Jacques Brel is a good starting point for a potted (or should that be confit) history of French song. Along with Georges Brassens and Leo Ferre, Belgium’s most famous son belonged to the great trinity that exalted chanson to its highest prestige in the early 1960s, with a combination of ambitiously poetic texts, dramatic delivery and music owing little to the United States.
Before Brel there was Edith Piaf, whose intensity of performance Brel echoed. But, before Piaf, on the one hand there were the great female forerunners, such as Damia and Frehel, whose lyrics and lives — steeped in a rough, sometimes tragic and always picturesque Parisian demi-monde — gave rise to the term chanson realiste, of which Piaf was a practitioner.
On the other were stars such as Charles ‘La Mer” Trenet, about whom Brel famously commented: ‘Without Trenet we’d all have been accountants,” and in whose work preoccupations of surrealism, jazz and Gershwin encountered Paris music-hall melody.
The cusp between Anglo and French music is the testing ground for chanson. Brel was notoriously aloof to Anglo-American trends, but his successor, Serge Gainsbourg, embraced them enthusiastically and somehow recast them in his own highly distinctive image.
Since Gainsbourg, no artist has achieved the status of chanson colossus bestowed by time, though hundreds of top-quality singers and songwriters, such as Alain Souchon or Jacques Higelin, keep the genre strong while updating the instrumentation.
Recently movements such as the neo-realisme of the Tetes Raides or the chanson minimaliste of artists such as Dominique A have claimed chanson explicitly in their parentage. New Gainsbourgs such as Benjamin Biolay have emerged, while too many murmuring Lolita soundalikes to name have taken up the Gainsbourgian craft of the chanteuse sans voix.
The much-lauded school of French rap is deeply influenced by chanson, as is its offshoot, slam. The last album by Joey Starr, France’s top rappeur, was dedicated to Georges Brassens, and Abd El Malik, slammeur non pareil, is a devotee of Brel. —