Worrisome Decline : French Sing Blues Over Their Songs

There have been times when French singers such as Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf and, more recently, Yves Montand and Juliette Greco caught the emotions of listeners throughout the world.

But times and tastes have changed. Few foreigners now listen to or even know anything about the latest singers of France. And many French, including government officials, fear that the art of the French song is in trouble even in France itself, in danger of collapsing under the onslaught of popular American and British music.

“France has become a trash can,” Guy Beart, a 56-year-old French singer with a folkloric style, told French reporters recently. “ . . . The Anglo-Saxons don’t send us real songs any more, but only pseudo-rock soup that works here even though it is rejected by their own public. We have to get out of this slavery bit by bit, and then our creativity will renew itself.”

Protective Measures

Influenced by such sentiments, the Ministry of Culture has announced a series of measures designed to protect the French song. One would require pop music videos in English to carry French subtitles, an irritant that might drive French teen-agers away.

But not everyone agrees that the French song needs protection. The sultry cabaret singer Barbara, also 56, told a Paris newspaper recently that she is tired of all the talk about “the French song” and the need to protect it.

“There is no better way to murder and bury the French song than to keep talking about ‘the French song,’ ” she said. “Every time I hear that expression, I want to cry out, in English, ‘I don’t speak French!’ ”

‘Imaginary Illness’

The plight of the French song, Laurent Joffrin of the Paris newspaper Liberation concluded in a recent editorial, “is an imaginary illness.”

The evidence is contradictory. French records now outsell foreign records within France. Thirty of the top 50 singles sold during the first week of January, for example, were French. French singers and musicians dominate album record sales as well. The wit and gentle music of two best-selling French singers, 35-year-old Jean-Jacques Goldman and 34-year-old Renaud, have turned them into the prophets of the university students of France.

But the recent success of French songs on the charts has come after several years of dominance by American and British records.

“It could be a flash in the pan,” said Eric Dufaure, the spokesman of the French Society of Music Composers and Publishers.

Anyone who twirls the dials of a radio in France hears far more American and English than French music. Some popular stations depend almost solely on foreign music and, indeed, thrive on it. American and British singers usually attract much larger crowds on concert tours in France than do almost all French singers.

Moreover, even the best of the latest French singers have little or no audience outside France.

Too Intelligent

One of the big problems, said Michael Zwerin, jazz critic for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, is “the French love of their language.” Singers like Goldman and Renaud depend more on the intelligence of their words than on the lilt of their music. They sing in a low-key, non-histrionic manner.

An American audience never had to understand French to understand a song of Edith Piaf. When she sang a hymn to love or a defiant ballad about regretting nothing, her sense of drama and emotion made listeners understand exactly what she meant. But a song by Goldman or Renaud is meaningless without a grasp of the French language.

What the world once knew as the typical French song came out of the tradition of the music hall in France. Chevalier, for example, began his career in 1907 and sang in Paris music halls, operettas and revues for many years before becoming a Hollywood movie and singing star in the 1930s. Piaf, after singing for coins in the street, won her first following in the large cabarets of Paris in the 1930s.

The infectious gaiety of Chevalier and the dark tragedy of Piaf were quite different, but both depended on sentimentality and a sense of drama. Their artistry overwhelmed the banality of some of their words.

Decline in 1960s

As the music hall gave way to movies, radio and television over the years, the art of the French song still persisted in intimate cabarets and small concert halls. Singers such as Montand and Greco perfected their styles there, attracted attention and then won recording contracts.

In the 1960s, however, economics and taste endangered the French song. Like teen-agers in the rest of the industrialized world, French teen-agers now had enough money to buy their own records. Teen-ager purchasing power and teen-ager taste made stars in France out of rock singers with an American rhythm. It was no accident that two of the most popular French singers of this period, Jean-Philippe Smet and Claude Moine, chose Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell as their American-sounding stage names.

Many of the new singers debuted on record without serving any apprenticeship, and critics described the results as “ye-ye music”: The words were so simple and unimportant that the singers would sometimes call out “ye-ye” just to keep up the rhythm of a song.

But the French song, with words as important as the music--or even more important--revived in the 1970s and 1980s. The new singers, however, unlike many of their predecessors, have failed to find a worldwide audience.

Three Key Elements

One problem is that the new singers--unlike Chevalier, Piaf, Montand and Greco but like most other new singers in the world--write their own songs. Pascal Sevran, a television producer and specialist on French music, laments this practice because it downgrades the importance of a performer.

“Can you imagine the French music hall without Piaf, without Chevalier, without Montand?” he wrote in a recent book. Sevran said that the song was a successful marriage of three elements: music, words and performance. “Young people,” he went on, “must have a heavy dose of optimism or of thoughtlessness to believe they can unite all three elements in themselves.” As a result, new Grecos and Montands are not developing.

The worldwide tendency of singers to write their own songs has created another kind of barrier to French music. “Autumn Leaves” and Frank Sinatra’s theme song “My Way” are examples of French songs that were translated into English for American singers. But foreign singers writing their own songs do not need to translate or adapt French songs any more.

Songs With a Message

Although their music may not be exportable, Goldman and Renaud, the two most popular French singers these days, faithfully reflect a special mood among French youth of commitment to moral issues without any commitment at all to political parties or traditional ideologies.

The Paris newspaper Liberation calls them both “pleasant rockers a la francaise “ who are ready to interrupt their concerts to talk about injustice, racial tolerance, aid for the hungry of Ethiopia and food distribution centers for the poor of France.

“I give you all my differences,” Goldman sings in his latest album, “all my faults which are also my opportunities.”

Liberation says that Goldman “speaks of morality to a moral generation, and everyone listens to him.”

Renaud, who likes to describe himself as nonpolitical, did raise some hackles across the English Channel last year with a song that ridiculed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose policies have long symbolized unfeeling and uncaring leadership to French youth.

Committed and Gentle

Renaud insisted, however, that his song was only a hymn in honor of the gentleness of women, using Thatcher merely as the great exception.

“Me,” sang Renaud, “I would change myself into a dog and remain on Earth if I could have Madame Thatcher as a lamppost every day.”

But Liberation regards Renaud as both committed and gentle.

“Renaud attracts the slum youth,” wrote the Paris newspaper, “but when they come to see him, they leave their drugs and anger at the door.”

In its defense of the French song, the Ministry of Culture has promised to increase financial support for musical shows, set up a special office for consultation between government and the musical industry, and start promotional campaigns. In addition to the rule about subtitles on foreign videocassettes, it published regulations setting a quota of French songs on government-owned television channels.

‘A Golden Issue’

As part of its campaign, the government also sponsored “the week of the French song” in January. Television and radio stations were encouraged to broadcast French singers and French songs.

Some in the music business are skeptical about the need or importance of the government program.

“It’s a golden issue for catching votes,” said Dufaure of the French Society of Music Composers and Publishers.

There is little doubt that the French take their song seriously. Serge Gainsbourg, the 58-year-old singer who has made a career out of shocking and titillating his audiences while looking somewhat dissipated, interrupted a discussion on the French television program “Apostrophes” recently to pooh-pooh songwriting as “a minor art.”

This led to a shouting match with an enraged Guy Beart, the singer who has spent a good deal of time talking about the need to defend the French song. It led as well to many inches of commentary in the French press about the great Gainsbourg-Beart battle.

Editorial assistant Alice Sedar of the Paris bureau contributed to this article.