Nantes 1: This Land is Your Land

My experience of France, of Nantes, so far has been one of necessary foreignness, as one would reasonably expect, but contained within that, and perhaps easily overlooked in anticipation is the foreign, French, and Nantais conceptions of America, independent of my presence as an American. That is to say that it has been fascinating to move towards an understanding of the ways in which citizens of Nantes engage American culture in their daily lives. I should however mention that the observations that I am to share here do not speak to any truly broad observation base, but rather are reflections on a rather specific group of people and a rather specific series of interactions. Those people are most particularly a group of “kids,” I might casually say – young adults, more formally, my new friends, specifically. They are artists and musicians; in a word, the closest parallel to the kinds of friends that I keep back in Chicago.

They find American art and pop culture fascinating and in a strange way, hold it both as novel and simultaneously more interesting, more valid, even, than French art and culture. Exemplifying this so very poignantly was a party I attended at which a band of twenty-somethings performed punk rock and surf-punk renditions of Nancy Sinatra and Beach Boys songs while wearing mustaches and cowboy hats. This was hilarious for them, as it was for me. Yet, illustrating the simultaneity of novelty and respect, many of the people at this party also perform more legitimate, serious music and also do so in English. When pressed on the issue of why they all so often sing in English (but never habitually speak in English), most respond by saying that it simply makes more sense to do so; that performing folk music or punk rock sounds better in English. But there is also a sentiment of distancing oneself from what seems to be a feeling of an absence of good music, pop music, and good, legitimate, respectable pop culture in France’s history. One guy told me that he sings in English because he is not interested in being a French singer, that he doesn’t care about Jacques Brel, but that he cares about Woody Guthrie. The idea of singing songs inspired by American art, but doing so in French does not seem to appeal, at all, even in the name of creating something unique or of moving French music culture forward. Yet, in doing this, in adopting this attitude, there is something distinctly French occurring.

Even in instances when American culture or daily life intersect with or utilize some foreign culture, it seems far less common that the “Americanized” version or the “American side” of something exhibits any real depth of knowledge of said foreign culture than the inverse. For example, I may know who Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg are, and I may use the phrases “tête-à-tête” and “c’est la vie,” but it is seemingly as common as that to find a French person of comparable interest and standing as me who can perform Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan songs and who can actually speak English. If I am approached on the street in Nantes (approx. pop. 500,000) by someone asking me a question in French, and I respond: “Je suis désolé mais je ne comprends pas. Je ne parle pas le francais,” the response, you can be pretty certain, will be: “Oh, do you speak English?” Of course this is no surprise, for English is spoken officially in more countries than is French, and unofficially in so very many more countries, but even language aside, and even the fact of the pervasiveness of American culture aside, there is a certain very real investment and interest in America. As mentioned above, there is a breaking with French history seen as somewhat (pop) culturally bankrupt but without any noticeable sense of shame. Indeed, these people that I meet are in fact very proud to be French and exhibit a decent knowledge of the cultural history of their country, but they are proud to be French people who know who Paul Auster and William Faulkner are. And that again is the strange coexistence. They seem to say: “There is no such thing as a legitimate French folk or pop singer, so I am not going to be a French singer, I am going to be an English (language) singer. But I am still French.” Therein lays a curiosity. I have mixed up my examples and am now curious if these same people are as familiar with Moliére and Proust as they are with Auster and Faulkner, for say what you will about Jacques Brel and Johnny Holiday, the contributions of Moliére and Proust are as uncontested as Auster and Faulker, as Hemingway and Kerouac. Yet I would be willing to wager that the distancing of the French artist from e.g. Jacques Brel and Johnny Holiday that can positively give forth an impressive cosmopolitanism, in fact detrimentally extends to Moliére and Proust.

Last night, I received a very simple answer from someone on the point of singing in English. Paraphrasing, he said: “If I sing in French, then when I perform in France, people can understand me. If I sing in English when I perform in France, Sweden, Greece, the United States, people can understand me.”