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.