Jordy: the strange story of the French four year-old who got to number one
From Michael Jackson to Donny Osmond, pop charts around the world have been both blessed and disgraced with hits by children who are frankly far too young to comprehend the gravity of stardom and being a notable public figure.
Both would have had their first tastes of success while still of primary school age, with Jackson making his debut with his siblings at the age of seven, and the littlest of the Osmonds making his first appearance at just six. Of course, I say they’d both have been of primary school age, but that’s overlooking the fact that they would have absolutely not attended formal education of any kind, and being born into a family obsessed with the idea of making showbiz spectacles out of their children was both a fortunate and damaging thing for them.
Being in the public eye from such a young age can go one of two ways: you either get your brief flirtation with fame over and done with as quick as possible, allowing yourself to live an ordinary life afterwards, or you become entirely dysfunctional as a result of having missed out on important socio-developmental milestones in your life. However, while both Jackson and Osmond are fascinating case studies, they’re perhaps not the most curious examples, nor are they the youngest to have had a number one hit.
In 1992, Jordy Lemoine, known simply as Jordy, hit the top of the charts in France with his song, ‘Dur dur d’être bébé’ (AKA ‘It’s Hard to Be a Baby’), and at the time of its release, he was just four and a half years old. It’s a remarkable feat for Lemoine to be able to claim, but alongside this triumph of juvenescence comes a cautionary tale.
You might be wondering how young Jordy managed to get here, and rather unsurprisingly, it’s another instance of having demanding parents with aspirations of pushing their child into show business long before they’re ready for it. Not only that, but his mother, Patricia Clerget, was a singer-songwriter, and his father, Claude Lemoine, was a musician and producer in the French-Italian synth-pop outfit, the Rockets.
Most parents will go some way to protect their children and ensure they grow up to be the best version of themselves, but Lemoine Sr was insistent that his son would become a star, and as the brains behind the initiative to land Jordy his first taste of fame, he did everything in his power to selfishly satisfy his own ambitions.
Lemoine had first tried to push Jordy into the entertainment industry by way of putting him forward to appear in nappy adverts alongside a wonderful tagline that translated as “hard to be wet,” a phrase that would eventually be reworked into another idea that he had been brewing.
After this failed attempt to vicariously find success through his infant child, he went on to create the house/rap hybrid track, ‘Dur dur d’être bébé’, which features the toddler singing along to a pulsating club beat about how tough it is to be a baby. There are lines about being nagged by your parents to stop picking your nose, their endless requests to wash your hands, and threats of not receiving pudding if you’re badly behaved – you know, all the things that make your early years seem like a Sisyphean slog where your freedom is suppressed by the tyrannical rule of your elders.
As if the irony wasn’t already beginning to rear its head by this point, Lemoine then pushed the track in the direction of a number of club DJs across France, and remarkably, the reception to this ludicrous novelty was overwhelmingly positive to the point that many supposedly encouraged him to officially release it as a single. Whether or not these were the genuine thoughts of the tastemakers he sent the track to or whether they were pulling his leg, he chose to go ahead and release the song anyway, and ended up having the last laugh when it began raking in money.
‘Dur dur d’être bébé’ experienced unprecedented success, with it topping the charts not only in France, but in 12 countries around the world. However, unlike most novelty songs, its success was not fleeting, and it ended up extending its run at the top of the charts in France for 15 weeks, a national record at the time. The runaway success of the track proved that it was, in fact, not hard to be a baby in the slightest, and the music video only echoed this, with it depicting the little tyke living the life of Riley as he gets pushed around the park in a buggy.
Now, this might be where you’d expect the story to end, but greed can do horrific things to a person, especially where a pushy parent’s vanity project is concerned. Jordy, or rather, his father, followed up ‘Dur dur d’être bébé’ with another number one hit, ‘Alison’, both of which featured on his debut album, Pochette Surprise.
The seemingly unstoppable father-son phenomenon managed to squeeze out three albums in total before Jordy had turned eight years old, but with two poorly-received Christmas singles and a handful of underwhelming attempts to recapture the magic of their breakthrough, things fizzled out just as quickly as they had risen. The dream was over, and another instance of a young star burning too bright, too young had inevitably run its course.
That is to say, there were numerous controversies that arose in French media whereby Jordy’s position in the limelight was treated as questionable. One of the major reasons for the swift collapse of the Lemoine family’s enterprise was down to there being concerns over Jordy’s welfare, with his parents having pushed him to stardom in a frankly exploitative way that the youngster had zero control over. This led to a media ban being imposed on his music throughout the country, for the fear that they would be promoting the idea that it’s okay to use your child as a vehicle for capital gain.
As if the Lemoine family hadn’t already milked their cash cow of a son for all he was worth, there were repeated attempts to push him back into the public eye through misguided ventures into creating Jordy-themed amusement parks and ushering him onto reality television. These repeated failures were only further evidence that the milk had soured long ago and that the initial charm had dissolved into nothingness.
Perhaps most bizarrely, Jordy attempted to have a comeback at the age of 18 with ‘Je t’apprendrai’, by which time he’d tried to transform himself into a proto-Bieber teen heartthrob. The song unsurprisingly failed miserably, as though there was some sort of belief that people may have forgotten that, little over a decade ago, he was quite literally France’s biggest nepo baby. 20 years later, this is the last the public heard from Jordy in a creative sense, and one would presume that he’s content with things staying that way.
It’s not hard being a baby, or at least, it shouldn’t be. You play with your Hot Wheels, eat plasticine and soil yourself all day, how difficult can it get? Evidently, if you’ve got overzealous parents running wild on an ego trip, it can get pretty fucking bleak.
