Michel Houellebecq: the prophet of decadence returns to music | Culture | EUROtoday

Visionary, dystopian and controversial, Michel Houellebecq is past good and evil. Or a minimum of it appears so: his viewers covers your complete ideological arc, his novels matter to each his passionate readers and his detractors. But the French author can also be past the literary: in his resume we uncover him as an eventual participant in performances creative (along with the Masbedo collective), competent actor (The kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Near demise expertise, Thalasso) and solvent musical performer.

His new work falls inside this final subject, Remember the person (Remember the Man), an album half recorded with the musician Frédéric Ló that will probably be launched on March 6 by way of the impartial French label Modulor. The title is expounded—maybe coincidentally—to that of their earlier album, the digital Human presence (Tricatel, 2000), recorded hand in hand with Bertrand Burgalat, producer and arranger of Nick Cave on the time. It contained songs like white seashore (allusion to a scene from his story Lanzarote) and the narration, in recited mode, Singles. With that repertoire he paraded his misplaced determine and his voice gainsbourgiana on tv packages in his nation, and got here to carry out for the general public indie in Spain on the Benicàssim Festival. With this different he has already introduced a French tour that features ten nights in a row on the La Scala theater in Paris subsequent May.

Houellebecq’s style for recording studios is neither new nor unusual. It began with The that means of fight (The objective of the wrestle), an album of poems recorded in 1996 for France Culture Radio —“I am part of a current of poetry that is made to be read in public,” he mentioned then—, and later one other in the identical vary known as Establishment of an alternating sky (Establishment of a sky of alternation), additionally appeared below the industrial radar, in 2007. “During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century there was a great concentration of magnificent poets, such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire… but in the middle of the 20th century, poetry lost its function. Lyrical talent shifted to song and that is why there are no great poets of the 20th century,” he mentioned then, arguing his style for music.

But this style additionally suits aesthetically along with his character. In one other collaboration with the Téléphone singer, Jean-Louis Aubert, already in 2014, we see that skinny and shaggy Houellebecq, harking back to Albert Pla, and likewise with one thing of Leopoldo María Panero, a minimum of in his means of liquidating packets of tobacco and dropping his gaze. His wasted look additionally had one thing of Iggy Pop. And this was no coincidence: in 2017 the Frenchman and the daddy of punk turned such mates that he recited it on his personal album Foreplay an extended fragment of The chance of an island, novel that the person from Michigan discovered “of intense pleasure and similar” to his personal expertise, and that positively impressed that French album.

In parallel, musical references seem in Houellebecq’s books, logical, alternatively, in authors who write about modern occasions. In that The chance of an island —the novelist’s foray into science fiction with a narrative of loneliness, cloning and transhumanism— Björk appeared (“conventional and mannered to a fault”), Keith Richards (“he had a Bentley, like all the important rockers”) and, to the shock in Spain, a David Bisbal (“a song played on the bar radio…”) that Houellebecq will need to have heard throughout his days residing in Cabo de Gata, Almería. Other indicators of nice rock—Hendrix, Stones—are specific in The elementary particles. Regarding The map and the territory, The writer himself has said that “it’s like a Pink Floyd song in which the melody starts before you realize it has started.”

All this helps to understand Michel Houellebecq as a pop character, at the same time as a star of that world. Protected by his e standingnfant horrible (nonetheless at 67 years outdated) and after errors like his shady look – he says below duress – in some porn recordings, that shine outsider It fits a personality who likes to faux that he’s again from the whole lot, and that presumably he’s. As was the case with the determine of royal jesters, he appears compelled to say what nobody dares (“We can have a civil war, there hasn’t been one in Europe for a long time,” he lately declared); Beyond these, you’ll be able to break the foundations of the sport once in a while. Somehow, he gives the look of getting a superb time along with his empty and disillusioned character.

Character who—returning to the album—reappears with twelve uncooked songs, lined in electronics and adorned with piano, that query the previous and replicate on the way forward for humanity (if there may be such, he appears so as to add). Among these there are titles corresponding to The dialogue of machines, The day after the explosion y Waiting for the invader (The dialogue of the machines, The day after the explosion and Waiting for the invader).

Let the avid readers of a brand new novel wait a bit of longer: sure—as agreed by José Carlos Rodrigo, writer of the current essay Michel Houellebecq. The corrosion of the human (Ediciones del Subsuelo)—each writer has a mission, the Frenchman’s is to “immortalize the loneliness of existence” from any technique of mass communication, together with, in fact, music. In novels, essays, movies and albums, the Frenchman is similar uncomfortable chronicler, prophet of the decline of Europe (no: of your complete West). Whatever you do, it’s not possible to look away out of your annihilating verb.