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rfmcdonaldA chat with a friend about an east-end Toronto diner where we ate last week, where a young couple complained to the waitress that their seemingly perfectly adequate Eggs Benedict were not up to their particular standards and talked about writing negative reviews in Yelp, brought to my mind Céline Dion's "Un garçon pas comme les autres (Ziggy)".
This song comes from Dion's 1991 album Dion chante Plamondon, a collection of songs written by renowned Québécois lyricist Luc Plamondon. "Ziggy", drawn from the 1970s rock musical Starmania, tells the story of a young woman hopelessly in love with her gay friend by that name.
(The translation's mine.)
It's worth noting that when I, bilingual teen, encountered that song and that video on MuchMusic for the first time, that was probably among the earlier instances of specifically queer content I came across. I'd go so far as to describe it as positive: Narrator Dion does not condemn Ziggy for being gay, for being incompatible with her. Ziggy just sounds like a nice guy who's impossible for her. That's not nothing, not nothing at all, in the early and mid 1990s.
I actually do like Dion chante Plamondon and its songs. What they say about Dion's French-language songs being better than her English-language hits, perhaps because she has a better sense for phrasing and lyrics in her native language than in her second one, perhaps because she draws on particular Francophone musical traditions that have no easy counterparts in English, is correct. She's a sensitive interpreter of well-written songs throughout that album, using her voice to great effect. The album, and this song, demonstrate why she's a star.
What made me think of this song in connection to that diner is Toronto cultural criticCarl Wilson's writings on Céline. In 2007, he wrote a book for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series on critics' reactions to key albums, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. That book, which got quite a lot of attention both in 2007 (see New York and The New Yorker) and in 2014 (see Pitchfork and Vice) when it was re-released in the expanded version Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, took one might call almost an anthropological approach to the Céline phenomenon. Why are specific forms, specific artists, seen as inauthentic and subjected to often scathing criticism? What are the reasons for doing it? Is it fair to do so? What do we lose by dismissing these? The New Yorker in 2007 phrased Wilson's argument nicely.
Different forms, different artists, relate to different conventions. Arbitrarily deciding that any of these conventions are irrelevant or don't matter, especially on their own terms, is a problem. If nothing else, by doing so you can manage to miss out on fun stuff. I liked the cheesecake and coffee I ate at that diner. Perhaps that place deserves a positive Yelp review.
This song comes from Dion's 1991 album Dion chante Plamondon, a collection of songs written by renowned Québécois lyricist Luc Plamondon. "Ziggy", drawn from the 1970s rock musical Starmania, tells the story of a young woman hopelessly in love with her gay friend by that name.
Ziggy, il s'appelle Ziggy
C'est mon seul ami
Dans sa tête y'a que d'la musique
Il vend des disques dans une boutique
On dirait qu'il vit
Dans une autre galaxie
Tous les soirs, il m'emmène danser
Dans des endroits très très gais
Où il a des tas d'amis
Oui, je sais, il aime les garçons
Je devrais me faire une raison
Essayer de l'oublier... mais
Ziggy, his name's Ziggy
He's my only friend.
His head's full of music.
He sells albums in a store.
One might say that he lives
In another galaxy.
Every night, he takes me dancing
To places that are quite gay
Where he has a lot of friends.
Yes, I know, he likes gay
I should come to terms
Try to forget him ... But.
(The translation's mine.)
It's worth noting that when I, bilingual teen, encountered that song and that video on MuchMusic for the first time, that was probably among the earlier instances of specifically queer content I came across. I'd go so far as to describe it as positive: Narrator Dion does not condemn Ziggy for being gay, for being incompatible with her. Ziggy just sounds like a nice guy who's impossible for her. That's not nothing, not nothing at all, in the early and mid 1990s.
I actually do like Dion chante Plamondon and its songs. What they say about Dion's French-language songs being better than her English-language hits, perhaps because she has a better sense for phrasing and lyrics in her native language than in her second one, perhaps because she draws on particular Francophone musical traditions that have no easy counterparts in English, is correct. She's a sensitive interpreter of well-written songs throughout that album, using her voice to great effect. The album, and this song, demonstrate why she's a star.
What made me think of this song in connection to that diner is Toronto cultural criticCarl Wilson's writings on Céline. In 2007, he wrote a book for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series on critics' reactions to key albums, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. That book, which got quite a lot of attention both in 2007 (see New York and The New Yorker) and in 2014 (see Pitchfork and Vice) when it was re-released in the expanded version Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, took one might call almost an anthropological approach to the Céline phenomenon. Why are specific forms, specific artists, seen as inauthentic and subjected to often scathing criticism? What are the reasons for doing it? Is it fair to do so? What do we lose by dismissing these? The New Yorker in 2007 phrased Wilson's argument nicely.
An appreciation of pop music, meanwhile, trades specifically in matters of coolness. Pop is social—a common idiom, readily accessible, relatable, and debatable. It is about crowds and groups, us and them. Pop is also, for many people, deeply personal: it is the realm in which many of us make and discuss our first artistic choices as young people, and those personal stakes often extend into adulthood. Wilson recalls his own formative experiences listening to music—punk, songs from the margins, what he calls “maverick art”—and cannot fathom how some other young person could reap similar emotional rewards from Céline’s slick, middle class, packaged soundtrack of hope. “It’s a fault endemic, I think, to us antireligionists who have turned for transcendent experience to art, and so we react to what our reflexes tell us is bad art as if it were a kind of blasphemy,” he writes.
To these secular priests of art, Céline fans seem to have failed to make a coherent, or even a conscious, aesthetic choice. Instead they listen to her music for imprecise emotional reasons, or else passively opt for the merely popular, what is readily available. But, not surprisingly, Wilson finds that fans of Céline don’t see themselves as dupes or apologists or stooges. Wilson speaks to a young male fan who tells him that, during a period of depression, Céline’s “My Heart Will Go On” helped “draw me out of the darkness and into the light.” The very sentimentality of this phrase does not render it meaningless to the person who actually feels it. If this fan says that Céline saved his life, who is Wilson, or any one of us, to argue? Another fan attempts to explain her attachment: “Even if it’s not cool, even if it borders on the ridiculous in a lot of ways, and you can’t imagine why people would ever cry to a Céline Dion song, I think we should probably have more respect for people’s lack of guile…. I think it’s good to have things that you can’t explain.”
Different forms, different artists, relate to different conventions. Arbitrarily deciding that any of these conventions are irrelevant or don't matter, especially on their own terms, is a problem. If nothing else, by doing so you can manage to miss out on fun stuff. I liked the cheesecake and coffee I ate at that diner. Perhaps that place deserves a positive Yelp review.
