French Music: Chagrin d'Amour – “Chacun fait (c'qui lui plaît)”
“Everyone does (what they please)” - Insomnia and a rapping prostitute form the core of this hit from 1981
Chagrin d’Amour’s first song is often credited as the first rap song in French. This isn’t true, of course, but it was massively popular when released.
NRJ, a new radio station at the time, broadcast the song 9 times a day while the 45 single sold 35,000 copies daily in early 1982, selling over three million in total. The song’s massive popularity extended beyond France, with adaptations in multiple languages, including Dutch, German and Swedish. It had no following in the US or UK.
Performed by Grégory Ken and Valli, who met in New York, the song “captures the disenchanted spirit of urban life,” according to some French critics of the time. It seems like no one really paid much attention to the lyrics at the time, including bits about prostitution and pedophilia. Folks just carried away with the catchiness of it all, maybe in the way that Little John’s “Get Low” sometimes gets played at weddings.
The lyrics were first written in the mid-1970s, inspired by the hip-hop scene, but it was considered kind of a dead project for years. After Blondie's "Rapture" in 1980 and The Clash's "The Magnificent Seven" in 1981, they had their style – the song very clearly borrows from both.
A fun fact is that Valli wasn’t that fluent in French at the time and, for the most part, had little idea what the lyrics were about.
