Beauty and pop music, especially pop music dedicated to painless or hopeless love, seem perpetually linked. In the gratuitously lookist mainstream, an unwritten rule seems to proclaim that so-called ugly or plain people either don't exist or they possess no rights to croon and wail about the pangs of passionate love. Only amazingly beautiful people, who many presume don't experience the anguish that unrequited or unfilled love bring, seem to have this privilege. Digging a little deeper, this may seem bizarre on an experiential level. Wouldn't stereotypically unattractive people singing about their failures in love present a more convincing picture? Maybe, but one can hear the obvious rejoinder: "it wouldn't sell." As much as we may like to consider ourselves above such petty frailties, it seems undeniably true. People seem to enjoy gazing at beautiful people, at least from the perspective of mass culture. So, on many occasions, the music industry has presented listeners with a parade of extremely desirable and gorgeous people who sing as though they can't find a date or even attract a smidgen of amorous attention. This should seem, especially to those who don't possess such magnetism, ludicrous. Of course, this also simplifies everything, as the psychology of the beauty gaze and its identification with the suffering and loss that so many in the public experience appears to add up to immense revenue for the music industry. Yet again a product emerges from paradox. After all, how would songs such as "I got asked out again," "I can't handle all of this attention" or "Everyone finds me adorable" sung by sculpted ravishing models sit with the general public? The perverse simulacrum of culture that the mainstream presents makes the idea seem feasible only as parody, such as in Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" 1992 song. The fashion industry also skimmed the domain of the ridiculous with its "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" campaign of some years ago. Perhaps fashionable vanity will become the next big thing. Perhaps it already has? Yes, it already has. It's hard to keep up.
One of the ultimate icons of 1960s French pop, Françoise Hardy, appears to present this paradox on the surface: an unimaginably, almost otherworldly, beautiful woman who often sings from the point of view of the amorously jilted. The persona would feel very inauthentic except for the incredibly moving, passionate and convincing manner in which she continually executes it. Of course even attractive people encounter romantic disappointment, since beauty has the power to both attract and repel, so perhaps her highly poignant vocalizations do reflect actual life experience, despite all the seemingly contradictory commercial mainstream appearances. Only an unreflective analysis would make this claim hard to believe. Ultimately, what makes the experience of a pop song feel genuine, even when it's not at its origin, is how the listener internalizes the music and lyrics. Ubiquitous music videos and the domination of image make it more challenging to experience music from an exclusively aural perspective today, but one still has the ability to turn off the screen - for now, at least. Disposing of all the residual imagery that lingers in the hazy and highly conditioned consciousness may prove more difficult. But perhaps the image enhances the experience, so that listeners can imagine these gorgeous creatures singing directly to them, pining for their love for some unexplained reason. In that case, anyone who listens to Hardy's 1968 album, self-titled like most of her 1960s albums, will easily feel that she loves them uninhibitedly. Her voice often feels whispered intimately into the listener's ear, titillating love-starved cochleas. She never seems defiant, but rather vulnerable and longing. The juicy heart-rending strings, a wonderful production staple of the time, that shimmer over nearly every song keep the melancholy mood of lost, soon to be lost or maybe, should I be worried about, lost love at a fiery intensity. Most of the music on this album brims with heartbreak, doubt, sadness, insecurity and loss. The penetrating gaze of the stunning drawn portrait on the album's cover just adds to the overall effect. Some consider this Hardy's saddest album.
Anyone not versed in the music of 1950s or 1960s France may innocently assume that Hardy, as usual, penned every one of the songs on the album known as "Comment Te Dire Adieu," her eleventh album depending on how one counts. Surprisingly, she only wrote two of the songs on this entire album, but she makes all of them her own. The opening song, "Comment Te Dire Adieu," sounds almost unrecognizable to the original version sung by Margaret Whiting in 1966, and later by Vera Lynn, called "It Hurts To Say Goodbye." None other than Serge Gainsbourg turned it into a boppy dance number complete with staccato Bert Bacharach horns. Phil Ochs wrote the hypnotic "Où Va La Chance," though with English lyrics and titled "There But For Fortune," and Joan Baez recorded it in 1964. "L'anamour," or "un-love," written and recorded by Gainsbourg for the 1969 "Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg" album, features heavier strings and a smoother mood than Gainsbourg's more rollicking keyboard and guitar version. "Suzanne" provides a French rendition of the famous 1967 Leonard Cohen song. "Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux" summons George Brassens' haunting 1953 setting of Louis Aragon's poem to music. Hardy's version features delicate piano. Brassens' version used nylon stringed guitar to highlight bold lines, aching with harsh reality, such as "there is no love that is not painful, there is no love of which one is not bruised." Hardy's own "À quoi ça sert," or "what's the point?" impressively qualifies as one of the album's most memorable pieces. A glimmering and unforgettable bridge pleads with an isolated figure in an Ivory Tower about the pointlessness and abject unhappiness of living alone, "tout seul, tout seul." "Etonnez-Moi, Benoît" breaks the mood with rousing dixieland horns, banjo and a New Orleans jazz feel. "La Mer Les Étoiles et Le Vent" closes the album on the interesting and poetic line "the sea, the stars and the wind, since I see you smile, I do not like them as much." This album may sound best listened to alone, in a reflective or pensive mood, possibly on a rainy or drizzly day. Perhaps following a painful breakup.
Françoise Hardy, in her own case, breaks the paradox not only by adeptly writing her own material and intermingling incalculable beauty with intelligence and sensitivity, but also by a fully genuine outpouring of the emotions she expresses in music. She played the lovelorn beauty with panache, whether real or contrived. Her albums also leave a lingering mood of intensity and uncertainty drifting behind them, as though the music itself remained unrequited. The lovely "Comment te Dire Adieu," yet another album in a long line of Hardy albums, will likely leave a lasting impression on anyone who appreciates heartbreaking atmospheric music sung in French.
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