From Wikipedia:
Le gorille — tells, in a humorous fashion, of a gorilla with a large penis (and admired for this by ladies) who escapes and, mistaking a robed judge for a woman, forcefully sodomizes him; the song contrasts the wooden attitude that the judge had when sentencing a man to death by the guillotine, with his cries of mercy when being assaulted by the gorilla; this song, considered pornographic, was banned for a while; the song's refrain (Gare au gori – i – i – i – ille, "beware the gorilla") is widely known; (translated by Jake Thackray as Brother Gorilla, Greek songwriter and singer Xristos Thivaios as Ο Γορίλας (The Gorilla), Spanish songwriter Joaquín Carbonell as 'El Gorila' (The Gorilla) and Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André (Il Gorilla).
From Georges Brassens and the French “Renaissance of Song”:
Georges Brassens (1921-1981) was a lifelong anarchist, and his songs express a lively antiauthoritarian spirit, even if most of them are about the simple pains and pleasures of life rather than about specifically political topics. Unfortunately, few English-speaking people are aware of him.
For French people he is at least as significant as Bob Dylan is for us (or at least was for people of my generation). But they don’t resemble each other very much. Brassens retains a connection with an older and in some ways wiser culture that was no longer available to Dylan, who was thus driven to a more desperate, apocalyptical mental and verbal dissociation sometimes almost reminiscent of Rimbaud. I don’t think Brassens, or anyone else, approached the brilliance of Dylan during his greatest period (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde). But even then Dylan was erratic, and his bitter sarcasm often seems petty and immature compared with Brassens’s worldly-wise humor and irony.
Leaving aside their rather dissimilar musical styles, Dylan might have written something like “Mourir pour des idées” (suggesting that those who urge us to die for ideas be the first to set an example) or “La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part” (about the “happy imbeciles” who take patriotic pride in being from wherever they happen to be from). Leonard Cohen might have written something like “Le petit joueur de flûteau” (a fable about a wandering musician who refuses to sell out) or “Le blason” (a delicate paean to the “most beautiful treasure of the female anatomy”). But I doubt if either would have been capable of the innocent rambunctious joy of “Les copains d’abord” (celebrating the camaraderie of a bunch of boys who used to sail around a duck pond in a little boat) or the simple poignancy of “Auprès de mon arbre” (bewailing his folly in cutting down a old tree, throwing away an old pipe, and abandoning an old lover) or the urbane drollery of “La traîtresse” (the mistress who betrays her lover by sleeping with her husband) or “Quatre-vingt-quinze pour cent” (contending that women fake orgasms 95% of the time). For that matter, what other Frenchman besides Brassens could have conceived of “Fernande” (“An erection is not a matter of will power”)?
[Re: 'Fernande', there's a clip of France's First Lady Carla Bruni singing it here.]
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