Momma, can you hear me yell, Your baby boy's gone back to hell: Jacques Brel in Spirit and Word

I've made my case for Jacques Brel before (here and here). Brel ( 1929-1978) was the Belgian singer/songwriter capable of wringing more expression from his teeth than a legion of vocal contestants from The Voice/American Idol/etc. His performances were a masterful balance of black comedy and heart shattered pathos delivered like a meth-crashing Pagliacci. And if the vocal and facial intensity weren't enough, watch him sweat buckets enough for a menopausal squad of Tina Turners. Intensity was his meat.





But what of the songs? Even in their English "translations" his lyrics are the opposite of cloying and sentimental. He seemed incapable of seeing love as anything other than humiliating, doomed, or worse, cancerous; or, as in Mathilde, all three together. (Not ironically it was lung cancer that took Brel's life at 49.) Purists have argued that the only way to understand the true depths of Brel is to hear him in his original French. No doubt this might be the preferred vehicle for the French enabled but that's not to say that some of the third-party English reworkings don't have a power of their own. (The title of this post is a line from one such translation.) As representatives of the translations, both Dusty Springfield and Shirley Bassey make cases of their own, understatement in the former and eye-shifting displays of power in the latter.

See Brel in action with a series posted at Network Awesome.


Below, Scott Walker—who famously recorded a hefty number of Brel translations—takes a crack at a reworking of Mathilde.



It's been argued that Michigander creative writing professor Dr Arnold Johnston may be the best translator for locating the truest spirit of Brel. As he notes in the video below, after Ne me quitte pas was voted Love Song of the Century in Europe, Brel asserted that it was not a love song at all but a description of one man's humiliation. Vocally, Johnston's performance will never suspend beliefs that he's anything but a professor singing in a small town library, still, he manages to get his point across.

Below, two Brel chestnuts offered with a little perspective and translations that promise to be more in the maestro's spirit:

Even Brel-ier than Before: Amsterdam

Until recently, like most of the hegemonic English-speaking world, I too was mostly ignorant of Jacques Brel. What a shame.

For those of us in living in the land of the Freedom Fries, we really don't have a proper cultural equivalent for the likes of Brel. Unlike many of his contemporaries at the time whose careers also came of age in the rock and roll era, Brel remained strangely inert from it. Perhaps it was the French in him. (More precisely, the Belgium-born, self-described "francophone Fleming" who spent most of his life in Paris in him.) The French never really got rock and roll anyway.

Sure, I'd heard Sinatra and Neil Diamond take their stabs at Brel (If You Go Away), and Bowie's take on Amsterdam (from a Mort Shuman's translation and a Dave Van Ronk arrangement). But now, through the grace of YouTube, to hear these songs in the master's voice, and face, is a another experience altogether. There's nothing in the covers that could prepare you for the originals.

The lyric of Amsterdam entails a mash-up of life's many tragedies described through the milieu of sailors on shore leave. There's no Tin Pan Alley in this Amsterdam, unless the Alley reached all the way to the Wiemar Republic and Bertolt Brecht. Brel's style as a performer is as much facial as it is vocal; his expressions, gestures and gesticulations, the whipping head shakes and Uzi-like rolls of the tongue, and the labial twisting in his French — and how theatrical are those teeth! — create a singular synergy that makes these performances so extraordinary. And then there's the way the song sneaks into its crescendo, almost unnoticeable, until he's nearly screaming at the end. This isn't "song styling" like you might expect from other singers: Not just new skin on an old nag, this. Instead, Brel's strikes are more surgical. Watch this and wonder if there are any singers, alive or dead (Brel passed in 1978), who might conjure more song out of their face than him? I don't think so. (His years spent on the cabaret stage were not for nothing.)

I chose this version for the English subtitles. The performance stands with or without the story, but the story adds even more gleam to the song's razor edge. (Appreciation to the translator for adding the double entendres.)