VARIOUS ARTISTS - Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes

Compilation CD 2008 Naïve 2008



"Between the late 70s and mid-80s, in the wake of the punk wave and in parallel to other types of music like disco, funk, ska and reggae, a prolific and chaotic music scene began to develop in France, combining the energy of rock and the nihilism of punk with electronic experimentation.
The period was not, on the whole, one of optimism and joy, played out as it was against a background of economic crisis and the cold war. The tendency was rather towards disillusion, accompanied by a clear-sighted recognition that a stalemate between the generations would be unavoidable in the short term.
Paradoxically, as it would appear, a kind of hope and frenzied vitality could also be detected during these years. Both were fed by a sort of modernist utopia, which was sometimes wilfully ironic. This was largely based on a certain fascination with technical progress and, by extension, on a belief, tinged with mistrust, in the infinite perspectives that the new technologies now seemed to offer.
A whole section of France’s youth found itself confronted by the contradictions of the times it was living in: young people were torn between the sensation of living on the edge of an abyss and hope for the dawning of a new world; they were deprived of tangible ideological landmarks but resistant to the posthippy utopias of the previous generation. In search of an identity, they recognised themselves in the dark lyrics, the cold synthetic music and the laid-back attitude of the new groups bursting up all over the country, as much in the provinces as in Paris.
With the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, the project Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes (featuring an exhibition, a book and an audio compilation produced in conjunction with Naïve, as well as a documentary) reactivates this post-punk / novo diskö / French new & cold wave scene, by means of selected works, personal testimonies and documented records. One of the project’s ambitions is to highlight a cross-section of the specific creative diversity of this scene: it does so by engaging with the music it produced, but also with the aesthetics, the attitudes, and the recurring problems that developed in parallel, looking particularly at its relationship to the modern world. So, first and foremost, it is about recreating the atmosphere and spirit of the time through what was most characteristic about it (and sometimes what partook of caricature), rather than making an exhaustive list of what was produced during those years in the style that concerns us".
(myspace.com/desjeunesgensmodernes)

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