Was Jacques Brel the original punk rocker?

[harjit]

This song is so hilarious. :rofl: He must have had the Stan Clan in mind with those lyrics.

Check out the way he punks out toward the end.
Les Flamandes, Les Flamandes, Les Fla Les Fla Les Flamandes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zldo8YrI_pI

[Farkas]

Punk is a music-style that goes against the government. But these days punk should be lightly named because every band is "punk" these days, even though they sing about how they love some dumb broad.

Brel was not punk because the Belgian government has always opressed it's Flemish people (they still do) and then there is some French singing asshole pushing them even deeper down the pit. So, no, he was not a punk rocker.

[harjit]

Brel was not punk because the Belgian government has always opressed it's Flemish people (they still do) and then there is some French singing asshole pushing them even deeper down the pit. So, no, he was not a punk rocker.

I always got the impression that the Flemish were the boring conservatives with a lot of power (so many extreme right-wingers on these boards is a symptom), and the French-speakers were the funky Belgians.

Examples:

Jacques Brel (Mais, bien sur, il est le sujet de ce thread)
Plastic Bertrand (ça plane pour moi)
The Singing Nun (Dominique-nique-nique, qui allait tout simplement...)
Georges Simenon (the Maigret stories)
Jean-Claude Van Damme

One Flamande I like is the tennis player Kim Clijsters. She seems cool.

[Farkas]

I always got the impression that the Flemish were the boring conservatives with a lot of power (so many extreme right-wingers on these boards is a symptom), and the French-speakers were the funky Belgians.

The Flemish are for roughly forty percent conservative but they have no power. The Walloons want to keep Belgium together because they receive a lot of money of the Flemish. Each Flemish family has to pay € 5.000- a year to Wallonia. That is 289777 INR. ;)

[Jimbo Gomez]

Brel's oeuvre was mainly sung in French. I'm moving this thread to the francophone forum.

[Königin Luise von Preußen]

Brel's oeuvre was mainly sung in French. I'm moving this thread to the francophone forum.

why? where is it? :confused:

[Baron_Corvo]

I'm old enough to remember that song, her story ended in tragedy. The poor woman was badly ripped off by her nunnery, who took her earnings to send to poor orphans in Africa (or something like that), but when the taxman came calling they didn't want to know; she was left to shoulder the bill herself. She was left destitute and I believe eventually committed suicide.

Brel was interesting, the American singer Scott Walker recorded an album of his songs in the late 60s (one, called "Jackie", made the charts). I understood though that his songs don't translate well into English and lose much of their lyricism when it is done.