It is difficult to explain Brigitte Fontaine to those who do not know her. Fontaine is a singular singer who could only be French. Divided between song and avant-garde is also a poet, an actress, a playwright, a novelist and an activist. Fontaine was born in a small town in Brittany in 1939 and fled to Paris at the age of 17 to do theater. Since then his life has been dedicated to experimentation, provocation and the pure pleasure of acting, speech and song.
Fontaine is the daughter of a culture in which the distinction between pop and avant-garde, between high and low, between refinement and kitsch was very nebulous. Radically feminist, in 1971 she was among the signatories of the Manifesto of the 343, a petition written by Simone de Beauvoir and signed by 343 women who, risking a criminal complaint, claimed to have had an abortion at some point in their life. Other famous signatories included Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Marguerite Duras.
Brigitte Fontaine had debuted in pop music in the fateful year 1968 with an album entitled Brigitte Fontaine is…? (also known as Brigitte Fontaine is… crazy!) in which he signed all the songs, pieces often inspired by a black humor that today would be considered decidedly inconvenient and that dismantled various sexist stereotypes. Since then his schizophrenic career has been divided between music and theater, with long periods of silence interspersed with the release of poems, novels and short stories. To make an Italian understand what Brigitte Fontaine is, one would have to imagine a crazy hybrid between Patty Pravo and Carmelo Bene.
In 2001, when his thirteenth album was released, Blue Zealand, Fontaine is an institution in France and his work is appreciated, by a few initiates, even abroad. In Blue Zealand the list of collaborators is impressive: the opening piece Half bum it is played with Sonic Youth who also appear in the title track of the album, one of the rare songs Brigitte Fontaine wrote in English. Until baby boum boum is an enthralling duet with Noir Désir, one of the most promising and most dramatically marked French rock groups of the late nineties. Only two years later, in 2003, the singer of Noir Désir, Bertrand Cantat, was arrested for the murder of his partner, actress Marie Trintignant.
In Blue Zealand there is no shortage of tributes to song more crooked French: There are zazous (a duet with the French guitarist M) is the cover of a 1944 song made famous by the French singer and actor Andrex and dedicated to an Anglophile and jazz-loving counterculture of the thirties.
One of the most fascinating songs of Blue Zealand is a reggae that is titled I smoke, “I smoke”, in which Brigitte Fontaine, allergic to all forms of health and respectability, sings the praises of smoking in an era in which tobacco is demonized more than heroin: “I smoke, against the opinion of all. I smoke relentlessly, I smoke for the sake of life “and with his hoarse and dirty voice he concludes, addressing himself directly to the cigarette:” You, unrivaled pleasure, loving hot snake, sandalwood minaret, nothing can ever surpass you “.
Exoticism returns to the Andalusian Guadalquivir, an almost baptismal moment, and the splendid one Rififi, with its insinuating course, it is a strange, disturbing “song of the mala”. The album ends with the torrential Nrv, a collaboration with the free jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp and, after a few moments of silence, with an elegant orchestral suite that is almost a precious, unexpected ghost track. The last sound we hear, before the album ends, is a “s’il vous plaît” just whispered by Brigitte Fontaine: a “please” which, knowing her passion for pun and nonsense, it’s all to be interpreted.
Brigitte Fontaine
Blue Zealand
Virgin, 2001
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