The opening act for the 2024 Olympic Games ceremony has already been in full swing for over a month: the ensemble is composed of political entrepreneurs, the media, and politicians whose shrill and polemical voices have been dominating France’s cultural stage. They have been ‘warming up’ their audience: French men and women have been riven by disagreements and are voicing their thoughts on the potential headline act.
In the spotlight for July 2024 is French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura, who has been energizing the French audience months before the international event that will saturate the already frenzied streets of Paris. Emmanuel Macron drew the ire of the public after he announced that he had asked the 28-year-old singer if she would like to perform songs by Édith Piaf for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Two questions still loom: is Nakamura the proper candidate to represent the land of Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Serge Gainsbourg, and Django Reinhardt? And, if she performs this summer at the president’s behest, what does this tell us about the devolution of music and the debilitated soul of a once virtuous civilization?
The case against Nakumara
The best-selling musician sent an entire nation into a tailspin. While Nakamura’s supporters take pride in her chart history, popularity does not automatically translate to admiration: polls revealed that a handsome majority of French people (73%) neither like her songs nor want her to represent them at the Olympics, and 54% of 18- to 24-year-olds claim that she doesn’t represent the youth either. More strikingly, only 7% of French people think that the president made the right call in provisionally choosing her, and this margin includes middle-aged elites who desperately want to parade how in tune they are with the times.
The controversy was further fueled by the singer’s right-wing detractors. Marine Le Pen stated that Macron is trying to humiliate the French people, observing that “It is not a question of her nationality, but the image we want to give of our country,” alluding to the singer’s indecent dressing, vulgarity, and limited lexicon.
Marion Maréchal, a former member of the National Rally and the current head of Reconquête’s list for the 2024 European elections, echoed her aunt’s statements, arguing, “This woman doesn’t even sing in French, and she doesn’t represent the French language.” During Maréchal’s campaign meeting, the crowd fell into silence for a good five minutes as they listened to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23 in A Major, K 488 Adagio. The speeches resumed with Éric Zemmour’s incendiary yet meaningful discourse. He stated that scientific studies have shown that the vast majority of fetuses react more often with agreeable facial expressions when they hear classical music. Even while they are bereft of culture or prejudice, 91% of them exhibit an affinity for the compositions of Romantics like Mozart than to lecherous lyrics and undynamic beats like those of Aya Nakamura.
These statements from the French Right were catnip for left-leaning media. Journalists were quick to ask whether these politicians had racist motivations, a hackneyed script based on crass assumptions about the Right. Worse, their reductive cant extends beyond France’s borders. Many anglophone journalists, like their French counterparts, immediately chastised right-wing political actors for their “chauvinistic” attitudes and purported to protect Nakamura from what they insisted was “racist” abuse.
None of these journalists mentioned that politicians like Maréchal had argued that Joséphine Baker better represented French culture—a black, American-born, French woman. Maréchal impugned Nakamura’s lyrics because the artist does not even sing in intelligible French. Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally who himself grew up in a predominantly extra-European neighborhood, also argued that Nakamura should not represent France—not because of her skin color (which myopic left-wing accusers assumed), but because a staggering three-quarters of the French population also do not believe that she should represent the country. Bardella additionally pointed out Nakamura’s conviction for domestic violence, and he argued that a hostile artist cannot represent the country in a global event that necessitates unity and peace.
Nakumara is not the modern-day Duke Ellington
These simplistic accusations of racism cheapen real cases of prejudice in the history of music, and they illuminate the shortcomings of contemporary identity politics. There is no denying, for example, that many African American musicians faced prejudice during the Harlem Renaissance. From accusations that they were mutilating classical music to complaints about jazz’s dearth of sophistication, many critics heaped scorn on the genre both because it was entirely new and because the fraught racial tensions during the Jazz Age were astronomically and undeniably worse than at present. Therefore, it would be deeply incorrect to make false equivalences and assume that the stark prejudice that black musicians faced in the roaring twenties is similar to Nakamura’s case today.
Not a single one of Nakamura’s opponents has ever argued that Nakamura should not represent France because she is not française de souche. Even the palest French singer would face similar comments if she demonstrated loutish behavior at concerts, wrote lyrics bursting with ribald language, used compositions with repeatable melodic formulae, and was indicted on charges of domestic violence.
Granted that Nakamura’s supporters are steeped in the belief that the singer embodies multicultural France, in reality, none of her pieces bolsters this criterion. Unlike her jazz counterparts of yesteryear, her lyrics do not capture an acute understanding of any political, cultural, or even profound personal struggle. Her works are just as expendable as those of the many other non-black artists who also relentlessly sing about sex and drugs.
Unlike the great jazz musicians of the past, Nakamura’s hardship stems from perceived racism. Although her antagonists criticize her work, those with a parochial outlook are quick to deem any scintilla of negativity as racist. An increasingly rancorous and pugnacious Nakamura responded by writing a song within a few weeks entitled “Doggy,” yet she inadvertently proved her critics right: only 40% of the song’s lyrics are in the French dictionary, and the scant English vocabulary the multicultural Nakamura employs are mere expletives. She attempts to evince resistance in her lyrics, singing “It looks like you can ‘dead’ (not die, but dead). I don’t have enemies. It’s them that don’t like me,” before ungracefully chanting “doggy” countless times.
By contrast, although the pioneer of big-band jazz Duke Ellington used jazz as a form of activism to combat racism in the 1940s, he did not want to be pigeonholed as a black musician. His rich and poignant compositions, such as “Black, Brown, and Beige” wielded enough power to convey the harrowing black experience in early 20th century America, from the palladian arches of Carnegie Hall to late night speakeasies in Harlem. It is also worth mentioning that Ellington’s largely instrumental masterpiece offered an aural image of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of African Americans. Whether it is when a sax or trumpet solo intervenes, what the tolling of a bell encapsulates, or why certain non-metrical rhythms were juxtaposed with a coherent melody, Ellington’s meticulous and judicious musical choices showcase his innate genius.
The death of music or a new zeitgeist?
Despite all these criticisms, there is no denying that Nakamura’s songs catapulted her into the limelight. Her supporters claim that she is one of the most listened-to francophone singers in the world, and therefore she deserves to represent the Republic. Her streaming records and overflowing concerts are indeed a testament to her success. She has also soared in popularity online, with over 20 million followers on social media, and her latest song—if we can call it that—had over a million views in just one week. But is the commercial popularity of an artistic product truly a measure of its quality—or its ability to represent one of the bastions of high culture in Europe?
Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin were perhaps right to lambast pop culture. They augured the devolution of art under late capitalism, arguing that the culture industry continually strives to make every consumer into essentially the same person as it entices them to purchase the replicable cultural commodities it manufactures. They further claimed that the extent to which a work of art conforms to social norms should never be the determining factor in its success. Instead, genuine art should not be replicable and easy to consume. It also ought to stimulate new ideas and thorough discussions.
Granting that the controversy that Nakamura’s racy repertoire instigates inevitably engenders thought-provoking discussions—such as the debauched, soulless, and lecherous social legacy of the long sixties—it in and of itself does not compel listeners to discuss the implications and underlying meaning of each song, beat, and lyric.
Another Frankfurt school theorist, Herbert Marcuse, discussed how contemporary art has also become prosaic and bereft of transformative power. The philosopher coined the term ‘repressive desublimation’ to refer to the way consumer capitalism has eroded the transcendental elements of high culture and has led to the flattening of art. Art under late capitalism has become unidimensional, as it no longer distinguishes itself from reality– or ‘that which is.’ Furthermore, his definition is rooted in the destruction of Eros and a rampant intensified sexual existence, which further serves as an affirmation of the current debauched order. Nakamura’s lyrics run parallel to this observation: they are mere facsimiles of countless degenerate songs that hegemonize the morally void Western cultural landscape in the aftermath of the deleterious sexual revolution.
Furthermore, Nakamura’s ability to produce a song entitled “Doggy” less than a month after her critics chafed at Macron’s proposition is a testament to the dearth of genius and assiduity in contemporary pop music. While Mozart wrote “The Marriage of Figaro” in less than six weeks, he composed a quasi-cinematic score of around three hours that included at least 16 different instruments. His cavatina in the second act, although composed of only four lines, has the sheer power to transport audience members to a transcendental realm that Nakamura’s vapid iteration of the word “doggy” categorically cannot. Both ordinary listeners and august musical scholars listen to Mozart with rapt attention and are prodded into undertaking an aural, lyrical, and perhaps even philosophical analysis of his opera buffa the moment they leave the theater, whilst Nakamura’s vacuous songs can be played as an accompanying background noise to our pedestrian lives—or worse, encourage listeners to gyrate to her music and promote libidinous behavior.
These two divergent experiences run parallel to Roger Scruton’s distinction between listening and hearing: devoid of an education of aesthetic appreciation, Nakamura’s fans hear her but they do not listen to the ways in which her tones and rhythm hang together structurally—perhaps because they do not. And although both Mozart and Nakamura produced works in such a scant amount of time, there is an immensely wide gulf between Mozart’s unrivaled artistry and prodigious talent and Nakamura’s vapid and incomprehensible whining. To argue otherwise would ring hollow.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly, philosophers like Plato, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer saw music as one of the noblest art forms. Plato thought that good music had the power to lead its listeners to virtue and an ordered soul, whereas bad music made them fall prey to evil. Similarly, Nietzsche stated that music could elevate our fragile being and lead our mundane thoughts to higher things. Schopenhauer maintained that music manifested the Will itself and the innermost soul of phenomena. It was not a replica of the Will, which made it inherently more powerful than other aesthetic pleasures. While these philosophers allude to instrumental music (and although they were not exposed to an array of contemporary musical expressions), there is a kernel of truth in the metaphysical significance of their theories that is urgently relevant today.
Although I wouldn’t consider Nakamura’s songs to be ‘music,’ if Schopenhauer thought that music was unparalleled as it was universal, based in the metaphysical, and the direct expression of the Will itself, then he would be crestfallen to learn how the marriage of Nakamura’s flat compositions and insipid lyrics echoes the inane and vacuous zeitgeist today. He certainly would not categorize her works as true music either, as they are antithetical to the Will, merely replicate phenomena, and further lead to more imitative music.
Although it is devastating to witness the French president cast a spotlight on a depraved singer, there is perhaps a silver lining. The onslaught of negative reaction vis-à-vis her lewd songs and salacious behavior can perhaps signal that good taste and virtue are not completely lost. While her popularity is an indictment of the weakening of the soul of her listeners and even of Western civilization, a resistant chorus emerging from both the left and right wings of the stage is rising to a crescendo. This symphony of virtuous and cultured voices, orchestrated with the help of brazen political conductors, is slowly muting the noise that at once misrepresents the bleu-blanc-rouge and unduly exploits the true virtuosic and uncommodified Black, Brown, and Beige.
