Saturday, October 23, 2010

Hello, I Love You and Baudelaire's "Á une passante"

1980s copy of Baudelaire's poetry


As well as the oft-cited musical resemblance of Hello, I Love You to The Kinks All Day And All Of The Night (and the never cited - up until now! - resemblance of My Eyes Have Seen You to The Kinks You Really Got Me, both of these tracks making the top ten in the US in 1964 - remember... Morrison's original Elektra bio had The Kinks as one of his favourite rock/pop groups), the resemblance also between the lyrics of HILY and French poet Charles Baudelaire's Á une passante from his collection of poems Tableaux Parisiens is quite striking...

Compare for instance the lines (badly translated here by Joanna Richardson in 1975) to the lyrics of HILY:

Tall, slender... Noble and lithe, her leg was sculptural... She holds her head so high, like a statue in the sky... her arms are wicked and her legs are long...







Early 1960s copy of Baudelaire's poetry, in French only








Of further note... as memory serves me (well or badly), HILY was used on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone's movie Platoon, The Cure have also covered HILY, as well as Nigel Kennedy on his Doors Concerto and there has also been a hit parody of the song by R.E.M. (although perhaps not evident as a parody at the time) with their track Pop Song '89 from their album Green. Here's the uncensored version of the latter:

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