ABSTRACT
The youth music culture of France in the 1990s seemed virtually indistinguishable from that of other countries, being dominated by internationally marketed popular music, usually of Anglo-American origin. There are some compensating factors, however: French rock culture, for decades limited by its mediocrity to a local market, has produced some original groups with considerable songwriting promise. The interaction between the artistic milieu and that of popular culture seems to have been one of the significant factors and, interestingly, it occurred again in the mid 1930s and in the years after the Second World War. What changed in the 1930s is that once again artists, writers and intellectuals became interested in popular culture. The last two decades of the nineteenth century seem to have been particularly propitious ones for the birth of the singer-songwriter. The high cultural prestige and the almost literary consecration accorded to the figures created a perfect example for a younger generation of artists.
