A Höfner bass, a joke that stayed
The bass arrives dry, almost rude, a short phrase played on an instrument that remembers Paul McCartney and is being asked, here, to forget him. Then a voice, processed until it is neither quite a man nor a machine, says the two words as if they were a secret and a product at once. Sexy Boy is tender and silly in the same bar. The silliness is the door. The tenderness is what you find if you do not laugh and leave.
Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, working as Air, made the song for Moon Safari, released on the Source label in January 1998. Godin, a guitarist, had borrowed a 1960s Höfner bass and put it through a guitar amp, which gave the riff its cool, un-bass-like dryness. He played it to Dunckel, who said the title out of nowhere. The verse that people call a vocoder is, by Godin’s later account, a Minimoog through a talkbox. The chorus, the spinning sexy boy, was a vocal sampled into an Akai S1000 and sent through a Leslie speaker in the real studio the label finally paid for. They produced the record themselves. It did not sound like the rest of the album, which worried them. It became the track that carried the album out of France.
The video, a kind of science-fiction fashion film, fixed the song as a look as much as a tune: slow motion, beautiful bodies, no sweat. Live, the duo had to rebuild a studio joke with keyboards and a drum machine, and the joke survived because the melody is stronger than the gag. French pop, which Godin had associated with an older, slicker embarrassment, suddenly had a new passport. The song was the stamp.
One day I played a riff to JB and he said sexy boy out of the blue, and that was how we got the song. If we’d sung sexy girl, it would have been a disaster. The night we did Sexy Boy, I knew my life would change.
(Nicolas Godin, The Guardian, 2016)
What listeners heard as chill-out was, in the room, a small panic about whether a pop song belonged on an atmospheric record. Dunckel has said the track almost missed the album because it had a verse and a chorus, which the rest of Moon Safari largely declines. That ordinary shape is why it travelled. You can sing it. You can also misunderstand it, which the pair spent years refusing to license when the pictures were vulgar. The title is not a leer. It is two men who were not, by their own account, the boys who got the girls, writing the boy they wanted to be.
What remains is the Leslie, turning a human syllable into weather. Sexy Boy still opens films and shops and the private afternoons of people who think they are above it. The bass riff does not care. It is four notes and a future, played on a borrowed violin bass, loud enough to embarrass a country and soft enough to be played at dinner.
