ABSTRACT
The work of Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Lo Ferr, and chanson in general, far from being against the music trends of their time, shared, if not the practices, at least some of the preoccupations at the heart of the social revolution of the 1960s. This proves that despite its unfashionable form, chanson was not a redundant genre but one that bore the marks of the transition between a traditional approach to song and music and the new trends brought in by emerging rock culture. The post-war period is one in which music and song gained a greater sociological significance; music in the 1950s started dividing generations in a way that it never had before. For chanson artists like Brel, Brassens and Ferr, who had been trained in cabarets and caf-concerts where the artist was alone on stage and had to make himself heard through the caf hubbub, the music-hall experience emphasised the self-revelatory dimension of the artists act.
