The following few weeks had been dragging on my PC until I reread the last time before publication. Ferrat's death this morning gives it a resonance that I had not expected, but I think it also works as a posthumous tribute, so I will book almost unchanged.
My memory's original Jean Ferrat is a television show that Michel Drucker had fully sanctioned in 1991, on TF1, on the occasion of the release of his new album, simply entitled Jean Ferrat 91. It was then that I could finally put a face to a name, and thus stop the confusion with Léo Ferré.
We still hear regularly about the plume Dominique A, changing the words of the Twenty-Two Bar to mock ceremony of victories which he was taking part. Mention is often less than that of Jean Ferrat evoking "A PAF is obscene in a" prime-time on a television channel whose privatization was then still new. Probably because today, the brain time available to allocate the audience with enthusiasm and gratitude to the merchants of soups, car or life insurance is no longer a subject of political debate.
This anecdote perfectly illustrates the problem when listening to Jean Ferrat today. A good half of his most famous songs are openly and explicitly political. They smell good May 68, the sexual revolution, decolonization, the Indochina war, the illusions and delusions of the Communist ideal, the Cold War, the rural exodus and the creation of the first cities to suburbs, etc. .. . Depoliticized views of our time where all these things have become, or distant memories, or established facts, they seem dated, incongruous relics of an era strange that Jean d'Ormesson was not an apple wrinkled eyes sparkling touting his latest fantasy novel from Pivot, but a fiercely colonial chronicler of Le Figaro, where a factory worker in Creteil was still the standard bearer of a future potentially brighter than a good customer for a tele-sidewalk on the ravages of globalization and integration problems in the dormitory.
How to Love an artist who proudly boasts "I do not sing to pass the time" at a time when almost everyone listens to music just to pass time, to take refuge in a Disconnected World of reality? When one looks forward to the release of the new MGMT, when we debate the merits of greedily new Midlake and the new Gorillaz, when we mourn the death of Mark Linkous, Vic Chesnutt or Michael Jackson, no longer wondering if his Carrefour will spend the winter, if the bankers are really going to redistribute them billions of dollars that the states have given them. And after all, why not? That the general public yet understands really something to the economy or geopolitics? In these circumstances it seems reasonable to build centers of interest in its scope, which is able to identify the ins and outs. If the political struggles that have built the second half of the twentieth century could not produce alternative that "the jungle" or "zoo", if "The door to the right" is the only one still open to What's the deal? How can we still believe?
So, perhaps we should listen to Jean Ferrat today for music. To the accompaniment of kinematic Maria or Potemkin, for strings and harpsichord of mocking An honest woman, for the texts of Aragon, for his homage mimetic A Brassens for melodies Mountain or Lullaby , and his deep voice and smooth, suggesting the grandfather filled with wisdom that we have never had or would we still have.
And if, after finding his first-degree texts activists are really too naive for the twenty-first century or have smiled indulgently and heard the sixties it became pester "Ah, the good society" when he describes the 80 and silver-king, we discover with surprise that listening dandy depoliticized can not prevent a word, idea or turn of phrase to make us take a fresh look at society today and dream of a different future, even if only for two or three minutes is all profit.
