The rose is without why
“Are you against the rhythm? For romance?”questioned him To Mirei in the show Le Petit Conservatoire from the ORTF years. “I am in between”, replied the very young “mademoiselle Hardy”. That was already it, yes. The disarming girl. That does not exist. No human being like that exists. Except her. A yé-yé anomaly? A brunette in the era of blondes. A composer among the performers. A leader among the muses. A lover without a lover. A rose without a why… “The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms. She doesn’t care about herself, doesn’t ask if anyone sees her.”.
We have in mind the image of this sad-looking young girl, sitting in the basket of a Ferris wheel, Place de Clichy, her hair flying to the rhythm of the carousel’s haunting comings and goings. From the scopitone of the song “Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles”, produced by Claude Lelouchall the elements of the mythology of Françoise Hardy are already there: a melancholic look at the world and romantic relationships, alone in the middle of everyone, a positioning as an outsider, apart from what was happening at the time.
And then this charm, a mixture of fragility and elegance, of absence, which drove her contemporaries crazy and made her the icon of a generation, that of her beginnings and also of those after. “The most desperate are the most beautiful songs” disait Alfred de Musset What did I like to quote? Françoise Hardy when asked why she wrote sad songs. She has sublimated melancholy like no other and created a unique work, a work of refuge when spleen, the vagueness of the soul ties the throat.
A few months ago, we talked about the curse of the closing, this mania that certain personalities have of dying just as the magazine goes to press. When Françoise Hardy put on her lamé suit to join the stars she had learned to read, the question did not arise. We stop the presses and start everything from scratch. Here is our tribute.
Return to Earth: in 1943, at the height of World War II, Woody Guthrie wrote a song called “Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues” and then decided to display a sticker on his guitar that would become iconic: “This machine kills fascists”. Many of his disciples, Bob Dylan in the lead, were going to make rock – music of crossbreeding – a vector of the fight against fascism. Donovan would even sport a guitar simply adorned with “This Machine Kills”, naively thinking that fascism was dead.
Today, the choice is not so simple… This dissolution leaves two options:
on one side the Peruvian orchestra with bonnet and panpipes, on the other the military band… or Mireille Mathieu…to use the musical metaphor, eh. At a time when parties conveying ideologies whose expiration date seemed to have long since been reached – without a word for culture – are at the gates of power, perhaps it would be good to think of uncle Woody. To say to ourselves that our music, which has done so much for equality, may still have its say. Let his voice count. Let’s vote!
Vincent Tannières
Summary
My Own Records
Olivier Lorquin by Stan Cuesta
Headlining
Penny Arcade by Matthieu Vatin
John Cale by Jérôme Soligny
Cage The Elephant by Romain Burrell
Michael Head by Alexandre Breton
Slash par Jonathan Witt
Alan Vega by Alexandre Breton
A vedette
Eels by Romain Burrell
Caleb Landry Jones par Eric Delsart
Appointment by Thomas E. Florin
David Bowie by Jérôme Soligny
Richard Thompson par Nicolas Ungemuth
In front page
Françoise Hardy by Pierre Mikaïloff
