All good things must come to an end. I have enjoyed writing monthly columns for The Connexion, an indispensable newspaper for English speakers in France. But it seemed the right time to catapult the column up to that great repository of journalistic endeavour in the sky. And that is what I have done.
This, held over from the beginning of last month because of the Paris attacks, was my last offering. I reproduce how it was submitted; there will have been minor tweaks and/or cuts before publication ...
French pop music, unlike French wine, fashion and film, travels poorly.
There’s no need to take an Englishman’s word for it. Benjamin Biolay, the French singer-songwriter, producer and magnet for beautiful women, once offered me a more colourful turn of phrase to make the same point.
At least he was trying to do something positive, with his own refinement of chanson française. But in classic French style, successive governments have less admirably handed homegrown pop a cloak of protectionism, forcing radio stations to play it whatever listeners think. Now, politicians want a say on which French songs are selected.
They noticed that music stations undermined the spirit of the law – a quota requiring at least 40 per cent of their playlists to be in French – by playing the same small clutch of tracks over and again.
Ostensibly to help new talent breach this airplay monopoly, the culture minister Fleur Pellerin proposed reinfoircing the measure. The 10 most frequently played Francophone songs would in future account for a maximum of only half the stations’ French-language output, a lot less than now.
Radio bosses responded Frenchly to this affront to artistic freedom by suspending acquiescence in the existing law for a 24-hour protest.
It is hard to find merit in the minister’s nanny-statish stance. All the music stations I hear in France - Virgin, NRJ, Nostalgie and RTL2 - have wretchedly unambitious and repetitive playlists, but not just in their choices of French songs. It also happens with the wicked Anglo-Saxon pop whose assault on listeners’ sensibilities the law is meant to repel. How many times can anyone hear Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall or Queen’s I Want It All without losing the will to live?
But it is inescapably true that British, American and, increasingly Australasian pop pleases more people, even in France, than francophone music.
The French should be embarrassed that since Edith Piaf, the trend has been bucked largely by such monumentally forgettable novelty hits as those of Belgium’s Singing Nun and Plastic Bertrand, not to mention Je t’aime ... moi non plus, Serge Gainsbourg’s piece of musical erotica recorded with the impeccably English though French-speaking Jane Birkin, then his lover. I had a teenage crush on Françoise Hardy but was coolly informed by her decades later that her big single Tous les garçons et les filles was “trite and inconsequential”.
When not the stuff of Biolay’s nightmares, French popular music can offer impressive lyricism. One recent list of 10 most-aired songs included Calogero’s Le Portrait, a movingly poetic story of a young boy’s yearning for his deceased mother. It’s just that French pop doesn’t, well, rock.
These are matters of individual taste. But it does seem today’s most compelling French pop is sung in English. The artists quite rightly see more prospect of commercial success that way and some of the results are encouraging. I have not heard a finer pop song in years than the Toulouse duo Cats on Trees’ Sirens Call. Others acclaim Daft Punk or David Guetta.
Perhaps a sensible approach would be neither to stop promoting French music nor to ram it into people’s ears. If good enough, it will make its mark in any case. And how many young people in the internet age rely on the radio for their fix of pop and rock?
Parliament can find other ways of nurturing domestic talent, though some would doubtless cost money whereas cultural fascism is free. Essentially, however, listeners will make their own choices, and these may include reaching for the off button if the content bears a stamp of official approval.
The excellent Cat on Trees
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