Summer will be home or it won’t be. This was announced by Beyoncé on June 20, when she released her latest single. This genre of dance music popularized in the 1990s is at the heart of the inspirations for break my soultitle chosen to mark the tone of Renaissancetheir seventh album available this Friday.
The American pop queen had been preceded a few days by Drake, who had presented the album. honestly it doesn’t matter a week before, the press and the public worked hand in hand to download the album -so much so that the singer himself came forward to defend himself- but also to highlight its surprising house sounds, forgotten for 30 years.
And on closer inspection, recent years have seen many similar resurgences. On both sides of the Atlantic, radio first witnessed a strong comeback of 1980s synths (The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, Soprano) before speaking of a disco revival (Kylie Minogue, Juliette Armanet, Clara Luciani). Twenty years after Avril Lavigne, Sum 41 or Blink 182, punk-tinged pop-rock is updated with the phenomenal hits of Olivia Rodrigo, Machine Gun Kelly and Yungblud. And if Queen Bey herself gets carried away by the fashion of musical disarrangement, one wonders if world pop is not suffering from a certain lack of inspiration.
It’s not enough to sound the alarm, according to Olivier Julien, specialist professor of popular music at Sorbonne University: “In some respects, the history of popular music has been, at least since the middle of the last century, a history of recycling,” he recalls for BFMTV.com.
“Essentially, it’s about ‘industrial’ music, in the sense that it’s part of a market economy. For the recording industry, I think it’s mostly about perpetuating formulas that have already made their appearance by updating them according to technological developments and even social.
“Fashion is often music from 25 years ago”
Is this rereading of old musical genres then just a low commercial strategy, whose objective would be to produce guaranteed hits on the chain? For Victor Le Masne, composer and music producer, these revivals are above all a natural tendency of art to “feed”, in all sectors:
“A new king kong released theatrically every thirty years, Steven Spielberg has just produced a new version of West Side Story, Marvel is a hit with movies out of the ’40s comics… even in architecture, we saw a big revival of the ’30s in the ’70s, with the art deco style. It is the same with music. And I have a feeling that producers in their 30s will often tend to produce sounds that remind them of their childhood. Basically, fashion is usually music from 25 years ago.”
This delay seems evident when the musician lists the examples: the nostalgia of the 50s in the middle of the 70s-80s, with films like fat or the soundtracks of Mercilessly Y dirty Dancing. In 1992, Vanessa Paradis explored 1970s rock’n’roll for her album titled vanessa paradise, written and produced by Lenny Kravitz. Two years later, Cédric Klapish established himself in cinema with the young dangerChronicle of a last year whose plot takes place in 1976…
“The question is what are we going to do with it so as not to fall into repetition,” he continues. “We take inspiration from what already exists, but we shouldn’t get lost in looking too much in the rearview mirror. My goal, as a producer, is to stay awake in my time, to stay modern.”
Kitsch yesterday, politics today
Victor Le Masne’s work is at the center of this questioning: he worked with Kavinsky and Gaspard Augé (former half of Justice), two ambassadors of rehabilitation in the 1980s. He is also one of the main architects of the album. burn the fire by Juliette Armanet, with a decidedly disco tone. “It corresponded to a wish for Juliette,” she recalls. “When I was starting to think about the different sounds for this new album, I was thinking about the great disco divas like Cher, Diana Ross or Donna Dummer, and I thought that would be a character that would fit her well.”
Beyond nostalgia, perhaps the return of old musical genres also finds its source in certain social advances. This is the theory of Éric Jean-Jean, music presenter of RTL and RTL2. The specialist considers it relevant that disco music be given a second life, at a time when the rights of women and the LGBT community are at the center of public debate:
“Only it is pas rendu compte immédiatement, mais le disco était aussi une musique communautaire. Elle a été un peu décriée, mais elle a été important pour la communauté gay, pour les femmes, elle était précurseure politiquement. Quand Gloria Gaynor sung I will Survive, interprets a feminist anthem. I understand that girls like Juliette Armanet or Clara Luciani claim it.”
“Music Mixes”
More generally, this encounter between disco music and the French variety, between rap and pop (Soprano) or even between R&B and house (Beyoncé), is also the symptom of a new way of consuming music. “Today young people have Spotify, iTunes, Deezer,” she continues. “Instead of going to the record store, and spending their money in the departments they know, they listen to playlists where they listen to rap, rock, pop and electro. The younger generations are totally uninhibited in what they listen to, and that is reflected in the productions. Music is mixed, because it has the means to feed on everything”.
For Olivier Julien, from the Sorbonne, the democratization of the exhibition undoubtedly played a role. This technique of borrowing an element from one song to incorporate it into another “has only accentuated the phenomenon, making it more evident”. Although it appeared in the 1970s, this practice is still more widely used. break my soulwhere Beyoncé reworks a Robin S. title, and the hit Broke my heart by Dua Lipa, in which she adapts the famous guitar riff from I need you tonightsuccess of INXS in 1987, are two recent examples.
It remains to be seen where the pioneers of the 2020s rank. “Perhaps there have been no new technological inventions that would give birth to a new musical genre,” estimates Éric Jean-Jean. “But I’m still fascinated by the creativity. Let’s take the example of NLP: they really offer something new by mixing ambient sound, electro from the 1990s, with very rap lyrics.” And to conclude:
“In the end, music is like cooking: it will always be meat, fish and vegetables, but there will always be a genius who will find how to mix them in a way we never imagined.”
Source: BFM TV
