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You can hear excerpts from Carla Bruni's new album of pop songs on her MySpace page. You will recognize the musical paradigm as quintessentially French: It's the breathy, high-pitched funny-girl voice with acoustic guitar and sweeping orchestral background that made Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg so popular in the sixties. It's the soft, cute and quirky sound parodied by the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords in their Foux Da Fa Fa video. It makes you want to be in a black-and-white movie and ride a bicycle along the Seine. The French don't really get pop music, at least not its hard edge, but they do specialize in this particular genre: the voice almost a whisper, the words clever, usually rhyming, and all amour amour amour. It's very filmic. We tend not to listen to it much, but it does inform the... [read full story]
