Audimat Review #22

Drag Race completed its third season on France Télévision this year, while in small towns across France, young queers are gathering to learn the fundamentals of voguing. Stories are told, almost legends, of survivalist communities that invented a popular and fabulous form of art-entertainment, in reaction to the white dominance of drag dances in the United States. Part of the dance soundtrack is now taking off to become the jersey club, an essential sound not only in international dance music, but even in the French rap scene—yet few people refer to the discreet craftsmanship of a DJ like Mike Q, who helped define its foundations. What will be the fate of ballroom culture? The proliferation of sponsored drag performances and whitewashing? The development of a discreet but effective community support infrastructure across the board? The promotion of celebrity DJs specializing in the jersey club whose social and cultural origins have been forgotten? All of these at once? Only time will tell, but by tracing its origins in detail, historian Tim Lawrence makes the question very relevant, and invites those concerned to take a position.

Look, this is a piece about two of the most exciting musical trends of the young millennium: that already good, old, mushy rap à la Playboi Carti and the latest ratchet-up (aggressive, exuberant, trashy) hits from artists like Sexy Redd. But it's by Camille Kingué, and it's not every day we welcome a poet trained in art history. So rather than recap the history of these scenes, let's take a detour through the words of feminist essayist and poet Maggie Nelson. In Of Freedom , she is particularly interested in experiences with alcohol and drugs, and how these substances allow us to "relieve ourselves of the burden of free will." But to achieve this, it is not enough to embrace one's own vulnerability—for not everyone is allowed to be vulnerable, at least not in the same way. This essay explores the ethical and aesthetic contours of this experience, by focusing on what rap does with it. Her lucid and uneasy writing also shows us a way of coming to terms with her own discomforts while asking a simple question: Why don't women make mumble rap?

Although it has always been a significant phenomenon in the United States of America, country music is now extending its global influence, notably through the success of Taylor Swift and Zach Ryan. A few years after Lil Nas X's exploits, Beyoncé participated by re-examining the genre's racial boundaries, launching a whole cycle of conversations between promotion and critical debate. These conversations found some echoes in the French media, demonstrating once again that we are often more comfortable discussing cultural conflicts in the United States than looking at ourselves in the mirror. We were therefore wondering how to think about the relationship of French listeners to country music, or if there were equivalents in France, when we discovered the texts of Étienne Castel. A country music enthusiast and (yes) avid blogger, he approaches it in a refreshing way, far from the purist scholar who constantly returns to the original masterpieces. In talking with him, we realized that France already had its own stories with country, including in the variety repertoires that we thought we knew well. These in turn raise many questions, because noticing the importance of country in French songwriting and in the charts also means thinking about the reasons that push some people to prefer this influence to that of blues or folk. Country elements are, of course, a way of playing on a rural identity consciousness. This identity is in turn based, more or less obviously, on (received) ideas about what would constitute a popular, traditional, or white culture. French artists can therefore find in it a way to invoke what would be for them a lived, intimate, and obvious experience, as well as a folkloric/exotic setting for their songs. At a time when political scientists and politicians are discussing a "peripheral France" or a "France of the small towns," it is interesting to see how French songs were able to find their countryside in the South of the United States, and thus reveal the futility of a rural identity perceived as authentic and unified.

We had noticed the series of articles “Transvocalities” by Charles Wesley at Manifesto XXI and we were very happy when he offered to write something for our pages. The result took the unexpected turn of a sort of self-genealogy of his taste. It's an exercise that could appear a little vain in absolute terms, but it offers here a privileged point of view on a relationship with music that music criticism seems to struggle to record, and which is nevertheless central to electronic and pop music of the last ten years. This relationship is constructed in the crisscrossing between a noisy and experimental music that has become more and more carnal, a pop that brings out the barbs and an increasingly intimate techno-industrial. By approaching his listening from a skin-deep perspective, Charles Welsey puts back at the center a pornophonic musical mode that suddenly appears to us, like a secret that would have always been hidden in broad daylight, and which was only waiting for him to become so clear. Any quest for music suddenly becomes fundamentally erotic, at the same time as a way of testing one's body and transforming oneself.

While the roots of indie rock can be traced back to the 1960s, for example to the experiments of the Velvet Underground, its true birth certificate certainly dates back to the time of punk. After a few twists and turns on both sides of the Atlantic, its grunge offspring would be renamed "alternative" when wealthier American labels (yet independent of the majors) began signing bands like Sonic Youth or Dinosaur JR. Mainly coming from the white middle or upper classes, "indie" subsequently went beyond its rock origins, to define itself by its link with the practices of taste, distinction and "informed choice" of its listeners (record store and critical culture, collecting, digging, relationship to History, etc.). From the early 1990s, the popularity of a scene gravitating around this universe grew and its social base gradually broadened (we think of Fiona Apple, Björk or PJ Harvey). If we are to believe the literary critic Mitch Theriau, this movement of openness has intensified since the 2000s. It is as if the spirit of indie rock is now found to be assimilated everywhere, with the side effect of this impression that the era is characterized by its absence of sound, or rather by a neutral, even neutralized sound, which can evoke the distressing homogeneity of this globalized style of decoration that we find everywhere, from Airbnb to coffee shops. Jack Antonoff, one of the most emblematic producers of the years 2010-2020, has driven this evolution. This essay originally published in the magazine The Drift looks back on his career and seeks to define his aesthetic to better understand the era.