Music, Style & Culture

J’adore La Radio: French Language Radio

Andy Vale takes a look at French language quotas on the nation's stations.

Andy Vale

DIY Radio presenter.

There were originally two videos released for Simple Plan's 2011 single "Jet Lag." They were nearly identical. Both featured the band wearily travelling through an airport, both feature the band rocking out in the airport and both feature a beautiful woman in a hotel room longing for her missing man. However in each video it was a different woman. One videowas in French, featuring Marie-Mai and the other was in English with Natasha Bedingfield doing the honours. As I said, the videos are almost identical. Same hotel room, same view and same postcards tossed around the room. The key difference was the language.



As a French-Canadian band, this duality works well for Simple Plan. By covering both halves of their home-country fanbase they managed to have a platinum selling single, which reached the top-20 in four different continents. While the English version was popular in Germany, Australia & Canada the French version hit No. 11 in France. While this latter detail may seem obvious, it is a good place to start when looking at French radio. In 1994 it became law in France that 40% of the music on all French radio stations should be either a French artist or French speaking. Releasing a song in French made Simple Plan a very attractive proposition to French playlist makers and undoubtedly helped them achieve a level of success over there. While recording and filming extra parts may cost extra, the possibilities for sales, marketing and touring that are opened up may make it a worthwhile investment.

This law did face some opposition from radio stations, if most of the Top 40 wasn't of French origin then how could a Top 40 (or "Hit Music") station broadcast to its audience remit? So to try and balance it out the law was later amended to give "young" music stations a small amount of leeway, while "specialist" stations had to increase their quota to 60%. The effects of it can be seen by looking at the current charts. The French Top 20 only has three songs that feature no French lyrics or no French artists. Compared to the UK charts, which are dominated by our language, this may not seem impressive. However a quick look elsewhere in Europe suggests the French may have a point here. In Spain 11 of the top 20 feature no native artists or lyrics, in Italy that number is 10 and in Finland it's 14 (with Adele at 1, 2 and 7.)

This law represents the pride in which the French feel in their language. A pride that is summed up by French rugby player Sébastian Chabal telling an English interviewer wanting English questions that "We are in France, we speak French..." Continental music enthusiast (yes, they exist) Rachel Potter explains how this pride is translated to their music, "pretty much every other country has realised that you need to sing in English to get anywhere these days. However France insist on sending French songs to Eurovision even though they’ve had bad results for the last 10 years or so. When they did send an English song (2008) it caused a big fuss and was even brought up in French parliament- apparently one MP demanded an explanation from the Culture Minister as to why the song was allowed to go to Eurovision."

I did wonder whether this law meant that by urging French artists to stick to their mother-tongue they would be restricting their ability to find success out of France. Rachel assured me that this may no be the case "I think most successful French singers that are famous outside of France (Patricia Kaas, Vanessa Paradis, Christophe Maé, Calogero...) only really sing in French anyway. So this law doesn’t necessarily seem to limit careers in that respect." However if an artist were to go to France and sing in a language other than French, it means that they do still have that hurdle to get over. It's hard enough for an English artist to get a playlist spot in the UK, what about when only 60% of the slots are available to them?

So if an artist does want to make a concerted effort to break into the French market, how would French versions of their songs sound? We took some well-known English language songs and translated them into French. Sing/hum along to these:

Calvin Harris
I get all the girls, I get all the girls!
Moi j'ai toutes les filles, moi j'ai toutes les filles!

Aqua
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere. Life in plastic, it's fantastic!
Tu peux me brosser les cheveux, deshabille-moi partout. La vie en plastique, c'est fantastique!

The Beatles
Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play. Now I need a place to hide away, oh I believe in Yesterday.
Hier, l'amour etait un jeu si simple a faire. Maintenant j'ai besoin de me cacher, oohh moi je crois en hier.

Ed Sheeran
And they say she's in the class-A team, stuck in her daydream, been this way since 18.
Et ils disent, elle est en equipe 'A', toujours la tete aux nuages, a ete comme ca depuis ses dixhuit ans.

Now regardless of its meaning, who on earth wouldn't want to be in a club shouting, "Moi J'ai toutes les filles, moi j'ai toutes les filles"? The simplicity with which basic sentences often translate possibly shows why most French (or European) artists that do well with English songs tend to be dance/house artists (such as David Guetta) as opposed to singer-songwriters or rock bands. However if poor little Ted Sheeran tried to bring his tales of drugged up teenage hookers to the French language market then they may need a significant alteration. The above example has already been tweaked as best as possible by my translator and despite her efforts the rhyme and syllables of the original couldn't quite survive the transition.

But is the French market important enough to be worth the effort? The aforementioned Simple Plan track also had a Chinese and Indonesian version, so why not expand and release a single in the language of all the major musical markets? In truth, it's probably too much hassle to do on a regular basis. However, we are repeatedly being told about the death of guitar music, so maybe it's something to think about. Although we have very few new rock superstars like pop, dubstep and RnB have, we do have a large number of moderately successful ones that may not survive on one market alone for too long. But if they built up similar sized followings in other countries around the world then they may not need to become watered-down chart-smashing megastars (or collaborate with Skrillex) in order to carry on having decent careers past their third album. So occasionally doing something in another language could help an artist's career, especially if other countries decide to follow France's lead.