Even so, audiences still...

Even so, audiences still listened to the recitals, recordings or broadcasts of home-grown sentimental singers like Freely, Dania or the rising Pilaf, where they found stories of the street to weep to, populist melodramas with a castoff pimps, broken-hearted prostitutes and sun-tanned legionnaires, known misleadingly as the ‘realist song’. Steadily, however, during the 1930s, the modernizing wind of the 1920s began to blow through chanson too. It came partly from the assimilation of jazz rhythms and arrangements, and partly from subject matter of more complex and wider-ranging emotions, expressed with greater lyrical sophistication. It was associated with the incremental rise of the singer-songwriter. Hawkins perceptively observes that French song has periodically become a popular art with literary ambitions at times when artists and intellectuals have taken an interest in it.23 At such moments, chanson acquires a different form of legitimacy from that conferred simply by the market, and some creative individuals are encouraged to turn to it as a serious form capable of the expressive subtlety of literature. Monometer’s Le Chanter in the late nineteenth century is one instance: Brunt sang there, Sati named his third after it, and its journal printed work by Overlain and other poets.24 Hawkins identifies two other such periods: the 1930s, with contacts between Cocteau, Max Jacob and Tenet, for example; and the 1940s, with the Existentialists, Raymond Quinoa, Jacques Pervert and others, when Saint-German became a melting pot like Brunt’s Monometer.

Music before 1958

The live music performed in the music halls of the 1920s was designed to liberate and distract, responding to a public thirst for modernity and forgetfulness after the Great War: from the vivacious numbers of Yvette Guilderland Maurice Chevalier to the spectacular revues of misting duet and the Follies berg ere. ‘Typical revues presented forty-five or fifty tableaux in two acts – bright kaleidoscopes of flamboyant dress and settings and comic and dramatic sketches. The music hall was a dream factory full of behind-the-scenes machinery and lighting systems, a technological complex producing the magical succession of scenes and bathing them in rainbow hues and brightwhites.’18More exotic styles also arrived, mostly from the Americas but of African origin: the tango (which had reached France before 1914), the samba and jazz band music. By 1917, American soldiers were present on French soil in some numbers, bringing their own music with them and sometimes their ownstars.19 Such wartime encounters heralded the establishment of a significant number of African-Americans in France who believed they had found a more open racial attitude than their own country offered.20 American performers and dance bands began appearing on music-hall bills, most famously perhaps Josephine Baker, an unknown nineteen-year-old dancer who arrived in 1925with the ‘Revue merge’ (Black Revue) and made a successful career in Europe. America was coming to France economically too by this time, thanks to the post-war Dawes Plan for European development. US goods thus flowed in, followed by the assembly-line methods which produced them.21 Hollywood was enough of a threat to the indigenous film industry for the first quota of national production to be introduced in 1928. Some of the music which accompanied these migrations was band music linked to foreign dance crazes like the Charleston; suddenly the traditional French dance halls began looking old-fashioned and started calling themselves ‘dancing’s’ in a semblance of English.

Invention of the Microgroove Disc

This next phase came with the invention of the microgroove 33 rpm vinyl disc in the late 1940s, cheaper, less fragile and longer-playing product than the shellac 78 rpm. The twelve-inch 33 rpm disc was pioneered by CBS and a competing 45 rpm by RCA. After some initial rivalry, both formats were adopted and they revived the fortunes of the record market, leading to a period of 10–20 per cent growth which was to last until the late 1970s. Two new majors also emerged in the 1950s, shortly before the advent of rock and roll. In Europe, the Dutch group Philips created its own music subsidiary; and Warner Bros, the US film company which had bought up the Brunswick record labeling 1934, now launched Warner Bros Records. This made six international majors in all. Meanwhile a number of independent French record companies were set up after the Liberation. Most notable among them was Barclay, named after its founder Eddie Barclay, who took the risk of importing the new microgroove record. By the early 1960s, the label had signed up the biggest names in chanson and some from the burgeoning French pop scene. Also influential was Vogue, created around the same time. Together, the two labels came to dominate the French independents in the 1960s and were largely responsible for the growth of chanson and the introduction of French pop. Writers, performers and labels were greatly assisted in the 1940s and 1950sby radio – both the state radio and the three major ‘peripheral’ stations (broadcasting from just outside France) – Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC), Radio Luxembourg and, from 1955, Europe 1. Programmers devoted to popular musician one form or another, like ‘Plum plum tarlatan’ or ‘Chansons grouses, chansons roses’ (Blue Songs, Happy Songs), were abundant and allowed songs to reach a much wider audience than the music hall did. There were live music shows daily, providing work for bands and singers. Established stars like Tenet, Montana, Chevalier and Pilaf appeared regularly and newcomers like Line Read or Luis Mariano could be launched, particularly after Radio Luxembourg brought back the pre-war formula of the talent contest in 1949. Nonprogrammer, entitled ‘Le Risqué des auditors’ (Listeners’ Record Choice),also introduced the record request show, and another, ‘La Chanson eternally’(Eternal Songs), prefigured the hit parade by allowing listeners to vote for their favorite records. This was the beginning of a process that would see radio and records form a commercial synergy, as programming, on the peripheral stations particularly, became more and more dominated by record shows, as had happened in the USA in the first half of the 1950s with spectacular results: it had helped give birth to rock and roll.

Sound Technology

However, neither the cultural nor the economic benefits of sound technology were unequivocal. From the Great War, the country’s international influence began to decline and it was forced into a defensive posture as America came to dominate both record and film industries. Although experiments with sound recording were taking place in the 1850s, the real history of the record industry begins in the mid-1890s with the marketing of Emile Berliner’sgramophone.16 Rapidly, the company set up in London to exploit the invention, the Gramophone Company and its US subsidiaries, developed catalogue of music and comedy recorded on 78 rpm discs. International competition then set in as other record companies sprang up in Europe and North America which adopted the technology, including the Society Latherers in France, initially involved in both cinema and recorded music. The international landscape of the record industry was transformed again in the1930s when the Depression, coupled with competition from radio (which foray time could reproduce live music better than the record could), created its first slump. Concentration began, producing four dominant international players, known today as majors: EMI in the UK (1931) and Decca (1929), RCA Victor (1929) and CBS (1939) in the USA. Struggling financially, record division was eliminated in the restructuring, bought out by EMI. By1939, then, the balance of artistic and economic influence had shifted in favored London and the USA. France’s absence from the world stage then became irreversible in the post-war period. Those already on the scene in 1950 were better placed to benefit from the next, massive phase of record industry growth and secure their positions for the second half-century.

Cafés-concerts in Paris

At the start of the twentieth century, there were some 150 cafés-concerts impairs alone. However, they in turn had vanished by the end of the First World War, giving way to the more spectacular English-style music halls, which had reached Paris in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: legendary establishments like Les (1869), Le Casino de Paris (1890), and Bobbin (1880). What distinguished the music halls was that they were entirely for professional performance. Whereas in cabarets and even cafés concerts, customers came to drink and carouse, in the music halls there were no beverages and customers were physically demarcated as an audience by wastage. Another difference was that the show consisted of a range of variety acts as well as singers: jugglers, comics, dancers, and so on. Hence the use of theater varieties (as in chanson de varieties) to distinguish styles of music that in English might be described as easy listening, intended primarily as commercial entertainment. The rise of the café-concert and the music hall inspired the Hollywood myth of a supposedly authentic Parisian nightlife, of the Moulin rouge (1889), Piglet and Monometer. In reality, however, their rise marks thetransformation of French popular song from craft into product. The more informal cabarets did not cease to exist, but the two types of venue purveyed two types of song. Despite the imposition of singeing taxes on box-office receipts after thereat War,15 the 1920s were the apogee of the French music halls and ‘revues’ associated with them, like Paris qui dense handcar, chest Paris. But they were laid low at the height of their success by the advent of radio, records and sound in movies. Audiences began to tail off and many halls closed or were converted into cinemas, as the Olympia was in 1928. Evens, French popular music had become a thriving business by the 1920s. The confluence of new measures with new media, from copyright and the café concerto records, radio and films, created the hit song and the multi-talented singing star, epitomized in Maurice Chevalier, who combined stage, screenland recording careers at home and abroad. These were good times too for the successful songwriter, whose songs might now be performed on an industrial scale and bring previously unimaginable income. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Paris enjoyed a reputation as the European centre of international live music of all kinds. Stravinsky lived there for a time, Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet made its mark there with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and popular venues like the Moulin rouge and enjoyed world renowned.

Popular singers in France

These proved to be major changes, as popular song was steadily professionalized and commercialized. While wealthier Parisians listened to Offenbach on the grinds boulevards, new ‘cabarets’ appeared, cheaper and less salubrious watering holes where it became customary to pay to hear specific singers, the best known of whom was Aristide Brunt (1851–1925) at Le, formerly the famous Le Chat noir in Monometer, who sang in naturalist vein about the excluded living in the slum belt of Paris known as the ‘zone’.13 More commercial were the cafés-concerts, which started during the Second Empire and became a celebrated feature of belle époque Paris. The marked the beginning of the process by which the singer would become a star, and the star a commoditized icon marked out by extravagant clothing, demean our and lifestyle; the beginning in fact of popular music as a mass culture.

Modern Representation

From these roots is derived the modern representation of the chanson as viscerally oppositional form: left-wing or even anarchist, gritty and participative,’ authentic’. Although Claude Dune ton prefers the term ‘popular’, he implicitly answers this question in his monumental history of pre-twentieth-century chanson: ‘The coquettes of the July Monarchy wreathe great source of the popular song, that is, of the song born among the people and sung by the entire nation; they encouraged in the French their habit of writing saucy verses counterbalancing the tendency to the easily maudlin, the clumsy outpourings of a bourgeoisie wallowing in Romanticism.’11 Chanson’s authenticity, then, stems from its being the voice of popular France, expressive of a national mindset of down-to-earth, irreverent, common sense rather than middle-class gush; the voice in fact of civil society. Following the revolution of 1848, a decree passed under Napoleon III in1852 banned public meetings which did not have police authorization. This helped bring about the demise of both châteaux and coquettes, assisted by two further institutional turning points. One was the creation of the SACEM in1851, which applied to musical performance the principle of copyright already applicable in the theatre. Once songwriters were remunerated for public renditions of their work, there was the prospect of regular earnings from writing and composing. This also encouraged lyricists to write their own melodies and double their money, or to team up with a composer as Delano did. The other turning point came in March 1867 with the lifting of a bacon performance with costumes and props in drinking establishments, originally imposed under pressure from theatre managers who feared competition. Had the ban remained in force, even the familiar cane and boater of Maurice Chevalier, who began his career in such establishments in 1899, would have been prohibited.

Popular Songs

French popular song grew out of an anonymous oral tradition going back to the troubadours of the middle Ages. But the phenomenon of named individuals singing and writing songs, and of people coming together in specific places to hear them, is much more recent and brought dramatic change. As the chanson specialist Louis-Jean Calved notes, the song form has always evolved in keeping with the places in which songs have been performed.8Calvet traces this process back to 1734 with the beginning of the châteaux, song clubs which met in back rooms of up market restaurants where members would eat, drink and sing topical satires set to familiar melodies. The working-class equivalents were the coquettes, which developed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815 and of which there were several hundred in Paris by the mid-1800s. The coquettes too were clubs for amateur singers and songsmiths, who met regularly in wine shops, cafés and drinking houses to sing either their members’ latest creations (again using existing melodies) or the songs of well-known singers like be ranger (1780–1857). Initially associated with popular opposition to the restoration of the monarchy in 1815,the coquettes were ideal sites for agents provocateurs to entrap dissident, like La Society des patriots, were even started up by police informers for that purpose.9 Later, under the July Monarchy of 1830, the politics of the coquettes became republican, though regular police harassment together with public demand for entertainment and a quiet life meant that many were involved in nothing more seditious than social drinking and bawdy singing. Nevertheless, the oppositional culture of the go-getter was to produce two of the best-known political lyricists of the nineteenth century: who wrote the words of the ‘International’, and Jean-Baptist Clement (1836–1903), who in 1867 penned the lyric of the famously Temps des cerise’s’ (The Time of Cherries), which was to become associated with the popular uprising of the Paris Commune of 1871, in which both writers took part. The coquettes in fact became cradles of class consciousness and socialism, where disaffected workers, artisans and traders ‘learnt to suffer and hate together'.

Edith Piaf - The best Frech Singer

Edith Piaf

Modern Music in France

The Making of a Modern Music Industry

In the early 1950s, Pierre Delanoë, a civil servant, began writing songs with Gilbert Bécaud in his spare time. Indirectly, this was to lead to Delanoë’s becoming a founder member of the radio station Europe 1 and eventually the administrator of the performing rights organisation, the SACEM. Looking back in the 1990s on the start of this second career, he observes that the music business he encountered then was much as it had been a century before when the SACEM had been created in 1851. Born in 1918, he remembers that street singers were still common in his childhood, particularly in the Montmartre area between Barbès and Clichy, at funfairs, and even in blocks of flats, where a singer would pass from one courtyard to another and coins would be thrown down wrapped in paper by appreciative tenants. On street corners, sheet music specially annotated for singing (known as ‘petits formats’ since the nineteenth century) would be sold so the crowd could join in. Although by the start of the 1950s the street singers had mostly disappeared, sheet music was still the core of the music economy, more so than the 78 rpm, which was expensive and fragile. The first song Delanoë wrote with Bécaud, ‘Mes mains’ (My Hands), was premiered by a pre-war singer, Lucienne Boyer, at her farewell concert. The public instantly began buying the sheet music, published by Beuscher, and a million copies were sold. In the offices of the big music publishers like Beuscher – or Salabert, Semi, Raoul Breton – a fledgling lyricist could pair up with a fledgling composer and meet established stars like Piaf, Luis Mariano, Georges Guétary or Yves Montand on the look-out for new material. They could have a song accepted for publication, sign a contract and receive an advance of perhaps 10,000 old francs while the firm tried to place their work. A music publisher could also help launch the careers of new artists, as had been the case with Trenet and Charles Aznavour, who were both indebted to Raoul Breton for their success. Aznavour would eventually buy the company to prevent it falling into foreign hands. In the early 1950s, then, the publishing house was a place of encounter, exchange and transaction, one of the key sites in which popular musical culture functioned. Soon, however, all of this was swept away. ‘Mes mains’ proved tobe Delanoë’s last big selling petit format, as the old publishing houses closed or were bought out, so that by the mid-1990s, only Beuscher and Raoul Breton remained fully French. The French music industry was in fact transformed from the late 1950s by the steady adoption of American commercial practices, at the root of which was vinyl.

Alfred Hitchcock's Point of view - French Film Music

In recorded music as in film, then, the notion of the solitary artist is problematic. In the production of a master tape, the creative source is rarely singular. It includes the person or team who wrote the song, the singer or group who performs it, the arranger, producer and sound engineer. Even though Paul McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’ alone, then sang and played guitaron the original studio session with none of the other Beatles present, it was still George Martin who suggested adding a string quartet and helped make it what it was. Then, once the master tape has left the studio, there are the packaging and image designers and, since the 1970s, those who produce the video. Of course, all of these interventions make for high production costs,which mean that profitability is crucial, in a market where all records cost roughly the same (however much is spent making them), where sales are unpredictable, and where outlay is often higher than return given that as manyas 80 per cent of album releases may fail to break even. The cultural industries, then, wed art to industry. Alfred Hitchcock once described the creative paradox of the film director as that of a painter given canvas, brushes and palette worth 1.3 million dollars and allowed to paint anything at all as long as it brings in 2.3 million dollars. It is this endemic contradiction which has placed popular music at the heart of cultural debate in France. This is true of other countries too, but in France it has taken a particularly intense and fascinating form because cultural values have for centuries been high on the national agenda. Throughout the twentieth century but particularly since the Second World War, the growth of a local music industry dependent on technologies and styles which have become global, with theUSA at their core, has been seen as jeopardising the French cultural exception. It is the historical background to this conflict which I want to trace in thisfirst chapter.

Market Research Model

To be effective, the convention of originality requires the sacralisation of the artist, who is distinguished from the artisan or engineer because he or she is driven to make a ‘product’ only by his or her inspiration, not by public demand or according to a set of pre-existing specifications resulting from market research. This model of the artist as solitary, inspired and, therefore, exceptional goes back to the Renaissance but still underpins Adorno’s critique of mass culture in the twentieth century. However, the rise of cultural technologies since the late nineteenth century – and especially of information technologies in the late twentieth – clearly challenges it, blurring the time honoured line between art and industry. Huge advances in music reproduction, from the shellac 78 rpm record through vinyl, cassettes and CDs to MP3, mean that it is now impossible to make untroubled distinctions between an originaland a copy, a work of art and its commodity value. New creative media have sprung up which are industrially reproducible by nature not adoption, like cinema and television, which have never had pre-industrial forms. Music mayat first appear to be a different case since it existed before industrialisation, so that it is susceptible of being represented as disfigured by recording. But this representation is anachronistic. High performance sound reproduction technologies mean that the record, rather than being an intruder in the relationship between music and listener, is a participant, no less integral to the history and nature of popular music than the music hall or other live venue.

French Cultural Exceptionalism

Succinctly summarised by the cultural economist Joëlle Farchy, French cultural exceptionalism is the conviction that ‘books, films and musical works are not run-of-the-mill goods which can be abandoned to the laws of the free market. When unpacked with the help of economic theory, Farchy goes on, this conviction implies that the exchange value of a cultural good can only be measured by means of a ‘convention of originality’, that is, by what the market conventionally considers original and originality, in art markets generally, is gauged according to three criteria. The first is authenticity, which here means that a work of art must be produced by an artist alone, with as little division of labour as possible. The second is that the work must be unique so that reproductions of it are considered of lesser value. The third is newness, according to which a work of art’s value is judged in relation to art history.

Music Hits before 1958

The history of popular music in France since 1958 is inseparable from the histories of youth culture and the cultural industries. All three raise issues about French conceptions of art and culture, behind which lies a further connoted issue: authenticity. This is a slippery term whose meaning is constantly renegotiated and therefore, to borrow the word Richard Peterson uses in the context of country music, ‘fabricated’. That is, as Peterson puts it, ‘authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct’. Nevertheless, authenticity is also, as Roy Shuker notes, a ‘central concept in the discourses surrounding popular music, with considerable symbolic value’. And this, in my view, is particularly true of France. In what Shuker calls ‘its common-sense usage’, authenticity in popular music (and in pop particularly) means artistic integrity. It ‘assumes that the producers of music texts undertook the “creative” work themselves; that there is an element of originality or creativity present, along with connotations of seriousness, sincerity, and uniqueness’. Beyond this, Shuker goes on, authenticity is defined by a series of dichotomies: ‘creativity’ or ‘self-expression’ is supposedly more authentic than manufactured commercialism; the independent sector is more authentic than the majors; live performance more authentic than recorded, and so on. Further binaries are added if one looks at the uses to which popular music is put in specific communities or subcultures. Here, for example, community music is more authentic than globalised, mass music. In all of these dichotomies, there is an assumption that, as Shuker puts it, ‘commerce dilutes, frustrates, and negates artistic aspects of the music’.1 This assumption may be unexamined and questionable, but it is none the less fundamental to the culture and ideology of contemporary popular music. This is particularly true of French popular music, as I shall attempt to show, though here the assumption is overlaid with another, which is that authenticity also has to do with popular music’s organic, historic connection with a people. In this additional sense, which one might describe as national authenticity, a music is genuinely ‘popular’ when it is born of, ‘natural’ to and expressive of a national community. Over the last half-century, the French cultural establishment has experienced considerable difficulty tolerating the industrialisation, commodification and globalisation of the arts in general and of music in particular, processes which pop is assumed to have introduced into France from abroad, or at the very least exacerbated. Artists, intellectuals and culture workers have often adopted an Adornian pessimism in this regard and in recent years have mounted a resistance in the name of a ‘French cultural exception’, to which the notion of national authenticity is, I suggest, fundamental.