“La vérité est une espèce menacée”. Jérôme Minière’s Quest for Meaning in an Age of ‘End Times’ Spirituality

Jérôme Minière’s song “La vérité est une espèce menacée”, first released online on January 11, 2018, strikes the listener by its profound interdependence of text, music, and interpretation. Text, music, voice, programming, instruments, editing, mixing, and clip making bear the same name, Jérôme Minière, who has rightly been acclaimed as one of today’s particularly promising multitalents. Compared to the parameters of popular music, the song is atypical in that it is not sung but recited. Its floating tonality corresponds with the fragile construction of the text while the video clip underlines the impression of fragmentation and flow perfectly in tune with the rhythm of the music and the spoken word. Altogether the song evokes an existential journey from metaphysical and societal crisis to arrival at a moment of potential becoming, an ‘end times’ spirituality, relative and ambivalent.

Reale und fiktive Sender-Adressaten-Konstellationen in Fußball-Fangesängen – mit romanistischen Beispielen

Football chants have been researched in several disciplines – from musicology to ethnology to linguistics – for quite a while now. They have been most intensively investigated in the German speaking countries, thus focusing on German chants; Kopiez/Brink 1998 is still the reference work in this respect. Other languages and cultures, however, have been studied much less; this paper therefore proposes an investigation of the (lyrics of) football chants of Romance language cultures using a corpus of French, Spanish and Italian songs. The analysis follows a new categorizing scheme, namely “participant constellations”, i.e. constellations of senders and addressees (fans towards their own team, fans towards referees, fans towards opponents’ fans etc.). The results reveal that constellations can be both real and fictitious; in the latter case, the fans sing a text which takes the position of a first person and is sung from the perspective of one exemplary fan. This is the case in chants which stylize the fan’s connection with his/her team as a romantic relationship. The corpus also contains other, sometimes very original fictitious speakers that are linked to the feeling of togetherness among the fan base and show creativity and humour.