Aging and Popular Music in Europe

Abigail Gardner, Ros Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317308430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica pop

Opening up the dialogue between popular music studies and aging studies, this book offers a major exploration of age and popular music across Europe. Using a variety of methods to illustrate how age within popular music is contingent and compelling, the volume explores how it provokes curation and devotion across a variety of sites and artists who record in several European languages, and genres including waltz music, electronica, pop, folk, rap, and the French 'chanson.' Visiting the many ways in which age is problematized, revered, and performed within Europe in relation to popular music, case studies analyze: French touring shows of popular music stars from the 1960s; André Rieu's annual Vrijthof concerts in the Netherlands; Kraftwerk and Björk's appearances at renowned art museums as curated objects; queer approaches to popular music space and time; British folk music inheritances; pan-European strategies of stardom and career longevity; and inheritance and post-colonial hauntings of race and identity. The book works with the notion of travelling, across borders, genres, sexualities, and media, highlighting the visibility of the aging body across a variety of European sites in order to establish popular music through the lens of age as a positive methodology with which to approach popular music cultures, and to offer a counter-narrative to age as decline. This book will appeal to scholars of popular music, popular culture, media studies, cultural studies, aging studies, and cultural gerontology.

1 Âge Tendre’s ‘Tour de France’

There is a jukebox, there are stars in the sky, silhouettes of the audience with their hands held high, an embedded video with a 48 second clip of the live tour, with back-stage set up scenes, shots of audiences clapping and of Sheila and the Rubettes among others performing. This is the trailer and ticket portal for the nationwide tenth anniversary 2016/7 tour of Âge Tendre: La Tournée des Idoles. Along with the YouTube and Facebook links, the words read, ‘The tenth anniversary tour will soon be near you. “Coyote Live” has taken over the brand to give you back this mythical tour (with over 4 million spectators).’ At the bottom of the page sits the exhortation to reserve your tickets today.

Every year since 2006, a group of French, English, Italian and Belgian singers have gone on tour around France, Belgium and Switzerland under the title of ‘Âge Tendre’. The name comes from a TV show that was aired in the 1960s called Âge Tendre et Têtes de Bois (Young and Headstrong), and the tour (‘la Tournée’), involves singers whose first performances were across Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. The tours are sell-outs, and 2008 witnessed the launch of the cruise version. A television series replicates the live performances in front of live studio audiences (channels). The franchise has gone through commercial ups and downs, it went bankrupt in 2015 and was subsequently resuscitated in 2016 under new ownership. As might be expected, there are the usual accompanying DVDs and social media sites.

The promotional rhetoric of the tour’s social media sites is soaked in nostalgia; a phenomenon that Tinker (2012) has written in detail about and upon whose arguments this chapter builds. Âge Tendre is undeniably versed in the tropes of nostalgia; it grounds and shapes the performances, the promotion, and the online interactions with its fans (whom it calls Âgetendriennes and Âgetendriens). Âge Tendre is a ‘nostalgia broadcast’ (Tinker 2012), and this chapter explores what lies behind this exhortation to nostalgia, with a particular focus on the performances of sexuality in the bodies of the ‘idols’. In this respect it hones in on the nexus of nostalgia, sexuality and aging within the context of an aspect of French popular culture of light entertainment whose roots embrace ‘variété’ and ‘chanson’ (Lebrun 2012, 2014).

Broadening out the discussion to look at the place of Âge Tendre within a popular music industry in contemporary France, it asks questions about French (and European) aging sexuality as it is inflected by nostalgia for a recent past, in particular how the emphasis on the eras of the 1960s and 1970s excludes the post-colonial voices of the French banlieue as well as the internationally acclaimed and outward facing voices of those on the French EDM scenes. Building into this argument is the contention the tour is a soap opera; that is, it manifests similar structural and narratological characteristics of the soap opera genre, which requires an examination of character and identificatory pleasures which, when mapped onto a reading of the tour as ‘nostalgic’ (Tinker 2012) offers a richer matrix within which arguments over the links between nostalgia and sexuality might be afforded. Further justification for positioning the tour as a quasi-televisual phenomenon comes from its origins; Âge Tendre was a television show running on RTF from 1961 to 1965 and up to 1968 under the title Tête de Bois et Tendre Annees.

The chapter also addresses this phenomenon through the concept of the palimpsest, whereby the present aging body in performance is a thin layer above the remembered youthful body of the performer in the 1960s. The tour and the series is entitled ‘Le retour de’, the return of, where youth is encouraged to emotionally collide with the present in a kairotic moment of celebratory musical communication.

There are therefore two main themes running through this chapter, concerning aging in the French light popular music entertainment context, that are significant in themselves but also have broader repercussions within European popular music culture with respect to aging. The first interrogates the web of sexuality in aging bodies as it is played out against a background of nostalgia. A key part of this conversation involves considering those performances of heteronormative, white sexuality within the context of the remembering of a specific French identity as it was positioned within 1960s and 1970s popular culture. The second reviews those connections within a non-chronological framework to see how far the kairotic notion of time might afford a different modality of understanding what is at play in this French popular music phenomenon.

From Têtes de Bois to ‘la Tournée’

A 1960s French television show, its title taken from the song of the same name by Gilbert Becaud and Pierre Delanoe, reappears sixty years later as a touring show and cruise. It attracts over 4 million spectators over a six-year period from 2006 to 2012, and goes into liquidation under the producer Michel Algay in 2015 only to resurface to tour again in the autumn of 2016 under a new producer and with a new presenter. It tours across Francophone Europe – France, Switzerland, Belgium – and is a sell-out. There are accompanying CDs, DVDs and in 2014, there was a cruise. For a price, you could be on the same ship as your idols and cruise around the Mediterranean to Casablanca, Cádiz and Lisbon.

Let’s work through some of the layers of that biography, as they hold some of the key ideas that ground our enquiry, first, Gilbert Becaud. Becaud is canonised within French popular culture as a key proponent of the chanson, a form of popular song peculiar to France (Lebrun 2012; Briggs 2015). Coming from the south of France, he was a member of the French Resistance in the war, was encouraged to sing by Piaf and sang up to his death in 2001 at 74. So he is configured as a creative cornerstone of Frenchness through his alliances with the brave (The Resistance) and the tragic (Piaf). Second, the song he wrote with Delanoe tells the tale of youthful insouciance and creeping Americanisation. The protagonists of their song, ‘Âge Tendre et Têtes de Bois’ are androgynous flâneurs, friends rather than lovers, drinking Coca-Cola and going to the cinema. They are the lyrical manifestation of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg; cool, uncommitted, adventurous, international, ‘young and headstrong’. They symbolise the new horizons and possibilities of the early to mid-1960s, prior to the May revolution of 1968. And in 1968, many of the current fans of the Têtes Tournée would have been in their early to mid-teens, as the current average age of the audience is around 60 (interview with Pierre-Nicolas Cléré, 22nd June 2016).

An audience that has grown up with its pop idols is one that is increasingly courted in the current European and Anglo-American popular music industry for its reliability in an industry that has been hit by streaming. This audience, aging and faithful, is a new and notable feature within the world of popular music, a world for whom cyclical development has dominated over linear. Pop has always looked back on itself, built on its influences and referenced them. But writers on pop music’s ability to recycle itself (Reynolds 2010; Samuel 2012) have noted the increasingly narrow margin as decades such as the 1980s and 1990s become ripe for review. Samuel, in his account of nostalgia and the heritage industry effects on British culture in general, notes its impact on popular music in particular, drawing out two related trends that apply to Âge Tendre, la Tournée. The first is that singers from the past might ‘enjoy a more active following in many cases than current stars’ (Samuel 2012, 89), a phenomenon that, Samuel argues, is enabled by the endless rehearsing of recent decades’ music. This rehearsing is enabled by the re-release on different formats of older albums:

In Pop Music, the re-release of many older albums on CD, the discovery of hitherto unused recording in tapes such as those of Jimi Hendrix, and not least the progressive Ageing of many rock and heavy metal followers, is producing a veritable explosion of nostalgia.

(Samuel 2012,104)

Samuel’s argument is predicated on the understanding that the past has more of a presence in the present than previously. And writing his book in 1994, he would not have been cognizant of the revolution that YouTube, Spotify and other music streaming services would have on this ‘all decades’ access to music. Now, the past is ever more imbricated in the present via the architecture of digital platforms whereby past performances share space on sidebars with contemporary releases (Gardner, 2015). This collision of the past and present is manifest on the Âge Tendre Facebook site where posts invite friends to view clips from the 1960s onwards, some from the original Âge Tendre television show (like Marjorie Noel and Michel Polnareff, who is still performing). The site operates like a family album, where ‘friends’ post comments on the cuteness or virtuosity of these young stars, sometimes in comparison to the inauthentic nature of contemporary singers, who can’t cut it live.

This nostalgic portal, the Facebook sites, the shows and the DVDs and CDs act not only as a memory prop (Van Dijck 2007) or ‘bridge’ to the audience’s remembered (and vicarious) past, but it relies too on the transference of what Samuel terms ‘unofficial knowledge’, that is knowledge which exists beyond the margins of the accepted histories of nation. Âge Tendre is unashamedly popular and its fans defend it against those for whom it is ‘ringard’ (Cachin 2016), which translates as ‘out moded’ and ‘mediocre’. Not just unimportant to now but also untalented, it is a damning epithet with which to describe any cultural player and clearly, might be considered within the terms of debates on taste and class that Bourdieu (1984) has espoused, and which builds onto Samuel’s idea of the ‘unofficial’-ness of this sort of knowledge (which also has a history of consideration with fan studies, see Duffett 2013). It was used by a long-standing Parisian friend of mine to describe Âge Tendre and acts as a way into locating this French phenomenon as out of date and not very good. Âge Tendre is outmoded, it is sentimental and nostalgic, it encourages its audience to revel in reliving, in rediscovering its youth; both the show itself and nostalgia as a pursuit are connected by this embrace of sentimentality and emotion, which drives the affectionate nostalgia upon which Âge Tendre depends. Tinker has argued that this nostalgia ‘represents a fantasy return to youth, and promotes social and cross- generational’ (2012, 239) dialogue. Indeed, the Facebook site’s embedded videos showing the Âge Tendre audience and newspaper comments indicate that the audience also includes the children of those in their sixties, and going out to the show is a ‘night out’ that includes dining, and in one comment, excludes men. We might then argue that the social cohesion Tinker suggests is being performed in Âge Tendre is reliant on a myth, in his words, a ‘fantasy return’, a ‘preference for the past over the present, social and cross-generational cohesion, and views nostalgia itself as a commercial force’ (Tinker 2012, 242), indeed, the show offers a ‘respite from gloom of everyday life (2012, 243). The Facebook site is written in the spirit of ‘égalité’, a spirit of equality, whereby, as the Facebook moderator (the producers) load up a new video every other day on average, which are viewed thousands of times and commented on. The Âgetendriens and Âgetendriennes in turn, are encouraged to look through the video archives to find new (old) stars from the ‘Golden Age’. The moderator of the FB site writes ‘Merci à vous qui nous aidez à retrouver de belles mélodies françaises des années Âge Tendre’¹ (thanks to those of you who are helping us rediscover those wonderful French melodies from the Âge Tendre years). The comments mention the word ‘souvenir’ and ‘jeunesse’ and comment favorably on the quality of the singers. The comment threads are indicative of the cohesion that Tinker suggests such nostalgic episodes engender (2012, 242) and it is apparent that these conversations are being conducted in a space outside of the everyday concerns of those commenting, and so offer some form of temporary escape (and much has been written on this with respect to active engagement in online participatory fandoms and this is not to be considered now except to acknowledge the positive aspect of this form of connectivity). This notion of a temporary release from the present via revelry in a ‘better’ past is retrogressive, apolitical and conservative (Samuel, 2012) but it is also democratic in its participatory potential, its ‘unofficial-ness’ where a stake for popular pleasures is being claimed (Fiske 2010).

Nostalgia and Âge Tendre

Tinker has written extensively on the role of nostalgia in Âge Tendre, drawing on the nuances of the term as expounded by Boym, whereby nostalgia can be restorative (trying to reconstruct a lost home), or reflective (where the act of longing is taken as the nostalgic practice). He also refers to Goulding’s (2002) work on ‘vicarious’ nostalgia where nostalgia is experienced at a remove, as ‘second-hand’ (Tinker 2012, 240). Âge Tendre mobilises all three modes in its production and reception. First, a progressive and pre-post-colonial France is yearned for, second, that yearning is emotionally capitalised on and sold/marketed as a rejuvenating experience, joyous and collective. Third, the past as it is rendered through the elderly stars who perform the nostalgic memory bridges of the songs of their youth do so to an audience which, although it may largely be people 60 and above, clearly consists of younger people who would not have been around to experience a 1960s adolescence.

Promotional and publicity material for the tour and local and national news coverage of it repeatedly uses the vocabulary of nostalgia to describe it, in particular the notion of rediscovery, return and revival. ‘Venez revivre la magie des années 60s et 70s’ exhorts the promotional video on the ÂgeTendre Facebook site (25/3/2016), ‘Vos idoles sont de retour’. The tour operates as a time machine, ‘une redoutable machine a remonter le temps’, and is a ‘come-back’ of the sixties generation. Pierre-Nicolas Cléré, the current producer of the show, emailed responses to four questions on the tour, one of which was the question as to why the show was so popular. His answer was commensurate with the notion of a re-discovery, as he claimed that the audience were very happy to ‘find their youth through the singers of their generation – “son époque”: ‘Le public d’Âge Tendre est donc très heureux de re-trouver “sa jeunesse” au travers des chanteurs de son époque’ (Cléré 22/6/16).

Press coverage of the tour, notably in May and June of 2015 when the business went into liquidation, refers to the ‘ancient glories’ (Le Parisien, 30/5/15) of the 1960s, the rediscovery of stars who had ‘rocked’ in their adolescence. Moreover, the French verb ‘bercer’ (to rock) comes from the noun ‘cradle’ or ‘crib’ and so the ‘rocking’ intimated here is not that of rock ‘n’ roll (although that tendency is mooted) but of the care and pacification of the infant. This casts the relationship between the audience and their idols as a familial one, where the ‘idols’ are maternal and avuncular figures rocking their youngsters.

The idols on tour

The Âge Tendre tour’s 10th anniversary is scheduled to run from November 2016 to February 2017. Its roster consists of ten artists, top of the bill being Gerard Lenorman (born 1945), Sheila (born 1945) and Hughes Aufray (born 1929). Further acts include Linda de Suza (born 1948), Marcel Amont (born 1929), Isabelle Aubret (born 1938) and Christian Delagrange (1947). Two bands are also on the tour, Les Rubettes (an English pop band whose main hits came out in the early 1970s) and Au Bonheur Des Dames, a French pop band from the same decade. The first point to note is that all of the artists are over 60 years old, with Aufray in his late eighties and so of the same époque as the audience. Second, they span a range of musical styles that came of age in the 1960s and defined specific types of Frenchness, from chanson (Lenorman, Delangrange, Aufray) to yeye (Sheila), fado (de Suza) and pop (Aubret).

Chanson, as it is performed in Âge Tendre, refers to a songwriting style and vocal delivery technique that has its precedents in the Holy Trinity of French chanson, Jacques Brel, George Brassens and Leo Ferre, which is itself a myth (Cordier in Briggs 2015, 47). It is typically defined by an ‘intellectual character’ (Briggs 2015, 49), a tendency to be dominated by singer-songwriters, who happen to be men. Writers have found it difficult to map out a secure generic taxonomy of ‘chanson’ in terms of timbre, texture of lyrical preoccupation (Briggs 2015, 49) and perhaps it is more telling to contextualise chanson by what it is not, and against what it is measured. In the 1960s, as English and American rock ‘n’ roll rolled out across the Anglophone world, chanson became a ‘defensive rhetoric’ (Looseley in Briggs, 2015, 47) that was mobilised to maintain the idea of an ongoing ‘vital’ French culture in the face of the onslaught of Hollywood and the Beatles. It functioned as a bulwark of French culture against what was seen as a rapidly homogenising popular music (and cinematic) culture. The Ministry of Culture, led by Andre Malraux, an esteemed novelist, instituted programs to shore up French culture and within this, there was what Briggs calls, an ‘equivocation of high culture and French culture’ (Briggs 2015, 49) within which the chanson provided a link back to not only medieval literary culture, but to ideals of Frenchness as lyrical, articulate and romantic. The chanson, and those that sing it, are ‘serious’ and they bridge back to a pre-modern (and pre-war) history as well as seemingly being abreast of new technologies in music (since the chanson, after all, is delivered to a popular music audience via popular radio stations and not in the classical music sphere). The 1960s, as for other European countries, was for France a period of progress, socially and technologically, which for France culminated in the student riots of May 1968. It was a period of immense change and Briggs argues that ‘As modernisation and urbanisation changed the social and economic fabric of French society, chanson offered an imagined combination of tradition and modernity to unify audiences and reinforce the continued solidarity of France in the face of globalisation’ (2015, 48). Briggs talks about the ‘cultural anxieties’ that were the backdrop for 1960s chanson; these anxieties are arguably present in contemporary, twenty-first century France too, if targeted not only at globalisation but to the increased rupture of the French ideals of fraternity which have been sorely tested by the upsurge of the right-wing Front Nationale. These anxieties will be considered in terms of how Âge Tendre functions as a memory bridge back to a white past.

Another musical aspect of this past is ‘Yéyé’, a form of pop music whose title came from a French rendering of that Anglophone refrain, ‘yeah, yeah’. Sheila, currently among the most elderly of touring elders on Âge Tendre was once a yeye singer. She had a hit with ‘L’ecole est fini’ (school’s over) and was cast as a ‘copine’ within the prevailing discourse of yeye in the early 1960s. This discourse was part of a media trend which was spearheaded by a radio programme on Europe 1 called ‘Salut les copains’ (‘Hi friends’), a show produced and presented by Daniel Filipacchi, who then followed up its success with a similarly titled magazine. It sold to a new generation of teenagers who were articulating their difference to their parents generation, their stake in sexuality (Briggs 2015, 35) but for whom rebellion still came in the form of...