Michel Polnareff, the ex-rebel who became a reactionary uncle with “Sexcetera”

At a certain period, humanity is weak, we were able to let ourselves be seduced by Michel Polnareff, particularly in the 1970s. When, affected voice, long hair, fly-on glasses, and Michel Serrault-style raffia hat in The Cage Aux Folleshe disturbed pop on the piano, like the notion of masculinity, in a France then corseted by moralism. When his androgyny, and his sexual allusions, made the headlines of the media and made him a symbol of decadence for young people.

And then success, egomania pushed to its extreme, delusions of grandeur, the move to Los Angeles and excessive bodybuilding, got the better of the man who collected a 60,000 franc fine for indecent assault after showing his ass on the posters of his concert Polnarevolution at the Olympia in 1972.

Farewell to showbiz

After a long period of absence, Polnareff, who was said to be moving more and more to the West, had, unfortunately, made his news again, publishing lives and useless revisits of his repertoire, without rediscovering the glory of his past, his fans of the time having undoubtedly since passed the weapon to the left. There, seemingly nothing, he is back, with Sexceterafirst single from an album announcing his farewell to showbiz. A sort of lazy pop-rock, composed on an artificial intelligence where, with easy words and play on words between IT and SHE, the rebel still believes himself to be sulphurous with his words of a boomer in free fall: “I told her what, who did she tell me? He told me he wasn’t her, She told me he wasn’t him, I broke up with her, And she told me I’m almost ‘he and I was told I’m almost her’.

We will have understood, Polnareff decided to get into the gender trappings, and to bring out all the clichés of Uncle Reac, or TERFs (we can easily imagine Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern laughing over the piece), the all punctuated with “But where are we, are we at home?” Slogans which resonate perfectly with the tone of the RN’s speech, but which betray Polnareff’s panic at no longer being able to inhabit his gender, surrounded by transphobic ideology. While his masculinity, which he values, seems more threatened by prostate cancer!

Michel Sardou rubs his hands

We will then remember Polnareff, deeply wounded, when in 1970, during a concert in Rueil-Malmaison, a spectator went on stage and beat the singer copiously, calling him a faggot. An incident which had traumatized him and pushed him to ask his faithful Pierre Delanoé to write to him I am a mana half-fig, half-grape song, where he denounced the masculinist conformism of the time while claiming a certain hetero beauferie, far from his hero David Bowie. “Society having given up – To transform me – To disguise me – To look like it – People who see me passing in the street – Call me a faggot – But women who believe it – Just have to try me.”

That Polnareff, approaching the age of the nursing home, sides with the executioners of his time, he who was the champion of sexual freedom, androgyny, and a certain facade bisexuality, is not ultimately hardly surprising. Finally, we say to ourselves that Michel Sardou has gained a new friend and that’s always a good thing!