Chanson

The French Singer-Songwriter from Aristide Bruant to the Present Day

Peter Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351572408
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

En France, tout finit par des chansons' is the well-known phrase which sums up the importance of chanson for the French. A song tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages and troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, chanson is part of the texture of everyday life in France - a part of the national identity and a barometer of popular taste. In this first study of chanson in English, Peter Hawkins examines the background to the genre and the difficulties in defining what is and what is not chanson. The focus then moves to the development of the singer-songwriter of chanson from 1880 to the present day. This period saw the emergence of national icons from Aristide Bruant at the end of the nineteenth century through to internationally recognized musicians such as Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg. Each of these figures used chanson to express the particular moral dilemmas, tragic situations and moments of euphoria particular to themselves and their times. The book provides bibliographies, discographies and details of video recordings for each of the singer-songwriters that it discusses. It is both an essential reference guide to the genre and a useful case history of the adaptation of an ancient form to the demands of the modern mass media.

Part I
A little theory goes a long way

Chapter 1
What is chanson?

'Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien' [No, nothing at all, no, I regret nothing]. Even the least francophone member of the British public will probably recognise the phrase and be able to sing the tune. They may even remember the name of the artist. Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien' has a place in British popular culture, but one has to say that it is one of the very few examples of French chanson to have achieved that degree of international renown. Yet in France, Britain's nearest European neighbour, chanson is part of the texture of everyday life, a form of popular culture which is part of the national identity, as in the well-known proverbial phrase 'Tout finit par des chansons' [Everything ends with songs].¹ The slightly dismissive implication of this is that in France, even the most serious conflicts are resolved in an atmosphere of collective jollification. There is a reality underlying this, however, which is that in France, songs have always had a greater symbolic impact than in Britain, or in many other cultures. The great moments of French history have been marked by popular songs, which carry with them a baggage of cultural associations, and which serve as rallying cries for particular causes: the classic example is of course the revolutionary marching song that has become the French national anthem, the 'Marseillaise'.² Such songs represent the high points of the impact of songs in French political and social life; but that importance is rooted in a culture where songs have always had an influence, across a wide spectrum of French society.

Chanson is a tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages, and probably beyond. The troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are a well-known example of the ancient origins of the form,³ although it has undergone many transformations since then. It seems that the song form is more closely bound up with the national identity in France than it is in many other cultures, that it embodies for a wide cross-section of people some of the fundamental elements of what it means to be French. In this respect it is a powerful but at the same time elusive component of French popular culture: there is at a given time not one chanson, but 'des chansons', it is a diffuse and multiple phenomenon which reflects a consistent taste for the form in the French public, but which is difficult to isolate and analyse because of its diversity. This study will concentrate on just one highly significant and original aspect of chanson in the last hundred years or so: the development of the singer-songwriter; but in order to do so it will be necessary to look more widely at the genre of popular song in France, at the context from which the modern singer-songwriter emerged.

Chanson has always been a kind of barometer of popular taste, a reflection of a period, and this is as true today as it ever was. Certain songs have the ability to evoke a particular time, especially for those who lived through it, but even for those who did not. The songs of a decade or other identifiable period evoke an atmosphere, reflect the everyday preoccupations of people, even if not always directly, and allude to the current fashions. They not only respond to these changes, but are also part of the process of creating them. In some respects they resemble a kind of poetic and musical journalism, with many of the ambiguities that implies: they can flatter the worst of public taste, or fulfil a pioneering, prophetic role; they can be commercially motivated attempts to cash in on current trends, or on the other hand high-flown declarations of principle that make such an impact as to transcend the particular moment of their creation. The relation of chanson to high culture is similar to that of journalism to literature: serious art is often what it aspires to, but only occasionally what it achieves. This is one reason why this study will be concentrating on the more prestigious end of the chanson spectrum, that of the singer-songwriter as ambitious creative artist, but also why it cannot do so by isolating and separating that phenomenon from the context in which it flowered, that of chanson in its more popular forms.

What are the ingredients that go to make up the hybrid form of popular culture which is French chanson? It is, first of all, a form of popular music, which sometimes has links with its classical, 'serious' counterpart. Closer still are its links with poetry, and there is a lot of interaction between chanson and its more prestigious literary cousin. It is also a variety of theatre, with the emphasis very much on variety: it is a medium of live performance, where the quality of interaction with the audience can be determining. In the modern period which concerns us, as the analogy with journalism suggests, it is also an aspect of the mass media in which the technical progress of electronic means of communication has been decisive. This enumeration may seem a little obvious, but it is important to establish the nature of the form of expression we are examining, so as to avoid oversimplification or reductionism. Chanson is not just a popular variety of poetry, not just a commercial product of the mass media industry, not just a reflection of popular taste, nor even a variety of folk-song. This is also the reason for the inclusion of a later section devoted to examining these distinctions in more detail. Precisely because of its ambiguous, hybrid status, and despite its apparent naturalness, chanson is a deceptive and elusive phenomenon. This elusiveness is of course part of the fascination, and one of the main reasons for writing about it.

In most instances a chanson is the product of the collaboration of a team of people, not of an individual. Although the single creative figure has a higher profile in the French version of this particular art form than in many other cultures, it is none the less true that the institution of chanson, sometimes called by those who work in it le métier [the trade], is made up of craftsmen, professionals, entrepreneurs and technicians who work in collaboration with each other. These constitute the soil, the humus from which sprouts, from time to time, a particularly dazzling bloom which appears to have come from nowhere and makes its mark with little or no apparent help from its environment. This effect is always to some extent an illusion: there is often more support from the environment than meets the eye. For every star in the chanson business, there is always a team of obscure workers preparing the terrain: even a figure as singular as Jacques Brel was heavily dependent on a regular team of collaborators, which included his arranger Francis Rauber, his pianist Gérard Jouannest, his tour manager Georges Pasquier and his impresario Charley Marouani,⁴ Yet sometimes the successful career of a star performer carries with it more than just the glamour of stardom; the most interesting and impressive figures we shall be dealing with in this study manage to make their stardom into a vehicle for something more than the reflected glory of their admiring audience. They succeed in creating a coherent world-view, in communicating their most profound responses to human problems in a way which is both popular and accessible, and at the same time personal and original. Given the constraints and pressures of le métier, this is no mean achievement; and in the French tradition such figures are revered in a quasi-religious way. The status of national folk-hero has already outlived Georges Brassens by fifteen years, and Edith Piaf by thirty years. Such achievements are most often the fruits of powerful individual creative talents, but not necessarily so, as in the case of Piaf, who worked closely with a team of collaborators, yet managed to impose her own style on everything she undertook. A world-view emerges from the output of artists such as these, with moral problems, tragic situations, moments of euphoria: they are analogous to the highest moments of literary creation, but they have an extra dimension in that they are by definition moments shared in a more immediate way and with a wider public than is true of most literature.

So although the highest achievements of the chanson tradition are comparable to those of literature, they are not assimilable to it in a direct and obvious way. There is an added mythical quality to the output of artists such as Piaf, Brassens or Brel. There have of course been French literary figures who have achieved a similar mythical status: Victor Hugo, for instance, or in a very different way, Arthur Rimbaud. But this was not usually as a result of direct contact with the audience that subscribed to the myth, which is most often the case with chanson artists. The magical and mysterious charisma of stage presence has a lot to do with this, as does the heady excitement of the live concert performance, which arguably shares many of the features of a religious meeting. Such factors cannot be ignored in any analysis of the genre: one has to take account of the mythical dimension of an artist's persona.

There are many ways of explaining this special status, which go beyond the scope of a study such as this. It is important to suggest some of them, however, if only to situate the phenomenon we are dealing with, and despite the fact that definitive answers to our questions are probably not yet available. The first point is that the dominant figures of the chanson tradition in recent times embody values which have a wide appeal to members of their audience: individualism, for instance, or a certain conception of masculinity, both of which will be later explored more fully. Singers such as Brassens have provided role models for a whole generation of Frenchmen, perhaps even for several generations. What is more difficult to determine is the degree to which their role is innovative in relation to the norms of their time, and to what extent it merely reflects the deeply-embedded attitudes of their audience. I shall make some attempt to address these questions when de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Part I: A little theory goes a long way
• Part II: Practice makes perfect
• Part III: Innovation and renovation: the Nouvelle chanson française
• Select bibliography and discography
• Index