Category poetry:
French Pop Song of the Week: “Mon amie la rose”
posted March 31, 2010
Posted by Thomas Riggs in music poetry world literature
As another hint of the upcoming books under our own imprint, we are starting today the French Pop Song of the Week. Writers live in the bubble of their own language, landscape, and culture. While waiting in a grocery store line or taking an escalator in a department store, French writers hear songs that Americans or Brits, for example, would not recognize. French music influences French writers, whether they wish it or not, just as growing up by a sea washes a permanent tint over a person’s sensibility.
There are a fair number of French singers who imitate Anglo styles, which is not surprising, as American and British music dominates the market in much of the world. But the French have tenaciously clung to music in their own language. Since 1994 at least 40 percent of songs on French radio stations have by law been required to be in French, and sales of French music in France, though varying from year to year, usually do not stray far from the percentage heard on the radio.
Is there anything distinctive about French pop music? Listening to the radio, I usually know before someone begins singing if the song is Anglo or French. The range of French pop is too broad to generalize, but there is often a romantic, epic, though ambivalent quality that settles in your spirit in some notable French way.
Read the rest of this entry »
Serge Gainsbourg, French Songwriter Lost in Translation
posted January 28, 2010
Posted by Thomas Riggs in music poetry world literature
Like many people in France last week, I went to the opening of Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), a film about Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), the French songwriter, provocateur, and cultural icon. It’s hard to imagine the American equivalent of Gainsbourg, who is as famous in his own country as Elvis Presley is in the United States. To describe his personality and public presence, I thought about combining Bob Dylan, Abby Hoffman, and Charles Bukowski, but any mélange of American personalities would lack the French sensibility of Gainsbourg and the French culture that he both embodied and challenged.
That Gainsbourg, an inventive and disturbing cultural force, was virtually unknown in the United States even during his lifetime reflects the cocooning effect of language. Gainsbourg sang literary and sometimes shocking lyrics and provoked traditional French citizens into a fury, but Americans, deaf to the French language, were left undisturbed and unaffected.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Sundance Film Festival opens this weekend with the premiere of the Allen Ginsberg biopic “Howl,” starring James Franco (angelheaded hipster du jour). Here’s a clip of Franco’s Ginsberg reciting the end of “Howl for Carl Solomon.” Just for fun, below that is John Turturro reciting the whole durn thing (from the Beat documentary “The Source”).
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments