Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013

Is European popular music actually ‘popular music’? Of course it is, especially if we consider that the United Kingdom is part of Europe. But perhaps the question should be formulated as follows: ‘Is continental European popular music actually “popular music”?’ Yes, if we consider that the first conference on popular music research was held in Amsterdam and offered a number of papers on non-Anglophone popular music, that IASPM was established in Sweden, that its second conference (titled What is Popular Music?) was held in Italy, that many popular music scholars are based in continental European countries, and many of them study their local genres and scenes. However, those genres and scenes are not called, in local languages, ‘popular music’, and only a semi-informal international convention made continental European scholars adopt the English term for their object of study. On the other hand, there are also many signs that Anglophone scholars, when they use the expression ‘popular music’, tend to refer to Anglo-American popular music, and incline to call other popular musics ‘world music’. Of course, the issue is not just about linguistic usage: in the article examples both from the media and the academia are commented, and their ideological implications are discussed.

This article briefly outlines some theoretical and methodological approaches to European popular musics specific to modern languages research. Outlining aspects of the relationship between languages, cultural studies and popular music studies, it suggests that the epithet ‘European’ cannot be appended to ‘popular music’ without some form of transformative reaction taking place. It illustrates this argument with reference to French popular musics specifically, looking at taxonomy, the notion of chanson and cultural history. It concludes that, as outsiders looking in, scholarly linguists are professional interculturalists. They do not simply ‘interpret’ between monocultures that need to ‘converse’: they actually are the ‘conversation’.

In this reflective article, I endeavour to raise a number of questions concerning popular music reception in contemporary Europe. First, popular music is described as a form of human communication where, it is argued, the verbal message should not be too easily overlooked. In this sense, I present two paradigms of listening to popular music: one, which is centred on the music and another, which is verbally focused. Drawing from several examples, the ways in which the verbal message in a song is appropriated by an individual or by a community are shown to be determined by complex factors, among which vernacular culture and language are crucial. For this reason, in the multilingual and multicultural European context, the study of the reception of popular music needs to draw on modern language, cultural and translation studies.

This article argues that behind the liberalism and revolt that the genre of French chanson is often seen to represent, many singer-songwriters embody conservative and ‘old-fashioned’ values, notably in their conceptions of women. The world of chanson has generally been dominated by men, and this article explores the work of three representative singer-songwriters (Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré) in order to illustrate that the unilaterally male perspectives offered by chanson authors testify to a wider social attitude of passivity in the face of gender inequalities. Chanson authors have contributed to the definition of French cultural identity by echoing fundamental national myths, in particular the myth of the left-wing intellectual and of the authentic ‘Gaul’ spirit. Indeed, the chanson author represents the ‘common intellectual’ who combines the ‘mediocre’ and the ‘poetic’, the ‘rough’ and the ‘cultured’, the ‘popular’ and the ‘intellectual’. In fact, there has been a long-standing analogy between chanson and laborious manual work traditionally associated with men. This article investigates the cultural tradition that seems to associate the concept of French authenticity – and even French identity – with the notion of masculinity.

In the first academic article on Raphael, I attempt to counteract the Anglo-centric bias still prominent in much popular music studies by focusing on one of Spain’s most commercially successful music stars whose recording and touring career is now in its sixth decade. I begin by examining how, in both musical and celebrity terms, Raphael came to simultaneously embody tradition and modernity in 1960s Spain. Then, in the second part, I explore his durability as a global superstar and locate his music and performance style within broader national and international trends. This analysis is deployed to sketch an objective aesthetic and culturally sensitive response to a very subjective question: does Raphael warrant the veneration and/or contempt in which he has often been held?

The singer-songwriter is a ubiquitous figure within popular music. Although the name may appear to simply refer to an artist who writes and performs his or her own material, it also signifies a web of assumptions around what constitutes quality and value within popular music. In the context of the European genres of the chanson française and the canzone d’autore, the singer-songwriter is conceptualized as a legend of his or her respective song form and a paradigmatic example of quality songwriting. Yet it is often the notion of the singer-songwriter as artist that remains the focus of analyses of these figures. As a result, an important element of what it means to be a singer-songwriter can be overlooked: that is, the place of performance, the necessity for a singer-songwriter to appear live on stage and play and sing his or her songs in front of an audience. This article explores some of the apparent tensions inherent to this artist-performer paradox, by critically analysing examples of the singer-songwriters’ performance styles in the context of the genre discourse which depicts them primarily as artists. It thus challenges the appropriateness of such conceptualizations when applied to the singer-songwriter on stage

In the nineteenth century, as colonial expansion abroad paralleled industrialization at home, West Europeans developed the conception of the foreign Other as ‘uncivilized’, a seductive yet simplified object, fit for the gaze of the powerful. In western art, literature and photography, a romantic conception of the ‘Mediterranean’ solidified, whereby those living in the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea were represented as ‘natural’, childlike and untamed. The same essentialist and reductive approach to a ‘Mediterranean’ identity is identifiable in the early songs and performance of Dalida (1933–1987), an Egyptian-born, Italian female singer who became France’s most commercially successful female artist of the second half of the twentieth century. This article contextualizes the early success of Dalida in France, between 1956 and 1961, demonstrating that the singer’s ‘Mediterranean’ image was carefully engineered by male professionals who selected her song lyrics, music and performance. Because Dalida’s early success in France coincided with the Algerian War, the singer’s oriental provenance was strictly ignored, and her ‘Mediterranean’ identity instead remapped onto the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Analysing Dalida’s early career allows us to examine the evolution of ‘Mediterranean’ imaginings in French popular culture, and observe the politics of racial and gendered representation in the field of popular music at the tail end of the colonial era

Drawing on my own experiences both as a performer and researcher of Cuban music, this article challenges the essentialism inherent in much promotion of ‘Latin’ music in the United Kingdom today, illustrating how issues of ethnicity and gender affect perceptions of authenticity by means of a case study of Charanga del Norte, a UK-grown Cuban music dance band, over the last fifteen years. Since its inception, my band has featured musicians from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Additionally, Charanga del Norte features more female musicians than most UK Latin bands. As I show, most promoters marketing the group have tended towards exoticization, using essentialized images of Latin culture, with an emphasis on not just the Cuban but all the Latin American members of the band. This meant the group was originally promoted as a northern UK-based salsa band, although audiences and promoters gradually became more aware of other forms of traditional Cuban music as a result of the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. Promotion of us at World Music events has taken a slightly different stance and focussed more on publicizing the African roots of our ‘Afro-Cuban’ music