Höfner through a guitar amp on Moon Safari
The bass arrives dry, almost rude: a short phrase on a Höfner that recalls Paul McCartney and is being asked to forget him. Then a processed voice says the two words as if they were both a secret and a product line. Sexy Boy is tender and silly in the same bar. The silliness is the way in. The tenderness is what you get if you stay.
Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, as Air, made the song for Moon Safari, released on Source in January 1998. Godin, a guitarist, borrowed a 1960s Höfner bass and ran 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 people call a vocoder is, by Godin’s later account, a Minimoog through a talkbox. The spinning “sexy boy” chorus was a vocal sampled into an Akai S1000 and sent through a Leslie in the proper 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 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 electronic pop suddenly had a new export stamp, and this single was it.
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. The pair also spent years refusing licenses when the pictures were vulgar. The title is not a leer. By their own account it is two men who were not the boys who got the girls, writing the boy they wanted to be.
What remains is the Leslie turning a human syllable, the dry Höfner riff and a chorus you can hum in a shop or a film cue. Sexy Boy still opens playlists and private afternoons. The bass line does not care about cool: four notes on a borrowed violin bass, loud enough to put French electronic pop on foreign radio and soft enough to play at dinner without clearing the room.
