Letter from Paris

Le pop

Christine Brooke-Rose Paris There was a time when 'pop' music meant a specific kind of music as opposed to rock or rhythm-and-blues and other types, but in France the word has become so generalised today as to mean, as strictly it should, anything popular. And anything popular includes, in practice, whatever the native popular traditions are capable of producing, as opposed to the impositions of American commercial and cultural imperialism, on which the French are particularly touchy. There is in fact clearly a conflict between the influence of American pop culture and the French desire to be, and absolute conviction of being, sui generis.

The conflict, however, is either a healthy one or more apparent than real. Syncopation and vitality never harmed any music, and the sheer competition on the mass media has been largely responsible for a sophisticated development of harmony. In France more and more young composers seem to come out of the Conservatoire or other schools, and write accompaniments like Bach fugues, just as many singers attend special schools such as Mireille's Petit Conservatoire ( Mireille was herself a popular singer in the 'thirties).

When I was young, musicians used to say that the most difficult thing to do was to set a poem successfully, and when I heard most efforts I rather agreed. In the world of French pop that problem has simply vanished with the advent of the singer-composer-poet. Just as Fabrizio de Andre in Italy has set and sings with panache an Angioleri sonnet, so Georges Brassens sets and sings Villon or Paul Fort, Serge Reggiani sings (but does not set) Boris Vian. And that is only one aspect.

For there are also Brassens, Brel, Moustaki, Nougaro, Barbara, Catherine Lara and many others who sing themselves, just as Bob Dylan and Randy Newman and others sing themselves. Pound's lament that words and music separated with the advent

of his hated Renaissance and Petrarchan fioritura is no longer valid : they have found

each other again, and travel together as did the troubadours or the Wandering Scholars, but over waves of sound. And together they spread their brief messages of love, of passion, of wit and fun, of sadness, of political and social protest, that have more effect by and large than a hundred pamphlets.

In pop song, everywhere, can be found the very same features that are found in litera ture, but more immediately apprehensible, narrative, dialogue, satire, irony, parody, humour, complaint, description, metaphor, allusion, play with words, with the magic of place-names, and so on. But what seems special about the French situation is pre cisely the way in which the specifically American influence has lost its fascination, (except sometimes thematically, as in Max

ime le Forestier's San Francisco); pop-song is in fact being fed by native traditions as varied as those of the chansonnier, of folk song, of the chanson populaire (not the same,

the latter being old hits that lasted), and of literature itself. For no one can deny that

the Belgian Jacques Brel's Le plat pays qui est le mien is a poem of great beauty ('Avec des cathedrales comme uniques mon tagnes ...'), as is Nougaro's Toulouse ('Un torrent de cailloux roule dans ton accent . . .'), in which he rhymes Toulouse with 'chanteur de blues' in the best mediaeval macaronic tradition.

The words of songs in France are meant to be listened to and appreciated, not incomprehensibly yelled or belted out, and although there are a few stars likeJohnny Halliday and Eddie Mitchell who translate rock and sing in a purely American style, the result sounds unnatural in French, the very accents of which are tortured and displaced to fit the rhythm; nor have I ever heard anyone other than themselves sing their songs. Songs are not only listened to but sung, and I remember a taxi-driver singing the whole

of Jean Ferrat's beautiful Pourtant que Ia tnontagne est belle, about the young leaving their villages for the cities as he drove (in the city), and being very pleased when I joined him in each refrain.

In fact the word 'pop', though used by the media to cover everything, hardly applies t°

most of the songs one hears on the sanle media, even on the French equivalent of T°P of the Pops, which can include anything from Halliday to Gerard le Norman's melodically unusual and poetic La Belle elk Bete or his dramatic incarnations of circus types (e.g. Le Funambule) to Marie-Pau,le Bell's ironic and witty La Parisienne or 11/011, gang et moi. Even protest-songs are first an° foremost songs, such as Barbara's anti-Or Gottingen or A nwurir pour mourir, 01. Maxime le Forestier's Dialogue between father and son. Both these singers write their own songs and have a very individual style, immediately recognisable, but then 5° do Yves Simon, Beranger, and many others' not all of whom I can name. Indeed the, singer here is nearly always an individua' rather than a 'group'. The French scene is certainly verY rich : there are those who sing in Occitan' in Breton, in Alsacian, and although these are not heard as often as thin others, they are heard, and make PeuPet aware that there is a problem, in a way dr, not even the Nobel Prize to Mistral ban done. There are also the Canadian singers (and here Canada means Quebec) such as Felix Leclerc and Robert Charlebois (Whose, Quand k's hommis vivront d'amour, together, won a prize this year), Paull.n, Julien, Diane Dufresne, Louise Foresoe'

od

(ex-partner of Charlebois, particularly gu e with him in that startlingly original jet-ago song Lindbergh), and the group 13e,,31e Dommage', who each have their own StY and form of humour. The French situation, then, is interesti for the strength of its native traditio; When I returned from America last Year9.1.„, instance, I was enchanted, after the personal and hygienically odourless suPe' markets, to find my street where the shoE keepers greeted me and where one coublue smell the cheeses, the coffee, the fish, charcuterie, even as one passes each shonvl and where, in fact, even a supermarket i5.03 quite American and has not quite succ'e°,,i, in killing the small shopkeeper. So it is wnr"e song; the native traditions are tough: 111.°11 so, for instance, than in Germany, pop-song seems, on the whole, either du") Oom-pah-pah or frankly US. It is possible, however, that the notoriorti: American cultural imperialism is i1.5e..usly myth, or that it is on the wane. Curl°,`',0 enough, despite the popularity of 13rL `ere singers from the Beatles on, no one ever talks of British cultural iniperI1. obviously because there is no imPer the° left to accompany the pop culture. But no one talks of Russian cultural imPeolsite ism, either, and possibly for the 0P1Lir. reason that there is no pop culture to ae6' pany the imperialism.