Europop

” the so-called anglosphere has had some advantages over that period, by being able to mix, remix and cross-fertilize African traditions through the blues with Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh folk music filtered through Appalachia and back”

The importance of these traditions relates to what Cornel West has called the “black prophetic tradition” synthesized with other forms. The demotic nature of popular musical forms derive their essential vitality from emancipatory politics. A combination of subaltern pain and protest that is able to invent, and find expression in, mass-cultural forms.

This may explain why outside of the USA a place like Australia produces so many significant acts whilst the example given here, France, does not. Australians inherited a class sensitive cultural sensibility from the UK which is combined with a post-colonial, young-nation, modernist syncretism that constantly looked to import forms from overseas. In contrast, places like France and Germany seem burdened with the weight of their cultural pasts.

Honourable mention must also be made of New Zealand and the manifold musical marvels from the Flying Nun label. Vale Martin Phillips of The Chills
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/29/martin-phillipps-the-chills-legacy

I’ll restrain myself to just three examples from the Antipodes.

The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience – Shadows

The Chills – Pink Frost

Died Pretty – Blue Sky Day

I spent a period being fond of John Renbourne, Bert Jansch, Pentangle and the like, but now when I listen to it, I find it overly Brit. Go figure.

This one rocks, thouigh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20D2meCq3K4

Steeleye Span was a rockier version of the above, of course. (Oops: the record version of this tune was much better. Sorry.)

But this stuff is all Brit and not Euro at all. Sorry again. Sigh.

This is… brave. I’m not sure if you’re asking for recommendations, or trying to start a fight, or enjoy having lots of people pointing out your total lack of knowledge. There are serious issues with the premises of the question, for a start; as you note, ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ are problematic terms at best, and it is certainly the case that music made in continental Europe has been massively influenced by music made in Britain and America since the 1920s if not earlier – but that neatly passes over the extent to which music made in Britain and America has been massively influenced by musical traditions from Europe through the same period. America in particular, with the influence of numerous folk traditions (perhaps a special place for klezmer) brought across by migrants and then incorporated into jazz and American folk, and as noted above the fundamental role of German electronic music (don’t call it ‘Krautrock’…) on disco, hip hop and techno. But then a quest for pure, authentic ‘European’ popular music starts to look like a search for music that doesn’t show any influence at all from the economically dominant Anglo-American tradition, even if that tradition had drawn from European forms at an earlier stage.

I don’t listen to enough pop music these days to offer many recommendations, but have you not come across Christine & The Queens for contemporary French pop?

On the jazz side, since roughly two-thirds of my listening is European, the problem is keeping the list to manageable proportions (and not spending too much time on it when I’m supposed to be writing…), so this is a slightly random selection of things that I like that seem to me to be distinctively European in different ways:

Bojan Zulfikarpasic, Koreni
EABS, 2061
Joachim Kühn, Komet
Mette Henriette, Drifting
Conic Rose, Heller Tag
Zentrallquartett, 11 Songs (aus teutschen Land)
Edwards Vesala, Lumi
Peter Brötzmann Octet, Machine Gun
Bodurov Trio, Seven Stamps
Tomasz Stanko, From The Green Hill
Tania Giannouli Trio, In Fading Light
Sarah Murcia, Eyeballing

I think there are distinctive (but needless to say not ‘pure’) aspects to Italian popular music. I am not that up to date but the most distinctive for me are the singer-songwriters of the 60s, 70s and 80s like Lucio Dalla, Fabrizio d’Andre, Francesco De Gregori. They were influenced by Anglophone culture – one of D’Andre’s best albums (in my view) is based on Edgar Lee Master’s poems Spoon River, and one of his earliest hits was an Italian version of Geordie (so successful that Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang it in Italian …) and De Gregori has a marvellous album of Dylan covers he translated, and Dalla is a real original with his songs tracing the changes in Italian society and politics post war life.

Is part of the story here to do with a) how pop/rock emphasise lyrics; b) the domination of US markets such that c) English became the dominant/definitive language of pop/rock and then d) the rhythms and intonation of English (esp a transatlantic version) became part of the aesthetics of pop/rock (such that it didn’t sound ‘too right’ in other languages)? That’s entertainingly explored/satirised by Adriano Celentano in Prisencolinensinainciusol (nonsense lyrics made to sound how English singing sounded to Italians in 1972 – and a great number in its own right.

Soviet and Russian (and other post-Soviet) music is a mixed bag, but some of it is, to my mind, really good. One group I like a like is a Soviet/Russian classic DDT. (The front-man is very interesting, opposing the war while still inside Russia, to no trivial amount of personal danger). One song of theirs I like a lot is this one (“This is all”, or maybe “That’s all” – the exact translation into English is slightly obscure.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEg1cF9Ycfs

Another by them that’s very good is this, “Born in the USSR”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MySnVNRMwE

Another great Russian band, which also sounds very “Russian” to me is Splin (“Spleen”). A favorite song is “Leningrad – Amsterdam” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df0PKPC64D4

A final “post Soviet” addition is Zdob ?i Zdub – a Moldovan band that mixes some ska influences with Moldovan instruments and styles. Here they are covering a song by the classic Soviet Band “Kino”, “Vidili Noch” (“We saw the night”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZSoF_BL-ag (Most of their songs are in Moldovan, though this one is in Russian.)

I don’t know that it counts as “pop” in any clear sense, but my favorite music out of France is pretty much anything done by Yann Tiersen. Here he is w/ his regular group of collaborators performing on a street in Barcelona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_DsNFGd90A

For more “pop” (in some sense) music from France, I really like SoKo. This might be one of her best more pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXGN6DoeuU8 (There’s a rummor that the person with the bunny head on in the video was SoKo’s one-time girlfriend Kristen Stewart, but I couldn’t say.)

A taste of her somewhat more typical “smaller” style is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGRlKEmVkdY

(I think she’s mostly devoting her time to acting these days, but I’m not sure.)

IMHO, speaking of Italy but perhaps also of other places, the problem is that the good music is not the one that becomes famous and ends up as soundtrack for the olympics or at eurovision.
This is because most people have lousy tastes, basically.

However, from 1994, Sonica, by Marlene Kuntz:

From 1996, Cupe Vampe by C.S.I. (it is about the burning of the library of sarajevo during the wars in former Jugoslavia):

Jazz: Diavolo Rosso in a live from 2013 (but the song is way older) by Paolo Conte:

Still Paolo Conte, live from 1988:

From 1992, Voglio vederti danzare by Franco battiato (one of my favourite singers):

L’Era del Cinghiale Bianco (still Battiato):

PS: yeah, sorry, I have outdated musical tastes so I have no great proposals for after 1990.

As does Italy:

MisterMr I’d v much second Paolo Conte – though he’s hardly obscure – either in or outside Italy. Also Franco Battiato.

Not sure why Kraftwerk is Krautrock and why Rap is a subcategory of Europop.
So suppose, just posting whatever you like and is vaguely successful is fine without any regard to relevance in music history or useful categories?

Either way, lyrics sometimes do matter to me, and they matter even more in Rap. So i´m sure every country has great rap for native speaker consumption:
So this works great in German (Prinz Pi) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPOgrtlc_ds
So does this (Danger Dan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-B0lXnierw
(Rap to Piano works surprising well in general)
Casper’s style is something I don’t know from Anglo Rap (not that I spent much time with it) and works independent of lyrics rather well for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIGM2dZX0CY

There is even rap to Blasmusik, which works surprising well:

Oh and what is wrong with Europop in the narrower sense?: Eifel65, Blue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY

Or just pop made in Europe (Marit Larsen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2eCiRVYTUY

A surprising large part of my musical consumption is in German, for example, Maffay, Pur. Some also in Italian but that mostly to learn, still nothing wrong with current Italian pop either.

Not sure what it’s supposed to do to be relevant compared to US one? Does not get me enthusiastic more often, either.

@Richard Bellamy 21

I agree that Paolo Conte is very famous both in Italy and abroad, but only in his own niche.
Battiato was also famous (and actually entered the Eurovision contest once), but he was mostly famous in the 80s/90s.
My impression is that there is that specifically commercial music is becoming worse and worse, and that while some singers/groups might be good they don’t become the top commercially succesful ones.

I personally can’t stand either the Eurovision contest or Sanremo (the main TV music contest in Italy that also works as selection for the Eurovision), and when it happens that I watch them (if I’m am say at my mother’s house or similar situations) I really can’t find any one song that is even vaguely interesting.

My opinion is that you can listen to music intensively (listening to the same song many times) or extensively (listen to many songs while you are doing other things) ant the modern overabundance of media stimulation is such that only stuff that works for extensive listeners works, that makes for simplier stupider and more fashion-dependent songs as time goes on.

It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The dominance of the Anglo American cultural sphere has been established since roughly WW2 and so comparatively few artists from other countries break through to the international level – exception: the Scorpions, lol. So the music scene of these countries is hard to penetrate (the same goes for film).

Some contemporary recommendations:

Erik Truffaz (Jazz)
Trentemoeller (Electronica)
Die Sterne (Pop)
Element of Crime (Pop)
Hooverphonic (Trip Hop etc)
Royksopp (Electronica)
Air (Electronica)
Morr Music (Label)
Emilie Simon (Pop)
Nouvelle Chanson”

Back when Gloria Gaynor was new, someone pointed out to me that “I Will Survive” had the feel of a French chanson, revved up by a disco beat. The same applies to its new incarnation as Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers.”

Django Reinhardt is indeed awesome, but I think he himself would have admitted that if there had been no Louis there would have been no Django.

Karlheinz Stockhausen is surely influential, especially via his influence on Kraftwerk and, via them, a great deal of modern electronica.

Olivier Messiaen just counts as modern classical, I guess.

And I kind of feel that there’s a whole style of French Jazz distinct from American Jazz {apart from Django Reinhardt, who we’ve already mentioned. “Minor Swing” etc form part of a repertoire of jazz standards distinct from the American ones)

What about Finland? I’m thinking of the group NightWish which has a considerable following. The Nordic countries seem to have a popular music presence that is bigger than their population fraction would suggest.

I found the music of the opening ceremony, for the most part, insipid, and the pageant itself was embarrassingly, vacuously pretentious. But the greatest crime against music in the Olympics, IMO, is the horrendous Nike ad, “Am I a Bad Person?” The philosophy of competition this ad expresses is horrific, a sort of commercial for Trumpism. And then the music: the repurposing of Beethoven, and the ninth of all things, is incredible. As the saying goes, if Beethoven and Schiller were alive today they’d be turning over in their graves. The ad expresses everything Beethoven was imploring us to overcome.

I don’t get the Dion thing. Countries normally showcase their own talent, so why did they go to Dion? France has plenty of singers who can belt out Piaf.

I feel the same weirdness about Eurovision, which Dion won for… Switzerland. Wtf?

Imho the greatest guitarist in the world, is the manouche (gypsy jazz) guitarist, and, arguably, the one closest to the style of Django Reinhardt, Stochelo Rosenberg.

Enjoy !!!!! :-)

(Stochelo is the one in the center in the white shirt. The guitarist on the right, in the black shirt, Biréli Lagrène, is also a very well known manouche guitarist, but in recent years, has moved to playing a more jazz fusion style of music.)

https://youtu.be/IkOfKmGWdnU

Pop-ular. = 4,000,000,000.

Sympathy for the non streamer.
This doesn’t have anything to do with records or radio…or does it? (apologies to Kevin Munger)

Streaming killed the… oldies pop heads. As Kevin Munger says re words / text – “In short: we have been routed.” Link below.

What do you all think of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers? **

CB ask “But still, where are those counter-examples?”

Ever heard of or listened to… “”Blinding Lights” is a song by the Canadian singer-songwriter the Weeknd” … “The Weeknd wrote the song with Max Martin, Oscar Holter, Belly, and DaHeala; the former three producing the song. It is a synth-pop, electropop, new wave, and synthwave track, which lyrically addresses the importance of a partner, and the desire to see them at night.” … ” and became Spotify’s most streamed song, and the first song to surpass four billion streams. By the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s stream equivalent units, which converts all digital formats (including streams) into a single figure, Blinding Lights is the most digitally listened to/best-selling song ever.[5]” Wikipedia

Max Martin? Produced just about every “pop”ular act you’ve heard of… and obviously many “we” haven’t!
He is Swedish. Europop? Nah.
“Martin has written or co-written 27 Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles; 25 of which he has produced or co-produced, an all-time record for the chart as of March 2024. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

Kevin Munger said; “We’re stuck, this group which I had mentally been referring to as “words-style people,” in a technosocial context that has collapsed in a span of less than two decades. Writerly values like clarity and facticity are transparently useless on Twitter. Deliberation has been overwhelmed by social information. Memes that combine words, sounds, and images have replaced even mildly structured writing as the primary way that information flows online.

“In short: we have been routed.”…
https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/sympathy-for-the-wordcel

** The Righteous Brothers – “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” (1965)
“As of 2011, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” ranks as the most frequently played song in US radio history.[20] It is described by music writers Nick Logan and Bob Woffinden as “the ultimate pop record”.[21]” Wikipedia

“We” may need another cohort to answer Chris B’s provocative question… “where are those counter-examples?”

Do the Grateful Dead count? Was just listening to a release from 1972 in Dusseldorf.
Back on topic, saw Nena (99 Luftballoons) twice in Germany back in the 80’s, the Fragezeichen and Feuer und Flamme tours, and more interestingly was one of the few in the Regent in Ess Eff during her 3 city US tour in 2016.
Oh and yes, I’m a Deadhead who listens to nearly anything. Nena remains appealing as her music holds together after all those years. That and I started listening to her in my early twenties which is where nostalgia’s roots take hold. Cover Me is an interesting album from the krautrock genre.

Pomplamoose* sings some of their songs in French and a Canadian friend reports that her French is very good.

*: An outrageously rhythmically tight California band whose sense of humor covers a gloriously wide range of stuff.

Speaking of a sense of humor, the Mona Lisa Twins are an Austrian duo who do mostly Beatles covers. They’re the pop music version of the Polgar sisters in that both are dad-powered experiments in extreme early education. Extreme being the operant term. Judit Polgar’s chess is seriously wonderful, and these two seem to be having fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F2sn2rQiXo

You’ll really need your sense of humor for this one, but if you can take it, it’s hilarious.

Folk music (meaning: what common folk listen to, not what hippy-adjacent originalist musicians produce) differs. In the USA it’s country. Not my cup of tea, but there’s enough crossover to pop. In Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland it’s schlager, which to me at least is a lot worse. Schlager stars don’t tend to become pop stars (except maybe ABBA?).
Language. The most successful pop band of the Netherlands only sang in Dutch. Look up “Doe maar”. Perfectly fine ska/reggae/pop. Probably true of a lot of other bands that I don’t know about because their music isn’t played here and if it was I couldn’t understand the lyrics.

But what do I know? I’m old and mostly listen to Bach with minor diversions to jazz and chanson (including Dutch and German chansonniers such as Ramses Shaffy and Reinhard Mey).

I haven’t thought about this enough but my gut feeling is rock was always about co-opting the rebellious energy of youth via a sanitised and commercialised appropriation of black culture and its formal inventiveness has been somewhat exaggerated here. Along with hamburgers and Hollywood romcoms it was rammed down the throats of the rest of the world by American empire in much the same way sport was by the British a century before.

Jazz (+ techno, hip hop, etc probably) are different and are doing rather well outside of the Anglosphere as others pointed out.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Or the James Brown of Bordeaux? Don’t know, but I know that I get a lot of the music I listen to from this free app.

Radio France – podcast, direct
L’application Radio France vous permet d’écouter toute la radio, les podcasts et la musique de France Inter, France Culture, France Musique, Mouv’, Fip, Franceinfo & France Bleu.

Écoutez la radio en direct en un seul clic. Retrouvez toutes vos émissions et vos podcasts préférés, suivez l’actualité en direct et écoutez de la musique en illimité ! Rock, classique, rap, jazz, électro, pop… où que vous soyez.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id310211433

(The “radio” Groove from Fip is my favorite selection in this app)

@Ken_L@48

Thank for that list of Italian prog-rock. I’ve heard of some of those artists but have yet to really listen to them.

Are you – and other people – a fan of Amon Düül II?
They seem to come from the same world and the same era of prog-rock as many of the Italian artists on your list.

@ChrisBertram@54

There were also notable defectors to the East such as Paul Robeson and Dean Read.
Musicians who attempted to bridge the Cold War divide such as Wolf Bierman.
Music is a very plastic art. Given that the USSR and the rest of the Eastern Bloc always painted the USA as a imperialist power marked by a continuing legacy from its Jim Crow era, it was never likely that BB King’s tour of the USSR in 1979 would excite pro-American feelings.

https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/b-b-king-in-the-ussr-1979

https://www.rferl.org/a/bb-king-wowed-soviet-audiences/27018576.html

Given the essentially apolitical and eviscerated nature of most of contemporary pop-music – Taylor Swift’s cat loving state of childlessness notwithstanding – it’s almost impossible to imagine that popular music was once such an ideological-cultural battleground.

“The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this list is, of course, the demonstrable contempt our society has for black people. But the implication that counts for our purposes is that the elite embrace of black music over the last few decades has made no difference to black people.”
https://jacobin.com/2014/09/jazz-after-politics

Perhaps I am not reading closely enough, but Croatian turbo-folk was the soundtrack of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and worthy of attention:

I think jazz is sort of analogous to Shakespeare: an intrinsically wonderful thing that was instrumentalised by imperialists and almost killed in its home country by institutionalisation. Rock (and its even more money-minded descendant, pop) was (with some honourable exceptions) boring, patriarchal and conformist from day one.

Since this hasn’t been mentioned, I think it should be pointed out that the lyrics of Edith Piaf’s Hymne d’amour are deeply sexist to the point of celebrating abuse (as are many old „love songs“) and it’s interesting that nobody seems to take issue with that message being prominently featured at the opening ceremony, despite all that talk of wokeism.

jazz started out as the pop of the day (big band swing) and got hijacked by some black folks

Have you ever heard of Louis Armstrong? Buddy Bolden? Joe King Oliver? Basie? Ellington?

Well it’s interesting that the lyrics were written by Piaf herself. But that doesn’t imho make the vision of love as female self-effacement any less problematic, and it’s hard to imagine them sung by a man (not that that would make them any less problematic).

Well that was 1949. It brings to my mind Germany‘s winning ESC song of 2010 with the dumb-ass line „Like a satellite I’m in orbit all the way around you“ (original English) and I found it pretty depressing that this is still happening in the 21st century. But admittedly I know next to nothing about contemporary pop music.

https://www.songtexte.com/songtext/lena/satellite-5be193a8.html

it’s hard to imagine them sung by a man

Try “Ne me quitte pas” by Prevert/Brel for some proper self-effacement (“l’ombre de ton chien” etc.)

David in Tokyo @66:

Thanks for the link to the Adam Neely video. (I hadn’t seen that one yet, but I have looked at a lot of them.)

I’ve always felt that the best pop music is done by musicians who love jazz and try to incorporate the features they like into their pop music. So, I just wanted to exemplify one central element of jazz mentioned by Neely, namely “swing”. In “purely” European music it doesn’t exist, and we’re not going back. An interesting question (for Adam Neely?) is, what is the difference in the use of swing in jazz vs fusion and pop? (Recently J Dilla has been celebrated for re-introducing swing to hip-hop.) In any case, here are a few examples, off the top of my head.

Koop is a Swedish pop group (lead vocalist Yukimi Nagano here) that makes extensive use of sampling, but they do have a vibist, it seems.

Pianist Patricia Barber performing in Paris. (In the concert this tune came after some “European”-type songs that didn’t really swing; but when she played this, the punters went wild, i.e., loud applause.)

Japanese musicians can swing with the best of them. (In order to appreciate jazz, you have to listen; screaming while the musicians are playing has no place in in the experience, and so the Taylor Swift crowd don’t see anything of interest.) Pianist Junko Onishi, live at the Village Vanguard, playing a Monk tune.

Since saxman Joe Henderson was mentioned, here is an example where he is not playing what I would call bebop, but is definitely swinging. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes solo is a great example of improvisation. (I like to think that Koop was inspired by this tune (and maybe sampled it) in making the song above.)

If you’re doing jazz improvisation and just play the root , third and fifth of the chord, people (like, the rest of your band or your music tutor) will complain that this is Not Jazz.

Come on, you need to throw in a least a seventh somewhere in there. maybe a 9. Half-flat fifth (blue note) if you’re feeling adventurous about pitch bends.

Re: Laufey …

“Jazz is dead. Jazz remains dead. And we have killed it.”

(Nietzsche, obviously).