Street Clashes, Made-up Languages and Shows in Mental Hospitals: French Lost Music Revolution of 1968

This seismic shock that May 1968 influenced the France's lifestyle has become broadly chronicled. These youth demonstrations, which broke out at the Sorbonne before spreading throughout the country, quickened the conclusion of the Gaullist regime, politically awakened French thinking, and spawned a surge of revolutionary cinema.

Much fewer understood – beyond French borders, at least – about how the revolutionary ideas of 1968 expressed themselves musically in musical expression. One Down Under artist and writer, for example, knew not much about French underground rock when he found a crate of old records, labelled "French prog-rock" during a pre-Covid visit to Paris. He became blown away.

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

There existed Magma, the expanded ensemble producing compositions infused with a John Coltrane groove and the orchestral emotion of the composer, all while performing in an made-up language known as Kobaïan. Additionally another band, the synthesizer-infused space-rock group created by the musician of the band. Red Noise incorporated political slogans within tracks, and yet another band created melodic pieces with bursts of woodwinds and drums and rolling experiments. "I never felt excitement similar after finding Krautrock in late the eighties," states Thompson. "It constituted a authentically underground, as opposed to just alternative, movement."

This Australian-born musician, who achieved a measure of creative accomplishment in the 1980s with independent band his previous band, absolutely developed passion with these groups, leading to more trips, long discussions and presently a publication.

Revolutionary Foundations

What he found was that the French musical revolution emerged from a frustration with an already worldwide Anglo-American establishment: sound of the 1950s and sixties in western the continent often were generic imitations of US or UK artists, including Johnny Hallyday or other groups, French responses to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They thought they must vocalize in English and appear similar to the Stones to be able to produce sound," the journalist states.

Additional aspects contributed to the fervor of the era. Before 1968, the North African conflict and the France's government's brutal suppression of dissent had politicised a youth. Fresh artists of France's rock performers were against what they viewed fascist police-state structure and the postwar administration. They were looking for fresh inspirations, without US mainstream content.

Musical Inspirations

They discovered it in African American jazz. Miles Davis was a common visitor in the capital for decades in the fifties and 60s, and artists of the jazz group had relocated in Paris from racial segregation and social constraints in the America. Additional influences were the saxophonist and Don Cherry, as well as the innovative fringes of rock, from the artist's his band, the group and King Crimson, to Captain Beefheart. This minimalist minimalism of the composer and the musician (Riley a Parisian denizen in the 1960s) was an additional influence.

Frank Zappa at the Amougies event in 1969.

One band, part of the trailblazing mind-altering music groups of France's underground scene, was established by the brothers Thierry and Fox Magal, whose relatives accompanied them to the legendary jazz club establishment on Rue d'Artois as teenagers. In the end of sixties, between creating music in bars including Le Chat Qui Pêche and travelling around India, the Magal brothers met Klaus Blasquiz and the future Magma founder, who went on to form the band. A scene began to coalesce.

Musical Transformation

"Artists like Magma and the band had an immediate effect, motivating further artists to establish their individual ensembles," explains Thompson. Vander's group developed an entire category: a fusion of experimental jazz, classical rock and contemporary classical music they named the genre, a term meaning something like "celestial energy" in their invented dialect. Even today it unites groups from across the continent and, especially, Japan.

Following this the urban clashes, initiated when students at the Sorbonne's Nanterre annexe rebelled opposing a restriction on mixed-gender student housing interaction. Virtually each group mentioned in the book took part in the protests. Several band members were creative learners at the institution on the Left Bank, where the collective printed the iconic May 68 posters, with phrases like La beauté est dans la rue ("Creativity is on the public spaces").

Student spokesperson the figure speaks to the Paris crowd after the clearing of the Sorbonne in May 1968.