Just heard "Lady Marmalade" on the radio.

I just heard "Lady Marmalade" (the Patti LaBelle version) on the radio. I have mixed feelings about it. Though I like a lot of songs that have French in them -- Melanies' "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" and Blondie's "Sunday Girl" among them -- those songs have verses translated into French, and not a French refrain. That said, I like the melody of the refrain. But, I hate how Patti LaBelle says "Lady Marma-lahd", because that sounds pretentious to me. It would be like if I said, "I just heard the Patti LaBelle version of 'Lady Marma-lahd' on the rahd-io"; everyone would hate me for speaking like that. That said, I love Patti LaBelle's voice; it's killer in the high range. But, I hate how the song is set in New Orleans, maybe because that's the setting of "The House of the Rising Sun", which I've always thought is one of the most overrated songs ever, and is also about sex-for-sale in New Orleans, incidentally.

BUT, what happened that was new when I heard the song this time, is that I realized is that in addition to the "gitchee gitchee ya ya ya ya" part of the refrain (which I like, it's almost like a perverse something you'd say to a baby in a crib), is that the next words after that are "mocha chocolah-tah ya ya". I think that's fantastic. It's much more evocative than the run-of-the-mill line in the song about Lady Marmalade's skin and how it's the color of cafe au lait (which is a nice image but a shitty lyric and has no poetry to it; it's prose, not poetry).