should be without, "Music Sounds Better" is a classic dance track, and the must-own album it comes on includes some of the biggest names in dance music from France (Les Rhythmes Digitales), the UK (Motorbass) and New York (Chezere). It's so propulsive, it could make Andy Rooney feel like a funk soul brother.

PARIS IS SLEEPING joins a slew of excellent Parisian dance-floor samplers from American label Astralwerks in the past couple of years, each offering a different perspective on the sounds of Paris. The above-mentioned SOURCE MATERIAL, a kinkily exotic mix of down-tempo tracks from the Paris-based Source label, drops Beasties-style hip-hop, lounge music, and compu-funk on cuts by obscure but great artists like Domiaq and Bertrand Burgalat. It isn't as buoyant as RESPECT, but its spacey elegance is undeniable.

SOURCE'S loungier side -- like Ernest Saint Laurent's "Moogie" -- will certainly strike a chord outside the dance world, especially with hipsters who got their first taste of Francophile pop through the coo of Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier. A band that has influenced everyone from the Beastie Boys to Björk Stereolab recently released a two-CD set of outtakes called ALUMINUM TUNES. Like their previous releases, it's as edgy as American indie rock, and as robotically groovy as Kraftwerk. It's also heavily influenced by the cabaret crooning of the '60s French pop sensation Serge Gainsbourg, a walking come-on of a balladeer whose heated, syrupy stylings could melt steel.
POP ROMANTIQUE: FRENCH POP CLASSICS features tunes by Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, and others covered by Air, Luna, Franco-American popsters Ivy, and Lloyd Cole, who delivers a bar-band version of Bob Dylan's "Si Tu Dois Partir." The album suggests what might have happened if the Velvet Underground had been formed on the Left Bank instead of in New York's Greenwich Village.

If you're wondering how Liz Phair might sound growing up under similar conditions, give April March a listen. A New York-born chanteuse who sings romantic pop (à la Hardy) with a barbed tongue and a coy delivery, March's CHROMINANCE DECODER finds her assailing love's joys and sorrows in both French and English inside of playful tunes steeped in happy horn charts and cinematic orchestrations.
SACREBLEU is a sampledelic mix of James Brown horns, sunny popscapes, and house-y grooves that suggests a spy movie filmed on Venus. Air's sumptuous debut, MOON SAFARI, is an album full of lush, summertime make-out pop that's as influenced by Italian film music as it is by the billowy beauty of early-'70s Philly soul. Anchored in the robotic vocoder vocals, their great 1998 single "Sexy Boy" might be the best French-pop tune ever -- piling fluorescent synths and Beck-like hip-hop moves on a groove so light it could float right out of your living room. Air should have a new album out in 1999 (a reissue of their excellent singles collection, PREMIERS SYMPTOMES, was recently released), which means we can expect a further evolution of soft-pillow grooves and fresh melodies, with no end in sight.

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