In his library, he said in an interview, there was no French song, “just three or four Joe Dassin records”. Jean-Louis Murat has never hidden his aversion to the French variety scene. Sometimes described as “mafia” or “omerta”, she found little favor in the eyes of the singer who died on Thursday, at the age of 71.
Jean-Louis Murat was not completely cut off from the French scene: he recorded a duet, “Regrets”, with Mylène Farmer, he wrote the hit “Un singe en hiver” for Indochine, as well as titles for Françoise Hardy or Isabelle Boulay. Some, like Benjamin Biolay, seemed to elicit his admiration –”He is a nugget“, he said of him. Or Maurane, “the one who sings the best in France“. But very often, in interviews, if he greeted his models who were Brel, Ferrat or Brassens, he was not tender with his contemporaries.
Many times he said “don’t even know what it was anymore, the French song, we have all these old things like Cabrel who takes himself for the Eagles or Goldman for any old American thing“. Asked in Elle magazine in 1999 about his “spiritual sons”, Dominique A, Miossec or Katerine, he replies that it only inspires him “indifference“. “I dropped out of the French variety, a long time ago“, he said.
Florent Pagny: “Arrangements below the belt”
We often summarize Jean-Louis Murat’s sulphurous speeches in recent years… but in reality, they go back much further.
This fan site notes that as early as 1990while Florent Pagny was a hit with his first hit “N’importe quoi”, the singer said, in an interview with the newspaper Best, that he hated this title: “I don’t like this side “I put my guts on the table”, this pseudo language spoken in a situation where, obviously, words are useless. Personally, if I was feeling bad, and someone asked me like Pagny does: “Tell me why you’re not well?”, I would answer: “Take care of your buttocks”. If it works, it’s because these are popular songs caressing the people in the direction of the hair, with arrangements aimed well below the belt..”
Johnny Hallyday: “The day of his death, it was a relief”
Even when he was offered, in the 90s, to write for Johnny Hallyday, Jean-Louis Murat was not kind to the rocker and his place as a taulier in French song. “I’m not going to think it’s great that it’s only Johnny Hallyday and Patrick Bruel who sell records in this country à la bite me the knot“, he said in 2003 in an interview.
Throughout interviews, Johnny was targeted by Jean-Louis Murat: “It’s French nerdyness at its maximum (…) it’s the absolute nerdy that fascinates with a kind of three-franc savagery“,
he said, in 2004, in Here is. “Johnny Hallyday does not exist”, he also said on France 5 in 2018. Above all, in 2019 in Les Inrockuptibles, he declared: “The day of his death, it was a relief. Like June 6, 1944 for music. Because of him, we looked like losers for 50 years“.
Claude François, Patrick Juvet, Dalida… at the sulphate
Three for the price of one. In
the Auvergne review Jimin 2003 – again according to
an online press review – the singers of the 70s took it for their rank. Basically it seemed to start from a good intention, Jean-Louis Murat calling on young artists to react to the Star Academy wave. And then… it started to be dezinced, as often with Murat:
“When I meet hyper trendy people who tell me that Claude François was great, I slap them, because we, the day he died, we did one of those javas! For Patrick Juvet, if we had seen him in 77, we would have blown his face off. We were making music against it! Dalida? The other time, at the Moulin de la Galette, I had the “Dalida” dessert and I said: “Do you have a Russian cigarette, to fuck him in the ass?”. In 77, if we had seen her in a car, we would have run over her“.
Alain Souchon: “Ass-licking career”
“Souchon, he is already 130 years old, we don’t even know anymore”: only seven years older than Jean-Louis Murat, Alain Souchon has been targeted many times by Jean-Louis Murat, and not only on his age. In 2011 in Le Point, he returned to the charge on Alain Souchon, whose career he describes as “ass licking career. He is the greatest strategist of French song, he went from Pompidou to Sarkozy without flinching: he is the Lecanuet of song“.
Jean-Jacques Goldman: “It’s Al Capone”
Jean-Jacques Goldman was not spared either, and particularly not as a troop leader of the Enfoirés, “a kind of mafia with Goldman in the role of Al Capone“, he said in 2003 in “Rock & Folk”. A little later, in 2006 in the Platine magazine specializing in French song, he said he had been “banished” from Les Enfoirés by Jean-Jacques Goldman after Alain Souchon offered a cover of one of his songs.
Years earlier, however, in 1989, Jean-Jacques Goldman found favor with these eyes on a specific point, his media discretion. “He’s the only one who understood. No one knows what he thinks, how he lives. He will still be making records in 30 years” – lost bet, Goldman released his last album in 2002.
Renaud: “The absolute trickster”
One would have thought Jean-Louis Murat close to Renaud for their common protest side. It is not so : “This way of taking oneself for Jesus Christ, of crossing the desert as Ricard and of presenting oneself on the cross with an ideology which claims to be Trotskyist and which in fact is of the extreme right… Renaud’s success is really total abjection! Johnny is Einstein next door. It’s a good Renaud reference because I don’t think you can go any lower“, he said in 2004.
And about the singer’s girlfriend at the time, all in finesse: “His girlfriend better be good with her fingers ’cause she ain’t gotta laugh her ass every day“. A little later, in 2006, another touch of humor: “Renaud is so dumb he could be called Citroën“. And to conclude, still in 2006 but in another interview, that Renaud is the person in the industry he likes the least: “This guy is the absolute cheat, life-size hypocrisy“.
Michel Polnareff : “A gros con”
In 2016, while promoting his album “Morituri”, Jean-Louis Murat reacted, for the newspaper Metro, to the fact of having trouble being scheduled in concert halls: “Halls take fewer risks, they prefer programming big idiots like Renaud or Polnareff”. If for Renaud, the singer’s spikes were nothing new, Michel Polnareff did not remain silent. “He believes in it too much: no modesty, he’s the big loser. We wonder who will miss Murat not touring“, he replied on Twitter.
Even certain monuments of international song did not fare any better in the eyes of Jean-Louis Murat, who said of John Lennon’s songs “that they can serve Crédit Agricole” and that Paul McCartney was the “Jacques Chirac of song“.
Angèle: “The Chantal Goya 2.0”
One of his last remarkable releases concerned the Belgian singer Angèle, “a Chantal Goya 2.0” he said in an interview with Paris Match. He reproached him in particular for the clip of his song “Balance ton quoi”: “Us, the guys, she towers above us with a crazy cheek, she tells us ‘You don’t look, you don’t touch’ while doing peep-show choreography”. “I have rubbed shoulders with a lot of singers who have infused science. But Beyoncé or Rihanna have never written a title. If they didn’t have guys behind them, they wouldn’t be there. Angèle, she’s going look like a pre-granny soon and it will be over”, he continued, to generalize.
“Club level Dorothy” NLP
A fan of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, he also admired… rap, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg or, later, Franck Ocean. But even French rap had no grace in his eyes. Thus, in 2019, he describes the PNL group as “vast and fatal joke” and of “Macronist music, as there was a Pompidou music whose acme was Telephone. They are little Macrons trying to make money by having the IQ of a fork! NLP is at Club Dorothée level. Even La Bande à Basile was better.
2023-05-26 09:10:32
#JeanLouis #Murat #French #singer #hated #French #song
