Posted By BillHeise on May 12, 2009

Okay, two weeks ago was talking about how tragic I thought it was that Googoosh had her career destroyed on account of being a woman and on account of having performed at the Shah’s birthday party. I believe that the systematic destruction of half of the nation’s workforce cuts the possibility of finding new ideas in half. This, I believe, is one of the reasons that the Soviets fell before the United States in the Cold War. While they were imprisoning (if not killing outright) people who did not think in a prescribed manner, in America we were promoting the notion of equal rights for women.

So this week it will take you back to a pre-political era: the era of the ye-ye girls.

Yé-yé (IPA: /?y??y?/) was a style of pop music that emerged out of France, Québec and Spain in the early 1960s. The term “yé-yé” derived from “yeah! yeah!” yell. (Wikipedia)

We can see the influence of the Anglo-Saxons in Sylvie Vartan’s “Twist et Chante” (the Beatles’s “Twist and Shout”):

The Yé-yé girls were frequently very young, and consequently many of their songs featured adolescent and preadolescent experiences. Here’s Sheila, “the top selling artist in France in the 1960s and 1970s,” according to her article in Wikpedia, singing a song about getting out of school (L’ecole est finie):

These girls were often quite young. France Gall “was only 16 when she released her first album, 18 when she won the Eurovision song contest for Luxembourg.” (Wikipedia) They were often very sexy young girls. (This did not trouble the French, apparently). Here is France Gall in a video (“Ich Kann Nicht Böse Sein”) featuring her “model shots.”

France Gall thrived in the music business until her retirement in 1997. There must be 100 videos of her on YouTube. She can be seen here in a 1980 duet with, of all people, Elton John.

As they grew up, they faced the pressures of what we now call “child stars.” Many, like Massiel, won the Eurovision song contest with “La La La” but could not keep her popularity when she grew older. Others, like Sylvie Vartan (seen above in her youth) managed to make the leap into adulthood better.

Among the yé-yé girls, Sylvie Vartan played the glamorous one. She married rock star Johnny Hallyday in 1965 and toured in America and Asia. But she stayed always a yé-yé, and as late as in 1968 she recorded the song “Jolie poupée” about a girl who regrets having abandoned her doll after growing up.  (Wikipedia)

Here she is in her adult stage singing “Buonasera Buonasera” (with costumes by Folco):

Of course, being French, they could not sit still and have their superior “culture” overrun by Anglo-Saxon and decadent music like this. So very early on (in 1963), a young 12 year old named Stella appeared on the scene as the “anti-ye-ye” girl. Stella sang in the new idiom, but she mocked the notion that there was any talent involved in the new music. Here’s an excerpt from an article on Stella:

In November 1963, Vogue Records issued Stella’s first EP, which included “Pourquoi Pas Moi,” (Why Not Me?), a seemingly sweet pop ditty with the most sarcastic lyrics.

I think I’ve got what it takes to be a pop star
I write the music, I write the words
I should already be raking in the big bucks
Alas, for the time being, I’m broke

Why not me?
I can sing “woo woo woo woo woo woo”
Why not me?
I can sing “yé yé yé yé yé yé”

Here is Stella’s “Pourquoi Pas Moi”:

Over time, politics serves the purpose of placing limitations on people, as well as lifting them out of oppressive situations. What was once seen as so liberating for these young women, is now almost universally seen as degrading.

The ye-ye girls have recently come back, as everything comes back in postmodern culture, as something that we can look back fondly upon without getting too involved ourselves in the charged political atmosphere of the 1960s. Here’s is Doing Time’s “I Was a Ye-ye Girl” recorded in 2006:

Back in France in the sixties
It was all so wonderful
We all played rock ‘n roll
And looked real cool.
We had such a groovy shoes
And fantastic hairdos
And supersexy dresses
And fancy clothes.
It was great!

The lyrics here bespeak a distance from the 1960s that could only come by being disengaged from the actual environment in which Stella’s support of the traditional French music was competing against Sheila’s “new wave” Anglo music. All Doing Time cares about is nostalgia for “fancy clothes.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Doing Time’s “I Was A Ye-ye Girl” is my favorite song of the bunch. My point is not that the conditions under which Ye-ye music arose on the only conditions under which we can appreciate it. This would make my appreciation of their song illegitimate in some way that listening to Stella or Sheila is not. But that is at odds with my own experience.

But politics and cultural context are not the only things that matter when we listen to music. They may not even be all that important in the grand scheme of things. On the contrary, my point, which I made yesterday, is that by becoming detached from the actual “cultural” and “political” conditions which gave rise to this (or any) music phenomenon, we can increase 20-fold the number of viewers for music that woyld otherwise stay a product of its time and place.

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