The Kid's got a point.
She's been at pains to remind me where I live.
A new portal on the roll of honour has some worthwhile links, but sets about its task in an only too conventional way:
"Can the French rock?" asks San Francisco Bay DJ Joe Sixpack in his 'Froghop'. "It's a question which has vexed the most diligent cultural scholars, yet there are several recently unearthed anthropological clues which indicate an affirmative answer."
I think he means "Yes".
Well, Joe got that one right. So let's try getting the hang of France and some of its songwriters. Giving the Kid some value for money is scarcely as difficult as people like to make out if they let the French get up their noses instead of sliding a tongue into their ears.
 I'd rush to lay my hands on Zazie's latest album 'Rodeo' -- if she weren't so famous in the French-speaking world. She's full of mischief and humour (the picture's the CD cover art), but there's more to Zazie than this and a rock band with nothing to envy most of the American and British artists who dominate the pop industry.
You know how it feels, that startled numbness we get in the first instant a bolt of bad news strikes from a clear blue sky to shatter a day. Zazie, a superb songwriter, catches that awful fleeting feeling in one of the sharpest numbers on a typically wide-ranging album.
She does better yet in the "hidden bonus" on 'Zen', by closing the set with a remix of 'Homme Sweet Homme' with its neat nasty twist in the last lines of a song about a woman who finds that her love-nest isn't quite the cosy paradise she thought, because neither is her man.
It's enough to drive a girl to insomnia, fretting about "the other woman". But the moment once marked in the remix and after that silent spell musicians increasingly enjoy giving us before whatever they've tucked at the end of their records, Zazie starts gently counting sheep!
"Un mouton ... deux moutons ... trois moutons ..."
What with chirrups mainly from woodwind instruments and distant bleats as if heard through an open summer window, she's so good at it you could almost leave her to put the baby to bed for you. But the nearer she comes to 117 sheep -- she does amazingly go that far -- the funnier they are, the occasional hiccups of wordplay she delivers on her dozy way.
Zazie's just one of the most established of many singer-songwriters who fail to understand that since they're mostly not very interested in working in English, they are either plain bad or skilled but derivative musicians unfitted for any place in the upper pantheon along with their creative counterparts. It's obvious. So many people say so!
Even in the wonderful Wikipedia, which is packed full of music nowadays, try seeking out anything on French rock in English and you'll probably wind up feeling sorry for me, stuck here in a sonic desert populated by barely more than a dozen others. If you're truly sensitive, you'd feel terrible for me, since there's scarcely a woman among them.
I don't know where it came from, this insidious myth!
Could it perchance be laziness about language? For heaven forfend it might have anything to do with "cultural imperialism". If it were true, what I've been exploring on the quiet for a couple of weeks and more would be a figment of a very fevered imagination and an odd invention, since it's a collective hallucination shared by Marianne and countless others from long before the day she said: "Dad, isn't it time you wrote about Camille?"
 Indeed it is. But today's a little too early to get straight into the woman on the right, whose place in the wider world is confirmed at Rock'n'France, another new blogroll portal -- in French, like most links in this entry -- with the great merit of often straying far beyond the borders.
Essays, I said yesterday, won't be frequent on this log. But this is one because if I'm going to start writing about French musicians, I'd rather do so on the basis of an overview of some of what's happening here today as I hear it in the voices of the nation's women.
Some of them, at the very beginning of their careers, are helping to define a sound that's so decidedly French that's it's time to debunk any nonsense the country's music lacks international appeal regardless of whether you can follow the words.
The dominance of English popular music can't be denied in Paris any more than many other world capitals. In most bars or inexpensive restaurants -- unless you're in a tourist spot like up on the hill of Montmartre -- the background music will usually be some radio station broadcasting hit after foreign hit single.
On the whole, the French not only put up with this but enjoy it, since few object to the habit many restaurants now have everywhere of sticking music on just loud enough to spare people the horror of silence -- how very awkward that might be -- and the racket from the kitchen.
Imported music is so popular that soon after I arrived in France, a war began. Almost from the start of the 1980s, a new socialist government then hailed with huge relief after years of stodgy sameness in politics decided to free up the airwaves. If my memory's right, within the week it happened, the number of FM radio channels in the capital leapt from four or five to ten times as many.
The first skirmishes for space on the air were among the likes of religious faiths, gay movements and a host of oddballs out for a lasting licence, but the biggest battle of all came when it dawned on the authorities that cultural freedom and enlightenment meant English, particularly in music.
"Oh dear," they said, "there's so much 'Anglo-Saxon' music being broadcast now there's no room for our lot. La chanson française is being wiped off the map! We must save it. Like the language."
What heady days: imagine a thousand blooming Chinese flowers mixed up with next-door Germany's commendable habit of encouraging the arts with state funds, all done with a very French flair. The politicians tried everything, including rules and quotas, decreeing that for every ten Madonnas or Michael Jacksons, there should be one Jacques Brel -- that he was borrowed from Belgium didn't bother them, he was still a French singer.
Some musicians did benefit and kept French singing very much alive, but I doubt most of them felt like grumpy taxi drivers actually born in Paris, when the majority are immigrants, who said you could smoke in their cabs but adamantly tuned in to French-only songs.
But what is French song? Unlike the more "Latin" nations of Italy, Portugal, Spain and the Caribbean and South America, it's hard to pin down any distinctive sounds like soaring opera, flamenco, fado, tango, reggae -- you name it -- unless you consider it was all wrapped up by the late Edith Piaf, Jacques Trenet, Georges Brassens and now Claude Nougaro, along with their various heirs.
I reckon there is a "French sound" all the same.
Like some of those other sorts of music, has very mixed roots. Some styles considered national by foreigners are in large part regional ones, but a French band's music can frequently draw on north African, west African and other former colonial influences, as well as whatever the musicians fancy in the modern styles and digital techniques that cross almost every border.
When people are often regarded with great wariness once their compatriots in the provinces spot the 75 on their car licence plate that warns "Parisian at large", you can hardly bundle up French music into the famous "chanson" style or the massed accordionists of Montmartre.
It's also pointless rationally to explain a nation of individuals so proud of each being their own man or woman they can end up doing everything together, like emptying Paris in August or scaring themselves out of their wits during the last presidential election when the traditional protest votes of round one meant people woke up with a start. They found themselves confronted with a choice two weeks later between Jacques Chirac and a cunning and dangerous fanatic nationalist, the odious Jean-Marie Le Pen.
So there wasn't really any choice at all. But you don't hear much about politics from French singer-songwriters as you do from Brits and Americans. "La chanson française" -- or even rock as rendered by the ageing Johnny Hallyday -- is only a small part of what's going on.
 Let's indeed take Camille, along with a fairly random list of -- mostly -- young women who all have a loyal public and can pack out concert halls for days at a stretch when they go on tour: Lynda Lemay, Zazie again, Pauline Croze, Mylène Farmer (Univers Farmer is an unofficial change from last time she cropped up), Coralie Clément, Nâdiya, Keren Ann (unofficial and in the picture), Autour de Lucie, La Grande Sophie, Judith Bérard (unofficial) and Carla Bruni, at 'The Observer' and thus even in English, since the bright model beauty's first foray into song-writing "enthralled" Charlie Gillett.
They're not all from France and most haven't done soundtrack songs to films such as 'Titanic' like the French-Canadian Céline Dion, but they would feel justifiably abused if you called them copycats and say they deserve none of your attention because you hear in their music a pale shadow of what the English-speaking world does better.
In a country that's been invaded as frequently as France, where centuries ago an army from the Arabic world got as far north as Poitiers, it's hard to avoid going on the defensive at the same time as you assimilate the influences from abroad.
In the last century, US troops brought records, then came the international music industry followed by the Net, while in Québec, people are just as attached to their cultural identity as the French but have to mingle and rub shoulders with English speakers.
Heck, the French have even had me for 25 years.
Some of the new generation of musicians sometimes sing in English as readily as Dion, Liane Foly (RFI bio of a woman with jazz in her heart) and Patricia Kaas. But there's so much wordplay in it, I'm sure most do this much more for the enjoyment they get out of it, like audiences made up of continental Europeans often good at foreign languages, than because they actively seek an English-speaking public.
Others who sing in nothing but French often turn out to be surprisingly fluent in other languages but are happy to work with the one they've got. It's a good job both kinds are around, because if there is what I'd call a "French sound", then it's got a lot to do with language.
That's the heart of the matter.
When you put French and music together well, it makes for a result as unique yet universal as any other successful blend of sounds and words. To dismiss the music because you can't understand what they're singing is a little silly. My French was abysmal when I arrived and music soon proved one of the best ways into the language.
But to call people "derivative" because they form rock bands and make the most of technology like musicians do everywhere else is frankly insulting and foolishly wrong. It's like the cliché that holds beauty is in the eye of the beholder when common sense tells most of us that true, natural loveliness is somehow innate, rather more than a cultural variable. Like a woman plastered in make-up, simulating such "beauty" in music is to fall for passing and often cyclical trends in fashion and marketing.
When I start focussing on individuals, as I shall, it's because long excursions into new French music have been every bit as rewarding in getting deep into the finest lyricists and poets in English -- or Latin American singers and Africans where it helps to have a translation in the sleeve notes.
"What are you doing?" I was asked at work in a spare moment's fiddling with wires and clothes.
"Groping."
"Well, don't grope me," the inevitable answer came.
But the only feelings I was into were tentative aural ones as I began to hear how the appeal of modern French song lies in shape and form and how these mirror the native speech patterns to such an extent you can't dissociate the music from the words.
Of course that's just as true in other languages, but the music often sounds French, whatever kind of musical style it's in, rather as in wordless "classical music", most great woodwind players -- clarinettists and the like, as well as jazz saxophonists -- turn to France for their reeds, a vital part of their instrument that makes for that special sound they want.
Without going into a long list backwards and forwards from Ravel and Debussy, if you've got a head for it you'll know the subtleties of French orchestration, the gift of many composers particularly for adventures in the range of woodwind sound like German-speakers can do with brass instruments.
Mother tongues must bring out such qualities. French can be very good at three things. One is choppiness, brevity, the quick wit with words, sharply funny or cutting like fine swordsmanship. The other is discursive, the use of little words, often soft on the ear, to make up long phrases and flowing sentences. And there's the same sense of the absurd and juxtaposition that makes for the "flavour" of some French poetry and once turned Paris into an ideal place for surrealism to develop.
Emotionally all mixed up into the subject matter, moods and sounds of French song, you don't need to pay much attention to the words to hear such things. Both Zazie and young Pauline Croze (her fine first album), can move from a percussive, fast technique to the lovely melodic lines of spoken French almost from one phrase to the next.
Whether it's in rock, jazzy, country-folk, music wide open to Latin dance rhythms or even spaced out to float on, the structure of such women's songs allows them to work up an exciting tension, sometimes like a set of half-answered questions, to points of resolution that delight the ear, before starting over. That very softness and charm (douceur) in much of the language that helps make for foreigners' erotic fantasies about French lovers is caught by many of these singers.
The French can shout and rave like anyone else and when they do it's gutsy and straight from the heart, but musicians in this country also nurture very fine and flexible voices to achieve a gentle, fragile beauty that's worth preserving and deserving of a much wider public than some enjoy.
Beauvais, a cathedral town north of Paris in a department named for the Oise river and its often marshy tributaries, has little to recommend itself to the casual visitor. But though it's one of countless dull French provincial towns devoid of night life and with almost nothing to offer young people who live there, like others it has highly creative survivors.
 Lauren Faure (her agent's site) is unlikely to join the august ranks of the Academie Française, an institution notorious on home soil for trying to stave off the onslaught of mainly American culture by inventing words for new technology and businesses where most people find a perfectly good English one will do.
Few take any more notice of the academy's injunctions than Zazie does in that pun of "Homme Sweet Homme". French has ceased to the most common currency in international diplomacy, but in sexual "etiquette" and exchanges of the heart, it has a "finesse" and poetry all its own.
Should Lauren be so silly, once elderly, to join a losing battle that's merely cultural interaction, the Beauvais-born lass's reluctance to be like Zazie and use anything but French is perhaps a qualification for academic seawall building, but she sticks to her own 'Regards de femme' and native wordcraft to tackle the ups and downs of l'amour, which she does very well indeed.
If these exploratory words have managed to pique your interest in the French and their music, they're written at risk of casting very different people in the same mould, after listening to enough of them to write about the shape and colour their lyrics give sound, rather as I drew out the underlying and inseparable likeness in creating music and making love early this month.
In short, I generalise in the hope you'll also enjoy listening to each of the birds in the context of the woods where they reside. The Kid's ear was right about Camille, though. Somebody like this singer always comes along with a warning for people with an ear for likeness: "Don't put all your eggs in the same nest!"
I don't feel like writing about 'Le Fil' until I've had a chance to hear her last work, since Camille's ruffled a few feathers this year. She's no cuckoo, though, but a musician who gets me, along with her French fans, appreciatively saying "Vive la différence!"
However, that's another story.
10:59:27 PM link 
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