Feature : A festival of music!

Sometime in the mid-eighties, French rock decided to cast aside the blanket of inhibitions that was smothering it and rediscover its roots rather than envy those of others.

Sounds like good news: on the eve of the 21st century, French rock has ceased to be the favourite object of mockery of international rock enthusiasts. Four decades have elapsed since the first electric tremors made in France, and the legendary inhibitions that once beset French rock musicians overshadowed by their Anglo-Saxon counterparts are now rife for the museum shelf, along with the past inhibitions of its soccer players.

Due to the insurmountable language barrier, rock music sung in French has always had a tough time getting beyond the borders of the French-speaking countries; but within those borders at least, it has managed to find its own identity and made a lasting impression, so much so that it no longer owes anything to anyone.

The era of French pop singers who used to emulate and sometimes ape the rock music of Elvis and Gene Vincent now seems to belong to a somewhat burlesque prehistoric age. With another, hardly more flattering age also over, namely that of groups cloned on obsessive models (Téléphone parodying the Rolling Stones without their calibre; Trust imagining they were the genuine French equivalent of AC/DC), French rock seems at last to have freed itself of its old habits, ready not only to stand by its own particular brand of rock but also to brandish it, like a standard.

Taking off in the nineties

Here, too, the talk was of the French cultural exception. During the nineties, while the various ramifications of France’s music output (notably electronic instrumental music) were taking the hitherto impregnable citadel of the international record market by storm, the impact of more traditional rock was also gaining in leaps and bounds, so much so that certain groups and artists suddenly found themselves floating in the sort of record sales stratosphere previously reserved for the big shots of traditional chanson.

Noir Désir, for instance, the Bordeaux-based group that was long the insiders’ tip in rock music for more than a decade, now sells several hundred thousand copies with each of its record releases. What is even more astonishing is that Noir Désir managed to establish itself by breaking virtually every tried-and-tested rule of marketing and promotion: refusing to take part in prime-time TV programmes, releasing video clips that often clashed with all the accepted standards of the genre, designing record sleeves that even portrayed the group with their backs turned, as on their most famous album Tostaky.

In fact, the breach opened by Noir Désir has since been secured by a whole generation of groups from the provinces, who have enjoyed the support of local networks while awaiting their nationwide triumph. Louise Attaque, for instance, the most important phenomenon to have emerged over the past few years (two million albums sold), was preceded by a powerful reputation after paying their dues on the most remote gig circuit in deepest provincial France.

Back to basics

Contemporary French rock can boast that it has done away with a number of old clichés. First of all, it has proved that the French language has sufficient depth to ensure that rock lyrics no longer revolve around the same platitudes. Inspired by the best of French chanson lyrics (Brel, Ferré, Trenet and Aznavour now rank just as highly in terms of influences as the Beatles and the Clash), French rock has given free rein to its imagination, strengthened its language and recovered its voice.

A young artist such as Brittany’s Miossec, who has already released three albums acclaimed as much for their musical intensity as for coarse and caustic lyrics - the first two are called, somewhat bluntly, Boire and Baiser -, is a case in point. He belongs to the new school of text rock, which refuses the cop-out of catchy rhymes and, instead, prefers to give substance and body to the message.

In the mid-eighties already, the emergence of an alternative music scene that brought nationwide fame to the likes of Bérurier Noir and Garçons Bouchers featured the highly explosive combination of punk energy and French lyrics, embellished with the argot and chanson populaire of the working classes. Fréhel and Piaf, already partially absorbed by Rita Mitsouko a few years previously, thus once again turned muse while electric guitars and accordions were battling it out under the fairy lights of the dance floor, so to speak.

One step ahead of everyone else, Rita Mitsouko set the tone (colourful, festive and unruly) for a period in which, for the very first time, rock had become a living, vibrant language translated into French. Capturing the airwaves (with hits like Marcia Baïla and C’est comme ça) and revolutionising the art of video clips (with Jean-Baptiste Mondino), the Parisian duo set about distilling, on a grand scale and to an unsuspecting audience, the very essence of this joyful subversion born of a dual heritage: May 68 and the punk era.

A little later, one group stood head and shoulders above the others, opening wide its windows to embrace world music, Latin American music in particular, then little known: the group was La Mano Negra. As a pioneer of the interaction between languages and cultures, it fronted an extraordinary stage dynamo in the person of lead singer Manu Chao. La Mano was the highly charged catalyst that introduced both a festive and an unashamedly French dimension to French rock. Thereafter, many musicians in France realised they would do better to draw their inspiration from the folklore and traditions that make up the country’s music patchwork than chase after the eternal illusion of Anglo-American influences.

Prior to that, during the sixties and seventies, there had been a few isolated hits, often originating from the very élite who, even today, is still cited piously in a vague attempt at demonstrating a rich musical heritage: Michel Polnareff, Serge Gainsbourg, Gérard Manset and a few others who, although exceptional godfathers to a booming French rock scene, have also been partly to blame for its inhibitions. Indeed, French rock and pop lived for too long under the bell-jar Gainsbourg, with the exception of a singer who managed to establish a perfect link between the generation of the great Serge and the new one, Alain Bashung. In 1999, Bashung clocked thirty years of career and yet he ranks among the three main constant innovators of French rock, blending an often tough artistic approach with significant commercial success.

Long dominated by a handful of stars, French rock is now genuinely multi-faceted and, each year, strengthened by new faces, new labels and new albums. Whether they be more pop and urban (Autour de Lucie) or more folk and rural (Tue Loup), "decibelian", minimalist or neo-traditionalist, all these new groups, together with their close relatives in rap, electro and chanson, have formed a creative bedrock which, it is hoped, will prove a fertile soil for the future.

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