Now that the web has become the main repository for detailed information about the quirkiest facets of popular culture, it's hard to imagine that MTV once provided, in a limited way, a similar service. I remember watching the Week in Rock one Sunday afternoon back in the early 90s and seeing a feature on an 60's video jukebox of sorts that played short videos on demand. The item was apparently more successful in Europe than here, or there was more European material for the box, and the piece reported on the sheer novelty of the device. I've since seen a post on this same subject on Metafilter, which of course provided more detailed information and links and so on.

One of the clips MTV showed charmed me completely. It depicted, in black and white, a young woman on a swing, singing in French about "all the young boys and girls." Pop in a 60's vein, sing songy melody with an elegantly simple arpeggiated arrangement, all sung by a curiously beautiful young French woman. I wrote down the phrase which stuck out from the clip they showed, in hopes that someday I might find the song and the singer. For days I wandered around with that phrase in my head and a half-remembered melody. The arrangement faded from my mind, but that line and the charm of the song continued looping over and over. Many years later, allmusic appeared, and then google appeared, and I could finally search for the song.

"Tous les garcons et les filles" was Francoise Hardy's earliest and probably greatest hit. It was a shock to hear the song again, this time in full. It so shocked me at first, how different it was from what I only barely remembered from the fifteen seconds or so that I heard on MTV. But it is lovely nonetheless.

This page presents a selection of Hardy's songs from the 70's in realaudio format. While I am certain that the broadband among us can simply p2p entire reams of her material at much better fidelity, for this 56k user, complete streamed songs that play immediately, even if marred by the odd quality of realaudio encoding, can be quite pleasurable, especially songs as engaging as these. My French is so old and rusty that I can't understand the lyrical content of the songs, but they are quite nice nonetheless. I recommend giving Francoise a listen, and checking out the photo of her face which accompanies her allmusic bio.