Mots de Brel - Le dégoût essentiel

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Treating love songs as ‘entertainment’, if such a thing exists, this original essay regards Jacques Brel’s work as a repository of metaphysical anxieties which it sets out to decipher. With a free-spirited tone characterised by biting wit and irony, the author sets out to offer a textual and musical interpretation of this world – and thus of Brel himself – that strays from the beaten track and ‘conventional’ approaches. From his early, unpolished songs to his absolute masterpieces, his body of work forms a living, organic whole, the most fully realised aspects of which can be glimpsed in the artist’s live performances and in his everyday life as a wounded nomad. The recurring themes that haunt Brel’s work are brought to life here: the oppositions and contrasts between the stifling, materialistic – and therefore sedentary – forces which the artist reviles, and the ideals of travel, friendship and dreams, embodied in Maître Jacques as the childhood and lost Eden of the Far West. It is this fundamental, salutary revulsion that he feels which has enabled the singer to be saved by the fierce lucidity conveyed by his work.

Artist 1

• Jacques Brel 1929 – 1978 · Belgium

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