1 Francophone Popular Music : A Report from Les Francofolies de Montréal [published in Contemporary French Civilization, August 2006] Christopher M. Jones Carnegie Mellon University – BH 160 Pittsburgh, PA 15213
[email protected] 2 Francophone Popular Music: A Report from Les Francofolies de Montréal Introduction Popular music is a multi-facetted and highly visible phenomenon, and increasingly an object of academic study. Musical and textual elements are insufficient to explain the meaning that popular music has come to embody. As Roy Shuker notes, this meaning can only be elucidated adequately by “…considering the nature of the production context, including state cultural policy, the texts and their creators, and the consumers of the music and their spatial location.” (x) The established history and practice of Les Francofolies and its Francophone context make the festival doubly attractive as an object of study, since the festival is clearly an instrument of cultural policy, as well as a concentrated display of aspects of the dissemination and promotion of popular music. 2004 marked the sixteenth year of Les Francofolies de Montréal, begun in 1988 with six acts to promote “la chanson d’expression française.” (Program 78) The founders Alain Simard, Guy Latraverse and Laurent Saulnier of l’Equipe Spectra 1 are still involved, though in 2004 a non-profit institution with a staff of nearly 1002 (not including temporary workers) spent $7.2 million dollars3 to put on over 200 shows by 158 acts over a period of ten days. As “the world’s largest festival of French-language music” (Bellerose) Les Francofolies can be subjected to multiple readings of interest to students of Francophone culture.