ABSTRACT
The "coda" format calls instead for a consideration of how a local popular music is perceived and evaluated "elsewhere." That "elsewhere" implies, first, an ethnographic distance: an outside gaze which defamiliarises local perceptions. Until the 1980s, French intellectual attitudes to home-grown rock and pop were largely dismissive. This was due in part to dominant Adornian pessimism about mass culture generally, combined with anti-Americanism. For the last fifty years in fact, the history of French pop and rock has been of its naturalisation, appropriation and segmentation into an ever more complex mosaic of genres, sub-genres, cross-fertilisations and tastes. The discourse of la chanson francaise is still at work, reshaping itself constantly in response to myriad new styles and genres emerging or re-emerging from 1950s rock 'n' roll and 1960s pop. The persistence of the discursive category chanson francaise suggests a desire to mark out homelier space within the global music scene and to invest that space with a superior, middlebrow value.
