It's the question that all our teenagers will soon be asking each other: Voulez vous coucher avec moi, se soir?
Parents already know that this French phrase means "Do you want to sleep with me?" because in their youth, they danced to a song called
"Lady Marmalade" by LaBelle. Now, their kids are grooving to a new version from the soundtrack of the film Moulin Rouge.
Moulin Rouge is the latest film from the Australian director Baz Luhrmann, the man behind the 1996 MTV-ized Romeo and Juliet. The film stars Ewan McGregor as a young French poet who moves to Paris and encounters the wild bohemians of the Moulin Rouge cabaret. They include a courtesan named Satin, played by Nicole Kidman, and the historical artist Tolouse-Lautrec, played by John Leguizamo (thanks to special effects to make him seem shorter).
While Moulin Rouge will be an original story rather than an adaptation, it follows the same formula of contemporary music and visual style mixing with a historical tale. And that formula could pay off big for the Moulin Rouge CD, just as it did four years ago when the Romeo and Juliet CD became the soundtrack of the spring of 1997. Romeo turned a little-known Swedish retro-pop act, The Cardigans, into one-hit wonders with the song "Lovefool."
People are already searching for the movie, which opens nationally on June 1. Last week it received roughly 70 percent more searches than the new Tom Green film, Freddy Got Fingered, and five times as many searches as the John Travolta thriller Swordfish which opens a week later.
But searches for Moulin Rouge were totally dwarfed by searches for the soundtrack's lead single, "Lady Marmalade." That's because this new version updates the song with some hip-hop beats and a rap interlude and features four of the hottest names in pop and R&B: Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya, and Lil' Kim. In case you were wondering why Miss Aguilera is back on the Lycos 50 this week, blame "Marmalade."
Despite being a disco classic, "Lady Marmalade" does not often show up in our search logs. But in the past three weeks, searches for the song have gone up 500 percent in one week, doubled the next week, and tripled again the following week for a whopping 3500 percent rise. The song was #29 last week on Billboard's Hot 100 after only two weeks on the radio.
Last week "Lady Marmalade" received almost triple as many searches as the current #2 song online, Lifehouse's "Hanging By a Moment." "Marmalade" received a remarkable 14 times more searches than Billboard's #1 song in the country right now, Janet Jackson's "All For You."
The soundtrack, which comes out next Tuesday, also features music from Bono of U2, Beck, and Fatboy Slim, plus a number of songs sung in the film by McGregor and Kidman. Plus, my pick to be the Cardigan-like, out of nowhere pop hit: a new Latin-pop version of DeBarge's "Rhythm of the Night" by the soon-to-be-famous singer Valeria.
It is possible that the soundtrack will be the #1 album out of the gate; or, it could take until the movie comes out for the teenage girls of America to flock to the CD stores. Either way, you can expect to hear a lot of "Lady Marmalade" all summer long, so roll down the windows and crank the speakers.
TOMORROW: The straight dope.
