Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"

But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.

The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:

There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:

I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.