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.