Maybe it is not right to smear all of France with this brush. I really can only speak to the far south down here on the Mediterranean Sea. But I would like to talk about the music that is played in public places.
And I realise this in itself is a reductionist analysis. We are out in the public a lot here in france, in cafes and restaurants, malls and convnience stores, bars and tiny shops. We are in public buildings, supermarches, and hardware stores. And like in any other city there is a lot of music playing. I hear pop music, French music, jazz, and more pop music. But still, like it was in Japan, there is one kind of music that stands out for how commonly it is played and for how out of porportion it is to the standard kind of music played in cities.
Before I tell you what it is, I want to explain it a tiny bit more by way of labored analogy.
Say you went to visit Vancouver, and in the shopping centers and cafes and shops and restaurants you heard all the mix of music you might expect to hear, but you also hear, to your utter surprise, old, authentic, ragtime music. You hear it so much it defines the music of the town. Why ragtime music? It stops even being weird. You notice it, but it doesn't even surprise you after awhile. You just understand that Vancouver has something going with Ragtime.
Vancouver doesn't have anything going with Ragtime that I know of.
Neither does Provence and the Riviera.
But the thing that the music here has, that is just like that fictional ragtime in fictional Vancouver is...
Cover songs of hits of the 70's, 80's, and 90's.
We have been in dozens, maybe hundreds of places here in France that play nothing but covers of hit songs from 30 to 50 years ago. They do not play the originals of these songs. Or, they play them so rarely that when they do I think "This cover is playing it really close to the original!"
Some of the covers are good. Some are... okay. It's mildly entertaining. And all of it seems like a pretty strange relationship to popular music.
I have no idea what's behind it.
But so it is on the Cote D' Azur.
Japan had something similar, though better. And perhaps I'll tell you about that in the next day or two.
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