Marcia Baila – Les Rita Mitsouko

French art-rock in a suburban Quebec City gym

I’d completely forgotten about this bizarre and completely catchy hit from the mid-1980s until a friend put it on a mixed CD for me, during that short period between mixed tapes and playlists (it might even have been a USB stick of songs, can’t remember). However it re-entered my life, it then made its way into my iTunes, where it has remained ever since.

This played on radio (CFNY?) all the time when it came out, one of very few French-language songs to ever be in regular rotation (it also made it to #27 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club hits in 1985, apparently). The video is both entirely of the 1980s and kind of timelessly bizarre; the sharp bob and severe bangs of the lead singer are burned into my memory. I would have seen it on MuchMusic or Good Rockin’ Tonight or Toronto Rocks, or possibly all three.

I don’t think I’m in this photo, but it’s so dark, who knows? And the arm positions do resemble the ones in the video below.

A few years later, the summer I turned seventeen, I went to Quebec City for a six-week French course, the one the government paid for as a way of fostering bilingualism. I was reluctant to do a homestay, understandably afraid that living in an orderly Francophone household might be a difficult adjustment from my chaotic English-speaking one, so I stayed in the residence at the Cégep de Sainte-Foy where I was studying, up the road from downtown Quebec. At the Cégep I met East Coasters for the first time – Haligonians who seemed reserved until they sang Farewell to Nova Scotia drunkenly on the bus, and Newfoundlanders who sang other songs I’d never heard before. I read back issues of Sassy magazine in someone else’s room, mastered ordering “une gaufre” perfectly at the Belgian waffle place on Rue Saint-Jean, and made out with a smart boy from Edmonton after challenging his counterfactual understanding of Canada’s settler culture.

Besides French-language classes, there were mandatory French-language activities. I signed up for dance, where we did gymnastics-like routines to music, and did not have to speak. (There was a lot of dancing in Quebec City that summer, including merengue lessons from our Dominican Republic classmates in the residence hallways.) Our big finale, which I’m guessing we performed somewhere – events like swim meets and talent nights formed part of our program, us teens corralled by earnest Québecois animateurs in their twenties – was a number we danced to “Marcia Baila”. The tape was re-wound again and again as we practiced, the sounds of Paris art-rock ringing off the walls of the Cégep de Ste-Foy gym. I wish I could remember any of the moves we rehearsed to accompany this piece, but in their absence, I’ll just swing along to this video.