Balance ton quoi
by Angèle
How to study this song
The card for “Balance ton quoi” is built from 70 study entries at B1: 30 French words, 9 adjectives and 31 verb forms. Start with the glossary: animaux, animal and rap come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 31 distinct forms against 9 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| FR | EN | ES | IT | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| animaux | animals | animales | animali | animais | dieren | Tiere |
Adjectives
| FR | EN | ES | IT | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sale | dirty | sucio | sporco | sujo | vies | schmutzig |
Verb forms
| FR | EN | ES | IT | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| parlent | they talk | hablan | parlano | falam | ze praten | sie reden |
What this song teaches you
Level · B1
- Vocabulary words
- 30
- Adjectives
- 9
- Word combos
- 11
- Expressions
- 14
- Verb forms
- 31
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Balance ton quoi» comes from «Brol», the debut album of the Belgian singer Angèle, released on 5 October 2018 on her own label, Angèle VL Records. It was issued as the sixth single from the record in March 2019, and within weeks it had become the song most closely associated with her. Angèle, born in 1995 in Uccle, on the edge of Brussels, had first been noticed on Instagram, where short videos mixing piano covers and deadpan humour built her an audience long before any label was involved. «Brol» — a Brussels word for mess or clutter — turned that audience into one of the biggest French-language successes of the decade.
The title is a pun that every French speaker caught at once. In October 2017 the journalist Sandra Muller launched the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc, roughly «call out your pig», inviting women to name the men who had harassed them at work; it became the French counterpart of #MeToo. The verb balancer, in informal French, means to denounce or to rat someone out. Angèle keeps the verb and replaces the insult with a shrug of a word, quoi — «call out your whatever» — which is both a wink at the movement and a refusal to shout.
The song itself is built on irony. Over a light, bouncing electro-pop beat that sounds almost carefree, the singer takes aim at the casual sexism she hears around her: in the way some men speak about women, in rap lyrics that seem to sell better the cruder they are, and in the remarks that people address to her directly. Those remarks are the sharpest part of the lyric. They are presented as compliments, but each one carries an insult inside it — about her looks, about her intelligence, and about the idea that her famous family did the work for her. She repeats them in a sweet, level voice and lets the listener hear how absurd they are.
The chorus is where the joke turns. The singer announces that she would like to tell her critics where to go, and then, at the very moment the rude word should arrive, she stops and hums over it. She adds that this is why she will never be played on the radio, and that she will stay polite for television. The self-censorship is the point: the song mocks the double standard that lets men be vulgar and asks women to be charming, while showing that she could be just as blunt if she chose to. Underneath the irony there is a note of hope — the idea that things may change one day, and that even the people she criticises know, deep down, when they have gone too far.