Along with the Queen and extraneous vowels in words like humour, another thing we inherited from our former colonial masters is the belief that the French are sex gods. Partway into an interview with Sebastien Tellier, the latest in a long line of oversexed Gallic entertainers, the opportunity to expose a long-standing mystery arrived: are Frenchmen really as liberated and adventurous in the bedroom (and on the kitchen table and in the back seat) as their most famous exports claim?
“Ha! No, no, not at all. France is a very sad —”
Tellier pauses mid-sentence and starts again.
“It’s a great country, you know. And it’s very hard for French people to change their mind because France is a country full of tradition and everything… and as a French guy it’s really hard to create something new in France because it’s always the same movie, always the same record, always the same book for many, many years, and that becomes really, really boring.”
So along with not being total swaggering Lotharios, Frenchmen are artistically paralyzed by anxiety of influence? It’s a good thing they have him, then, since Tellier’s latest album, Sexuality, doesn’t suffer from any lack of virility in either respect. Take “Une Heure,” whose big drums and rubbery synths are what Gainsbourg might have sounded like if ’80s synth-pop maven Giorgio Moroder had included him on the Flashdance soundtrack, or maybe it’s more like Tangerine Dream’s score for Risky Business screwed and chopped for a post–Daft Punk era (and I do mean screwed). With all the low female moans and soft-porn basslines, this music — save for the squeaky-clean single “Divine,” which nonetheless caused a stir when it became France’s nomination for the Eurovision song contest —?is steamier than a bathhouse in full swing.
But neither is it imitative of any particular sound. Tellier credits his antecedents in French electronic pop, from Air (whom he toured with in the early part of the decade, when Tellier’s own music was more acoustic) to Daft Punk (who used Tellier’s haunting “Universe” in their film Electroma, and whose Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo signed on to produce Sexuality shortly after) with having used electronic instruments to carve out a space for him and his countrymen to express themselves.
“In France we haven’t very good past music, and so we have to create something to exist in the music world, and electronic music was our only weapon to try to exist. Paris is a very small city with a lot of very old buildings, and so when you live in the smaller apartments in a very old building it’s impossible to play the drums or to record strings or to play trumpet. There is no choice. The city creates the music in fact because in a small apartment we can only play with a synthesizer.”
Playing alone rather than playing with others? Sounds a bit like masturbation, doesn’t it?
“With Guy-Man from Daft Punk we create a kind of couple for this album, because if I talk about sex alone it’s just masturbation, but if I talk about sex with somebody else that creates a kind of sexual authenticity.”
It’s an interesting theory, one that you can imagine R. Kelly putting to good use in finding duet partners. But as much as music that addresses sex on a superficial level isn’t hard to find in North America, most R&B here presents a cartoonish set of stereotypes in lieu of actually dealing with mature sexuality.
“There is a message in my album which is very different from other sexual albums,” explains Tellier. “My message is, if you want to be a great lover, you have to be a nice person. And so I talk about sex but with a lot of tenderness, a lot of sweetness, and for me that’s a new kind of sexual education.”
It’s Tellier’s positive approach to sex that allows him to master a form of expression that’s difficult to pull off.
“There are no rules to create sexual music, because it’s impossible to learn to play sexual music at school, for example. You can learn to play jazz, or very happy music, or even dance music, but sexual music, it’s so special. You need a kind of very good taste.”
Say what you will about the French, but good taste has never been in short supply.