Georges Brassens

Brassens the poet, Brassens the irreverent author, Brassens the voice of the downtrodden, Brassens the contradictory anarchist and anticlerical, Brassens the debunker of an unjust society barricaded behind its own clichés. Brassens armed only with voice and guitar, always ten steps ahead of his time.

And yet, however hard one tries – all the more so within the space allowed here – it remains rather difficult to give a full portrait of Georges Brassens, or to explain what he meant for French chanson and beyond, Italy included. The reason is simple. Behind the guitar-and-voice songs of the singer-songwriter from Sète, accompanied only by the double bass of his faithful Pierre Nicolas, songs as apparently simple as they are complex in every single aspect, lie worlds that call for in-depth study – so much so that in recent decades a flourishing of publications, conferences and study days has emerged, all aimed at shedding new light on his lyrics, on the construction of his melodies and his skills as a guitarist, on his wordplay and shifts of register, on the rigorous mechanics of his metre, even on his seemingly ungraceful singing voice, which was in fact fully functional and an essential part of the whole. A "simple complexity", to use an oxymoron, that audiences loved then and still love today, wrapped as it was in that plainness of tone and spirit of which Georges Brassens was a lifelong master. He took the stage late, already past thirty, but it took him no time at all to become the greatest.

Of the countless things we could say about the art of this Occitan troubadour, there is at least one thing we're entirely sure of. Brassens was the artist who brought literature into music, or rather who elevated the song to the rank of poetry. The keyword, let's keep this firmly in mind, is precisely that: poetry. There are verses and rhymes, the epicentre of every song, plus a guitar, a stage, a seated audience listening, first in the cabarets of Montmartre, then across all of Paris, and finally in prestigious theatres. "The song is poetry within everyone's reach," he used to say, reconciling in a single phrase every facet of his thinking. It's no coincidence that the title of his very first LP reads: "Georges Brassens chante les chansons poétiques (…et souvent gaillardes) de… Georges Brassens", literally: "Georges Brassens sings the poetic (and often bawdy) songs of… Georges Brassens". The collection of his first recorded material came out in 1953 under the guidance of Jacques Canetti, brother of Elias, less than two years after his first public performance at Patachou's cabaret in the picturesque Place du Tertre atop Montmartre; and as would happen with all of Brassens's other albums, it would come to be known informally by the title of the first song on the track list: "La Mauvaise Réputation".

"Au village sans prétention/ J'ai mauvaise réputation": we barely have time to get used to the first guitar riff before we're presented with the portrait of the Brassens-style anti-hero, the artist's alter ego who refuses to bow to the will of society and, on 14 July – France's national holiday – would rather stay in bed than follow the band marching through town, drawing the gossip and suspicion of "decent folk". The verses alternate, directly and mercilessly, between attacks on the bigoted, ignorant small town that dislikes anyone following a different path (the line "en ne suivant pas les chemins qui n'mènent pas à Rome" is superb) and a proud defence of freedom of thought: "I do no one any wrong by not listening to the sound of the trumpet."

The other great anti-anthem is "Le Gorille", a song later covered and translated by Fabrizio De André, who, not by chance, regarded Brassens as his great point of reference. Here the tragicomic tale turns into a foul-mouthed song – a classic chanson paillarde in the French tradition, perhaps with troubadour-era roots – not without a sadistic moral: the mighty gorilla who takes his revenge (and how…!) on the judge is an allegory of the oppressed getting even with the oppressor who had unjustly condemned him. In effect, it's an anti-death-penalty song avant la lettre, so foul-mouthed and perverse that it was censored in France for quite some time: "Gare au gorille!" rings out proudly like a threat. Once again, it's the established order – in this case the representatives of the Law, with all their power – that the young songwriter takes aim at. A theme especially dear to Brassens, who as a boy was sentenced by a strict judge, along with his friends, over a minor theft: an episode that convinced his parents (incidentally, his mother was Italian, from Basilicata) to send their unruly son to live with an aunt in Paris, where his destiny would be fulfilled.

Then there's another Georges Brassens, the one who sings of love in a bittersweet tone. That timeless masterpiece "Le Parapluie" blends tenderness and mischief with such perfection that it becomes simply unmatchable. Over the guitar's driving rhythm, once again, unfolds the story of the roguish protagonist, always narrated in the first person, who falls for a passer-by without an umbrella. He has one, having probably stolen it "from some friend", and offers to share it with her. The minutes, or perhaps only the moments, that follow are described in a different register: the providential umbrella turns into a corner of Paradise (the whole song is full of "divine" metaphors), the young woman into an angel, until, prosaically, she bids him farewell and "happily heads off into my oblivion".

It's through such brazen subject matter (especially for the early postwar years), through the flexibility of his linguistic register, through ideas about song form that differ from traditional chanson, that Brassens opens up an entirely new path on the French scene. The protagonist of "Le Parapluie" is a loser forced to give in to the evidence of his own unappealing condition. The gravedigger in "Le Fossoyeur", not by chance the darkest song on the album, lives out the curse built into his trade: people look at him askance, believing he feels no remorse earning his living by burying the dead, while he himself is troubled because he doesn't wish for people to disappear – though if they didn't, he'd be the one starving to death.

The thin line Georges Brassens treads is thus constantly suspended between innovation and tradition. As for the latter, the vaudeville number "Corne d'Auroch" picks up, at the end of each verse, the refrain ô gué! ô gué!, typical of French folk songs. In "Hécatombe", the amused (and at times foul-mouthed) portrait of the classic village market turning into a sort of comic open-air boxing ring finally finds a precise setting: Brive-la-Gaillarde, the Aquitaine town that would later dedicate a public space to him.

The more high-minded vein instead belongs to "La chasse aux papillons" and "Le petit cheval", which introduce two threads destined for great fortune throughout Brassens's songbook. "La chasse aux papillons" is a treasure trove of literary references, from Goethe to the Comtesse de Ségur to Charles Perrault, while its language reworks old sayings and regional vocabulary into a new form.

"Le petit cheval", on the other hand, is the musical setting of a poem by Paul Fort, with whom Brassens had forged a close friendship. Along with Louis Aragon and Paul Valéry, who shared his birthplace of Sète, Fort would be one of the authors whose poems Brassens most often set to music. The guitar's driving rhythm, a hallmark of every song in this very first body of work, finally settles into less cheerful tones. The young white horse cut down "before he had even seen the good times", in the prime of his life, introduces another recurring theme: death, in this case premature. Brassens himself would pass away at the end of October 1981, just days after turning 60. He who, in his musical last testament, called himself a humble minstrel, was mourned by a grieving France as if he were one of its great poets.

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27/10/2019