French Kiss

By Lil Louis

“Take equal parts musical production ingenuity and equal parts erotic underpinnings, conjoin them onto a record, and what do you get? ”

For the Chicago artist Lil Louis, the answer is "French Kiss" (1989) - an unapologetic, electronic number that is as much a sonic adventure as it is a sensual one.

Marvin Burns, a.k.a. Lil Louis, a fearless producer and disc jockey hailing from Chicago, boasts a relatively more compact resume of hits compared to his house music contemporaries. Sporting his signature topless look paired with a flat cap or bucket hat, Lil Louis started DJing well before the same age young aspiring jockeys today might touch a turntable for the first time. The apocryphal story goes that the budding DJ got his stage moniker after a brush with the law during a nightclub raid.

Either in little or large part due to this, Lil Louis spent more and more time in the studio. Right at the tail end of the 80s came tracks like "Frequency" and "Video Clash," but none more arguably iconic than "French Kiss."

One dose of "French Kiss" is sonically jarring enough, not unlike a gateway drug. Two weird organ-like glissandos, in the beginning, give way to a familiar type of house beat featuring a commanding drum machine kick, slinky hats, and later on, snares, shakers, agogo bells, and claps. Brassy, horn-y (pun intended) Yamaha DX100 patches form chords and melodies which contrast against the main synth power chord motif. It's not too dissimilar to the composition of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's "The Message" maybe if the protagonists in that song pushed a little too close to the edge and got stuck in monotonous, looping purgatory.

An unwritten rule of house music is that a track should be set in the positively danceable 120+ BPM range for obvious commercial and aesthetic reasons. The track's creator did not hesitate to throw this out the window the first chance he got - which is not even a quarter way through the song. Tempo changes in both directions, some more abrupt than others, are affected. In the middle, the song marinates at a deliberate ~45 BPM before maddingly picking back up to the 125 BPM neighborhood minutes later. "French Kiss" is a visual mistake when displayed on a DAW grid; it is a pseudo-psychedelic sonic trip. It's not so much a concrete record as it is a happenstance capturing of an electronic performance at the whims of a madman.

It only gets steamier from there. Five and a quarter minutes in, "samples of the vocalizations of a woman in ecstasy" is perhaps the best safe-for-work description of what is happening. The aforementioned tempo change now comes into context, perhaps. It was not purely a creative musical choice all along but a metaphor for the natural rhythms and timings of a torrid, intimate encounter (donations to this website greatly support the furtherance of PG-rated descriptions in our content).

The best of "French Kiss" is ultimately saved for last - no surprises there, hopefully. The track keeps pace at 125 BPM for its final act, churning along and reintegrating all previous motifs, and after the meat of the beat has subsided, it concludes with a string synth sustaining the tonic note. The "shell-shock" nature of the song's dying moments juxtaposes its frenetic energy, like a musical refractory period.

Lush arrangements and innuendos aside, one might wonder if there is any true impact behind Lil Louis' one-hit-wonder. There is, and it should not be taken lightly.

“The impact of “French Kiss” lies not in what it manages to accomplish, which is a remarkable list unto itself, but in what it rebels against. The track manages to get away with slowing down to less than half of its initial tempo and still maintain a cohesive sonic journey.”

It is an impressive unique challenge for any DJs to incorporate into their sets. Further, the choice to implement a key change downward is an excellent antithesis to so many pop ballads of that time, which relied on key changes upward (think Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You) so much, it has become a parodied technique.

And lastly: how many songs have ever come close to imparting as much carnal and provocative energy as this one? Is that not the true mark of songs produced for audiences and connoisseurs of this type of music? Whereas rap has seen the overuse of explicit, over-the-top lyrics, and modern house-pop goes gaga for ambiguous yet cliched messages, it's certainly satisfying to think that up to now, the bar has remained untouched save by one anachronistic track with no songwriting and plenty of everything else your grandmother would deem sacrilegious: "French Kiss."