Urban Confrontations, Created Languages and Gigs in Mental Institutions: French Forgotten Music Revolution of 1968

This massive impact that the month of May 1968 exerted on the France's way of life has been broadly chronicled. The student protests, which erupted at the university prior to expanding throughout the country, quickened the conclusion of the Gaullism administration, politically awakened France's philosophy, and produced a surge of radical cinema.

Much fewer understood – beyond French borders, at minimum – about how the revolutionary ideas of 1968 revealed themselves musically in sound. One Australian musician and reporter, for instance, understood barely anything about French underground music when he found a crate of classic LPs, categorized "French experimental rock" on a before Covid trip to the French capital. He became astonished.

Underneath the non-mainstream … the musician of Magma in 1968.

There existed the group, the large collective making music infected with a John Coltrane rhythm and the orchestral emotion of the composer, all while performing in an made-up language referred to as the language. There was Gong, the electronic cosmic rock band established by Daevid Allen of the band. Another group included anti-police slogans throughout tracks, and yet another band produced catchy pieces with outbreaks of instruments and drums and rolling spontaneous creations. "I never experienced enthusiasm like this after discovering German experimental music in late 1980s," states the writer. "It represented a truly subterranean, rather than simply underground, scene."

This Brisbane-native musician, who had a degree of creative accomplishment in the eighties with indie ensemble Full Fathom Five, totally fell in love with those bands, causing additional journeys, long discussions and presently a volume.

Transformative Origins

His discovery was that the French artistic revolution stemmed from a discontent with an already globalised Anglo-American norm: music of the 1950s and 60s in western Europe tended to be generic carbon copies of US or British artists, like Johnny Hallyday or other groups, France's responses to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They thought they must vocalize in English and appear like the Stones to be qualified to create art," the journalist states.

Additional elements played into the passion of the era. Before 1968, the Algerian struggle and the French authorities' brutal stifling of opposition had awakened a generation. A new breed of France's music artists were against what they regarded as authoritarian surveillance structure and the established government. They were looking for fresh inspirations, without American commercialized pulp.

Jazz Roots

They discovered it in US music. The legendary trumpeter became a common visitor in the capital for years in the fifties and sixties, and artists of the jazz group had found sanctuary in Paris from racial segregation and cultural restrictions in the US. Additional influences were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as well as the avant-garde fringes of music, from the artist's Mothers of Invention, the group and the progressive band, to the experimental artist. The repetition-driven approach of the composer and the musician (Riley a French capital resident in the 1960s) was a further element.

Frank Zappa at the Belgian festival in 1969.

Crium Delirium, one of the pioneering experimental rock ensembles of the French non-mainstream culture, was founded by the siblings Thierry and Fox Magal, whose family accompanied them to the famous Blue Note venue on the street as youths. In the end of sixties, amid playing jazz in bars including Le Chat Qui Pêche and journeying across the country, the musicians encountered another artist and the future Magma founder, who eventually form the band. A scene commenced take shape.

Artistic Innovation

"Bands like Magma and Gong had an instant influence, motivating other people to create their individual bands," says the writer. Vander's ensemble developed an complete category: a combination of jazz fusion, orchestral rock and modern classical sound they called the genre, a word representing approximately "spiritual power" in their created language. It still attracts bands from throughout Europe and, particularly, Japan.

Subsequently occurred the street battles, begun after students at the university's suburban branch protested opposing a prohibition on co-ed dormitory interaction. Nearly each band referenced in the volume engaged in the uprisings. Several musicians were creative individuals at the institution on the Parisian district, where the collective created the now-famous 1968 images, with slogans such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the roads").

Student spokesperson Daniel Cohn Bendit speaks to the Paris gathering following the evacuation of the Sorbonne in May 1968.