Far from the eyes, close to the hearts of fans, Jean-Jacques Goldman has become an unassailable icon, as shown in a book by historian Ivan Jablonka, published in a France that can still be swept away by a song from the 80s. .
Friday appears the Goldman essay, where the academic is interested in the reasons why the singer of I walk alone experienced sudden popularity, and kept it when fashions passed. “Goldman has become consensual,” the author told AFP. It hasn’t always been the case. “He was reviled by the left intellectual press in the 1980s. There were hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to his concerts then, but for others he represented political softness, cultural capitalism, mediocrity artistic”.
Michel Sardou, from the same generation born after the war, was another target of this French intelligentsia. At the heart for a week of a controversy born of the remarks of the singer Juliette Armanet on Les Lacs du Connemara (1981), which she finds “filthy” and “right-wing”, Sardou is more divisive. But in this controversy, he adopted a very Goldmanian posture: to let people speak.
Jean-Jacques Goldman, who has been fleeing the media for twenty years, is marked on the left. “Fully aware of his political family, with a strong family tradition, his father’s involvement in the Resistance, and a half-brother (Pierre) who was a figure of the far left”, details Ivan Jablonka. If there is one lesson to be learned from Goldman, it is that for the historian the song is political. The author goes so far as to speak of “goldmanism”. He brings in a social democratic tradition, close to the sensitivity of the British writer George Orwell or former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, made of attention to the weakest, respect for cultural differences and the ideal of fraternity. humanist. “The question I asked myself is: why the end of goldmanism?”, explains the historian.
Jean-Jacques Goldman, 71, precipitated it by his refusal of the system of celebrities born with the Internet. “We live in a regime of ultravisibility, with social networks, the hunt for likes, influencers, etc. Can we imagine Goldman in this new deal? Certainly not,” says the author of the essay. If he did not seek to meet the singer, the author of Laëtitia or the End of Men, Medici Prize 2016, asked to consult his archives. “In vain, because I did not have an answer”, he remarks.
The book is based instead on interviews given by the singer-songwriter, where we rediscover his natural modesty, and his gentle way of exposing his convictions. His arrival in bookstores showed the love rating that keeps the one who has been 12 times “favorite personality of the French” (annual Ifop poll for the Sunday newspaper).
The front page of the weekly Le Point reads: “When France loved each other: the Goldman years”. On that of the daily Le Parisien: “Why Goldman always fascinates”. And for L’Obs, classified on the left, “a captivating essay” on an artist “who is a beautiful enigma to solve.”
“To each and every one his Goldman”, notes the historian. His is double. Faced with skeptics, “Goldman won with the music he invented: pop rock, this mixture of rock, pop and text song, which today influences the avant-garde of young artists”, whose Juliet Armanet.
And it accompanied an evolution towards a less sexist, less racist French society. “In the 1980s, Goldman’s audience was overwhelmingly made up of young girls from working-class or suburban backgrounds, to whom he offered a model and, beyond that, a path to emancipation,” according to Ivan Jablonka. Which admits it without difficulty: he too was a fan, and still is.
