6 years 4 months ago #1528
by Nikita
I played that an hour ago with a friend around a bier, and went back, well, a long time ago...
This is only talked, no music. But it's strong.
This is Utopia by Bernard Lavilliers, recorded live at the Olympia in Paris in 1978.
It's me or this is carried on...?
I will sing the new world
Born from the Zone 1 and junk
In those days your beautiful actions
Always went through writing
You were fatting up with projections
Serious projects, future
While order and repression
Was lining us against the walls
You purred for the old world
In objective opposition
Respecting the rule and the round
In your morbid headlines
It smelled like medicine
Frustration and the submissive
It already stank the electron
Passing time on credit
Skinny technocrats
Were predicting you better days
From the auroras 2 of expansion 3
To the sneaky night of the unemployed
You made lard on your belts
The placards waved by sluggish arms
Circled in the junk
Where you dragged on your knees
The barbarians, who showed their fangs
At the barriers of the peripherals
Were giggling, replacing your words
By Celtic warriors screams
It sent chills up your spine
Although explaining this phenomenon
You tried to go home early
Hating the urban militias
You were watching us in these times
Inventing another music
Made of violence and blood
Of ignorance and prophetic
Your reason weighed you heavily
In your masochists orgies
In your derisory loves
Your revolt and your suckers
The little left-wing eked out a living
Skittish as a lark
Your bars, your parties, your congresses
Your singers, your painters, your poets
Your reason, your righteousness
Your illusions, your habits
Your submissions, your culture
Your ambitions, your certainties
This phony lucidity
Which replaced guts so well
Was sinister and without passion
And militant and castrating
She was blocking your loins
Like a diabetic calculus
And left you hungry
Of well nourished and asthmatics
We dream about another planet
In this future, do you remember?
We make faceted plans
Towards extinct comets
We install our gold mines
On itinerant podiums
Where we play always very hard
Guitar and wind
We sense a fracture
A rift, clean and bloody
A scar in the azure
A switchblade in the silence
A crack in the certain
An embolism in finance
A detonator in the hand
An embarrassment in the nuance
We live, underneath the cobblestones
Having never known the beach 4
And never the king of summers
Has inscribed on the landscape
We have deep hatred
A hatred, fundamental
For the hierarchy and the schmuck
For the everyday and the fatal
Notes
1 - Historically, "
La Zone
" ("the zone" or "the area"), is the name of the land beside the former fortifications of Paris, named Enceintes de Thiers in French and
Thiers wall
in English.
At the begining of XXth century, after the fortifications, called "Les Fortifs" in French slang, became useless on military aspects and then neglected, that land, where nothing was allowed to build, became occupied by a very poor population nicknamed "Les Zonards", who started to build some shanty towns. After the French Wikipedia, "these newcomers came mainly from the small Parisian people driven by real estate speculation, the scale of the work and the influx of workers who accompanied the transformations of Paris during the Second Empire, as well as by the peasants driven by the rural exodus and transformed into an urban proletariat".
That term of "La Zone" then evolved in French slang to designate any suburb of rather medium-size towns, often semi-industrial oriented areas, populated by a massive average of worker-class people housed in nearby bedroom suburbs, caracterized by insuficence of public services, undersized educational and cultural structures and lattent/active criminality. "Les Zonards" designates the rather young/male population raised in these suburbs and often considered, right or wrong, as rogues and hooligans, perhaps offenders or criminals.
2 -
See
3 -
See
4 - Allusion to the famous motto during the students demonstrations in May 1968 in Paris : "Sous les pavés, la plage" (Under the cobblestones, the beach).
The following user(s) said Thank You: snowman, Maki, jacobston
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