Cultural Differences Part Three.......................Having spent my formative years growing up in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties, it was perhaps inevitable that the sound track to my life should be pretty much based on blues and rock.............folk rock , country rock , country blues , urban blues , Dylan , Springsteen , The Stones , Neil Young ,Van Morrison , together with the more obscure corners of Americana and of course jazz - Armstrong , Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges , Miles Davis , Chet Baker , Billie Holliday and Sinatra .....oh, and The Clash .
Walk into any record shop ( record shop ? ) in the UK - well, ok, if you can still find one ( it's still difficult to come to terms with the fact that one of the most enduring images of my life , the album cover and the vinyl album , had a life span of less than fifty years ..... " what are these , Grandad ? They're LPs , James....Oh - what are they ? what's a ' record ' ? ) .......walk into pretty much any record shop and most of the floor space was given over to rock, pop , metal , punk.......and with most artists the usual suspects , all very familiar.
Walk into a music department in France and you are lost at sea , a completely alien culture alive and flourishing , names I've never heard of - Mylene Farmer ? The artistes , the musicians that I know from Abba to Zappa are located over in the corner somewhere, filed under ' International ' , and allocated about the same amount of space as ' world ' music or ' independent '. By far the biggest allocation of space is given over to French artistes , most of whom are completely unfamiliar to me. My perception of American blues based music as the fountain-head, the source from which all other music flows , is gone with the wind . Jazz has a solid presence , given its wholesale adoption by the French as part of the zeitgeist of bohemian Paris in the Fifties, but other than that its a different world...........and Mylene Farmer is no local somebody - sales of over 25 million and ten number ones' in France - this is a major artist by any one's standards, an icon in France , probably as big there as Madonna.
Whether it's because that for most of my life - I am of the baby boomer generation - the UK has been firmly looking westwards to the US of A for guidance , culture , aspirations and defence.......a bias that has almost totally effected my entire life........the more time I now spend in France the more I come to perceive the UK as a small and isolated ( indeed, insular ) off-shore island on the edge of a Europe that could quite happily manage - and does - without it.
vive la difference ??
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