"La jupe retroussée sur ses pantalons blancs..."

I've long since believed (or is it, known?) Serge Gainsbourg's "Cargo Culte" to be the greatest song of all time, but if you needed further proof, read this thread on ILM, which contains a good translation of the lyrics.

It helps if you know what "cargo cult" means, and if you understand the basic story of Histoire de Melody Nelson, which is: your narrator [1] is driving down the road in his Rolls Royce, and he runs into a girl on a bicycle: Melody Nelson. They strike up a romance--it's summer, she's 14, how could it go wrong?, &c.--and all is going well.

But then--of a sudden--she dies, in a plane crash.

That's basically the whole story, but it's the greatest album of all time, and "Cargo Culte" the greatest song of all time. I particularly love these lines:

Et je garde cette espérance d'un désastre
Aérien qui me ramènerait Melody
Mineure détournée de l'attraction des astres.

The literal meaning is, in short, "I'll wait for an airline crash that will bring Melody back to me"--the rest of the song being devoted to the description of said airline crash that brought Melody to her end--but the true meaning is much more beautiful & fucked up. Here's a translation from the thread linked above:

And I keep hoping for an aerial disaster
that will bring back to me, Melody,
a minor hijacked by (her) attraction to the stars

I'll quote liberally from the ILM thread:

"Mineure détournée de l'attraction des astres" is a lovely line that's extremely hard to do justice to. First of all it makes reference to détournement des mineures or "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" but détournée also means "hijacked, weaned, circuitous, and turned away or in the wrong direction." Gainsbourg, who had a penchant for using puns even if he had to appropriate them from other languages, may also be making a reference to himself in astres. The French word for "star" as in celebrity, is usually vedette but the English word "star" is not unknown, and this line could be read "a minor who has been turned away from her attraction to the stars." Again, the rhyme désastre/des astres is quite simple but powerful.

Anyway, read it through. It's a very good translation, because it's not just literal & phrase-for-phrase--Gainsbourg was as much about the nuances & wordplay in his lyrics as the literal translation, so it takes a certain familiarity with the language to bring out the really fun stuff.

[1] um, Gainsbourg.