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.