Kékéland

The approach

Title track of the album Kékéland (Virgin, 2001). Recorded with -M- (Matthieu Chédid) — singer-songwriter of the following generation, son of Louis Chédid, heir to an off-kilter idea of French song. Virgin production, artistic director of the album. The track is conceived as a demonstration: two generations, two worlds, one grammar.

Text structure

Text by Brigitte Fontaine, music by -M-. The word “Kékéland” is an invention — an imaginary country, an absurd topography. The text constructs this fictional space with a coherent surrealist logic: places, inhabitants, laws of Kékéland, burlesque evocations.

• opening: presentation of the country as a real territory
• inhabitants of Kékéland — gallery of absurd portraits
• laws and customs — internal logic of the absurd
• return to the title as affirmation — Kékéland exists

The textual structure is that of a world-song: an imaginary universe described with the precision of a documentary. It belongs to the same order as Ionesco’s absurdist plays or Borges’s impossible geographies — but set to music and declaimed.

The technique — two voices, one gesture

-M- sings. Fontaine declaims. The cohabitation is the subject of the track: two ways of inhabiting text, two relationships to melody, in the same space. -M- provides the melodic structure that Fontaine never wanted — and Fontaine provides the raw verbal material that -M- could not have invented alone.

What is remarkable: Fontaine does not align herself with -M-’s singing. Where a less confident artist would be drawn toward the melody, she holds her declamation. The voice remains percussive, delivery remains the rhythm. The permanence holds even when the substrate is pop.

Arrangement

Characteristic -M- production from the early 2000s: clean guitars with slight distortion, groovy bass, midway pop-rock drumming, some keyboards in the background. This is a mainstream sound, far from the 1969 free jazz or the 1972 Diéval orchestra.

This contrast between the mainstream sound of the production and Fontaine’s declamatory voice is the demonstration: the Fontaine grammar can hold in any substrate, even the most “normal” one. This is precisely what explains the gold record — the general public hears something familiar (-M-’s production) and something unexpected (Fontaine’s voice) in the same space.

Filiation and resonances

French lineage: -M- as heir to off-kilter French chanson (Louis Chédid, Nino Ferrer, Higelin) — the same Higelin who had accompanied Fontaine at Saravah in 1968. The Fontaine/-M- encounter is also, at a distance, the return of the Saravah loop.

International lineage: Beck and Sonic Youth had rediscovered Comme à la radio (1969) in the 1990s. Sonic Youth participates in Kékéland (on another track). The album is thus carried simultaneously by representatives of American alternative rock AND off-kilter French chanson — the two poles that had defined the Fontaine grammar from the start.

Reading in light of the permanences

Permanence 1 — Speech before song: in the middle of a mainstream pop-rock production, in tandem with an artist who sings, Fontaine still declaims. The permanence resists commercial pressure, the presence of a melodic co-performer, and thirty-two years of change in music production. The grammar does not yield.

Permanence 2 — Radical collaboration: -M- in 2001 for Fontaine is as improbable as the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1969. Not because -M- is radical in the free jazz sense, but because the encounter of their two worlds should not work in a mainstream commercial context. It works. 130,000 copies sold. Gold record. Radical collaboration can also produce commercial success — that was not the goal, but it happened.

Kékéland (the title track) is proof through success: what Fontaine had invented in 1969 is still alive thirty-two years later, in a radically different context, with a radically different audience. The permanence holds even as the world changes around it.

Critique + listening — no published score