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Aux Armes et cætera! Covering the National Anthem as a Cultural Critique

2003; Éditions Mélanie Seteun; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2117-4148

Edwin Hill,

Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies

1979 release Aux Armes et caetera, an album entirely recorded in Kingston with legendary reggae musicians, takes the French chanson where it had never geographically or musically gone before. In retrospect, we might be tempted to dismiss Gainsbourg’s adaptation of the French national anthem; after all, Gainsbourg had already written music in other genres such as jazz and disco. Yet while Gainsbourg’s previous work had earned him recognition as a major innovator in French music somewhat because of his playful and provocative eccentricities, this song was met with a scathing, overtly anti-Semitic, and nationalist backlash. Gainsbourg’s play with genres (national anthem, French chanson, and reggae) touched on sour spots of French identity. Years later, Big Red covered Gainsbourg’s version of the national anthem on his album, Big Redemption. While Gainsbourg only minimally alters the words of “La Marseillaise,” letting the genre itself perform the critique, Big Red’s version remilitarizes and desexualizes the cover while inverting and reappropriating the roles of revolutionary and oppressor in the contemporary dynamics of popular culture and postcolonialism. His cover of the national anthem became a performance of the “empire singing back.”