Le Grand Chemin

Las Patatas Espantadas

Disques Gaulois 070268011-2


  1. Le Grand Chemin (Le Départ)
  2. Poi-Poi
  3. Bob & Bill
  4. Au Bord de l’Eau
  5. Le Grand Chemin (suite)
  6. Tanarive
  7. Petit Poete de Proximite
  8. Drink
  9. Le Grand Chemin
  10. Aglaé
  11. Voguez
  12. Baïla
  13. Nain Rebelle
  14. Pasteur Rappeur
  15. Enfants d’la Guerre
  16. J’Aime les Vaches
  17. A Mururoa
  18. Las Patatas Espantadas
  19. Le Grand Chemin (l’Arrivé)

God, what memories this brings back…a brief window of time at the end of 1998, helping Anne-Laure paint her apartment in Paris’s 11eme arrondissement while this played on her boombox….

My French may be reasonably fluent but it’s not quite deft enough to keep up with these guys and their patois and other various lingo. I get the impression at times that I should probably be appalled at the lyrics of what I’m grooving on in some of their songs, especially when I catch the whiff of the “rendezvous [au] pays des grècs et sodomites” in “Aglaé” and the AIDS/blood mentions in “Pasteur Rappeur,” and of course there’s all the marijuana references throughout all three of their albums.

Still, it’s damned catchy, from “Poi-Poi” to “Enfants d’la Guerre” and many of the tracks that run the musical gamut between them. And of course who could do anything but bop along and giggle over “J’aime les Vaches”? Plus which, MC Romulus is a dish.

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Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.