JANE BIRKIN WANTS AUNG SAN SUU KYI FREED

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=104

December 12, 2008 – 3:36 am


It’s hard to imagine that a singer whose song was banned in da $ingapura in 1969 has come back with a song for Aung San Suu Kyi.

A track about Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi appears on singer Jane Birkin’s new album Enfants d’hiver. Birkin wrote it herself and she says Serge Gainsbourg, her ex-husband, would have approved.

“I met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon,” Birkin says. “She is an extraordinarily funny and brilliant lady, and when I got back I went to see President Sarkozy to try to get him to pull [French oil giant] Total out of Burma. It didn’t work. So I thought: perhaps the only force left is people. It comes down to the individual, what they can do.”

Birkin has been performing Aung San Suu Kyi live to create awareness for “The Lady”. She’s involved in a campaign for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release and a plea for governments to pull out investments from Burma. Jane Birkin is 62 and still working for causes.

In 1969, Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg released the song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (”I love you… me neither”), which had salacious lyrics (sung in French) against a background of female moaning and groaning, culminating in an orgasm at the song’s conclusion. The song was not only banned from radio in $ingapore but also from sale.

Hear Jane Birkin sing Aung San Suu Kyi live at Le Pont des Artistes Studio Charles Trenet, Maison de Radio France, Paris on Nov 12, 2008.

Aung San Suu Kyi
will be gone
and she’ll be on a t-shirt
the marketing’s good

monks are dying
so the children are crying
we’ll be playing buckles
before you’re old girls

torture, drug dealers
finance our dreams
why should we care
the stock market’s good

petrol’s booming, generals wooing
trucks are looming
in Rangoon

we know your faces
come out and die
welcome the tourists
under the Burmese sky

…but tomorrow
the world will see
we did nothing
for Aung San Suu Kyi

Click here to download the track. (6.2MB)

$ingapore is Burma’s biggest supporter in Asean.