Having driven the length and breadth of Western Europe and in parts of the East, one thing has struck me on the long hours on the road: French radio is probably the worst in Europe. Most of it consists of bourgeois chatter, like their television. French radio also has a commitment to 'French' songs, largely meaning songs in the French language and generally meaning rap music, which is not French at all. This has been going on for quite some time; during the 1980s there seemed to be a transition from the indigenous French tradition of the chanson, a modernised form of lyric-driven song that traced its roots as far back as the ancient troubadours of the Middle Ages and sung by the likes of Jaques Brel, Édith Piaf, Dalida, Léo Ferré and Charles Aznavour, who died on Monday; a transition to Black American influenced rap and hip-hop that gained in ascendancy just as the non-White population began to explode in mainland France. Zouk also rose at the time, coming as it did from the French Antilles and was organic to that section of the population, but synth pop, which emerged during the 1970s, was completely overlooked.
In the news last week was the ongoing war between British and French fleets. No, we haven't rolled back the clock a couple of hundred years or so, and the fleets are not military - at least not yet. The boats at war are fishing vessels, with the French ramming the English and throwing projectiles at the mariners, and the dispute is all about scallops. The French fleet outnumber the English 35 to five, so it is hardly a fair fight and some of the English fishermen have called for the Royal Navy to defend the fleet while they trawl for scallops in international waters off the Norman and Breton coasts. It all seems very farcical, especially when one considers that the third world is overrunning both countries on a daily basis, and the Lügenpresse like Le Figaro and the Daily Mail do so love to distract the masses with a bit of phony patriotism when it suits, but there are some very serious issues that no one seems to be addressing.
The situation in Catalonia is a difficult one for me to reconcile: on the one hand, I believe the different peoples within Europe have the right to govern themselves and that political borders should be redrawn to reflect the historical boundaries of peoples (obviously, there would have to be a certain amount of compromise); on the other, the independence movement has been orchestrated by Communist groups in an area of Spain dominated by the Extreme Left. After all, this is the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, who delights in urinating on her own streets:
