Foux du Fafa (Foux Da Fa Fa)

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Flight of the Conchords can be uneven, but, as someone who studied French in high school, I absolutely loved “Foux Da Fa Fa”:

While “Foux Da Fa Fa” sounds like a stereotypical 1960s French pop song, “A Kiss is Not A Contract” clearly borrows quite explicitly from the old-school video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson (about 45 seconds in):

(Edit: The original YouTube video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson that I embedded is no longer available, and other versions, like this one, aren’t embeddable — by those of us who lack Serge’s certain je ne sais quoi, at least.)

When I first listened to “Foux Da Fa Fa,” I missed a few of the lyrics, so I looked them up. Unfortunately, HBO does not provide the French lyrics with accents. Of course, they’re not really in correct French to start with, either. As a public service, I’ve added the accents, fixed a few spelling and grammar errors, and provided a rough English translation:

Foux da Fa Fa (with English translation)

Je voudrais ~~une~~ un croissant (I would like a crescent roll)
Je suis enchanté (I am enchanted/delighted [to meet you])
Où est le la bibliotheque? (Where is the library?)
Voilà mon passeport (Here/there is my passport)
Ah, Gérard Depardieu (Ah, Gerard Depardieu [a famous French actor])
Un Une baguette, ah ha ha, oh oh oh oh (a loaf of French bread)
Ba Ba ba-ba Bow! (Ba ba ba-ba bow [gibberish])
Foux da fa fa (Foux da fa fa [no, it doesn't mean anything])
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Et maintenant le voyage à la supermarché! (And now the trip to the supermarket!)
Le pamplemousse (Grapefruit)
Ananas (Pineapple)
Jus d’orange (Orange juice)
Boeuf (Beef)
~~Soup~~ Soupe du jour (Soup of the day)
Le camembert (Camembert [cheese])
~~Jacque~~ Jacques Cousteau (Jacques Cousteau [the undersea explorer])
Baguette (Loaf of French bread)
Mais oui (But yes/of course)
Bonjour (Hello/good day)
Bonjour
Bonjour
Bonjour, monsieur (Good day, sir)
Bonjour mon petit bureau de change (Hello, my little foreign exchange)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Voilà – le la conversation ~~a la~~ au parc. (Look, conversation at the park)
Où est le livre? (Where is the book?)
À la bibliotheque (At the library)
Et le la musique ~~dance~~ danse? (And the dance music?)
~~Et le~~ À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
~~Et le~~ À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
C’est ci, baby! (This is it, baby!)
Un, deux, trois, quatre (One, two, three, four)
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
Pardon moi? (Excuse me?)
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
…Uh…
Splish splash
…Uh…
Eh…
Je ne comprends pas. (I don’t understand.)
Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Eh?
Eh? Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Uh ….No.
Hmmm.
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Ba ba ba-ba bow!

“Foux Da Fa Fa” won’t be on the new Flight of the Conchords EP, The Distant Future, but “Robots” obviously will.

Binary solo!

Addendum: The Flight of the Conchords album is available (on CD and in MP3 format), and it includes Foux du Fafa. (Note the spelling.)

Posted in Flight of the Conchords, Media | 3 Comments »

Comments

Wobbly says:

January 1, 2012 at 12:39 pm

Awesome song. And you need to fix «passeport» and «français». Bonne année et bonne santé!
Isegoria says:

January 1, 2012 at 1:14 pm

Bonne année et bonne santé à vous aussi, Wobbly! (J’ai fait les corrections.)
Mattman says:

May 11, 2012 at 4:05 pm

I think mon petit bureau de change actually sounds more like:

Bonjour mon petit pierrot de chien.
Hello my little clown dog.

It’s the chien/change where it doesn’t fit for me when I listen to it.

gaikokumaniakku: Tangentially related: https://simplicius76.sub stack.com/p/3m22-zircon- debunking-misconceptions At the link, a military expert criticizes Russian hypersonic weapons.
bob sykes: LBJ also kept a cooler of beer in that Caddy, and he usually was drinking a beer while he drove around.
Jim: Design really is everything.
Jim: Superb excerption.
Jim: I predicted thith.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...
Bob Sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Namur: Well, it’s all about EROI (Energy Returned on Invested). Can this machine produce more energy in the form of natural gas than it consumes in the first place? Also, the energy to build and operate it also counts. Now, let’s say that it works: we are still far away for something like it that works for Diesel, the holy grail of our energy society.

Isegoria

Foux du Fafa (Foux Da Fa Fa)

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