These days, the most important ingredient in French culture is the navel. Artists, writers, singers and film directors spend their whole time gazing at it. Writers write books about being writers, directors make films about their latest failed love affair, singers listen to themselves moaning clever puns over non-existent tunes. They’re all inside the Establishment and they have forgotten what life is like – or even that there is a life – outside. There is even a word for this in French – nombrilisme. ‘Navelism’ is so entrenched that it is an ‘ism’.
And their excuse is: OK, it may be merde, but at least it’s French merde. This too is in the dictionary. It’s called l’exception française. Culture has to be good except if it’s French. Zola, Matisse and co. must be turning in their graves. Voltaire would just giggle.
Popping the Bubble
The French think too much to be any good at making music. Music comes from the soul (or, where rock is concerned, from somewhere between the guts and the genitals), and the French rely too much on their brains.
I’ve played bass with lots of semi-professional bar bands, murdering everything from pub rock to salsa, and I’ve noticed one fundamental difference between French and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ musicians. If you want to start off a rehearsal with a jam to get to know each other, a Brit or American will say something like, ‘OK, blues in E, one, two, three, four,’ and you’re away. The French will argue for ten minutes about who’s going to come in first, what speed to play it, and what order to solo in.
This is why the French love to play and listen to jazz. It’s thought music. I can busk along with pretty well any tune if you give me a minute to learn it, but I went for double-bass lessons with a French jazz bassist, and after every lesson I was playing worse. Instead of helping me busk along (which I thought was the point of jazz), he explained Greek scales and Ultrabionic harmonies or whatever, and I had to think so hard that I didn’t dare touch the strings any more.
It’s the same with kids’ music lessons. At French schools, any child with a burning desire to learn the piano, the guitar or the drums will be forced to do a year’s solfège (reading music) before they’re allowed to get their hands on the instrument. This ensures that all the really passionate, impatient wannabe musicians (the ones likely to turn into a Hendrix or a Cobain) will give up and do volleyball instead.
Consequently, French pop music is, apart from a very few exceptions, excruciatingly painful. Short of finding a dead swan in my bathwater, there are few things that would make me jump out of a steaming tub in the middle of winter and dash across a freezing cold bathroom. But if I’m listening to the radio and a bad French pop song comes on, hypothermia seems a small price to pay for the relief of changing to a less offensive station.
And if you complain that a tune is rubbish or nonexistent, you’ll be told, ah oui, but the words are wonderful. Which is like saying that a bowl of soup tastes like dog’s breath but looks sublime.
To give you an idea, here are a few recipes for French dog’s breath soup – I mean, hit songs:
• Take a boring tune. Get a producer to dub grungy guitars over it to make it sound rocky. Write a list of twenty unrelated but similar-sounding words. Find a singer to mumble them throatily. Sell to French radio station.
• Take a cute ethnic-minority girl. Imitate the backing track to a recent American R&B hit. Get a rich Parisian to write some lyrics about how hard it is to survive in the poor suburbs. Sell to French radio station.
• Take an ageing star. Get him or her to sing any old nonsense. Call it a glorious comeback. Sell to French radio station.
• Take a below-averagely talented busker. Proclaim him as a poetic genius. Sell to French radio station.
The recipes can’t fail because there is a legal quota system that obliges radio stations to play French music (as up to 40 per cent of their output, depending on what type of station it is), with an emphasis on ‘new French production’. The message is clear – you slap any old merde on to a CD, and the radio will play it. You don’t even need anyone to actually like your record, let alone buy it, because radio play generates plenty of income.
This is the driving force behind French pop music today.
It’s not surprising that the musicians themselves have an image problem. They don’t know what they’re doing. One famous French singer thinks he’s Radiohead, dresses like Jim Morrison, and writes songs like Andrew Lloyd Webber. Another dresses like a punk clown on stage and looks like a nerdy webmaster off it – hasn’t he heard about living your music? At least old Serge Gainsbourg always looked like a human cigarette butt and sang almost exclusively about shagging. He understood image.
French music hasn’t really known what it’s up to since fake French Teddy Boys started singing translations of American rock’n’ roll songs at the end of the 1950s. These singers, with stage names like Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell and Dick Rivers, didn’t understand the original words or the music. They were basically crooners with a quiff. Since then, you can count the number of decent French pop bands on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to hold your Gauloise.
This fundamental lack of understanding about pop music is good news for some people, though. The French have so little concept of the changing fashions in music that once an artist has cracked France, he or she will stay popular for ever. Eternal favourites here include Supertramp, the Cure, Jeff Buckley, Midnight Oil, Lenny Kravitz, Texas, Placebo and –
