I discovered Radio Oh-La-La on Boingboing.net in the fall of 2006, and I'm not sure why I started listening, other than the fact that I love boing-boing. The podcast's creator is Natasha Cloutier, and since coming to Europe, I've been determined to meet her. I finally got the chance when I went to Amsterdam at the end of March. She's great, and she's definitely on to something. To me, she's proof that you shouldn't do what people tell you or try to make money--you should just find something you love and sink your teeth in. Have a listen, I've linked her blog in to the right...
There might be 50 thousand techno DJ’s in Holland, but there is only one Natasha Cloutier.
She spins regularly on Sunday night at a club called De Nieuwe Anita in central Amsterdam. Her audience is mostly Dutch, but the regulars, apparently, have come to learn some of the music she plays well enough to sing along.
You see, Natasha has converted Dutch-hipsters into lovers of French-rock. I’m convinced that if Natasha had stepped into one of my French immersion classrooms, she really could have turned things around for my poor, suffering teachers.
Those teachers made us listen to Roche Voisine. He grew up in Edmunston, New Brunswick, but made it big as a rock-star in the French-speaking world. Apparently he was a heart-throb in France, I was never convinced.
Some of today’s French teachers seem to agree with me about Natasha. When I met her she told me she’d been helping a teacher in California with the lyrics to LOVE by Nat King Cole:
L est pour la façon dont tu me regardes
O est le seul pour moi
V est très très extra-ordinaire
E est encore plus que quiconque que vous pouvez adorer
Nat King Cole, by the way, didn’t know French, but he learned it phonetically in order to sing.
Natasha does a lot of lyrical, and historical explaining of the songs featured in her podcast—Radio Oh La La, Franco a Go-Go. For example, it might not be common knowledge that “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra, was originally written in French. Paul Anka is credited as a co-composer of the song, because he essentially re-wrote Gilles Thibau’s original lyrics.
What makes Natasha’s podcasts so great is the fact that she really knows and connects to the music—and she’s a natural translator. Her enthusiasm helps her audience forge their own connections with the music.
On top of dj-ing gigs and podcasting, Natasha runs her own copy-writing and translating company. She speaks French, English, Dutch and Russian all fluently.
She told me that it took her ages to actually openly appreciate French-language music. She’s an only child—so on road-trips with her Francophone mum and Anglophone Dad—she was exposed to a mix of Stevie Wonder, The Beejees, Janice Joplin, Joe Dassin, and Jean-Pierre-Ferlin. For ages, she told me, she was actually embarrassed about loving French music, but she came out of the closest when she started attending a popular weekly gig of French music in Montreal called, “C’est Extra.”
Natasha grew up all over Quebec (her Dad was in the military) but having a parent on both sides of the bilingual divide never allowed her the luxury of fitting into either culture.
“During the first referendum (1980), both French and English kids threw stones at me.”
It’s the French side Natasha says she relates to, and she told me she’s not much into heading West from Quebec, because she always feels such a strong prejudiced from English-Canadians when they hear her last name.
This doesn’t make her any more accepting of French narrow-mindedness.
“For years,” she told me, “My step-mother refused to learn English, but still went to Florida every year and relied on my father to translate. It made me crazy.”
Natasha told me this politics, this linguistic and cultural prejudice definitely played a role in her move to Europe.
The Dutch, she told me, are terrified of anything French.
“They consider it exotic, and France is just a place to go on nice holidays,” she said.
Natasha’s got a strategy going to get over this hurdle, and it seems to be working: Get the novices on board, and just get people communicating.
No comments:
Post a Comment