I Ain't No Square, with My Corkscrew Hair

joey-andromeda:

peacockbluey:

Funny thing about Ian Guage: if I’m not totally mistaken, his name is an in-jokey tip of the hat to Lliana.  I remember Birdy tweeting a little story (sometime last year?), laughing at herself for glancing at Noel’s copy of Lenny Bruce’s Language and misreading it as “Ian Guage.”  I’m guessing the joke stuck.  :D

(Also, hi, Noel singing in French basically made my life.)

I love this sketch, but I have to say that, as someone who’s studied actual French, the fake French here really got on my nerves. I mean, he could have at least looked up the translation of the subtitled bit and sung the rest in gibberish and I would have been satisfied. I dunno, it just grated on me.

Heh.  I’m fluent in French, actually; I lived and studied in Tours and Paris for a bit, and have been back to visit since.

But I have to say that the faux-French didn’t disturb me.  It was a deliberate choice, I’m very sure of that, because Noel is a definite fan of Jacques Brel, and he’s quoted/tweeted grammatically correct French before.  Even if he didn’t know how to say “Est-ce que tu m’aimes?” off the top of his head, it would have been a very easy thing to find out… and it’s not really like him to just handwave details without having consciously considered them even a little.

So that leaves me thinking that, since it was obviously an affectionate homage and a spoof of Jacques Brel’s work, and of the French Cabaret style in general, what he was getting at is that the words don’t necessarily matter: most of the songs are asking the same question with different words, telling the same story.  They’re all about love and heartbreak.  That sort of transcends language, which is why we understand what opera and French torch songs are about, even when we don’t know the words.  He’s not translating the literal meaning; he’s translating the underlying sentiment.  And all of this might just be why the character is named Ian Guage—in other words, Language.  

At least that’s my take on it.  Or maybe Google Translate let him down.  ;-)