Tout en étant centrales de par leur fonction d’incarnation, les langues chantées dans les musiques populaires prennent place lors de rituels d’écoute où l’intelligibilité de la langue joue un rôle fondamentalement ambivalent. Cela induit un rapport complexe entre pratique de la langue chantée et identification que nous abordons au prisme d’un questionnement de la diversité culturelle à l’heure de la mondialisation numérique. Pour cela, nous dressons un état de l’art sur la question des langues chantées dans les musiques populaires, avec la notion de « transfert culturel » comme fil conducteur. Puis, en articulant cette dernière à celles de « sphère publique » et de « justice sociale » de Nancy Fraser, nous proposons un cadre d’analyse critique de la diversité des pratiques de la langue chantée que nous appliquons au domaine des musiques populaires françaises.
Nowadays, popular music artists from a wide range of cultures perform in English alongside other local languages. This phenomenon questions the coexistence of different languages within local music practices. In this article, I argue that we cannot fully understand this issue without addressing the sacred dimension of language in popular music, which entails two aspects: 1) the transitory experience of an ideal that challenges intelligibility, and 2) the entanglement with social norms and institutions. Further to which, I compare Latin hegemony during the Middle Ages and the contemporary French popular music, where English and French coexist in a context marked by globalisation and ubiquitous digital technologies. The case of the Middle Ages shows that religious control over Latin led to a massive unintelligible experience of ritual singing, which reflected a strong class divide and created a demand for music rituals in vernacular languages. In the case of contemporary French popular music, asemantical practices of language are employed by artists in order to explore alternative, sacred dimensions of language that challenge nationhood.
Paris has often been considered the cultural centre of France, especially as it is the home of many major recording companies. But during the 1970s, a significant number of folk music scenes appeared in other parts of France.The major attribute of these local scenes (in Brittany or Southern France for instance) was the lyrical emphasis on their regional cultural heritage and the use of traditional instruments or/and a regional language (Tenaille 2008;Hennion 2011). In Occitania, folk musicians' work was highly influenced by the rediscovery of Occitan melodies, tales and traditional instruments such as the cabrette or the hurdy-gurdy. The use of the Occitan language was also a significant characteristic of their music. Occitan is a Romance language that has existed for more than a thousand years. It was the troubadours' language from which chivalric romance emerged (Nelli 1989). For instance, the word »love« in French (amour) comes from Occitan. Occitan continues to be a challenge for the new generation of popular musicians, whether they find inspiration in the folk repertoire or not. Nowadays, new popular musicians hardly eke out a living; they are stuck between the purist Occitan folk scene receiving public or regional subsidies and the popular music market that has very little interest in regional/local expressions. I will try to demonstrate how this specific local context has created a hierarchy of authenticity that plays an important role in popular musicians'practices. More specifically, this hierarchy often relies on a series of discourses claiming to preserve the Occitan identity, which has forced popular artists to find strategies to resist this »identity confinement«. This article is based on eighteen interviews I conducted with artists and bookers between
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