Date: Mar 29, 1975
Weeks: 1
vs.
Date: June 2, 2001
Weeks: 5
So once again we find the same song on the charts twice. But which version is better?
Patti Labelle is one of the true talents of popular music, to be sure, and this song is an excellent showcase for her talent as the lead singer of the group with her name. Her bold voice grabs your attention even as she sings a whole lot of nonsense. Her backing singers are also very good, keeping the song's base vocals going along while Labelle elaborates.
The music is very engaging, as well. The bass and drum lines in particular are excellent. I also like the synthesized organ all right. It's surreal sound creates a sort of heightened reality that seems appropriate for a song with this much fun lyrical nonsense. The brass section is all right, but it sounds small, and cheap. In fact, a lot of my impression of the music in this song is that it's not living up to the larger-than-life effort Patti Labelle is putting into it.
The lyrics in this version are pretty cleverly written. It's the story of a man who meets a woman, Lady Marmalade, in New Orleans. It's likely, but I guess not certain, that she's a prostitute. Anyway, she rocks his world, and he remembers their night together forever afterward. Then there's a lot of nonsense like "gitchi gitchi ya ya da da," which almost seems like it's only there to serve as cover for them to slip in the part that was the most controversial, and easily the most famous part of the song, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soi)," which is French for "Do you want to go to bed with me (tonight)?" Such is the song's lasting cultural impact that I've heard many people claim this is the only French they know.
At any rate, the song comes off fairly feminist, at least for the 70s. A woman asserts control of her sexuality in a way that a man is totally unprepared for. Potential prostitution aside, it's practically a declaration of sexual independence.
Which is probably why it got picked up as the song to be remade to promote the 2001 movie Moulin Rouge. And it's hard for the original to compete with this remake, because it's impossible to avoid noticing that the remake has a much, much larger production budget, and it's put to good use.
For one thing, as great as Patti Labelle is, it's hard for her to compete with the sheer amount of talent present here. Christina Aguilera and Pink have several other No. 1 hits and are surely some the greatest vocal talents of the 2000s. Mya is also a very talented singer, although she may not have quite the same resume as those two. And I don't know a lot about Lil' Kim's other work, but I like how she was used here.
The remake's production is clearly guided by the philosophy that bigger is better, which is definitely true for this song. It's a bold song, and the bolder the better. What's bolder than getting three of the most talented singers of the time, adding a rap verse, updating the quality of the synthesized instrumentation, and extending the song just enough to make it bigger without wearing out its welcome?
And they managed to keep the feminist theme intact. They got a woman to do the rap verse, which includes lines like "we independent women, some mistake us for whores." That one line manages to updates the feminism by suggesting that Lady Marmalade isn't a prostitute, she's just a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it.
My verdict: Like it. I like both versions. But I have to give the edge to the 2001 remake. I just like the additional bigness, and the interesting variety of the different singers' voices.
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