albums – Tina Amirtha

In order to prepare for this post, I’ve picked out the appropriate ear-wear. As I write, I’m wearing one dangly earring in my right ear and a less conspicuous one in my left. I feel a certain solidarity with my pop icons from the 1980s and ’90s and also like I’m part of a larger feminist effort to debunk symmetry rules for ear jewelry. It was a symbolic revolution at the time. Now, some 20 years later, I’m silently rekindling it in my little workspace.

Janet Jackson was one artist who did the one-earring statement very well. (I credit her as having started it, but she probably didn’t.) In an interview before one of her first television appearances as a serious artist, she wears a large hoop earring with a key looped into it. The show’s host asks her what the key is for, which is an obvious question for him because all he sees is a large object on the side of Janet’s face, and she’s clearly not hiding it by so ostensibly displaying it within the viewfinder of the camera. The response comes from a shy Janet, who says that it’s the key to her house, and she puts it on her earring so she won’t lose it. Of course, any young girl watching her at that moment would have known that it clearly wasn’t true and that it wasn’t nice to ask a lady where her jewelry comes from. Janet Jackson sported that earring for a couple more years, while the story of the key retained a special secrecy that only she could unveil. It was all very powerful.
Getting back into the swing of reviewing my father-in-law’s albums took a bit of time, especially for this album. Life events got in the way, like me getting married, but I also felt like I needed to give this album a little more consideration than the others. I started blogging for The Next Women, an online business magazine, in May. All of the articles on the site celebrate women in the entrepreneurial world, so when I had earmarked the record for my next critique, I needed to make sure that I wouldn’t automatically give it a good review, just because it was made by a female artist. Or, if it turned out to be a horrible record, I didn’t want to have a bad taste in my mouth about how absolutely dismal female French pop stars from the ’80s could be. I let this album sit until I felt I had the capacity to overcome a potential let-down.

Rose Laurens, on the cover of “Vivre”(Flarenasch Music, 1983) had a serious look but, to my delight, sported a single gold earring. Before the record player’s needle touched the ridges and valleys of the LP, I thought the album could play out in one of two ways. One, Laurens would do justice to the earring and everything it symbolized. Two, she would ruin it all. For me and Janet.

I guessed that the label would have given me an idea of what I was getting myself into. After doing a Google search, I wanted to love Flarenasch, the French label. It was active from 1979 to 1996, when it was acquired by the Dutch Arcade records, who was quickly taking up smaller labels and media concerns in Europe in the ’90s. During what was a relatively short time, they brought to life a unique set of sounds in the Francophone world. Then a bunch of A&R guys in suits had to bring them down. Grr. I wanted to love Flarenasch for the service it provided to the musical history of the world before larger economic forces took away its identity. It lost some of my respect for having sold out.

The title track put Laurens in the same category as Tina Turner, her voice booming through my Sennheiser HD 595 headphones with such force that I sat up straight for the whole song. For most of the album, I felt like dancing along, even to the slow songs. When I heard “Esmerelda”, I felt that feeling you get that usually occurs after staying up with your friends at four in the morning, where everything seems more important than normal, and you think you’ve found the meaning of life and decide to do something about it the next day. At one point, on an upbeat track, I thought I heard Kraftwerk. (It probably wasn’t Kraftwerk.) She even got away with singing, “Je suis une negresse blanche” (I am a white Negro woman) over and over on one track. It was a little freaky, but I let the track roll on. Yes, she was that good. The only criticism I have of the record is that her producers thought it would be a good idea to put her previously released single “Mamy Yoko” in the mix. Maybe it was meant to be a part of the release, maybe not, but I felt that it didn’t mesh well with the remaining repertoire.

When I learned about the work she did before “Vivre”, I embraced her bold choice of songs for the album even more. Rose Laurens sang “J’ai rêvé d’une autre vie” (“I Dreamed a Dream”) for Les Mis’s 1980 French concept album and then starred in the musical. Even then, she was rockin’ the one earring.

I must say, that Rose Laurens did us proud on this album. And by “us”, I mean me, Janet, and all of the chic rockers that have existed in modern times. Both buoyant and grounding, “Vivre” let Rose Laurens explore the range of sound that her synthesizers and electric guitars could reach within the limits of 1980s pop-rock. Her lyrics were unexpected, letting her freak flag show, but in the best possible way. I hope she has a collection of right-ear-only earrings because she deserves to right to make that statement for the rest of her life.

Verdict: Keep

Leave a Comment

Mustaches represent a phase in rock history that we pretend wasn’t there, but in fact, everyone was sporting them and knew none the wiser. ZZ Top, running around like a pair of Cousin It‘s, Freddy Mercury‘s almost political over-the-lip fluff, and a slew of men who fashioned their ‘staches to resemble such things as walruses, pencils and the curiously daring “Fu Manchu with an inverted toothbrush” posed proudly during photo ops to show off their mustaches in all their glory.

Today, men from this era still sport them, like my dad, who wears a Little Richard–esque one. (It occurs to me now that many Bollywood actors have paraded around in this same look.) I just learned that mustaches can even protect you from harmful radiation, so maybe they will make a comeback with my health-conscious generation.

Jean Ferrat was not only a man who was unrecognizable without his moustache but also belted out a few records. His music reconciled these two facts, given that each album was a canvas on which Ferrat could display his ever-increasingly unwieldy mustache to the millions of women who bought them. Yes, as I listened to six of these vinyl records back-to-back, I knew that I was entering dames territory, or today’s equivalent of places where Robbie Williams or John Mayer rules.

There were a slew of records that I didn’t like. On La Montagne (Barclay Records, 1964), it seemed like Ferrat had picked up a mic at a supper club and decided to be the evening’s entertainment. William Shatner was brought to mind when during “Autant d’amours autant de fleurs” (“As Many loves as There are Flowers”), Ferrat relentlessy repeated, “La jeunesse, la jeunesse” (“Youth, youth”), ad hominem. His interpretation of gypsy culture and music on La Commune (Barclay Records, 1971) left me in critical need of listening to Beirut’s much more evolved work to repair my ears. It sounded like a book report that the record execs made him do in order for him to sound more worldly (which made me think that Lavillier had the same idea when he concocted what became O, Gringo!). When I got to Ferrat’s ambitious project to set Louis Arag on‘s poetry to music, on Ferrat chante Aragon (Barclay Records, 1971), something told me I should straighten my glasses on my nose and get into student mode. After a track or two, I felt like I was in a poetry lecture. I much more preferred NU‘s “Reading and Writing Poetry” to sitting through “Ferrat Singing Aragon”.

Although both La femme est l’avenir de l’homme (Barclay Records, 1975) and Premières chansons: Eh L’amour! Le p’tit jardin (Disques Temey, 1976) made me want to take Ferrat by his shoulders and demand that he get his voice out of my head, Maria (Barclay Records, 1966) was … palatable. Stringed basses accompanied the arrangements, and I really thought I could dance to “En groupe, en ligne, en procession”.

My theory is this. There is a linear relationship between the size of his mustache and his album’s release dates. The earlier the record was released, the smaller the mustache, and the later the record came out, the more sweeping its side tails became. I believe that it was in 1966 when Ferrat and his moustache hit a sweet spot. Well, his mustache had even not begun to be.

Verdict: Keep (the one from 1966).

Category: albums

Father-in-Law Vinyl Purge #5 – Rose Laurens

Father-in-Law Vinyl Purge 2012 – #4 – Jean Ferrat