NYLON - May 2008 - (Page 108) FRENCH KICK Girl-power-touting Gallic rap sensation Yelle is making a Technicolor splash on dancefloors across the globe. By Lauren Harris. Photographed by Julian Gilbert Rap beefs are usually the stuff of high-flossing motormouths, not pixies with a penchant for neon, but that didn’t stop 24-year-old Julie Budet from heading into the fray. Back in 2005, the Brittany-born rapper, better known as Yelle, was dreaming up electro-pop anthems with her friend and producer GrandMarnier, and, just for fun, the two decided to take a swipe at rapper Cuizinier (a member of French hipster hip-hop trio TTC). The diss came in the form of “Je Veux Te Voir” (sample lyric: “I wanna see you in a porn flick/ Getting busy with your potato or French fry shaped dick”). After first getting permission from Cuizinier, Yelle posted the track on her MySpace page, and it instantly garnered thousands of hits. Soon, record labels came calling, and that’s when Cuizinier asked her to take it down. Too late. “It’s complicated,” Yelle explains in charmingly accented English. “He hates the song, but I think at the beginning, he was not really upset with it. After it had a little success, he was embarrassed.” By that point, though, the song had been unleashed upon dancefloors throughout France and was quickly spreading across the world. Luckily, behind Yelle’s publicity savvy is a truly great debut album. At first listen, Pop-Up may appear to be a playful electro-pop romp with lyrics about boys, bra sizes, and sex toys—only differentiated from similar American albums by Yelle’s French lilt. But there are several clues as to the more substantive music she is making. Even her name, which is a portmanteau of “Yeah” and “Elle,” embodies a type of exuberance for the female condition that is central to Yelle’s music. She believes that women should be as unfettered in discussing sex as men are. “Sex is not shame, and I think if you talk about sex with fun and humor, it may be easier to understand and for young people, it de-stigmatizes it,” she explains. Before Yelle became the Jocelyn Elders of the French pop scene, she was just the daughter of famous French folk singer Jean François, and although she had been singing since childhood, she never believed she could make a career out of it. In 2000, she met GrandMarnier at a party where they discussed music over marshmallows—an encounter that would prove pivotal for the musical identity it would help Yelle to forge. The two had other musical commitments at the time, but whenever GrandMarnier needed a female voice on a remix, Yelle was his go-to hook girl. It wasn’t until she played her biggest show, at fashionable club Paris Paris, that she knew it was time to take him up on his offer to make a full album. “In my head it was, ‘If it doesn’t work, I’ll stop everything.’ But this night was crazy because everybody screamed, and knew the lyrics. So I said to GrandMarnier, ‘OK, I’m ready.’” The two went about marrying Yelle’s sexually-charged lyrics with GrandMarnier’s samples and production prowess, and the resulting Pop-Up is a distinctly ’80s floor-shaker that seeks to embody the carefree milieu of that era. “We tried to use old keyboards to find the right sound. We really liked the aesthetic of [’80s] bands,” she says. “Now we’re in 2008, but we can say the same things. We can have the light references and the fresh lyrics, and we can talk about parties and sex and little boobs. We have fun.”
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