The 1975 Saigon audiocassette of French pop standards that haunts my dreams
Originally published 26 Oct 2020 on another web site
At some point in 2018 I was trawling YouTube looking for covers of the Sonny
Bono composition "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" in different languages
languages when I found a bilingual French-and-Vietnamese performance by pop
singer and actor Thanh Lan. From there, by copying search terms from the
Vietnamese video description I didn't understand, I found Nhạc Trẻ
6, (Youth Music 6 in English), the sixth entry in a series of
audiocassettes featuring various artists in the emerging "youth music" genre
genre and produced in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) during what would turn
out to be the final years of South Vietnamese rule.
Nhạc Trẻ 6 itself was released in 1975, the same year that the People's
Army of Vietnam took control of the city, bringing a decisive end to a
twenty-year war against the U.S.-backed forces of South Vietnam. So it's
already apparent just from the cassette sleeve that this is a relic of a
failed state, an enclave that would not exist much longer. This is
reinforced by the live introduction on the first track, featuring
concert-hall applause and two announcers speaking in multiple languages.
Just before the first song begins, one of the announcers concludes in
English:
And remember when we air from South Vietnam… composed by Ngọc Chánh and
Phạm Duy, singing by Thanh Lan. "I Have Learned Sorrow."
This brooding, bluesy number is preformed entirely in Vietnamese and ends in
more applause; no live-concert noise occurs occur on the rest of the album,
but with a murky reverb on the vocals and the same consistent sound from the
acoustic backing band (strings, guitar, piano, and organ) it's not hard to
imagine the cassette as the well-edited product of a single live
performance—though I don't believe it is, as some of its tracks
appeared on previous tapes.
The next number is a sentimental pop ballad, perhaps a Vietnamese reworking
of a J-pop song, since the cassette sleeve notes "Anata" as an alternate
name. But the third track in stats a pattern that characterizes most of the
songs on the album. The song is "Après toi," a French hit from 1972, and
Thanh Lan sings the original lyrics all the way through with the diction of
a lifelong Francophone and the passion of a Method actor, then when the
song seems to be reaching it's musical conclusion, the band keeps playing
and she sings it all again, just as capably and passionately, in
Vietnamese. Twelve of the album's sixteen songs are performed bilingually
like this. On all but one of these, the Vietnamese lyrics are credited to
Phạm Duy, who would go on to become the preeminent songwriter of the
Vietnamese diaspora.
I imagine that simply to sing so much in French would haven been quite a
political act in Vietnam in 1975; the government of North Vietnam was born
from armed resistance to French colonization of the region, and the South
Vietnamese government was seen in a number of ways as heir to the legacy of
French colonialism. Especially notable, given South Vietnam's status as a
sort of de facto Catholic theocracy in a majority-Buddhist region, is the
inclusion of "Oui devant Dieu," whose original French lyrics echo
traditional Catholic wedding vows.
But for all the political portent surrounding the album's
performances, they don't strike me as especially ideological.
Granted, knowing no Vietnamese, I can't evaluate the songs' lyrical content
in that language. But on an album that contains mostly international pop
standards of its era, these are all thematically quite
inoffensive—basically, they're just bog-standard love songs. The
political element here (again, as someone who understands no Vietnamese)
sounds more like a matter of ethnic/cultural signifiers (the French
language, Catholic overtones). This is in contrast to other songs recorded
during the war by musicians like Elvis Phương and Carol Kim that explicitly
decry socialism or romanticize the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
One interesting inclusion is a French/Vietnamese performance of the
traditional folk song "Scarborough Fair." The lyrics of the song itself are
not especially relevant to 1975 politics, but it was internationally
fashionable at that time because of a late-1960s recording by Simon &
Garfunkel that turned it into a thinly-veiled protest of the American war in
Vietnam by setting it in counterpoint to an original song about a wartime
massacre. Only the traditional tune and its lyrical themes are performed on
Nhạc Trẻ 6.
What really gets to me about the whole album is just the depth of pure
feeling throughout the whole thing, from the opening right through Thanh
Lan's duet with charismatic baritone Elvis Phương on the final number, the
only song to feature a second vocalist. I've listened to a smattering of
other music from the Nhạc Trẻ series and from Thanh Lan's post-1975
career, and its all musically good, but none if it quite matches the
emotional resonance of this tape. Part of it is simply the quality of the
band—many of Thanh Lan's later recordings use more mechanical
sequenced synth instrumentals belying her powerful voice—but much of
it is just the ineffable sincerity of the musicians and the mystique of the
moment in time it captures. For me this is most present in the virtuosic and
highly emotionally charged performance of Christophe's "Oh ! mon amour," a
rapturous and plaintive song about love's power to uncover the value and
meaning in life.
The people who made this tape had to know that the social order that defined
their lives was about to drastically change. They must have understood that
the cruel war that had long surrounded them, with its constant uncertainty and
massacres of civilians on all sides, was coming to a close. And at the same
time they must have feared (and rightly so), that there would still be hard
times ahead; there would still be displaced refugees and old scores to settle
after the war. There's something interesting in the choice to enjoy all these
beautifully naïve love songs in the middle of that fraught context.
I guess this is why I enjoy the tape so much, as someone with no
personal connection to the world it represents. It is obvious from the way
this music is preserved online, categorized explicitly as pre-1975 music and
mixed into YouTube slideshows of photographic street scenes from early 1970s
Saigon, that it has a much more personal significance for much of the
Vietnamese diaspora; it's a touchstone that connects them to a period of their
lives, a whole world of experiences, that had a definite and non-negotiable
end date in 1975.
Maybe it's just because I hadn't got just the right Vietnamese web search
terms yet, but at first I wasn't able to find Nhạc Trẻ 6 as a
collection of downloadable audio files, so I ended up making mp3 files from a
YouTube video of the whole tape. Since then the album has been uploaded to
commercial music streaming services.
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