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reckonslepoisson · 4 months

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Georges Brassens (1953-1972)

Full titles: 1ère série : Georges Brassens chante les chansons poétiques (...et souvent gaillardes) de... Georges Brassens (1953), 2ème série [Le vent] (1954), No3 [Les sabots d'Hélène] (1955), No4 [Je me suis fait tout petit] (1956), No5 [Oncle Archibald] (1957), Volume 6 (1958), No7 [Les funérailles d'antan] (1960), 8 [Le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire] (1961), N° 9 [Les trompettes de la renommée] (1962), Les copains d'abord (1964), IX [Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète] (1966), 13 [Fernande] (1972)

Years ago, I went through all of Jacques Brel’s stuff – and to this day I regret not writing about it, at least in some form. Brel transformed so much of my musical taste, opening me up to pop traditionél and enlightening me as to how one man could dominate a stage, innately entrance hundreds, thousands, millions.

I won’t make that mistake again with Georges Brassens, another master of chanson who didn’t do so much lip-smacking or low-end belting but instead opted for wistful melodic innovation and high poetry. Brassens, too, was an extremely tall man and a captivating physical presence, and as much a poet as a conventional musician or performer.

In non-lyrical terms, it is Brassens’ melodic nimbleness, his restless and unwavering sailing through musical scales, that is most immediately endearing. One would like to think that even without understanding the lyrics, Brassens as man and personality is still perfectly graspable.

And yet it’s in lyrical terms that Brassens’ greatness truly lies. As poetry proper – poems put to music rather than music with poetic intent – his lyricism stands up to the finest written word (or at least of which I’ve cast an eye over). Appreciate this stuff best as an English-speaking listener by reading through translations, to realise how funny, cheeky, dark, lithe, poignant, conflicted, picturesque, interpretable it all is. I imagine much nuance and sophistication is still lost across linguistic boundaries – but even so, Brassens is masterful.

And there’s more. So much more, in fact, is there to be gleaned from Brassens and his context that I am not nearly knowledgeable enough that I cannot hope to engage with him with any satisfaction. Take his stratospheric popularity in France, for instance. This stuff, this beautiful, intricate, sophisticated poetry, had an extraordinarily huge audience. Is that not also fascinating? I’m no Francophile, but it becomes really quite understandable how the French, with the knowledge that this was their mass art, revel in an inflated sense of cultural superiority.

Pick(s): ‘Le gorille’, ‘Le vent’, ‘P… De To19i’, ‘Je me suis fait tout petit’, ‘Oncle Archibald’, ‘Le pornographe’, ‘Pénélope’, ‘Le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire’, ‘Les trompettes de la renommée’, ‘Les copains d'abord’, ‘Supplique pour être à la plage de sète’, ‘Fernande’

#Georges Brassens #1ère série : Georges Brassens chante les chansons poétiques (...et souvent gaillardes) de... Georges Brassens #2ème série [Le vent]#No3 [Les sabots d'Hélène]#No4 [Je me suis fait tout petit]#No5 [Oncle Archibald]#Volume 6 #No7 [Les funérailles d'antan]#8 [Le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire]#N° 9 [Les trompettes de la renommée]#Les copains d'abord #IX [Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète]#Fernande #1953-1972 #chanson #Chanson à texte

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strawberry-metal · 2 years

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