A French Perspective

While in France, a couple of us met up with a guy named (shortened for privacy/respectful reasons) H. H is from France and lives in Paris but studied abroad at the University of Georgia this past year. He had some mutual friends with some of the members of our group so we went out with H and his French friends. We continued to make friends with this Parisian group of girls and guys and earned the chance to ask them a ton of our unanswered questions about French life.

I asked one of the guys about his taste in music before I even chose to look into this subject. This guy is twenty years old and lived in France his whole life, though only been in Paris for the past two years because of school. He, who we will call M, started describing and listing off his favorite songs. Oddly enough, a wide majority of the songs were American or English songs. One of his all time favorite songs, he said, is a song by the Stooges. Now if you read my post called "A Little History for You," you'd know that music of the Stooges became popularized in Paris in the 1970s into 1980s with the spread of American rock and roll into Europe. M, a member of the millennial generation, chose one of the Stooges songs as his favorite, thirty to forty years after their peak popularity in France. He chose one of their songs over many other French songs and French artists. This shocked me. I expected his choice to be a stereotypically French song or at least a song that wasn't in English since his English itself was not fluent. I was wrong obviously.

M continued to list off some of his top song choices and continued to keep naming songs in English, like those by the Kooks and the Who and the Beatles (yes I know they're not American but their songs are still in English). Some of the songs he named I myself had never even heard of, though I consider myself a big fan of music from those decades. I then had him play me clips of those songs thinking maybe I just didn't know the names. For a couple, I was right and knew the song itself but not the title. For the majority, even after hearing the lyrics and tunes, I had no clue what the songs were. It amazes me to this day that a French twenty year old raised in a city two hours outside of Paris knew American songs that had yet to even reach me, a nineteen year old raised born and raised in Georgia. M's taste also extended to American techno music and EDM, but that didn't come as much of a shock to me; EDM and techno became popular in Europe before reaching the US. The shock for me came from the fact that American music from 40 years ago continues to resonate with the population of Paris.