English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Two senses of popular music 0:00 This is the first time in the history of world music consumption that you can hear the same tunes between 10pm and 2am in Tokyo, in Abidjan, in Timbuktu, in Paris, in Rio. That's quite unprecedented, all the same. In other words, popular musics have been liquidated. There are two meanings of "popular music." A music is popular in the sense that it expresses a given people, as there is a popular Sicilian music quite distinct from the popular music of northern Thailand, in the sense that there is a specific geographical and historical here-and-now of which this music is the expression, the way certain flowers only grow in certain soil.
0:37 And then there's a music that is also called popular in a very different, even opposite, sense, namely because a lot of people listen to it. That's not quite the same thing. Quite the opposite, I'd even say. Because there's a popular music, the first sense I gave, that's a music that's popular from below. That's life, the sorrows, the joys, the happiness of life. On that manure, there are miracles. Bach's learned music is never anything but an extension and an extremely deep development of frameworks that are of popular origin. Bach uses structures that were as popular in his time as a sarabande — these are titles you see in Bach — a bourrée, a gigue.
1:14 The gavotte, these are dances that were very popular at the time, about as much as a zouk or a salsa is today. That's what I call "popular" where the origin comes from below, with an upward movement. And then there is popular music from above. There's a big producer who wants to make money as fast as possible and who makes the simplest possible hook that everyone will memorize within a week, that I'll hear in the morning while shaving, hear again in the car that takes me to work, and when I do my shopping, in the Franprix too, I'll hear it in the background. So that all of France will be whistling it after three or four days.
A frozen music, amnesiac and amnesia-inducing 1:44 So it's popular in that sense, it has nothing more to do with the other one. My criticism is exactly the opposite of those who find this music unbearable because it's too modern for them. Right? I have exactly the opposite criticism. For me, it's a music that no longer moves, that for 60 years has been frozen in a metric that no longer changes. Let's take it in order. When I say it's been 60 years, I'll roughly trace it back to the 1950s. That is, to the appearance of what is called rock rhythm.
2:14 There is still, in rock'n'roll strictly speaking this time — I'm not talking about rock in the broad sense, but rock'n'roll, the Bill Haleys, the very first ones, a bit later the Elvises and people like that — there is still a slight alternation between the beat and the afterbeat, between the downbeat and the upbeat, which produces a little sway, a bit of rhythmic creation. Before it got completely flattened out, from disco onward for example, where all the beats are equal. I'm trying to talk purely about musical determinations. I'm not making a value judgment. There's a whole promotion of this music to make people believe it's the music of youth, of protest, of transgression, whereas for me it's the music of enslavement to the world we live in.
2:49 To the world that is dominated by a single master, an Anglo-Saxon master. I'm not racist, I have nothing against it. There are plenty of things I admire in the Anglo-Saxon world, that's not the question. It's the world that dominates. It's not a world without a master. There is a master, and not one picked at random. The big drawback of the American world is that it's a world without history. That can be with a capital H or a lowercase h. But it's a world whose history doesn't go back very far. Roughly speaking, it's a world that is embarrassed by history. Americans would like to impose on the world a culture that takes no account of old Europe. That's where I want to get to.
3:20 This repetitive, binary music has as its primary function to be amnesic and amnesia-inducing. Or rather, amnesia-inducing and amnesic. But let no one say I'm putting all binary or repetitive musics on trial. Almost all so-called baroque music is binary. Vivaldi's music, Bach's music, you can beat it out like this. It can swing from one end to the other. It doesn't bother me that it's binary. But to compensate for the rhythmic monotony precisely, Bach develops an incredibly complex harmony and melodic writing.
3:54 Polyphony, counterpoint — when you sing "Frère Jacques" with several voices, that's counterpoint. It's the act of thinking several melodies simultaneously. Each one is an autonomous piece of music. There isn't one that is the melody and then the others that accompany it. It took centuries to arrive at this marvel that is a philharmonic orchestra. Centuries of progressive enrichment. There are enormous nuances between the sound of the horn, the sound of the oboe, the sound of violins, of strings, of brass. And now, for the past 60 years, in the sonic ghetto that I denounce, there is only a single timbre. The amplified string, bass guitar and electric guitar.
Blues and jazz, a miracle born of singing off-key 4:41 America had prepared the most beautiful of popular musics. I'm thinking here of jazz, which was set to become the classical music of the 20th century. And it was perhaps in the face of the threat of this emancipation of Black people. What an extraordinary paradox that the music which came perhaps to deliver 20th-century music from the dead end it was in. Because contemporary classical music was in a dead end when jazz appeared. It had drifted away from the general public. I gave the example of Bach earlier. Learned music, but not elitist, insofar as it takes up popular frameworks.
5:13 A peasant from Bach's time, even if he didn't often listen to Bach's music, was immediately in tune with it, recognizing rhythms that were also played at his own wedding, at the feast. So classical music, contemporary classical music, was already in a dead end. Jazz came at just the right moment. Precisely, one needs to see how the blues scale originally came about. We have a scale — when I say "we," in so-called Western, European music — which is based on what's called the C mode. The C scale, if you prefer. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.
5:44 Its characteristic is that it doesn't contain only whole tones, but also, twice, small intervals called semitones, between E and F and between B and C. There are none in the traditional African scale, nor hardly any in the Chinese scale either, which are so-called pentatonic scales. So when the slaves were asked to go sing at the temple on Sunday, the Black singer could not sing on that scale. The semitones were so foreign to his ear, culturally, collectively, that he couldn't manage to sing them.
6:14 So he sang the C scale out of tune, and that gave us the miracle of the blues. You see, when I said miracle, it was unexpected, it wasn't planned, this move. And at the same time — well, I spent more than 34 years in sub-Saharan Africa, after all — it's at the same time the African form of resistance. "You want to make me do this, you want to make me sing the Lutheran chorale, and I'm going to create the spiritual, I'm going to create gospel." So it's in that sense that it's a miracle, it wasn't planned, it wasn't originally on the agenda. And here again, the music that would literally liberate 20th-century music, and let it hear intervals, harmonies, a rhythm, a feeling strictly unheard-of, in the literal sense, that had never been heard before.
7:00 And God knows there are centuries before it of incredible diversity, with the abundant richness of classical music, or of other popular musics. And yet here is something unheard-of, coming from what? From the most exploited part of humanity, the one picking cotton in the fields of Virginia. All the same! This is C major. This is C minor. There's a difference, it's a tiny slide from that E down to the note below, E flat, which is minor, a bit sadder. The genius of African Americans was to do both at once.
7:32 Here's C major, here's C minor, both at once. And you can hear right away, it's a jazz chord. Simply by superimposing the major scale and the minor scale, in a thousand years of classical music, no one had thought of it. The blues comes very early, but not yet the swing. That takes time. Swing comes at the end of the 1920s, beginning of the 1930s. It's late. Between a weak beat and a strong beat, what's called the offbeat against the beat. It goes boom, chip, boom, chip. The chip is the offbeat.
8:03 There's the strong beat on the boom, and the chip which is its echo. Each time, as if there were an echo. That's not all there yet at the beginning, in the early stammerings of jazz. And then it's strictly binary because of military marches. It's often during the marches at funerals, with the one, two, one, two. That passage from South to North, from one jungle to another, from the African jungles of origin to the urban jungle of Chicago, of New York, will produce yet another new miracle. I'll come back to the notion of swing in a moment.
8:35 Swing is a high, a low, a caught breath, then a tension, then a release. It's an alternation of opposite poles. Breathing is that too. There's inhaling, exhaling, and so on. You have to imagine the electric shocks that the Stravinskys, the great classical composers, the Ravels and Debussys, suffered when they had their first contact with jazz. There's a song that resembles us — I'll take this melody, which became a jazz standard because one of Miles Davis's great loves was Juliette Gréco. You see the kind of coincidence involved. Here's a version.
Les Feuilles mortes, from Gréco to Miles Davis 9:05 It begins...
Repetition, inertia and death according to Freud 10:06 It was the linguists who first saw this. We only hear what we expect to hear. There is a rigorous mediation, not an impressionistic one like that, brought by Freud between the notion of repetition itself and the notion of death. Namely, for him, as for the scientific world in general, inert matter preceded living matter.
10:43 That's the only hypothesis I ask you to grant me. There was, in the universe, methane, hydrogen, and stardust before there were protozoa and a fortiori mammals. Now, he says, let's not forget that every drive, in order to be satisfied, tends to return to an earlier state. If I'm hungry, for example — I'll take the simplest example, hunger at the level of the wild beast, the lion — I need to eat in order to return to the state of satiety I was in before I was hungry.
11:15 Freud says, if we apply this to the letter, we must not forget that at bottom every desire is the desire to return to what is most prior, the most ancient — that is, to the state of inertia that preceded the living state. It's an extraordinary audacity, this hypothesis of his. That is to say, the essence of the living, of the biological, is traversed by something coming from a transbiological realm, from inert matter that exists in the universe. Repetition is the frozen side of things, it's the side where we rediscover what Freud calls inertia, in the physical sense of the term, the inertia that preceded living matter.
11:48 It's the complete opposite of a music that, for example, breathes. In the repetition of the same, there is none of that call to difference which makes for life. It's a way of creating inertia within time. There you go. So that's why there is something reminiscent of what is terrifying in the repetition of death, in this music that evacuates all living, spiritual, and historical content. That evacuates the richness of memorial acquisitions, for example.
12:23 So often, we're walking down the street, and we're caught by a scent, a smell, a sound that suddenly brings back — I won't do a whole Proust thing — a forgotten moment from our history, but a moment of extraordinary richness that hits us all at once as if it were a lost paradise. This is not of the order of repetition. This cannot be absorbed into the musics I am denouncing. That's what I'm trying to say.
