Le Plastique c'est fantastique by Elmer Food Beat (1990)

Elmer Food Beat, from Nantes, made party rock whose every lyric was about the same thing, and in 1990 they released 30 cm, an album whose title is a measurement nobody asked for. Le Plastique c'est fantastique is its hit: the verses tell the girl to drop her knickers and the boy to cover his "carotte", and the chorus celebrates how fantastic the plastic feels. It arrived at the height of the AIDS epidemic and became, without anyone planning it, the country's safe-sex sing-along, a public-health campaign with a drum kit.

It peaked at number 31 on the French Top 50 in the spring of 1991, the album sold more than 650,000 copies, and the band won Group of the Year at the Victoires de la Musique that year, which is the most respectable prize ever handed to a song about a carrot in a condom. In 2019 they rewrote it as Le Plastique c'est dramatique, the same tune with new words, for the navigator Yvan Bourgnon's campaign against plastic in the oceans.

Its afterlife is the public-health accident. The song is phallic by function rather than by naming, which is why it ranks below most explicit French entries, but it is the one French radio could play and schools could tolerate, and a generation learned the word for a condom from a band whose album title was a boast.