Made in France

Studies in Popular Music

Gérôme Guibert, Catherine Rudent, Gérôme Guibert, Catherine Rudent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317645702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Made in France: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary French popular music. The volume consists of essays by scholars of French popular music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in France. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in France, followed by essays that are organized into thematic sections: The Mutations of French Popular Music During the " Trente Glorieuses "; Politicising Popular Music; Assimilation, Appropriation, French Specificity; and From Digital Stakes to Cultural Heritage: French Contemporary Topics.

Contributors:

Christian Béthune

Juliette Dalbavie

Gérôme Guibert

Fabien Hein

Olivier Julien

Marc Kaiser

Barbara Lebrun

David Looseley

Stéphanie Molinero

Anne Petiau

Cécile Prévost-Thomas

Vincent Rouzé

Catherine Rudent

Matthieu Saladin

Jedediah Sklower

Raphaël Suire

Florence Tamagne

Part I

Zeitgeist

The Mutations of French Popular Music During the “Trente Glorieuses”

Preamble

Gérôme Guibert and Catherine Rudent

From the end of the Second World War through to the beginning of the 1970s, French popular music underwent a period of renewal.

The war and its fallout transformed the global balance of power, with the influence of the United States becoming increasingly prominent in the economy, politics and culture of the Western world. International politics revolved around issues linked to the Cold War, as well as the violent upheavals of decolonisation. In France, the 1960s and 1970s formed a period that Henri Mendras (1994) has described as the “Second French Revolution,” affecting every aspect of society. As Mendras has shown, it was between 1965 and 1984 that

four large and antagonistic classes [the farmers, the labourers, the bourgeoisie and the middle classes] crumbled [. . .]. The dominant institutions—the Church, the military, the Republic, education, the Communist Party and the unions—lost their symbolic aura and their authority [. . .].

Amongst other factors, this multi-faceted and radical transformation of French society was brought about by the so-called baby boom—that is, the exceptional number of births occurring after the end of the war. In France, this occurred particularly between 1946 and 1951 (Bernstein & Milza 2, 367). At the beginning of the 1960s, these individuals were becoming teenagers, and the demographic composition of the French state was thus profoundly altered and renewed, with a lower average age and a significant proportion of the population aged under twenty. This facilitated the arrival of new cultural practices, themselves reinforced by the economic prosperity of the nation between 1945 and 1975. This was a time commonly known in France as the “Trente Glorieuses,” a “period of significant and steady growth, benefitting from a favourable international trade environment, an opening-up of foreign markets, a strong increase in population, and state intervention” (Berstein & Milza 2, 365). This period of growth would only be cut short by the global financial crises of 1973–1974, when “a succession of disturbances […] rocked the international monetary system created by the Bretton-Woods agreements, upset global oil prices, and affected a wide range of older or maturing industries” (Berstein & Milza 3, 7).

As for the world of music, the baby boomers of the 1960s showed tremendous enthusiasm in adopting new popular music styles (that of the so-called yéyés in particular), and in embracing the new, light, practical and cheap recording formats and broadcasting equipment (transistor radios, 45 rpm vinyl “singles,” portable “turntables”). Indeed, it was this young generation that made the radio show Salut les Copains (lit. Hi There, Buddies) so successful. This show was created in 1959 by Daniel Filipacchi and Frank Ténot for the Europe n° 1 station (which was also young itself, having been started in 1955). Aimed at school-age teenagers, it was broadcast daily at the end of the school day and featured the “smash hits” of artists who themselves were only just entering adulthood: Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, France Gall, Sheila, Françoise Hardy, Eddy Mitchell, Claude François. This was a group of perhaps a dozen or so artists in all, according to Jean-Marie Périer, the photographer who found himself at the heart of this musical phenomenon. The music of the yéyés represented a significant stage in the history of French popular music in the second half of the twentieth century: it is analysed here from both a cultural and aesthetic perspective in the chapters by Florence Tamagne and Matthieu Saladin.

French music, like French society in general, has undergone some major transformations, and yet, it is important to situate these in an extremely divided national and cultural context. During this period, the hierarchies between “high” culture and “pop” culture remained strong. Excellent and complex analyses of this divide can be found in the work of Bourdieu, and particularly in his book La Distinction, published in 1979, for which sociological surveys were conducted in 1963 and in 1967–1968. This work proposes sociological explanations for the structuration of tastes, crystallised around the notions of “legitimate” taste, “middlebrow” taste and “popular” taste.

And yet, from a historical perspective, it seems that all musical fields, both “legitimate” and “popular,” underwent major changes in the post-war period through to the 1960s. Indeed, in the world of “legitimate” music, Boulez revived the principles of serialism, seeking to make a break with the recent French past. The studios of the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF) also broadcast the musical experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry—experiments that parallel those of Stockhausen in Cologne and Berio in Milan. At the same time, musical revolutions were occurring in chanson—that is, on the other side of the art music / popular music divide.

In Paris, an extraordinary renaissance occurred in cabaret music in the 1950s and 1960s: from the end of the 1940s onwards, the “cabarets d’esprit rive gauche” (Schlesser 2006, 87–111) saw the arrival of a great number of talents. These venues were the first springboards for the careers of Gréco, Brassens, Brel, Ferré, Barbara, Anne Sylvestre, Nougaro, Gainsbourg and others. At the end of the 1950s, a series of further shake-ups occurred, starting with the arrival of rock music in France from 1956 onwards. Initially, this came via the humorous parodies performed by Henri Salvador who, whilst maintaining a certain critical distance, fitted pun-filled lyrics by Boris Vian to music by Michel Legrand (“Rock and roll-mops”) or Henri Salvador himself (“Rock hoquet”). At the same time, American 45 rpm vinyl “singles” began to arrive in France, where they provoked quite a different, and indeed enthusiastic, response from the youngest generation of musicians who subsequently became the first French “rockers.”¹ Next, France saw the rise of the yéyé phenomenon, which had its roots firmly in this first wave of rock music, but which was nevertheless distinct from it, occurring a few years later from 1960 onwards. Issuing directly out of the Salut les Copains programme, the yéyé movement was borne along by a handful of artists aired on this show, whose singles frequently sold more than a million copies. In their music, they reworked the styles that were proving particularly commercially successful in the United States for a French audience—of which the twist is a notable example. Most of the time, the yéyé groups simply adapted French lyrics to pre-existing music—an analysis of these adaptations is provided here in the chapter by Matthieu Saladin. It was only in 1963 that this musical style was baptised “yéyé ” by Edgar Morin: in two articles published by the newspaper Le Monde, the sociologist analysed this musical phenomenon as the expression of a new way of growing into adulthood, one in which one’s “friends” (“copains”) played an essential role.

The first section of Made in France traces the history of these profound transformations: Florence Tamagne thus highlights the difference between the societal anxieties raised by the violence of the so-called blousons noirs and by the first year of the yéyé movement, on the one hand, and the conservative values associated with the yéyé groups during their heyday in the years after 1963, on the other. The fear of rock music, she shows, continued through into the 1970s with the rise of rock festivals.

Julien’s chapter calls attention to the extent to which Gainsbourg—whose production precisely is at its best between 1958 (“Le poinçonneur des Lilas”) and 1979 (Aux armes et caetera)—borrowed from the many contradictory trends present in France during this turbulent time. In a blend which is his own, Gainsbourg not only assumed the high poetic ambitions of cabaret music but also managed to incorporate new styles imported from the English-speaking world.

Kaiser, on the other hand, focuses on the French vinyl industry. In this domain also, the changes of the era did not occur all at once: as he shows with examples drawn from archive research, this industry regularly underwent cycles of obsolescence and of regrowth. As for the post-war revival, Kaiser demonstrates that it was already well underway in the form of the variety shows of the 1950s, many years before yéyé music exploded onto the scene.

It is therefore necessary to put the yéyé revolution (1960–1965) into perspective, position it within its wider chronological context and consider it as the result of a series of broader and more complex changes in terms of the economics, technology, demography, society and culture of the time. It is also important to realise that this musical movement—which seemed so short, so boisterous and so instantly recognisable—did not break out from a tradition of French chanson that was sedate, poetic, homogenous and refined, whose progression had until then been seamless and uniform. This simplistic narrative of a stimulating, and without exception authentic, French chanson movement—running from Bruant (at the end of the nineteenth century) through to Brel, Ferré and Brassens—is questioned by a number of researchers. In En avant la zizique, Boris Vian (1959, 114–117), himself a prominent actor in the history of French chanson, calls attention to the tasteless records that occasionally characterised chanson during France’s Belle Epoque; Jean-Claude Klein (1988) shows the aesthetic divides at play in music-hall chanson during the 1920s; Gérôme Guibert (2006) traces the constitutive tensions in the field, which go back to well before the twentieth century. French chanson before 1960 is not a uniform and calm landscape, living out a golden age which would be destroyed by the yéyé cataclysm.

The yéyé revolution must also be reinterpreted in terms of what is happening today: the older members of the baby-boom generation are now in their seventies. As a result, there has been what commentators have called a “papyboom.” For these individuals, who represent a considerable proportion of French society, the years of the 1960s and the music of the yéyés are those of their youth and their teenage obsessions. They are invested therefore with an aura of nostalgia, an important sentiment in cultural and musical practice. As a sign of this renewed interest in the yéyé phenomenon, we might cite the recent “Vieilles Canailles” (lit. the “old rabble”) concerts: Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell and Jacques Dutronc, all over the age of seventy, performed in six concerts at the Palais Omnisport Paris-Bercy arena in November 2014. The hall was filled to capacity (17,000 seats), and the performance was screened in cinemas a few days later, and then again on 15 January 2015, because of the popularity of the show. It was undoubtedly hugely well received amongst a very broad audience and its success has been prolonged further still by the recent release of a DVD version. Vast swathes of the French public have turned out to listen to these three artists who, it must be said, have not always been to everybody’s liking; and this audience is, in all probability, more homogenous in terms of age than social or cultural standing.

The history of French popular music and the upheavals it underwent during the thirty years following 1945 is thus a complex one which demands nuanced analysis. But those actors who were implicated at the time in supporting (or resisting) the rise of the yéyé did not always recognise these subtleties. On the whole, the yéyés shared with their teenage audience an unbridled fascination with the musical hits imported from the United States and used this to fashion a new local generatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• List of Translators
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: What’s the French Touch in French Popular Music? A Sociohistorical Introduction to Chanson and Other French Repertoires
• Part I: Zeitgeist: The Mutations of French Popular Music During the “Trente Glorieuses”
• Part II: Politicising Popular Music
• Part III: Assimilation, Appropriation, French Specificity
• Part IV: From Digital Stakes to Cultural Heritage: French Contemporary Topics
• A Selected Bibliography on French Popular Music
• Index