FRENCH BOOGIE 1980/1984 (2 vinyls)

Description

"Chébran - French Boogie," the new compilation from the Born Bad label, is a rare, funny, and unsettling object, brimming with commercial flops and textual crashes driven by the synthetic funk of the 80s. These are all wannabe hits that were hastily thrown into the depths of the charts before rap took over everything. After a dozen precious compilations, often for their documentary qualities and sometimes musical, J.B. Guillot's label unearths a new series of tracks by digging even deeper into the graveyard of pop's hidden side. While the fantastic compilation Bippp swept through the 1979/1985 period of "French Synth-Wave," Chébran - French Boogie scans the 1980/1984 period of a genre that will never truly exist, keeping one foot in the disco-funk of the 70s while placing the other in the barely ajar door of rap, with synthesizers serving as a monkey bridge between these two shores. This boogie - also called funky, disco-funk, or disco-boogie - should therefore be considered a strictly transitional style, with anyone straddling two chairs destined to fall onto the linoleum. On TV and radio, the general public will see the few shooting stars and neon lights of this movement named Elégance (Vacances j'oublie tout), Le Club (Un fait divers et rien de plus), Tristan (Bonne bonne humeur ce matin), Regrets (Je ne veux pas rentrer chez moi seule), Claudia Phillips (Quel souci Montaigne et la Boétie), Bandolero (Paris Latino), and the most famous of them all, Chagrin d'amour, with this hit still haunting the airwaves of Nostalgie and Chérie FM: Chacun fait (c'qui lui plaît). In Chébran - French Boogie, you will find all the failures of this non-scene, all the castaways of a rush towards a bad vein, carried by indifferent or opportunistic artists, ambitious producers who entered the studio to make a quick buck; the 80s will forever remain THE decade of one-hit wonders. Some bear names that give a precise idea of the notion of "cool" at that time, such as Interview, Style, Casino, New Paradise, or Attaché Case. They are DJs at the Palace, American top models, ex-convicts, studio sharks, or young hopefuls pulled from the gutter, and they will all end up as protagonists in "the story of a botched robbery," as Born Bad analyzes. Diametrically opposed to Bippp, monochrome and depressive, Born Bad's new compilation offers a gallery of likable losers in bright colors, filled with one-shots that all missed their target, written by clever musicians and often disastrous lyricists, tangled in their messy narratives, bouncing off overly easy rhymes. But it is with guilty pleasure that one listens to Chébran - French Boogie, which will reveal itself to some as the stale yet still tasty madeleine of a tenderly debilitating era, crunching a parallel 80s decade, a mark of pop culture, or even a uchronia where the misfits of the Top 50 would have triumphed, still playing today on Nostalgie, collecting Sacem royalties as a form of supplementary retirement, and sailing in a decrepit crew on the buses of the Star 80 tour.