Paroles, Paroles
Song of the Day 08/01/2022
A French-Italian singer born in Egypt, Dalida was able to sing in eleven different languages and sold millions of records around the world. Her most famous song, though, Paroles, Paroles is in French, (it means words, words in English), and features the considerably gorgeous Alain Delon.
The lyrics detail a pretty banal conversation between a man and a woman, something about the man offering caramels and chocolates, and the girl saying, like, no, dude, these are all empty words. Continuously, the woman scoffs at all of the man’s compliments. What she really wants is his love and full attention, and fuck his chocolates.
Paroles, Paroles is a cover of an Italian duet, Parole, Parole, composed by Gianni Ferrio, who was better known for the music he scored for Spaghetti Westerns, like Giorgio Ferroni’s Blood for a Silver Dollar, which was included in the soundtrack for Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. In Italy, Ferrio’s Parole, Parole was a hit, so big that Dalida’s brother, Orlando Gigliotti, went to Italy to beg the rights holder, Manolo Broccoli, to allow Dalida to record her version. Little did the Italians know that Dalida’s take on it would grow to become more popular than their own, even in Italy.
While recording the song, Alain Delon had a few demands. First, that Dalida record her part before his. Second, that he could record his part in the dark while sitting on a stool and looking at Dalida in the eyes (sic). Apparently, it had to be a stool, not a chair. One must never sing on a chair. When toward the end of the song, Delon repeats ‘que tu c'est belle’ (how beautiful you are), he did it not because it was in the lyrics, but because he wanted Dalida to know how beautiful he thought she was. The recording would spark the beginning of a multi-year affair between the two narcissists.
A large part of the French iteration’s success may be owed to Orlando Gigliotti’s rearrangement of the song’s instrumentals, which leaned heavily on bossa nova, the samba jazz from Brazil developed in the late 50s and early 60s. Following the single’s immense success, Dalida recorded the song in German twice, once in 1973 and the other in 1984; both were flops.
Paroles, Paroles has been commonly used by French pundits to call out politicians who never keep their promises. I suppose it does make sense that a horny, flirty man’s empty words would become, on a larger scale, a metaphor for political deceit and neglect. Ironically, it was even used by the far-right, sung mediocrely by Marine Le Pen in 2012 as a response to Nikolas Sarkozy. Dalida did not respond for comment. It was also sampled, in 2018, by the Algerian rapper Soolking as a way of evoking the everlasting consequences of French colonialism.