No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Barbara Lebrun's informative and thorough study covers an area of recent French popular music little known on this side of the Channel, with one or two notable exceptions. The reason for this, apart from its linguistically limited export potential, is that the main practitioners of French rock alternatif in the last 30 years have chosen to avoid commercialisation through marketing by the major international record labels. This was in many cases an ideologically motivated decision, since its left-wing practitioners regarded the ‘majors’ as responsible for the bland and commercially-inspired music most often heard on French popular radio stations, even allowing for the famous quota of French-language material imposed by the French state. Even so, these artists and groups were very often dependent on the manufacturing and distribution networks of the big multi-national corporations for their recordings to reach their audience. Their success was usually based on their reputation in live performances and often remained limited to local or ‘niche’ audiences. The exception to this general rule would be groups like Les Négresses vertes, a surprising hit with UK audiences in the 1980s, or soloists such as Manu Chao, who has achieved a successful international career in World Music circuits. Other groups, such as Zebda from Toulouse, managed to launch themselves nationally in France, but at the cost of some commercial compromise and the loss of their ‘cult’ reputation. More often than not, groups such as Les Têtes raides and La Tordue, practising a revival of the chanson réaliste of the early 20th century, remain relatively little known, even in France, and attract only a minority following. Barbara Lebrun's analysis of this recent cultural output looks at the institutional background of the French music industry and the ideological attitudes that motivated the practitioners of rock alternatif in their rejection of commercial structures. She naturally extends her analysis to cover the proliferation of regional pop festivals that provided the platform for many of the groups studied, such as the Francofolies of La Rochelle, the Printemps de Bourges and La Route du Rock of Saint-Malo. As often with the ‘cultural studies’ approach to popular music, she has little to say about the content or the quality of the music produced by these performers, relying rather on contextual information and statistical and sociological evidence for their cultural significance. She does allude in passing (p. 99) to the monumental banality of some of Manu Chao's multi-lingual lyrics - such as ‘Politik kills’ or his ability to rhyme ‘amour’ and ‘tous les jours’ – but in the end provides mainly a deconstruction of the paradoxes of ‘radical chic’ and what was ‘cool’ and ‘alternatif’ among the audience of French popular music over the last three decades.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.