Normalization - Blog Posts

This is normal

Recently, while listening to the very nicely eclectic radio station named FIP, I discovered the song ‘C’est normal’ (‘This is normal’) by Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem, from 1973. Listen: [YouTube/Spotify/Deezer]

The song consists of a dialogue between two characters in an apartment, recorded over some simplistic, innocent music. The apartment is bit by bit revealed to be on fire, and the duo on their way to death. It is first a very amusing piece of exchange, with an absurd contrast between how disastrous the events are and how laid-back the characters stay, featuring lengthy descriptions of how the catastrophe unfolds, describing in four minutes something that would happen far quicker.

The character played by Areski is a jaded man, somewhat condescending, who can’t see things going another way and takes a great care of explaining, borderline mansplaining, why what is happening is entirely ‘normal’ or, said differently, ‘fine’. Brigitte plays the only lucid person in the room, truly realising the disaster but not seeing how to escape it, not entirely believing it and therefore seeking reassurance by asking many questions.

‘Areski?’ ‘What do you want again?’ ‘Don’t you feel like we’re somehow falling down?’ ‘Listen, try to understand, it’s simple.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Do you remember the combustion?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And the building being burned down by the fire?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, it means that all under us, the walls and the floors have disappeared in flames. So we aren’t supported by anything any more.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Now, something that isn’t supported by anything falls down. That’s what we call gravity. This is normal!’

After listening to it several times, I found it echoing the talks about ‘normalisation’ that have been taking place these last months. In that way, it resembles greatly to the notorious comic strip ‘This is fine’ by @kcgreenn (freely adapted as the header image of this post).

Although I have no idea if the allegory was intended when Fontaine and Areski wrote the song, I now think of the ‘la la la la la’ tune they keep doing as a sort of vocal version of the ‘This is fine’ meme, something you can hum when things are clearly not fine.

I’ll end this with a nice cover of the song, recorded last year by the great Yolande Moreau and François Morel, both very finely fit to the roles – for the latter I can’t help but picturing him as the scientific he also voices in ‘Tu mourras moins bête’. You can listen to this new version right there: [Spotify/Deezer]