Of course, this is un clin d’œil humouristique (a humorous wink or allusion) to Jennie’s previous post, “Yelle if you love Fridays!”

Jennie is right, YELLE‘s songs were all of a sudden heard “all over” in France, and even reaching other European countries and the United-States: “Elle défrayait la chronique”, as the French expression goes. And like Jennie mentioned, she owed her succès fou (big success) to “un coup de gueule” (in this case, a “diss song“) directed against the French rap group called TTC.

TTC “vs.” YELLE?

Just like “YELLE”, the name “TTC” is also an acronym, composed of the initials of the names of the group members. But as we will see, the “ressemblance” between the two groups does not stop here. First, the word “TTC” in French usually stands for the financial term “Toutes Taxes Comprises“, meaning “All Taxes Included.” Second, if you remember from the B.A.-BA de l’Argot (the ABC of French Slang) that the word “fric” (or “FRI€”, as in “CA$H”) means “money”, you will not have too much of a hard time to translate the “(p)unny” title of this post: “Yell if you like money the TTC way”…

In fact, some producteurs de musique (music producers) and observateurs des médias (media watchdogs) have already “yelled” -like the title of this post says- “à tue-tête“, an experssion meaning “at the top of one’s lungs”, but literally meaning “killing a head”, which in turn should allow you to appreciate le jeu de mot (the pun) even further, since, like Jenny said, the songs in question are far from being remotely classy or “intellectually challenging”… The music producers were of course “yelling” out of sheer happiness to have made so much “fric”, while the media watchdogs were yelling more out of outrage (in French it’s called “crier au scandale”), for the way that fric was made!

Comment ça marche? (how does that work?)

Dialectique cartésienne… en marketing!

The two music groups, TTC and YELLE, seem to stand as diametrical opposites, or très commodément opposés (very conveniently opposed) to each other… and that is exactly the point, bien entendu (of course)!

In fact, it’s really no big surprise to find out that the maison de disque (the music label) which lately produced TTC, after they became more or less “tendance” (“mainstream”, that is), was spun off from the very same conglomérat musical which immediately happenned to be the one producing –devniez qui? (guess who?)- YELLE as well…

It seems that the dialectique cartésienne (a reference to the renown French philosopher René Descartes. See “The French Language: L’Éloquence, Par Excellence“) works perfectly well when it is cleverly applied as a marketing strategy targeting the rather callow masses of our chère société hyper-consumériste (hyper-consumerist society.)

Cela n’a au fond rien de très machiavelique (that in fact is not too machiavellian), but the marketing device can be summarized as follows: You provide la thèse (the thesis), which is in this case the group “TTC”; then you promote l’antithèse (the antithesis), allegedly “opposed” to the thesis that you have yourself previously manufacturé (manufactured)… And la synthèse (the sythesis)? La synthèse is tout simplement (very simply) le fric that you reap from this clever form of “dialectique de marketing”!

En guise de conclusion (as a conclusion), the “feud” TTC vs. YELLE has less to do with any sort of “bataille des sexes” (“battle of the sexes”), masculin vs. féminin, or even “macho against feminist”, but rather -you’ve guessed it- with le fric.

The French say: “L’argent n’a pas d’odeur“, meaning that “money has no smell.” They should also add that, as far as marketing strategies are concerned, money has no gender either…