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Incongruous moments in life offer insight into how we think about our world and our place in it. They are tricks of the mind like instants of Zen satori that force us out of conventional patterns and routines. To illustrate: In , artist friend Foto Sifichi, a displaced Scotsman from New York City living in Paris, during my annual visit left a cassette, Peter Rowan’s T for Texas (Waterfront, ), behind in my arranged lodgings in Aubervilliers. Rowan, a Boston Tex-Mex phenomenon , is recorded live in London, yodeling Rodgers style. Rowan is a fine singer, but it’s when he yodels on “I Dreamed of Home,” “Dustbowl Children,” “Texican Badman,” that spirits surge, things go electric, revealing how borders of taste and nationality are porous and inconsequential . But many continue to believe—because they want or need to—that yodeling defines a certain area, topography, people—let’s just say the Alps. This makes it easy to identify others by the clichés that we hang around their necks like cowbells. When we’re told about yodeling in the Lowlands or France, people become uncomfortable. Immutable truths teeter. France’s symbols include wine, Eiffel, berets, fois gras, Monet, Deneuve, fashion, moules et frites, parfum, accordion, Piaf . . . but not yodeling. I will break it to you gentiment: The French have done their share of yodeling, some of it, albeit, along Alpine borders it shares with Switzerland from Evian down the Italian border to the Mediterranean. But the more distinctive Franco-yodels emerged from an unlikely source: legendary venues like the Folies Bergères in Gay Paree.1 The craze for things Alpine, including the tyrolienne as a leftover from a hangover known as the Romantic era, also infiltrated mid-nineteenth-century théâtres de vari- étés (circus, cabaret, burlesque plus dinner), especially the Caf’ Conc’ (café concert) scene. Gifted vocalists proved the French quite capable of yodeling their “Troulala—ï—ou!,” somewhere between ribald and satire, titillation and parody. The history of French yodeling begins not long after the invention of the croissant, circa , although we can certainly imagine French berger(e)s (shepherds[esses]) yodeling in the Alps and, of course, along the Pyrenees that separate France from Spain, where the people of the Pays d’Oc have their own unique yodels.2 Popular Alpine singers of the day were already engaged in manufacturing folklore, fostered by early-twentiethcentury nationalism and commerce, and were enthusiastically immersed in unconscious self-parody (imitating folk music), dressed in their approximations of folk costumes , hemmed tight to the hilarious-creepy. This was the genre that demi-monde Paris embraced with the sardonic enthusiasm of the Weird Al Yankovics or Mrs. La Vie Tyrolienne à Paris   THE LANDS OF YO Thee Mysterious Asthmatic Avenger Claims Yodeling Cured His Asthma Masked avengers like Batman and Zorro are a strange, lonely breed, one-person operations—at once heroic and existential, alienated from society and paperwork, preferring flamboyant capes to Docker khakis. Even stranger, however, are one-man bands, the DIY all-in-one noisemaker street minstrels. Folding strange into certified wacko entails welding a masked avenger theme to a one-man-band concept. How about a surreal character playing ultra-real, close-to-the-bone rock ‘n’ roll? Add Frenchness! asthma!! humor!!! and yodeling!!!!, and you have a recipe for pure aural derangements of the soul by a vrai troublemaker. I’d been fascinated by this French voodoobilly performer since I discovered his broken-down website. In October , I met him at Radio Patapoe’s clandestine Amsterdam studio. We made immediate accommodations for a live session; I taped up the limp mic stand so that the mic hung somewhere between his strumming fingers and voodoo voice. And we uncorked a bottle of French chardonnay and commenced our live interview-performance. Between bouts of frantic strumming—a swirling riffra ff of chords that coaxed trailer-trash poesie from his throat—I discovered other slippery truths about Thee MAA: His real name remains undisclosed to protect the guilty; he was born in Kehl, Germany, to a French father and German mother; he now lives in Tours, two and a half hours southwest of Paris, with his wife and two budding musician children. It’s here in his makeshift kitchen studio that he produced most of his recordings. “I was alone in my kitchen, but I had two tape recorders, each recording two channels to get that pingpong two channel stereo-like sound and to...

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