France Can't Escape America

I stayed in a hostel during my first night in Paris. In the morning, after being prematurely roused by Australian backpackers and still-drunk Brazilians, I doddered down to the lobby for a complimentary breakfast and a second rude awakening. My illusions of Paris were quickly shattered during that meal: not only by the stale croissant, but by the horrors of MTV France.

I had arrived in the patrie of Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, and Daft Punk—and in the summer of Justice, no less, the Parisian duo whose “D.A.N.C.E.” was omnipresent in America at the time of my departure. This was the land of baguettes and Bizet, and I, a professed Francophile, was gagging down processed pastry and watching similarly packaged English-language videos by Kelly Rowland and Nelly Furtado on the lobby’s television. C’est affreux, n’est-ce pas?

Hours later, I was asking a French friend about Justice, and I got a blank stare. Hadn’t heard of them. “Oops!... I Did It Again,” he opined, was the apotheosis of pop music.

It was depressing. I wanted buzzy synths, enormous sunglasses, robot DJs—I wanted French music. I had expected to find Paris dauntingly cool and found myself instead in a Coca-Colonized country.

The traditional notion of the French as stolid anti-Americans is complicated by their love for our pop culture. Many French critics hated the recently released “Simpsons” movie—one radio review called it vulgar, stupid, and American, as if the third adjective naturally followed the first two. Nonetheless, the movie stayed in theaters all summer and the show enjoys near universal popularity, as do other exported TV programs such as “Friends,” “Lost,” and “Prison Break.” French pop culture is, by and large, American.

Which is a tough phenomenon to explain: Why isn’t French music big in France? Unfortunately, the cliché stereotypes don’t apply.

It’s not like the French import foreign pop because they’re lazy. They give as good as they get, even if bands like Phoenix and Air aren’t as popular in their home country as they are overseas.

And it’s not as if Parisians are just too impolite, too hostile, to support local groups. In fact, they’re a little too nice. Jazz, no matter its quality, gets standing ovations. And at a show by British dance outfit Hot Chip (pronounced by the Francophones around me as “Haute Sheep,” which I think is probably a better name), the Parisian crowd was anything but rude, cheering after every song, infuriatingly permissive of the band’s mere half-hour set and refusal to play an encore after five minutes of hearty applause.

I was disgusted; in America, we would have burned the motherfucker down.

Maybe Hot Chip escaped unscathed because of their foreign passports. In that sense, Avril Lavigne is popular for the same reasons that compel the Parisians to exclusively smoke Lucky Strikes (and the Americans to smoke Gauloises, which the French largely eschew).

Plus, the problem with a bunch of French bands is that they perform in English. It’s not that the preposterously bilingual French can’t understand the lyrics; it’s more that adopting English constitutes a sort of insult against the mother tongue.

And of course, most of our own prejudices against shitty American pop songs are elitist and unfounded. The French understand hooks and love songs that only 12-year-old girls can admit to liking in America, which made Paris completely liberating. I sang “Gangsta’s Paradise” with no irony; I discussed the merits of “The Sweet Escape” in French; I kind of liked a Mika song for about two minutes.

I was reunited with television for my last week in Paris, and I spent a lot of time watching MTV France—which, shockingly, actually played videos. Paris had destroyed my pretensions to the point where I didn’t mind watching “Ayo Technology” six times an hour.

And a shocking thing happened. After T-Pain’s “Buy You A Drank,” the video for “D.A.N.C.E.” came on. The visuals were glorious: hipsters in ironic computer-animated T-shirts! Justice, at last. For four marvelous minutes, I was in the Paris I had imagined in America.

Then “Buy You A Drank” played again and the reverie ended.

—Staff writer Jake G. Cohen can be reached at jgcohen@fas.harvard.edu.