“Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” came hard on the heels of “Groovejet” as a revivalist disco hit. It also works as a despondent, pleading answer record: where Sophie Ellis-Bextor embraces the dancefloor as a flirtatious zone of mystery and ambiguity, “Lady” begs for resolution. Lyrically, musically, emotionally, it circles its sampled groove like water circling a drain. Where “Groovejet” is spry, happy to lose itself in the possibility of disco, “Lady” finds a rut and keeps scratching it deeper in its despairing neediness. The singles’ proximity does “Lady” no favours – this suitor, and his simple plea, is run rings round.
What’s interesting for me about the comparison is that “Lady” is outclassed even though it’s classier. Where Spiller’s production was a lucky dip of disco sonics, Modjo cut their cloth from the most impeccable of sources: Chic, specifically late-period soundtrack single “Soup For One”. Soup For One – the film – sounds missable, a Woody Allen-esque rom-com about a single dude’s struggles in 80s NYC. “Soup For One”, the single, condenses anything you might need to know about the topic into five faintly paranoid minutes: it’s worth the salvage. Modjo brighten Nile Rodgers’ riff and refine it further, extracting a tincture of frustration. They pay the sample a sizeable compliment: hearing “Lady”, you imagine it’s from earlier in Chic’s career than it is.
By 2000, that career was a dance music touchstone. In Disco’s heyday, Chic’s British chart presence was consistent, but there was no specific breakthrough. Each incarnation – the irresistibly lean party funk of “Le Freak”, the barbed and brittle social observation of “Good Times”, or the terrible frozen longing of their slow jams – bobbed around in the top ten. Part of the fabric, but not dominant. Instead, this is their moment – the pristine, precise Rodgers/Edwards sound, “glass mountains on fire” as Melody Maker’s Paul Lester once called it, became a shorthand for disco itself. And their sense of economy – disco as a vehicle for intense emotion coolly expressed – was the backbone of the music’s French and international revival.
Which is something Modjo get right. “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” has few ideas, it’s an emotional monochrome, and it comes off worse in an unfair comparison. But it lands a genuine feeling – the awkward anomie of the dancefloor – making it a track I won’t play often but appreciate when I do. Yann Destal’s vocal is an animal chewing its own tail, but there’s some sense of relief in the track’s secret weapon: its springy, Bernard Edwards-esque bassline, which drags “Lady” out of its own soup for one and at least offers the possibility of liberation.
Score: 7
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1. Great sleeve! 2. BUNNY WARNING: There is another Chic-sampling record coming up soon, let us not speak of it until we have to.
Pleasant enough but a bit tasteful for me at the time. Not being a club kid, Groovejet worked for me as a pop song, whereas I couldn’t really find an entry point to this one.
I like it more now, but it’s still not really something I’d actively seek out. The recent Chic revival certainly casts it in a flattering light though, it’s aged very well. There was a mash-up with Brandy & Monica’s The Boy Is Mine that I preferred then, but listening back that’s aged terribly. (The mash-up, not TBIM)
7 is about right.
Further down the top ten, A1 took a predictably hefty fall to #4, opening up for Sonique’s ‘Sky’ at #2 and Wyclef Jean’s ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ featuring arguably more famous now than then The Rock at #3
N-Sync also entered at #9 with ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ – which I always remember for Justin Timberlake’s bizarre pronunciation of the title (you probably saw it used as a Meme on Friday). They never quite took off here until just before Justin went solo.
My favourite new entry in the top 40 this week was Unforgivable Sinner by Lene Marlin, the follow-up to her deceptively dark spring hit ‘Sitting Down Here’.
I was going to dismiss this Popular entry as some sort of elaborate conceptual prank – I mean, “Modjo”, what kind of a name is that – of course listening to it I recognise it wholeheartedly and it feels like a deserved, if not groundbreaking, number one single. I can [6] by the look in your eyes
The video looks like an excerpt from an obscure Scandinavian film about being a teenager.
I found the re-emergence of the ‘French House’ sound at number one quite interesting with this single. It did become a bit of a wide-ranging genre but seemed to have peaked in 98/99. I’m thinking specifically of the very famous bunnied group, Cassius and Air. Of course we had Stardust the year before as well. Although the filter effect was something quite common to all French House artists, this has that ‘disco filter’ reminiscent of Stardust and Music Sounds Better With You.
I don’t personally rate this song as highly as some of the efforts by the above artists and in hindsight it seems derivative of the genre trail blazers.
To link back into one of the discussions on the ‘Music’ thread, Madonna’s Confessions album would have a few songs with nods to French House, another example of her constant desire to keep in-touch with current trends. Madonna aficionados will have more of an idea whether this was unusual in being quite a few years after the peak of the genre that provided the influence.
I didn’t think I had heard this before, but in fact it was familiar to me. Checked quickly to make sure I wasn’t confusing it with “Soup For One”: Nope, definitely “Lady”. Obviously cut from similar cloth to “Groovejet”. I originally gave Gj 7/10, but I think I’ll retroactively bump that up to 8/10. 8/10 for this too. Unlike Spiller, Modjo managed a Hot 100 appearance, peaking at #81.
Enjoyed the video too, even though it’s not what I would’ve pictured for this single. Predictably I found myself trying to guess which US state it was filmed in. Turned out not to be a US state at all, with a dead giveaway I had overlooked at the very beginning. At least my feeling that it looked New Englandish wasn’t far off geographically.
New to me. Quite liked it at first, with its Chic sample and skewiff vocals reminiscent of other French favourites, but by the end I was bored. Does the album version add anything substantial to stretch it out another 80 seconds? 5.
Number 10 in Australia, hanging around the charts there for 21 weeks.
there’s definitely a seam of melancholy that runs through this song and its repetitive quality suits its somewhat obsessive and nostalgic mood. The sample does more than clip a simple guitar riff but also includes (what sounds like) Bernard Edwards’ subtly varied bass line.
The video is like a contemporary ‘Jules et Jim’ with hand-held camerawork and a carefree energy that also (to me anyway) seems to suggest a memory of a happier simpler time.
New to me, and first few listens it’s pretty dull. They’ve sampled lots of Chic without distilling out anything approaching a hook. Put that together with an ugly vocal and unpleasantly needy lyrics and the sense that there’s only half a song here – the thing doesn’t sound finished either writing- or production-wise – and in my books you have a:
4 or 5
I’m not entirely fanatical about this track, but credit where it’s due.
Though I knew this was based on a Chic sample, I hadn’t heard the original track until now. Having assumed that Modjo were maybe little more than piggybacking onto the original, it’s clear that “Lady”- while relying on that sample- does enough different with it to stand up as a song in its own right.
If anything, Tom is right- Modjo make the hook sound like it comes from an earlier (and better) Chic track than it does.
As with the rest of the disco revival I found this alien and unwelcoming at the time (for reasons I’ve talked about – perhaps too much – on other threads already) and approached my re-listen with a sense of doom, but actually for the first time I can hear something good here – the strung-out loneliness, the mechanical looping, and especially the way the baseline comes out at the end. It’s still the last thing I’d want to hear in a nightclub though.
Instant recognition for this one – which has subsequently had “Hey Ya” levels of weddings-parties-Radio 2-anything exposure, surely? Or maybe that’s just the weddings I go to. Never heard the original before – sad, and not in a good way.
I don’t get the chilly, desperate vibe others are detecting here; to me it’s just an everybody-on-the-floor party banger, with a particular appeal to girls who still find it flattering to be called a lady. And as such I think it works really, really well, to begin with at least – the moment when the vocals come walloping in, after that long, almost leisurely intro (“we’ll just wait for it to come around on the guitar here”, as Arlo Guthrie said), was a real rush. It works in particular because at that precise moment you hear that chord sequence beginning all over again: you know exactly what you’re going to hear, but there’s no time to think about it because it’s already starting. In its simplicity, its relentlessness & its slightly hectoring positivity, it’s a fairground ride of a song. But it’s much too long for what it is – you wouldn’t want to be stuck on a fairground ride for 3 minutes 42 seconds. 7 is about right.
Is this the video that inspired Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien”?
Anyway, I have a fondness for the way the samples intertwine with what else is going on. It’s very similar to Stardust in lots of ways, but unfortunately for Modjo, it doesn’t match up to MSBWY. Where “Groovejet” uses it’s Disco lifts to weave in and out of SEB’s vocal, Modjo use the lightly processed vocal to weave in and out of the Rodgers/Edwards sample. I find myself concentrating on the intricacies of the guitar/bass dynamic which dulls the impact of the vocal hooks. It’s imbalanced compared to MSBWY and “Groovejet”, but yet, there’s still something going on here that stops me from writing it off as just another Disco revival track. It works better in an unobtrusive way, like in a coffee shop, or at the gym. Not a club banger, but it never was meant to be one, really. (8)
@thefatgit – he of course took the title from Daphne & Celeste’s lyrics in February.
@flahr
#4 The French house sound is clearly evident on Music (particularly in the title track and ‘Impressive Instant’). It reappears on Confessions (Mirwais Ahmadzaï co-wrote/co-produced a couple of tracks and you can hear it on ‘Get Together’ too, which he wasn’t involved in). So maybe it would be fairer to say she was hanging on to the sound rather than latching on late.
As for Modjo, I find ‘Lady’ a total bore.
‘Chillin” was much more fun, although pretty throwaway.
Of the French house big hitters of the time, Daft Punk ‘One More Time’, Cassius ‘Cassius 1999’ and Stardust ‘Music Sounds Better with You’ were and are really really great.
The real classic (of what I remember from the charts, I didn’t delve particularly far into the genre) was Cassius ‘Feeling for You’.
Etienne de Crécy’s ‘Am I Wrong?’, I think you mean.
I adore ‘Lady’, but to be honest the entire visible genre is there to be adored, whichever had made it to no.1. I’m sure there must be an equally terrible French House hinterland, but it never reached my ears. (9), because Groovejet got to ten first.
I let the Modjo LP play out on Spotify after finishing the entry and it was a very pleasant Sunday morning listen, spoiled only by a “lounge” version of “Lady” at the end.
Late 90s French house was a leeetle bit too tasteful for me, on the whole – I didn’t really go for Daft Punk until Discovery, and the sound peaked for me with the much more maximalist/ultra-repetitive “So Much Love To Give” by Bangalter & Falcon. (or by Together – was that a pseudonym or a Gym & Tonic style rip off?)
I did once put on the full version of So Much Love To Give at a dinner party, at a subtly increasing volume just to see what happened. People seem to be too polite to say anything, but you can see them getting a bit side-eyed around the six-minute mark. One guest was still singing it when he left at the end of the night.
Together was Bangalter & Falcon’s own psuedonym. There was a charting rip-off but that was cheekily credited to ‘Freeloaders Featuring The Real Thing’. And they were somewhat shafted again by a saucy Swede not long after that. Bangalter in particular seemed to end up having a hand in at least half a dozen number ones between the end of the 90s and 00s without getting his own. But I digress…
Etienne De Crecy’s ‘Tempovision’ LP from 2000 is great (as were his first and second Super Discount comps, of which a third chapter was finally released just a few months ago) although I spent more time that year listening to Laurent Garnier’s ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ (obviously more techno than house).
Too early to talk about ‘Confessions On A Dancefloor’ but it’s more Moroder than Motorbass.
#18 – gosh; didn’t know relentless repetition of a disco sample was a thing (or a sub-genre). As a long-time fan of things like this and this – not to mention this, this and this – I naturally approve.
As in all of these cases, I think the relentless simplicity of the Modjo track is its greatest strength and source of vitality; it’s certainly a big part of why I can’t hear it as dry or exhausted, or not until they try to introduce some variation near the end (and largely fail).
@17-19. Honestly, what’s the appeal of ‘maximalist/ultra-repetitive’ stuff like SMLTG? Is it the same as the attraction that very conceptual art starting with Duchamp sometimes has: an extension or even reductio of previous assumptions is presented…. which can amuse if you are in a contrarian mood? At any rate, listening for the first few times now, SMLTG is *so* boring that it’s almost enough to make me rethink my love for ‘Da Funk’ which I guess is where this sort of thing begins for me. But, no, listening to ‘Da Funk’ again now, it does *enough* to keep things interesting – its sonic and production pallete, despite feeling quite pared back in 1997, is so *much wider* than SMLTG’s. It feels really well put-together, worth reverse engineering as countless parties in fact did, whereas SMLTG feels slapped-together. Banghalter & co. probably knocked SMLTG off in an hour or two at most, had a laugh about it, and then were amazed when such a piece of practice-room fluff became any sort of hit.
Since dance music was made to split hairs to: Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor–era stuff seems much more of the Stuart Price–filter house vintage than the turn-of-the-century French house we have here.
Looking forward to seeing the inevitable discussion on later French house once the lead single from Confessions on a Dance Floor gets unbunnied! (There’s actually another 2000 bunny that I associate with that song, but more on that soon…)
This felt like a joyous little throwaway to me – hadn’t the foggiest idea that it’s sampling something so utterly miserable, and missed just how needy it was. A big part of me still feels that way, and of course it’s got a tough job holding up against Groovejet as one of those. But the treatment of the sample genuinely makes it an improvement on its source to me, and that’s some feat. Worthy of a 7 for that alone? I’m not sure I can disagree.
#11 – it feels like the sort of thing that would’ve got a lot of play on local radio with their Radio 1.75-style playlisting at the time – similar to Ultra Naté’s “Free” from a couple of years earlier, which got such heavy rotation on those stations that it seemed to spend forever at 11 or 12 on the commercial radio chart (which at that point was sales-only for the top 10 but a Billboard-esque sales-airplay hybrid below that, so the eleventh spot would nearly always go to an airplay monster like “Free” – if memory serves, the rules would get even sillier in years to come.)
However, it’s felt to me like its afterlife has been rather lower-profile than Outkast’s ubiquitous I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bunny. On the flipside, I did hear it occasionally for some years afterwards, which is more than I can say about many of 2000’s chart-toppers!
This is an attractive tune with a cool video. It could get a bit repetitive if it went on any longer. I like the way the vocal just teeters on being a bit smoothie but has that urgent tone that keeps pulling it back. I thought this was from a year or two later than 2000.
Gosh, this was number one when I went off to university.
There is literally nothing else I can say nor want to say about this record (other than it seems to have been around FOR EVER)
Just to say I posted a rather link-heavy comment yesterday which has been auto-modded – any chance of rescuing it?
[sorted — a passing lordly admin]
I always found this to be a Tesco Value of the oft mentioned Stardust single. There’s so much more punch and energy in that record, this feels bit vanilla to me. It’s decent enough don’t get me wrong, and it seems to have stuck around longer than Spiller has at parties/weddings etc but its a rather inferior song.
I still bought the cassingle.
This was notably the record that finally proved that number one singles could still spend more than one week at the top and, after the rapid turnover of the summer, two weeks seemed an age. It also achieved that second week with an increased sale. It’s ironic that it should have blocked Sonique, the last artist to have managed more than one week at the top while Kylie Minogue’s On A Night Like This became the first number two entry to be blocked by an incumbent number one since Pure Shores held off Artful Dodger’s Moving Too Fast.
I liked Lady at the time but from fifteen years distance it feels oddly anonymous and uninteresting now; one of more than a few records from this era that were once popular in clubs but seem to have completely vanished off the radar.
You don’t hear it anymore, except sometimes in piped in radio in the supermarket. I admit I once cried to this in a cab.
To me, people who preferred “Music Sounds Better With You” to this are as incomprehensible as those who think “Genie in a Bottle” holds a candle to either “Baby One More Time” or “Oops! I Did It Again”. It just does so much more with so much less for me.
It’s interesting to hear people talk about how this never gets played. It’s been a regular feature of some of the recent comments – this never gets played anymore, etc – and I think it’s a function of one listening to music in more traditional ways.
This, for instance, is on GTA V, so for a period, I heard it extremely regularly. It’s also a staple of the free music channels that are on the Sky EPG at around 360-390 – bung on one of those whilst doing the housework and you’ll inevitably come across some generic list programme (Top Dancefloor Fillers of the 00s or some such) that is played every two or three days and there it will be (and Groovejet and Madison Avenue and any number of similar Disco inspired tracks from the early part of the century). Similarly, Kerrang TV has the same set of videos go around and around – Offspring’s number 1, The Bad Touch, Blink, My Chemical Bunny, all that lot. I don’t listen to the radio much but several of these channels appear to have links with commercial radio stations and, if that’s any indication, some station is likely playing Modjo right now in the UK and will probably be doing so for a good while yet. Seek and, I am reasonably confident, ye shall find.
This is where I go off to university and looking at the list ahead, it’s very noticeable how pre-September I remember them all crystal clearly and post-September I have no idea some of them were ever number 1, or even released.
I liked Modjo enough to buy the song in a charity shop years after the fact. I also had good memories of the lounge mix, but on re-listening discovered that it was, er, not very good after all. I do agree with everyone that Stardust was way better – Modjo certainly felt like the tail-end of the French disco house thing for me. Discovery would come along a bit later but I see that as a separate development, a move on from the Stardust/Cassius/Modjo crop.
I think there are two reasons this song and similar others are now virtually unplayed. The first is the relative anonymity of the artist; A1 at least make for a decent `where are they now` feature. The second is that 2000 is long enough ago for it to have faded from the memory while not being long enough ago for nostalgia nights.
I’ve also looked at 2000 as a whole. Of the 33 acts who scored a number one single that year only eleven* (only one now bunnied) who never scored a number one in any other calender year. Of the twenty two that remain it’s interesting how few of them were getting to number one with their best material which perhaps explains why so few of these records are played now.
As for Modjo themselves they were the third and last chart topping act of the year who could be classed as a dance act – Fragma and Black Legend being the other two** – and unfortunately for them their genre moved on big time.
* If anybody double checks my count I’ve not included Melanie C in my eleven due to her prior success as a group member and over simplified by crediting Don’t Give Up to Bryan Adams while rather inconsistently ignoring Lisa Left Eye Lopez and two other bunnied credited artists.
** Chicane might possibly be a fourth but their chart topper doubles as a stadium rock anthem.
#20/21 – I remember that with the next Daft Bunny record, I used some editing software to make Hum After All, mp3s (god, remember mp3s, those were the days) of all the songs that faded out exactly at the halfway point.
But then one of the themes of Popular is that “I will now sit down and listen to a record” isn’t necessarily even in the top five of ways that people use music (and buy music to use) – something on while you do the housework, for example, is something where an enjoyable and not-massively-changing groove can be a bonus.
Weirdly it’s the end of SMLTG that really annoys me, that it’s just faded down with no change.
Re30 etc: I’m going second Cumbrian here – I’m not sure, in today’s fragmented pop world, how we define ‘doesn’t get played anymore’ – other than, as some people suggest, the wedding circuit. But even at the peak of my wedding attendance, I wasn’t going to enough weddings for it to feel like a representative sample. Plus, the same two friends of mine DJed at least three of the weddings I went to. And there was a least one wedding where Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth summed up what was played.
On the other hand, as Cumbrian says, both this and Groovejet come up plenty of times on TV pop channels here in the UK – which is the only place I’d actually expect to hear this kind of music from this era anyway.
#21 I can’t speak for anyone else but the buzz I get from SMLTG is closer to the one I get from loud drone music – its sense of perpetual peak reminds me a bit of listening to Glenn Branca, for instance – than from, say, minimal techno (let alone anything song-ier). Essentially psychedelic (though “So Much Love To Give” came out long after I stopped doing recreational drugs, so I’m not talking from direct experience). The addition of the beat changes the repetitive experience, of course, makes it feel less purely like meditation and more like, I dunno, distance running or something?
STAT ATTACK: Modjo’s “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” was played 464 times in the past 30 days across UK radio, mostly on Heart subsidiaries but with a respectable 12 plays on Absolute Radio 00s and 1 play each on Magic and BBC Radio 2.
“Groovejet” managed 476, Fragma a paltry 209. “Gym and Tonic” has not been played in the past 30 days.
For comparison, the current #1 and #3 are doing about ten times that.
Based on all the conversations about whether you hear these played anymore, I thought I’d have a look to see whether people are still listening to these songs anymore (which is a slightly different question) by looking at last.fm & Spotify. I had a look at all the number ones we’ve had from 2000 so far and was surprised to see that this one actually gets a lot of listens.
It’s 3rd highest of the year on last.fm with around 24k listens in the last 6 months (behind Eminem on 49k & Britney’s Ooops on 32k) and 4th on Spotify on 9m total listens (behind the same two on 49m / 20m and Craig David’s 7 Days on 12.5m)
This means it’s getting lots more listens than either Madonna, or Robbie for example. Groovejet is way down the list (probably because it’s not on Spotify).
For comparison A1 gets just over 1000 on last.fm & 1.1m on Spotify vs A-ha’s 90k & 45m.
Bottom of the pile are Geri, Oxide & Neutrino and Billie Piper
#38 I wonder to what degree Spotify’s curatorial efforts have an influence on these figures. I can imagine ‘Lady’ being whacked into “best of 2000” playlists more readily than ‘Bag It Up’ or ‘Day & Night’.
I’m sure many listeners will seek it out independently of course, but I find it interesting how curated playlists are an alternative radio format of sorts.
Re: 36
Is 12 plays over one month respectable on a station that only plays music from the that decade? It doesn’t sound too impressive at first hearing
Although I don’t know if Absolute 00s skews it playlist much like its 90s version towards a particular demographic (lots of Oasic and Prodigy, very little Whigfield or Boyzone).
Playlists could well be part of that – I’d guess more disco house ones than ‘best of 2000’ otherwise more obvious candidates like ‘Music’ or ‘Rock DJ’ would be as popular as Modjo, and they’re not.
YouTube supports the Spotify playlist effect – Modjo has 3.4m views on there which is pretty respectable, but way behind Craig David’s 7 Days, Rock DJ, Music, Mel C & Born to me you happy
#40 It’s not a hugely mixed bag, you’ve got acts with broad pop appeal like P!nk and Kanye West but the skew is definitely towards guitars: http://absoluteradio.co.uk/00s/music/
Daft Punk are a dancey exception, but I suppose they are ‘quite Q magazine’
#41 that’s true, I guess genre playlists are generally more popular than “best of [year]” ones, which would perhaps appeal in the main to BTL-commenting chart geeks: I happily self-identify as such and have made several year-themed playlists.
Another explanation is that fans of album acts like Robbie and Madonna might own Sing When You’re Winning and Music on CD album, and would either listen to songs from it on the CD or an mp3 through an iTunes import, using Spotify for stuff they don’t own (that said; I often use Spotify for music I own on CD out of pure convenience, having long lost my ‘main’ iTunes library)
#18 – that’s quite something. I think a bit of work has gone into it, too – the fade-in section in particular is terrific (not going to give pointers, partly out of laziness but mainly because you really do have to hear the whole thing). I could imagine dancing to it (although I probably wouldn’t dance again for the rest of the night) but at the same time it’s quite meditational, genuinely ‘trancey’. See also links at #20.
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Fairly nice, but a tad repetitive for me. Still, I’d go with a 6/10 here.