Die young, stay pretty

by Will Hodgkinson

IN 1966, Jean-Luc Godard was a little lost. The father of the Nouvelle Vague had his best work behind him, he was splitting up with his actress wife Anna Karina, and he hadn’t quite got his Maoist ideology aligned with a basic need to make money. So he turned his camera onto the superficial world of youth. In Masculin Féminin Chantal Goya stars as Madeleine, an aspiring pop singer who does little more than sit around in cafes and talk about herself. One guesses that Godard wanted Madeleine’s empty self-obsession to represent the emptiness of pop life. Unfortunately it backfires, because Masculin Féminin is very boring indeed and Chantal Goya’s shallow charm is the only good thing about it.

Jean-Luc Godard is one in a long line of serious-minded artists who have criticised pop music for being vacuous and transient. Music that’s built to last is music with quality – or so goes the argument upheld through generations by classical composers, jazz players, rock gods and most of all, earnest and overblown music critics. Like master craftsmen, the best musicians patiently finesse their work so that it can survive beyond the shifting whims of fashion. Bob Dylan is good; the Pussycat Dolls are bad (although you’re allowed to like Girls Aloud, if only for memories of fancying the hard girls that smoked cigarettes at the bus stop after school). But just as living in the moment without hang-ups about the past or the future is liberating, so can the pop equivalent of a firework – brilliant, dazzling, over in a flash – be a wonderful thing.

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