Friday night, don’t look for me. I’ll be at the Bell Center performing Michel Sardou’s greatest hits.
Why do I like this singer so much, who regularly appears in the rankings of the most popular personalities in France?
Because in a sclerotic time when cute ballads are legion, Sardou sings loudly what many people are silently thinking. And that in a chilly time, he was never afraid to write songs that could be taken at face value.
SHE’S RUNNING, SHE’S RUNNING
Of course Sardou is lovesick. It is Je vole that we rediscovered in the film The Bélier Family. It is also Je va t’aime, the dirtiest song in the French-speaking world, in which a man announces to his partner that he is going to own her in every orifice.
But my three favorite Sardou songs are more political.
I love Les Ricains, written in the 1970s in response to a movement of primary anti-Americanism. Sardou imagines what would have happened if American allies had not intervened in France during World War II. He was 20 years old when he sang it, with his hand raised to commemorate the Nazi sign the French might have had to make if France had lost the war.
“A guy from Georgia / Who didn’t particularly care for you / Came to die in Normandy / One morning when you weren’t there.”
Ouch! He didn’t beat around the bush, Father Sardou! General de Gaulle even banned the song from being broadcast!
My second favorite song is Le France. He sings nostalgically about the docking of the liner France. A song about a boat is boring, right? But it’s a metaphor. What Sardou sings about is nostalgia for a time when France was ambitious and grandiose. A patriotic, nationalistic song.
And my third favorite song is Le temps des colonies. Sardou sings (with a lot of irony) what an extremely condescending French colonist would say in his cozy living room: “I had many black servants / And four girls in my bed / In the blessed days of the colonies”.
Don’t be afraid, Sardou is neither racist nor colonialist. He is an editor who makes fun of his fellow citizens. Except that in our time without humor, when everything is taken at face value, young people will not be able to read between the lines.
Recently, Sardou has been at the center of controversy. A young singer, Julie Armanet, described her song Les Lacs du Connemara as “dirty,” “sectarian,” and “right-wing.”
Hating an artist just because he is supposedly “right-wing” is a stupid argument.
WELL DONE
But if I like Sardou so much, it’s also because of his rants. In 2022 he explained on radio: “It used to be a party when we toured from city to city. People were much happier and more relaxed… Today… I hate our time. I hate them. This era sucks, you have to be honest about it. We can’t drink anymore, we can’t smoke anymore, we can’t… you know what I mean, there’s nothing we can do anymore.”
Mr. Sardou, we can still sing with all our hearts: “I will love you!!!”
