Everybody Was in the French Resistance…Now! Tries to Fix The Charts

Everyone Was In The French Resistance... Now!

There’s a very specific conversational genre – prominently featured in bars and Cracked.com articles – that kicks off with “have you ever really listened to what they’re actually saying in that song?” For Beatles fans the canonical example is Run for Your Life, which is deeply creepy, and for some reason the game is particularly easy to play with pop princesses like Britney Spears. Opps!

Just as a quick taxonomic sketch, these aren’t the conversations about songs like Sweet Home Alabama, which are more of the “don’t you know what those lyrics are about…” variety, and they’re also distinct from discussions about songs like Sarah McLachlan’s Possession, which follow a “don’t you know where those lyrics came from…” line. With Sweet Home Alabama the issue is about internal references to external context, and with Possession – which was inspired by letters that McLachlan’s stalkers sent her – it’s again about external context but that context has been totally emptied.

Here – in songs like Run for Your Life and Oops!… I Did It Again – the sociopathy is right there in the lyrics, but the songs go cheerfully the other way. Ergo the conversational genre that unpacks them, usually after some libations have been had.

The analogous musical genre for handling that task is the answer song, which Wikipedia says “became widespread in blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s.. [and was] also extremely popular in country music in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Enter Everyone Was In The French Resistance… Now!,” a project bringing together Eddie Argos of Art Brut and his girlfriend Dyan Valdes from Los Angeles indie darlings The Blood Arm. Apparently one night Argos became particularly incensed by the “you better hurry back or I’m going to start banging the neighbor” upshot of Martha and the Vandellas’s Jimmy Mack and – worse – wouldn’t shut up about it. Valdes told him to just write something down, and eventually that ended up as entire album of answer songs called Fixin’ The Charts, Vol. 1. About their response to Avril Lavigne’s ode to home wrecking Girlfriend – remember, pop princess – he commented “the Avril Lavigne one was fun to write because it was telling her she’s got mental health problems.”

Embedded below: He’s A “Rebel,” which is the strongest track from the album but seems to be one of the few they don’t do in shows, and He’s A Rebel by The Crystals, which is the song to which it’s an answer: