Fabricating Johnny - French Cultural Studies

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French Cultural Studies
Fabricating Johnny
French popular music and national culture
DAVID LOOSELEY
University of Leeds
This article takes Johnny Hallyday’s current status as a national icon as
the starting point for an investigation of the relationship between popular
music, authenticity and national culture in contemporary France. Public
representations of Hallyday at the time of his sixtieth birthday in June
2003 were very different from those prevailing at the start of his career,
when he scandalised the cultural establishment by appearing as the conduit
for US-style rock’n’roll, which seemed to symbolise the Americanisation
of French cultural values. Today, he is portrayed as belonging squarely to
the canonical French chanson tradition and even as the incarnation of
l’exception culturelle française. This discursive transformation testifies to
a parallel mutation in the status of pop music in France, which the article
traces.
Keywords: authenticity, chanson, Johnny Hallyday, pop music
O
ne hundred years after the Entente cordiale and the onset of
Americanisation in Europe, the cultural divide between France and Britain
is narrower than it was. Sites nevertheless remain which testify to the two
nations’ obdurate misunderstanding of each other. One such site is Johnny
Hallyday. UK perceptions of French popular music as a whole often seem
hermetically sealed in the past – at least, those perceptions retained by the
generations which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the myths of
Anglophone pop music were being forged. While today’s British adolescents
probably care little that international acts like Daft Punk and Modjo are
French, older Britons (including a few French-studies academics) continue
to speak about the popular music of France ethnocentrically and in
remarkably antiquated terms. Depending on the age of the speaker, it is still
common to hear French chanson identified with Maurice Chevalier, born in
French Cultural Studies, 16(2): 191–203 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com [200506] 10.1177/0957155805053707
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the nineteenth century; Édith Piaf, dead for over forty years; Charles
Aznavour, now in his ninth decade, Jacques Brel (a Belgian, in fact), who
died in 1978; or Serge Gainsbourg, dead for well over a decade and still
known in the UK primarily for his one succès de scandale, ‘Je t’aime, moi
non plus’, released in 1969. And, with the same dreary inevitability, talk of
French ‘pop’ is bound sooner or later to elicit a snigger about Hallyday,
France’s first rock’n’roller, who turned sixty in 2003 and whose career began
half a century ago.
Within these British caricatures, the likes of Piaf or Aznavour at least
benefit from a veneer of Gallic exoticism. Hallyday, on the other hand, is
dismissed as having, as it were, sold off the family silver, as having squandered
this exotic capital by promiscuously adopting an Anglo-American-pop
identity – from Elvis clone, through hippie and glam rocker, to sinister biker,
Mad Max and beyond. France, of course, configures its pop music in a more
complex way, though Hallyday himself did not greatly benefit from this
difference until the latter half of his career. My aim here is not to assess, still
less to rehabilitate, Hallyday as an artist. It is to explore the complexity of
this French configuration by examining him as a public figure.
Authenticity and fabrication
Both singer and film actor, the popular-cultural icon known as ‘Johnny’ is far
removed from the clownish image of him circulating in Britain. For a start,
he has sold over 100 million records; his song ‘Marie’ became France’s
fastest-selling single ever in its first week of release in 2003; and his image is
regularly used in advertising. He has acted in films since the early 1960s and
his starring role in L’Homme du train (2002) has brought him acclaim as an
actor. Secondly, there is much more to his celebrity than box-office statistics.
Reaching pensionable age in 2003, he marked the occasion with a sell-out
stadium tour lasting six months, culminating in a concert at Paris’s Parc des
Princes on Sunday 15 June 2003. This event, and the fact that his birthday
was celebrated nationally, provide an important insight into his constructed
persona, as well as a measure of the discursive distance he has travelled
since his career began. Prime Minister Raffarin is known to be a fan. Having
already illuminated his electoral promise to govern for ‘la France des
Français’ by adding ‘the French who listen to Johnny’ (Broughton, 2003),
Raffarin and other government members showed up at the Parc des Princes
(Raffarin, it was noted with some excitement, ‘without tie’). The President
himself had already decorated Hallyday with the légion d’honneur in 1997;
and for the Parc des Princes the Elysée was reported to have reserved no
fewer than 800 seats. At the opening of the 1998 World Cup, Hallyday was
chosen to sing the national anthem, and so on. Such enthusiastic public
investment in the Johnny myth suggests that his function in French society
goes beyond that of mere entertainer. That function needs to be analysed and
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the value-system behind it teased out, a value-system founded, I believe, on
a redefinition of the popular-musical notion of authenticity in terms of
French cultural exceptionalism.
As Roy Shuker (1998: 20–1) notes, authenticity in its ‘common-sense usage’
in music discourse means artistic integrity: it ‘assumes that the producers of
music texts undertook the “creative” work themselves; that there is an element
of originality or creativity present, along with connotations of seriousness,
sincerity, and uniqueness’. In the French context, however, Shuker’s useful
definition needs to be complemented by reference to the notion of national
culture. In an edition of Melvyn Bragg’s UK arts programme, ‘The South Bank
Show’, devoted to Hallyday (ITV, 9 May 2004, 22.45 p.m.), The Guardian’s
Paris correspondent, Jon Henley, remarked: ‘it’s very difficult for us [AngloSaxons] to accept Johnny as a French phenomenon because what he does isn’t
French, rock’n’roll isn’t French’, adding ‘there is no doubt that the chanson
tradition is a more genuine expression of the French spirit’. Such confidence
about the national characteristics of French music is common in British
journalism and draws on some unquestioned assumptions about authenticity.
Clearly, Henley’s implication is that la chanson française, established before
the coming of rock’n’roll, is authentic in that it emerged organically from the
‘spirit’ of the French people; whereas Hallyday’s version of rock is inauthentic
because it simulates a form foreign to that ‘spirit’. This idea of simulation in
turn implies that ‘Johnny’ the star has been deliberately and collectively
‘fabricated’ (Peterson, 1997).
Certainly, nobody – not even Hallyday himself – denies that he began his
pop career by consciously imitating US rock’n’roll. He has described how,
with the expert help of his boyhood friend and fellow rocker, the halfAmerican Long Chris (Christian Blondieau), he studied the erotic display
and vocal delivery of Elvis and others. It was Long Chris who devised a stage
costume for his first serious concert, at the Paris Alhambra in September
1960: a lace-trimmed shirt copied from a Gene Vincent album cover. Learning
from the acrobatic stage movements of American rock’n’rollers, Johnny
himself selected his signature technique of rolling on the ground while
playing the guitar (Barsamian and Jouffa, 2002: 51–3). Once he had adopted
his American-sounding name, he also allowed himself to be billed initially
as a US citizen living in France, a ruse dreamt up by Lee Halliday, the
American husband of Johnny’s cousin Desta, who together had brought him
up. And as with many of the manufactured stars of the late 1950s, his
managers (Georges Leroux, then Johnny Stark) and his record labels (Vogue,
then Philips) were also instrumental in fabricating an American-style persona
for him.
The methodical mimicry of successive Anglo-American styles was to
become Hallyday’s trademark for the next 20 years. His regular lyricists, Ralph
Bernet and Georges Aber, would scout round in Billboard for new hits to adapt,
while another of his writers, Michel Mallory, would compose material for him
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in the latest idioms (Perrin, 2003). He would try his hand at practically
anything, from ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ (a cover he
later regretted), through blues and soul, to the Beatles and Phil Spector; though
he drew the line at 1970s disco à la Patrick Juvet or Claude François.
Sometimes, too, he would perform and record songs in dubious English, or
travel to an American studio to record an album, in order to duplicate the
‘authentic’ rock sound. He would also take on, sometimes belatedly, the
personal styling that accompanied his adoptive material.
This fabrication process helps account for UK perceptions of Hallyday as
second-hand and second-rate. There is, however, a further and specifically
French dimension to his apparent inauthenticity. By incessantly changing
styles, and singing the songs of others instead of writing his own (which he
did only occasionally), Hallyday was denied the benefits of a different
conception of aesthetic integrity which had grown up in France in the late
1950s: the consistency and artistic self-expression of Brassens, Ferré and Brel, a
triumvirate of highly rated singer–songwriters and anti-stars deemed to be
writing from their own experience rather than to satisfy the music business. In
the early 1960s, the chasm between Johnny the noisy interloper and the homegrown poetic chanson helps explain establishment reactions to his unfamiliar
style of music. At the Alhambra in September 1960, some stars of the chanson
world, who were there to see Raymond Devos in the second half, laughed at
Hallyday’s antics and the crowd was noisily divided. Afterwards, music critics
of all shades of opinion impugned his crazed impersonations of American stars.
La Croix’s Henri Rabine wrote of ‘Johnny Hallyday qui, en mal d’imiter le trop
célèbre Elvis Presley, afflige le public d’une exhibition baragouinante et
hystérique, promise à brève échéance au cabanon’; while L’Humanité’s Gilbert
Bloch spoke of ‘l’exhibition de très mauvais goût d’une sorte de caricature des
pires chanteurs de rock américains’ (Barsamian and Jouffa, 2002: 48–50). A
little later, Gilles Durieux began an interview with Hallyday in Cinémonde by
reciting some of the lyrics of his songs and asking whether he was aware that he
was spouting ‘niaiseries’ in comparison to the lyrics of Brassens (Barsamian
and Jouffa, 2002: 82).
Yet it is not only chanson fans who have dismissed Johnny in France.
French commentators who pride themselves on being aficionados of rock are
also at pains to distance themselves from him by joining in the Anglo-Saxon
mockery of French pop. In an issue aiming to show the cultural validity of
French rock today, the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles condemns the
rock of yesterday for its ‘surface plane peuplée de rockers officiels,
pâlichonnes copies de modèles étrangers qui nous faisaient tant honte lors
des échanges scolaires avec la Grande-Bretagne ou les États-Unis’. It goes on
to evoke ‘la peine qu’avaient dû éprouver les plus vieux quand nos Beatles
s’appelaient Chaussettes Noires, notre Elvis Johnny Hallyday et notre Dylan
Hugues Aufray’ (Les Inrockuptibles, 1999: 13). It also asks a number of young
French musicians which French rock artists they are most ashamed of and
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Hallyday crops up regularly, accused of having, in the words of Imhotep
(member of the rap group IAM), ‘représenté une version dénaturée et à l’eau
de rose de la soul afro-américaine’ (Les Inrockuptibles, 1999: 29).
On the face of it, then, the case against Hallyday for crimes against
authenticity looks unassailable. Yet the question is never quite that simple,
as evidenced in recent writing about him. For some years now, a certain
revisionism has crept into representations of Hallyday, beginning around
1980, though the sociologist Paul Yonnet, one of the first academics to write
seriously about him, sees a turning point occurring in the mid-1970s when
the music critic Claude Fléouter described Hallyday in the sober-sided Le
Monde as ‘le plus doué, la plus belle bête de scène jamais vue dans le musichall français’ (cited in Yonnet, 1985: 202). But it was the emergence at the
end of the 1970s of a new wave of ‘le rock français’, outcome of an increase
in amateur or semi-professional bands, the rise of punk and the birth of a
new independent record sector, that really precipitated the change, allowing
Hallyday’s rock of some 20 years before to be interpreted less pejoratively.
Yonnet detects signs of his influence on some of the later rock musicians,
such as Jacques Higelin (Yonnet, 1985: 202). A degree of ‘heritagisation’ also
began around this time, for example in 1982 when Philips brought out a
massive box set of over 400 Hallyday songs, with all the symbolic capital the
box-set formula (chiefly identified at the time with classical music)
possessed. It is also commonly accepted, not least by the performer himself,
that, after his acting roles in Godard’s Détective and Costa-Gavras’s Conseil
de famille, both in 1985, some intellectuals started to speak of him more
favourably, which allowed them to display their own pop-cultural
credentials by admitting to having listened to him in their youth. Yonnet
was among them, his article ‘Hallyday for ever’ appearing that same year.
In the process, the notion of authenticity as applied to Johnny has
gradually been recast. In some instances, and particularly in the bastions
of popular-cultural legitimacy, the recasting is only implicit and a trifle
begrudging. Télérama, for example, a heavyweight TV magazine enjoying
considerable cultural capital, was willing to produce a special sixtiethbirthday issue; yet its editorialist, Philippe Barbot (2003a: 5), admitted that
the idea had surprised some magazine staff, for whom ‘Johnny, c’est pas
Télérama’. The issue also featured a piece on whether Johnny is really ‘rock’
by Philippe Manœuvre, editor of Rock & Folk, a similarly ‘legitimate’ music
magazine with intellectual pretensions, and one which, Manœuvre candidly
admits, would lose a host of readers if it ever put Hallyday on the cover.
What Manœuvre points up, though, is the paradox of Johnny’s status today.
To an extent, Manœuvre argues, he resembles the statue of some ancient
God, whose name is remembered but whose primitive function has been
forgotten. And yet, he goes on, although Hallyday’s detractors in the 1960s
predicted that his young fans would soon become engineers or tax collectors
and forget about him, this has patently not happened (Manœuvre, 2003: 88
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and 91). Philippe Blanchet probes this paradox further, locating in it the
essential ambiguity of the whole notion of ‘French rock’. In Blanchet’s piece,
Johnny comes over as a rather dim-witted childhood friend whom the French
find themselves saddled with well into adulthood. In a ‘vertigineuse série de
métamorphoses pas toujours très heureuses et parfois même très difficiles à
digérer’, he has muddled through popular culture, condemning long hair just as
it became fashionable, discovering the hippies after everybody else, and so on:
‘Bref, Johnny nous fout la honte, alors qu’on ne demande qu’à l’aimer.’ This is
the enigma as Blanchet sees it: irrespective of these embarrassing transformations and the disappointments they have produced, Johnny fans cannot
quite stop believing that he is still ‘le seul, l’unique, à incarner, même
grossièrement, ce rêve (absurde) d’un rock français’; even though, just as they
succeed in convincing themselves that he is, along he lumbers with yet another
inept change of image or grotesque costume. We ought to hate him, writes
Blanchet: ‘on préfère faire avec. D’ailleurs, on n’a pas vraiment le choix. Juste
ce qu’on mérite, sans doute. Quelque chose en nous de Hallyday . . .’ (all
quotations in Blanchet, 2003: 92).1
Astute though these readings are, neither Manœuvre nor Blanchet makes
adequate sense of this paradox. Indeed, both reveal a degree of puzzlement,
though Manœuvre hints that it is the result of a postmodern sensibility,
which makes us no longer know how to judge or classify, whereas in the
1960s we thought, wrongly, that we did. But a resolution of the paradox may
be found in the more enthusiastically revisionist readings of Johnny’s
accomplishments. What is striking in such readings is that the image of the
singer as thieving magpie, switching from one popular-cultural movement to
the next and embarrassing the nation in the process, is often recast in terms
that are reminiscent of the perspectives of cultural studies. The fabrication of
Johnny is no longer represented here in Adornian terms, as exemplifying the
crude industrial processes of mass culture. On the contrary, it is acknowledged
without shame, as if his supporters were taking for granted a theoretical
position which characterises popular culture as naturally a process of collective
creation, like cinema. Marc Robine, for example, writing in Chorus about the
various songwriters Hallyday has employed over the years, states: ‘l’image qui
se dégage a posteriori du personnage Hallyday est le fruit d’un travail d’équipe
où chacun précise, à sa maniere, le portrait de l’artiste . . . chacun apporte à
l’ensemble un regard personnel et un éclairage particulier qui finiront par se
fonder en une espèce de mythe commun’ (Chorus, 2003: 86). Fabrication
here is viewed as unproblematic because it is no longer antithetical to
authenticity. On the contrary, it is Johnny’s particular way of being himself.
Instead of simply faking Anglo-American rock in his own language, Yonnet
argues (1985: 202), Hallyday could only really ‘donner sa mesure’ by singing
in French, since it enabled him to personalise the foreign material, as in the
case of ‘Le Pénitencier’, his rendition of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, more
powerful and ‘irrespirable’ in Yonnet’s view than either Woody Guthrie’s or
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the Animals’. In such representations, Johnny is more chameleon than
magpie. Robine insists that ‘il y a une patte, une manière Hallyday’: his
personal artistry lies in his ability to appropriate what is constructed for him
and make it his own: ‘qu’importe l’auteur ou le compositeur: tout ce qu’il
chante devient “du Hallyday”’ (Chorus, 2003: 86). The other face of this
aesthetic essentialism is his fans’ consistent perception of his ‘sincerity’.
Rather than simply conforming to the roles carved out for him by the music
business, Robine goes on, Johnny becomes those roles, with the result that fans
are ‘convaincus que Johnny n’a jamais triché. Ni avec eux, ni avec lui-même.
Johnny est: il ne joue pas’ (Chorus, 2003: 88). As a radio presenter interviewed
for the ‘South Bank Show’ (2004) comments, ‘he never played being Elvis
Presley or James Dean. He was Elvis Presley and James Dean.’
One might wish to object here that taking an American name when one is
a Belgian born in France must surely be at least a mild form of trickery. But
naming too becomes an ambivalent, slippery business in the fabrication of
Johnny. Today, after countless biographies, everyone knows that the young
Jean-Philippe Smet did not choose his stage name at random. Having been
brought up by Desta and Lee Halliday, the name he took was a composite of
his own first name as anglicised by Lee and of Lee’s surname. The American
name thus attains a biographical authenticity of sorts. The fact that Johnny’s
record label accidentally misspelt the surname, and that ‘Lee Halliday’ (also
spelt sometimes with a ‘y’) was itself a stage name, only serves to further
subvert naming as any kind of measure or guarantee of authenticity. Even in
his numerous films, it is suggested, Hallyday does not act a part but, like the
great Hollywood stars analysed by Edgar Morin (1972), he ‘contaminates’ his
roles with himself. Illusion, then, becomes reality in the postmodern myth of
Johnny. Despite all the changes of musical style, Robine insists, Johnny’s
discography is in fact his autobiography (Chorus, 2003: 88).
To reinforce this conception, the revisionist project also resorts to
legitimation through comparison, most notably with Piaf. Typically, we find
Hallyday described – as here by the singer–songwriters Jean-Jacques Goldman
and Alain Souchon – as ‘la seule et unique star française de la chanson
depuis Piaf’ (cited in Chorus, 2003: 84). Like him, Piaf did not often write
her own songs, but a succession of writers and composers learnt to write for
her stage persona, with the result that a song like ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’,
today an international standard sung by everyone from Shirley Bassey to
Hallyday himself, is indelibly Piaf’s own, only acquiring its full, tragic
potential from her (initially sceptical) adoption of it at what turned out to be
the end of her relatively short life. This intimacy between discography and
biography helps explain why she has been admitted into the exclusive club
of chanson greats alongside Brel and Brassens, without her ever being a
card-carrying auteur–compositeur–interprète. Today, the revisionists deploy
Piaf’s name as a way of lobbying for Hallyday to be accorded the same
exceptional conditions of entry.
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Accordingly, Johnny today is constructed as more a chanson than a rock
star. His supporters frequently flag up the fact that, like Piaf, he was born an
‘enfant de la balle’; that as a child performer he sought and received early
advice from Maurice Chevalier and went to shows by 1950s chanson stars
like Montand, Trenet and Henri Salvador. We are forever being told that he
began his career with songs by Brassens (among others), and that he enjoyed
the support or friendship of Brassens, Brel and Aznavour, when others were
vilifying him. Since 1980, his repertoire has also become a good deal wider,
including chanson standards like Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’, which he
introduced at the Zénith in 1984 by saying ‘C’est sans aucune prétension que
je chante cette chanson, qui est simplement un hommage à celui qui pour
moi sera toujours le plus grand dans mon cœur.’ He has also used a number
of accredited singer–songwriters like Jean-Jacques Goldman and Michel
Berger, who both wrote entire albums for him. ‘Ainsi’, writes Robine,
‘Johnny s’inscrit-il dans une tradition historique qui fait de lui un
authentique maillon de la chaîne des artistes du music-hall; héritage naturel
de son passé d’enfant de la balle’ (Chorus, 2003: 85).
What this underscoring of a chanson lineage at the expense of his rock
credentials is designed to achieve is Johnny’s aesthetic and cultural authentication. His rock’n’roll origins are not denied (this would be futile, since
Johnny constantly reclaims them), but they are discreetly sidelined, as if
they were a phase he went through to arrive where he is today: ‘Pour lui,
c’est sûr’, writes Robine, ‘la chanson n’a pas commencé avec le rock’n’roll …
et il est visible qu’elle ne s’est pas non plus arrêtée là’ (Chorus, 2003: 85). In
the process, Hallyday is re-nationalised, converted from Trojan horse of
America to public space given over to a kind of Frenchness. This patrimonial
dimension is itself based on a complex set of representations.
For Gilles Verlant, for example, Johnny on stage, still upright and still
belting out music with his veins almost popping out of his head, is a phallic
symbol representing France’s eternal virility and youth. He also stands for
what today’s middle-aged survivors of the 1960s – those who, unlike him,
have compromised with time and allowed themselves to become bankers
and civil servants – believe they still are inside: ageless rockers in love with
life. Hence the affection in which he is persistently held: ‘Alors, on se rend
compte qu’il fait partie de notre vie, qu’il en a ponctué les étapes, heureuses
ou désagréables, scandé les amours et les emmerdes. Et on se dit que ce qui
le lie à nous, c’est tout simple: une infinie tendresse’ (Barbot, 2003a: 5) At
the same time, this nostalgic affection, coupled with his ‘sincerity’ or
authenticity, have made him immutable, superhuman, timeless. Contrasting
him with Elvis, whose social background was well documented, Yonnet
points out that, from the start, Johnny was represented as coming from
nowhere (D’où viens-tu Johnny? was the title of one of his early films): ‘le
Johnny éternel, né pour le rock … Bref, un jeune pur, donc un rock’n’roller
par nature’ (Yonnet, 1985: 201–2). Similarly, Barbot, answering those
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journalists at Télérama who thought that Johnny had no place in the
magazine, argues that his status today places him beyond such judgments:
il est parvenu à un tel stade (de France), Johnny, qu’il n’est plus
nécessaire de l’écouter chanter pour savoir qu’il existe, il plane
désormais à une altitude souveraine, au delà de tout critère esthétique ou
artistique. Il défie les lois de la critique, du bon goût, de la normalité. Audessus du lot, le Jojo. Hors série . . . (Barbot, 2003a: 5)
Soaring above aesthetic judgement, he is ahistorical, like all myths. For
L’Express (2002), he is ‘a natural phenomenon’. In Libération, Patrick
Sabatier writes ‘Les héros de mythologies n’ont cure des soubresauts de
l’histoire’. Johnny ‘est devenu un monument historique de chair et de sons
au cœur du patrimoine culturel français’ (Sabatier, 2003). A monument, says
Télérama, picking up the metaphor, like the Eiffel Tower or the station at
Perpignan, but also much more: ‘une sorte de conscience nationale, bonne
ou mauvaise’ (Barbot, 2003b: 7).
Naturalised, monumentalised and dehistoricised, he is also deemed to
transcend divisions between generations, classes and even ideologies; and
this, significantly, at a time (2003) when social movements and industrial
conflict about raising the retirement age were once again tearing France
apart, conflicts behind which lay fundamental socio-cultural shifts in the
collective representations of baby boomers, old age and leisure. He appeals,
we are told, to everyone from seven to seventy-seven. It is frequently pointed
out that his audience at the Parc des Princes was composed of adolescents
and young couples, older couples, men, women, grandparents. Proletarians
and intellectuals also came together there. He has performed at an RPR
congress and the Fête de L’Humanité; he is a long-standing friend of Chirac
and Raffarin, yet also of the Communist leader Robert Hue, whom he knew
when Hue played in a rock band. Johnny, then, according to Libération, is an
‘espèce de lien social républicain’ (Chemin, 2003). And, as a result of this
status, he is viewed as ‘un ambassadeur décoré et adulé de l’exception
culturelle’ (Sabatier, 2003), symbolising what makes the French incorrigibly
different from the common herd. This is a fascinating reversal of his cultural
standing 40 years ago, and it hints at one last form of revisionist transfiguration of what were once seen as Johnny’s faults. In a deft pirouette, his
failure to make a commercial impact in the English-speaking world, and
even, in a sense, his being derided in that world, are rewritten as signs of
what is authentically singular about French culture.
The meanings of Johnny
Transcendent though he is, Johnny’s importance to France is, like the myths
identified by Barthes (1957), still essentially ideological. All of the above
representations in fact help us better understand the 800 presidential seats at
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the sixtieth-birthday concert. The state’s enthusiasm for the occasion was an
easy but effective way of stressing not only that the government was in tune
with popular taste at a time when it was clearly out of tune with public
aspirations, but also that music brings the French together in one happy
family, conveniently masking the social protests troubling Raffarin’s first
year in office. Johnny is thus a national metaphor: not just ‘une espèce de
lien social républicain’, but a convenient topical symbol: an energetic sixtyyear-old, who ought to be retiring but has no intention of doing so.
There is, however, more to this symbolism than topical politics. If we
compare these ideological representations today with the equally but
differently ideological images of Johnny in the early 1960s, we can see that
his case testifies to a significant shift in French public perceptions of
popular music. When he became France’s first rock idol in 1961, pop was
feared by the cultural and political establishment everywhere as a dangerous
influence on youth, and, in Gaullist France particularly, as a vehicle of US
cultural imperialism. As Barbot writes of rock’n’roll, ‘c’était un truc violent,
désordonné, bruyant, obscène et vulgaire parfois. Johnny représentait tout
cela’ (2003a: 5). This perception also has to be set against media-driven fears
since the summer of 1959 of the infamous blousons noirs, gangs of workingclass youths on the look-out for trouble. Violence broke out during his first
national tour in 1961, reputedly the work of blousons noirs, and some of his
concerts were banned. Then, the infamous outdoor gala on 22 June 1963 at
the Place de la Nation, organised by the pop magazine Salut les copains, at
which Johnny performed, made the French fully aware of pop (or yéyé, as it
became known), because of the numbers involved (some 150,000), the acts of
vandalism and violence, and the general hysteria the music generated in the
young audience.
At this juncture, then, Hallyday’s status as ambassador of the French
cultural exception was a long way off. Pop, in fact, was thought to be
socially divisive and corruptive, a distinct threat to the republican social
fabric rather than a unifying force. As I have argued elsewhere (Looseley,
2003), it was coming to be represented as the Other, the outsider who
permits the group to imagine itself as a community of insiders. Richard
Middleton (2003) has used the term ‘Low-Other’ to describe how, from the
late eighteenth century, ‘classical’ music constructed its popular counterpart
so as to legitimate its own claim to be high art. In France, a comparably
Bourdieusian strategy can be identified within popular music itself, with the
most respected chanson stars set apart, in a process of ‘distinction’, from the
lower orders of the entertainment world and used as a universal yardstick of
quality, as evidenced, for example, in Gilles Durieux’s recourse to Brassens
in order to underscore the ‘niaiseries’ in Hallyday’s lyrics. Indeed, there is an
underlying premise that while pop communicates only by provoking
affective communion, the lyrically more sophisticated chanson, at its best,
does so by working on both the emotions and the intelligence. And I would
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suggest that this premise also underlies the culture shock produced in
France by early pop and events like the Place de la Nation. Hence, too, the
strategies adopted to legitimate Hallyday in the latter half of his career: if he
is to accede to the status of national myth, he must be shown to belong to the
timeless universe of chanson.
The essential issue here is how a popular culture achieves legitimacy in
contemporary France. As Johnny’s case indicates, the standard Bourdieusian
view – that classical, or ‘bourgeois’, culture is socially constructed as
legitimate in order for its elite proponents to be demarcated from the mass –
has been overtaken by events in the last quarter-century, because popular
cultures themselves have undergone a legitimation process in their own
right. This can be explained by a variety of factors, most of which can be
tracked back to the meanings of May 1968: the demise of ideology and the
accompanying shift in the attitudes of French left-wing intellectuals to
America; the rise of the aesthetic relativism associated with cultural theory;
the development of a sociology of popular music; the ‘heritagisation’ of pop
(fifty years old in 2004) and its establishment as the commercial mainstream
of an increasingly global music industry. These factors also explain the
Ministry of Culture’s acceptance from 1981 of pop as a public culture worthy
of state support, which both reflects and completes the legitimation process.
I suggest, therefore, that we are seeing in France a change in the national
status of music: the ‘musicalisation’ – or more accurately the ‘popmusicalisation’ – of French culture and society (Looseley, 2003: 3 and
205–6).2 As cultural analyst Gilles Lipovetsky observes, ‘nous vivons une
formidable explosion musicale . . . l’individu post-moderne . . . est branché
sur de la musique du matin jusqu’au soir, tout se passe comme s’il avait
besoin d’être toujours ailleurs, d’être transporté et enveloppé dans une
ambiance syncopée’ (Lipovetsky, 1983: 33). In France, this musicalisation is
still very much in progress, but it is taking the form of a shift in the balance
of cultural power, as the place of the written word at the heart of the national
culture is being challenged by music. Since the 1960s, the hegemony of the
printed word has been weakened by generations of young people more
attuned to audiovisual and electronic culture, as surveys of cultural
practices constantly confirm. As a result, an alternative rhetoric has quietly
been gaining on the traditional cultural values of republican France: body
over mind, music over words, sound over sense. As Lipovetsky goes on:
‘[L]’individu devient cinétique, aspire au rythme, à une participation de tout
le corps et de tous les sens, participation aujourd’hui possible par la
stéréophonie, le walkman, les sons cosmiques ou paroxystiques des
musiques à l’âge de l’électronique’ (Lipovetsky, 1983: 34). At government
level, this kind of rhetoric has produced, and can be seen at work in, the
Fête de la musique, the Techno Parade, and most recently the 800 reserved
seats at Hallyday’s birthday concert.
Ultimately, then, the transfiguration of Johnny Hallyday is more than
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anecdotal or mediatic. It is part of a much wider shift in cultural ideology,
reflecting evolving notions of artistic authenticity and national culture.
These notions help us better understand the paradox identified by
Manœuvre and Blanchet regarding the affection in which Hallyday is held
despite the infelicitous makeovers and the international indifference.
Bourdieu (1993) argues that youth and old age are not simply biological data
but social constructions for ideological purposes. We can recognise one such
construction in what Morin (1963) calls the ‘copinisation’ of French youth in
the early 1960s under the impact of pop. To defuse the dangers of rock’n’roll
– its associations with dissident, working-class youths presaging both class
and generational conflicts – rough diamonds like Johnny were swiftly
polished up and transformed into the voice of the much more docile yéyé,
whose ideology was that all young people, regardless of social position, were
brought together as copains by their charmingly innocent love of pop music.
Once safely defused, pop could then be assimilated by adults: Daniel
Filipacchi, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, and all the
personalities of le Tout-Paris of 1961 shown gleefully doing the twist in the
pages of Paris Match. Since then, of course, the juvenilisation of adult
society has become a given and the Johnny myth has matured, but it is still
deployed for much the same purpose. Once vilified as a conduit of
Americanisation, Hallyday today symbolises adult France’s continuity in
change. At sixty, he is both young and old, a phallic symbol who could be
drawing a pension. He is both France and America, pop and chanson. Far
from proving that, as Blanchet put it, French rock is an ‘absurd’ fantasy and
a contradiction in terms, Johnny today is carefully configured to demonstrate
that it is in reality an authentic expression of the French themselves as they
would like to be: canny and débrouillard, skilfully ducking and weaving,
adapting and growing. Johnny is fabricated to demonstrate that the French
cultural exception can redefine itself without compromise, that the national
culture is changing in the era of globalisation but remains the same. At a
time when, according to Lipovetsky (1983: 33), ‘la séduction post-moderne
est hi-fi’, Johnny reassures the nation that, far from being eroded, Frenchness
has simply got wired for sound.
Notes
1. Blanchet’s last sentence here puns on the title and refrain of one of Hallyday’s most
popular later songs: ‘Quelque chose de Tennessee’ (1985).
2. I make substantial use in the following paragraphs of my arguments in Looseley (2003).
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David Looseley is Professor of Contemporary French Culture at the University
of Leeds. Address for correspondence: Department of French, University of
Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS2 9JT, UK [email: [email protected]]