What Could've Been for Alizee in the U.S.

[Corsaire]

Originally Posted by Bigdan

I have the painfull duty to be... agreed with you.

Thanks for the support Bigdan...
I do feel mostly lonely on AAm forums. I think this is because I try my best to analyse situations and state facts regardless of what Alizée means to me. I will not intervene most of the time, but when the illusion becomes unhealthy, I think someone has to do the dirty job. We have to call it as it is and not let our admiration/love/dedication/respect for the little Tinker Bell blind our judgement.

People keep mentioning that Alizée might occasionally visit this place (which I doubt very much, but it isn’t impossible) and from time to time, there are some concerns about the way we are perceived from a general public standpoint. Allowing all sorts of unsubstantiated statements (not directed at anyone in particular) unchallenged does not help giving us a good image.

[JoeNY]

Originally Posted by Corsaire

The problem I see with your line of reasoning is that those YouTube numbers for Alizée are/were mainly generated by days gone by dance moves, panties display, sexy look and bathing suit pictures. I am all for promoting Alizée, but let us be realistic, if you were to subtract the views and comments that relate to her teenage beauty and sexy moves, those numbers might not even be 5% of what they are. I have introduced Alizée to countless people and although every single one of them (male and female) commented on her exceptional beauty and grace, I doubt very much that a single one would care to see one of her shows, let alone stand in line for an autograph.

I can’t speak for other countries, but one can easily list 5-10 French female singers (Mylène Farmer, Patricia Kaas, Vanessa Paradis, Véronique Sanson, Mireille Mathieu...) that could show up in Canada tomorrow and get way more interest generated than Alizée can. The potential might be there, but I really doubt she is the most popular female French singer in the world right now, not even close.

And that is not counting other female francophone artists that are not of French nationality, like Céline Dion or Lara Fabian.

I agree with you, which is why the thread title is "What Could've Been for Alizee in the U.S." (past tense). Considering Youtube only came into existence about 2006 or 2007 - well past Alizee's success with Gourmandises and MCE in 2001 through 2004 - it's pretty impressive that Alizee got so many views after her glory days. A lot of Americans are only discovering her today, so I imagine sales of her first 2 albums may eventually double or triple from the initial 5 million back in 2001-2004. I think they just added Alizee to iTunes, but unfortunately, only her first 2 albums. If Alizee's mgmt had any brains, they'd put Psychedelices and UEDS there too and hope for some trickle down effect. Right now, everyone is just lining the pockets of Mylene Farmer.

And you are right. The initial draw to Alizee is her incredible beauty during her early days. But which artists don't sell a bit of skin to get attention? It's like a bread crumb trail, and before you know it, you've seen and heard every song on Gourmandises and MCE as well as Psychedilices and UEDS. But the music and vocals also have to be strong for people to stay interested, which is Alizee's problem now.

BTW, you really shouldn't belittle Alizee's voice and talents. It's unfortunate that her incredible sex appeal overshadows her voice, but I'd like to note that 2 of her top 4 videos on Youtube are La Isla Bonita and Ella Elle L'a with 12 million and 8 million views respectively. And she isn't exactly stripping for the cameras in those 2 videos. She's wearing sweatpants as more than one comment on those vids stated. She can't help that she's incredibly sexy. It's a curse! And most importantly, neither of those 2 songs are from the Mylene/LB team who gets most of the credit for Alizee's success.

If you were to ask 100 Americans to name a famous French singer, I'm pretty sure Alizee would top that list regardless if they are fans or not.

[lefty12357]

Well, I feel I should clarify my position a bit. Speaking only for myself, I am not making any claims either way as to where Alizée stands in the World French Singer Popularity Contest. Of course “known” and “popular” are really two different things. And I suppose we should clarify if we are talking about French singers or singers from France. When I have something to add to the subject I do, but one should not assume what my position is unless I state it specifically. In fact, in regards to Corsaire’s last few posts, I agree with much of what he said.

In my last post, I was merely pointing out that there is still some significant interest in Alizée’s new offerings in the last year or two. I said no more than that. With the lack of meaningful data, it is really hard to know much of anything or just how significant to her career these YouTube numbers really are. I guess the only thing they tell us is that the number of people around the world that are aware of Alizée is probably in the millions.

Personally, one of my frustrations on this subject is the lack of a broad range of reliable data. Even sales figures from record companies are extremely unreliable, as it can serve their interests to overstate as well as understate the numbers depending on the situation. I’ve even watched the sales rankings at the US Amazon store and I’ve seen Alizée at the top of the French category ahead of a lot of well known French singers, but I’ve also seen her way behind. I think the numbers are small, and therefore a few sales can jump someone up or down quite a bit. Mylene’s latest album is #5 and UEDS is #95. A few weeks ago Mylene was not even in the top 100 and Alizée was near the top. Again, the numbers are too unreliable to draw a firm conclusion.

[Corsaire]

Hey JoeNY, I see we agree on many things, after all. For the rest...

Far from me the idea of belittling Alizée’s singing voice, I just think people should not overstate its quality. We love Alizée for so many things that we tend to want all her qualities to be more than what they are. That is my appraisal of the situation, but I might be wrong. The most impressive quality about her voice as far as I am concerned is the way she speaks. I think she is just irresistible when she speaks. For me, it is also due to her accent and mannerism.

As for the rest of her talents, I think I have quite a few posts on here that can testify to the fact that I believe she is very gifted.

I am mainly against the idea that Alizée is the most popular French female singer in the world today. I think this can easily be shown to be an unfounded claim (but I will be happy to discuss any tangible proof of this). BTW, if you can really get 100 Americans to name Alizée more often than any other French female singer, I can tell you I could not do that in Canada (and we do have a substantial portion of the population speaking French up here .

[Scruffydog777]

I agree with Corsaire's point that a lot of views are drawn by sexy images in the thumbnails people see for a certain video. Such as when I first downloaded the video of her performance at the Festival de Alcalá de los Gazule, it was just one video of her two songs ML and JAM. The video I had downloaded was obviously a video someone had copied from a vcr video because it had those lines at the bottom when a vcr isn't tracking properly. (There may have been a better video available at the time but that's not my point right now.) So I decided to crop out those tracking lines and split up the two songs of the video into two seperate videos.

Now when you upload a video to Youtobe, they give you the option of about 4 different thumbnails to pick from in their process . You then pick one to represent your video. Well with her ML song, there was a beautiful thumbnail to pick from as you can see from the video below, but for her jam performance which was just as good, there were no real good ones ( those images of her on the screens behind her, can,t be seen in a thumbnail) and as a result, ML has gotten twice the hits of JAM.
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JKU6Yr2BFck" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Xyw_MoH0HcI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I think she has a tremendous amount of draw power left from her beauty. She doesn't have to wear the sailor suit to be appealling. I think her looks in this performance in Spain is probably one of her most beautiful looks ( i wish we had this video in a better resolution.) and I think she is still capable of an equally beautiful look if she is willing to wear something that accentuates her beauty as this outfit did as opposed to all the horrible outfits she wore during the Psych era.

Another thing she needs to be successful is to take advantage of that wonderful skill of dancing she developed from numerous years of hard work. No more eye candy on stage as there was with Hung Up. People want to see her dance. Again it doesn't have to be anything elaborate. It could just be like her performance or ML here where she's just dancing in place or Ella Ella, or when she did the medley on New Years eve 2003 again, where she's just dancing in place. As this years Enfoires demonstrated, she is still a joy to watch dance and she needs to put her abilities to good use.

Going back to what could have been in the states. I think all it would have taken was one appearence and Hollywood and the entertainment industry would have fallen in love with her. They would have loved her voice, her beauty, her dancing, the person and the story of Alizee. If MF, couldn't come up with good English songs for her to sing, they would have. They probably would have had her do a duet like Stevie Nicks did with Tom Petty, or Cheryl Crow and Kid Rock, or even another great song that was sung by a two members of the same band,
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CwXKOVH5uYI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
They would have found a way to make it work here. Hollywood probably would have loved to seen her in a movie and like I said, all it would have taken is one appearence at the right time, and what I mean by that, it's hard to tell what the political climate in this country back in 2003 would have had. It could have killed any chance she may have had at that time.

Now a days, I think there is still a potential for her to have success here, but she will have to use all her abilities.

[lefty12357]

Since this subject is about Alizée and the US, it made me think of the report on French TV that Bigdan showed us. It was a report on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and one soldier was watching Moi, Lolita on his phone. Thanks to Aaronius for putting a small bit of it on YouTube.

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ld2hrsZBuW4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Thought I'd post it for those who haven't seen it. Full video here: http://13h15-le-samedi.france2.fr/?p...52010153121_F2

[neoteny]

that's really nice. what better way to keep sane right?

[rcs]

Nice find! I wish I had that ability to view Alizee while deployed to Afghanistan in 2003-2004. That was when I first heard her...enroute via Sicily. It was JEAM, however, that I heard on radio and TV.