Le Quietus

I've started doing these columns over here. It's my niche, it's an odd one, not because liking French music is strange per se but because it's so broad as a category to 'like'.

But still, music that emanates from France, whether good or bad, is a near-constant source of interest for me. But it’s not because I necessarily think the country’s musical output is in any way superior to that of any other country. (I get the impression, though, that there’s a lot more going on than in Italy, the land of my mother, for example, but I’d love to find out that I’m wrong). But I’ve spent various periods of time living there and, as music is my primary interest, I couldn’t help but explore the musical landscape, and Rockfort is a way of putting the knowledge (and the records) that I have accrued to some use. France is also appealing simply because it’s not England or North America, and so what happens there often hasn’t been picked over, analysed or hyped to death in the UK (or in France for that matter - the French don't really do that in the same way). It doesn’t make me Columbus but, outside academia, informed Anglo commentators on French music are thin on the ground (Mojo's Kieron Tyler being one notable exception). The fact is that my interest can be piqued regardless of the quality of the actual music, just because, even when a record is rubbish, I have some ideas about the context in which it arises, of its place in the culture. Even if I wanted to ignore it, I couldn’t – the subject of French music always sets my antennae twitching. I've come to know the terrain.

Attention to French music on the web tends to be about the fetishisation of certain aspects, kitsch-and-all, of the 60s and 70s (Yé-Yé/girl singers/France Gall, BB and the Gainsbourg girl axis – and Gainsbourg himself, French psych etc), or modern derivations thereof such as the ‘fragile girls, singing in French, making me sigh’ of Guuzbourg’s admirably single-minded ‘Filles Souries’. I say admirable because I have a great deal of respect for that kind of devotion to mining a single seam – or, in Guuzbourg’s case, doing more than that and pretty much willing into being his own genre.

But I can’t follow that approach myself. Firstly because, well, why would I want to, when other people do it perfectly well.

Another reason for this is my own changing tastes. When I was in Paris in 2002 I noted the arrival of New new wave (for there have been others) of chanson artists like Benjamin Biolay (who, natch, writes for lots of breathy girls, including his own sister) and Keren Ann. At the time, I was charmed, it was the perfect complement to my French dream. How perfect that the French had again started making music that sounded like the classic 60s pop of yore! All my Francophile fantasies fulfilled! I could put on Coralie Clement, smoke a cigarette, and instantly be in my own little Truffaut film.

But at the time (and a piece a wrote for Time Out Paris backs that up) I already anticipated that this specific fascination would be relatively short-lived. Fantasy is an essential component of the pop experience but for me it is not enough in itself to sustain my interest in largely insipid music. Again (and maybe I’m being overly defensive here) I want to make it clear that I don’t think every French girl singer, or every nouveau chansonnier is insipid, but certainly that the ratio of inspired to just plain old respired is not so hot. Furthermore, although I understand that the idea of ‘the future’ may have become an irrelevance in pop music (as it has in culture more widely), I can’t accept the total surrender artistic surrender of straight-up pastiche. Yes, chanson (or folky, wafer-light pop in the case of most modern ‘chanson’) is a pillar of French culture, but in 2010 it’s no more a sign of the vitality of that culture than a group doing Beatles and Kinks-y pop or music hall (yes, Britpop basically) would be in Britain.

I can anticipate a counter-argument, and I have some sympathy for it – that it’s at least a properly French mode, a vibe that is particular to the country. I'd always be open to discussing that. I don’t want to shy away from discussing nouvelle chanson (in fact I have just spent the last few paragraphs doing just that) or the way that chanson’s influence might manifest itself in current French music. But, also, let’s take the cases of French Touch, French rap, Cold Wave, Yé-Yé (and all the 60s stuff that gets grouped with Yé-Yé these days) – all examples of a French tendency to refract outside influences in subtly unusual and captivating ways, possibly because of that simultaneous superiority/inferiority complex (particularly relating to Anglo-Saxon culture) that puts French music-makers at more than just a geographical remove from any sources.

Simon Reynolds, mentioned this ‘distance’ a while back in a post called ‘We Are All French Today’:

“It's no secret that France has a bit of a chequered history with la musique roque. There tends to be this twice-removed, distanced aura to that nation's guitarband output. It can be enjoyable for precisely that quality: Plastic Bertrand "Ca Plane Pour Moi" (he was Belgian though right? apparently he didn't even sing on his own records, sez Malcolm McLaren, admiringly), Les Ritas Mitsouko on their one great track whose title escapes me (sounded very T.Rexy though), even things like Metal Urbain and Les Thugs. And of course Daft Punk took that nonreal vibe and turned it into a positive aesthetic strength. But maybe that degree of twice-removed and hyper-selfconsciousness is our common condition today, maybe it's impossible for anyone anywhere to rock in that basic pure from-the-gut unreflecting scare-quote-free way that was available to James Gang or AC/DC or whoever. Maybe we are all French today.”

Some might see as arrogantly Anglo the assumption that French music is only interesting when contending with the influences of UK and US music. I don’t think it’s the only way French music can be interesting, but it is fertile territory: French pop as a distorted mirror held up to UK/US sounds, and (as Simon Reynolds suggests above), of pop at large. The recent obsession among some French artists (M83, Phoenix, Valerie Collective) for the atmospheres and sounds of 80s teen-films/John Hughes is just the latest example.

And things can get more twisty and post-modern than that – take the two very obvious examples of Air and Daft Punk, who are simultaneously French and ‘French’ (aware of, and drawing on, the nebulous associations that for a foreigner might constitute ‘Frenchness’ in music, from ‘sophistication’ to ‘naffness’. It’s not for nothing that their first album bore the legend ‘French Band’).

I guess this is all my way of saying there’s plenty of meat for further discussion and elaboration. In what ways does French music parallel British/UK stuff - or not? Does a French rock group, for example, sound different to an English or American one? If it does, is that just an impression, or is it based on something more tangible? Also, there’s plenty to say because (even though it probably seems as though I’ve been trying my hardest to say the opposite) and there are plenty of French musicians (bands/artists/music-makers…) I want to celebrate too. So yup, going to be doing this on The Quietus for a bit.