[MUSIC] An Addendum on "Plus Grandir"
Mar. 5th, 2006 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn prepping for my post yesterday on the live version of Mylène Farmer's song "Plus Grandir," I'd neglected to consult the excellent French-language fan site Mylene Farmer Is Called. If I had, I would have noticed that Mylène's interlocutor is the late expatriate Carole Fredericks, and I would have been able to point the reader to this analysis of the original song, like Mylène's definitive hit single "Libertine" from her debut album Cendres de Lune.
It's funny, but this live quasi-hip hop version is so much more energetic and happy than the original wan despairing mid-1980s synthpop as to qualify as a different song, with its sung American lyrics and the embedding of the original narrative of a young person's fear of aging in a contested mother/daughter relationship that ends with a reconciliation and a shared desire to face the problems of age and mortality. It's perhaps for this reason, to quote this site and to translate the relevant passage, that since 1995 Mylène "said that she would no longer sing this song live, since according to her, this is no longer one of her preoccupations: the fear of aging has no longer frightened her since she opened up to become a new woman." It is true that her later songs are no longer quite as preoccupied with failure as her first ones, characterized by a more existential sort of appreciation of life.
It's funny, but this live quasi-hip hop version is so much more energetic and happy than the original wan despairing mid-1980s synthpop as to qualify as a different song, with its sung American lyrics and the embedding of the original narrative of a young person's fear of aging in a contested mother/daughter relationship that ends with a reconciliation and a shared desire to face the problems of age and mortality. It's perhaps for this reason, to quote this site and to translate the relevant passage, that since 1995 Mylène "said that she would no longer sing this song live, since according to her, this is no longer one of her preoccupations: the fear of aging has no longer frightened her since she opened up to become a new woman." It is true that her later songs are no longer quite as preoccupied with failure as her first ones, characterized by a more existential sort of appreciation of life.
