Femme Fatale Songs

At the moment I am loving this song, “Heart Killer”, by Gossling. A friend describes her voice as like P J Harvey on helium, which is about right. She has one of those very, very weird voices that people love or loathe. Kind of like Blossom Dearie, who I also adore. And, yet, Minnie Mouse singing does not make me happy.

Anyways, “Heart Killer” is a femme fatale song. A song from the point of view of the woman who is the breaker of hearts. The point of view bit is key because there are an ocean of songs about evil, mean, cold women¹ who break poor innocent men’s hearts.² So I find it very refreshing when a woman is singing with joy about scything also those hearts into tiny pieces.

Even though PRO TIP: setting out to break someone’s heart pretty much never goes well and will rebound on you and make your heart either explode or shrivel up into a tiny dry wizened husk.

I recently claimed that Femme Fatale songs were my favourite genre of pop song. I was then asked for a list of such songs and my brain froze. These are the only ones I could come up with.

Here’s Gossling’s “Heart Killer”:

Gershwin’s “Lorelei” sung by Ella Fitzgerald:

And lastly Blossom Dearie singing “Peel Me A Grape”. Okay, it’s not strictly a Femme Fatale song but, c’mon, anyone making these kinds of demands—Peel me a grape! French me a fry!—is clearly Up To No Good and would slink about in seductive manner.

I know there are other fabulous Femme Fatale songs but I’m deep in Sekrit Project rewrites and my brain will not cough up anything else. Do feel free to share some of your own suggestions. Ironically, Sekrit Project has a Femme Fatale in it. But for some reason this book wanted no music while I wrote.

Last thing: Yes, I know the vids don’t fit on my blog. Too much other work to do to figure out how to fix it now. Hopefully, the Mighty Mistress of All Things Digital who oversees this site will tell me what to do. She fixed it. Yay!

Often called things like “Devil Woman” or “Devil in Disguise” or “Cold as Ice” etc etc. [↩]
Many of them written by Chris Isaak—what a whinger! [↩]

Posted by Justine at 7:46, 12 September 2012 under Listening, State of the World, Sydney novel | 2 Comments »

Comments

Rosedragons Says:

‘It was Good for you too’ by Marian Call

September 12th, 2012 at 11:57 AM
Little Willow Says:

Shh by Frou Frou, depending on how you interpret it; and Under the Thumb by Amy Studt, watch the video.

September 13th, 2012 at 10:57 AM

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Justine Larbalestier