This will ramble, do not expect any consistent thread running through it.
German television these days seems to be awash with talent shows. IMHO more show than talent. If you have a favourite song that has been around in your head for a generation, and you want to hear some nondescript performance of it by someone whose name you do not know, and probably will want to forget in a hurry, then this is the place to go.
In English, of course, nobody here seems capable of singing in German these days. Quite why .... For more on this, see later.
These programmes are actually more a source of domestic upheaval in the house than anything else. My wife, for a reason that is beyond my personal credibility, loves them. My view is that if I want to hear "Let's Stay Together", I will dig out the Tina Turner original, I do not need some obscure male singer trying to perform it and only being capable of hitting the higher notes (Tina Turner could hit the lower notes better than a male singer? Says everything about the cover version!).
Age is no limitation to the material. The other week, I heard the Ben E. King classic "Stand By Me" being ritually murdered by some performer (followed by praise from the professional judges, who should have known better). That song is 50 years old.
Anyway on Thursday this week, I was compiling soccer statistics on the computer that is not attached to the Internet, and found myself being tortured by the noise in the background coming from one of these emissions. After four lamentable efforts (and the only German that I heard in that time was the usual shallow rudimentary comments from the judges, who obviously do not know the words "schrecklich", "furchtbar" or Sch*iße"), enough was enough.
Back to the laptop, on with the headphones, off to YouTube.
OK, if we want to hear some 50-year-old material, type in the letters B, R, E & L. Where YouTube is wonderful for people of my generation is the way that some classic television recordings have re-emerged from obscurity. Watching Jacques Brel on television in various countries in the 1960s is amazing. And hearing the genius of the man, and the brilliance of the performances .... The ability to mix the French and Flemish of his native Belgium was one of his charms, and there is an agelessness about many of the lyrics.
One of his more interesting songs is IMHO "De Nuttelozen van de Nacht" - a Flemish version version of one of his French songs that I think actually works better in Flemish. The song is about the lost souls who hang round sleazy night clubs in the early hours of the morning looking for "pick-ups". It recalls some rather sad memories for me personally, I would add in passing. The song definitely has a compelling, realistic atmosphere, if you have ever found yourself in that situation.
I often wonder to myself whether one of these talent shows could throw up a Brel, a genius, a talent that has not been spotted through the orthodox channels. Following a link to Brel's version of the song (one of YouTube's more interesting facilities), you come to a cabaret style performance of the song by a wonderful, almost unknown, Flemish lady called Saskia van Rafelghem.
It is almost heresy IMHO to expect anyone to cover any of Brel's material, but this definitely works. Far better than any of the performers that I have heard on any television talent shows recently! It is in Flemish rather than English (or French)? Maybe the fact that I understand Dutch most of the time helps, but I do not see that that distracts from the performance.
It is a personal view, but this obsession with imitating the Anglo-American entertainment industry is damaging the amazing diversity that can heard internationally. I would also personally claim that Spanish and Italian are far more tuneful languages to hear than English ever could be (and my command of both those languages is negligible).
My tour round YouTube has in the past few weeks introduced me to Wende Snijders (a Dutch lady who performs a lot of material in French), Rowwen Hèze (a group who perform in Limburg dialect Dutch music with a Mexican bias, often with Spanish lyrics added), and some classic Italian stuff from Albano and Romina Power, and Gigliola Cinquetti (whose 1964 Eurovision winner "Non ho l'età" is still a personal favourite). Among others.
The obsession with the Anglo-American music industry being what it is, of course, means that unfortunately that we are going to be stuck with more of these awful cover versions on talent shows, while a great deal of potentially fascinating music in other languages is ignored. Sadly!
So back to YouTube, and back to Brel. This morning I picked out a recording of one of my favourite Brel numbers "Marieke". The reference to "le ciel flamand entre les tours de Bruges et Gand" recalls train journeys between Brussels and Zeebrugge when I was working in Brussels in 1990 and 1991 - not that I get particularly nostalgic for those days. The intermingling of French and Flemish in that song creates a wonderful atmosphere.
Follow a YouTube link on there to the item on the exhibition that Brel's daughter held in Brussels around the time of the 30th anniversary of his death - a news item that was interesting but should have been longer.
And on a link to that, for reasons that only YouTube can explain, is the wretched Jean-Marie Le Pen explaining that the Nazi concentration camps were insignificant .... Poetry to political revisionism in one stride! What Brel would have made of that, I hate to think.
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