Damien Saez is a popular French musician. If you want the details Google his name, his biography is on Wikipedia, a lot of his songs are free on line.
A few hours after the 2002 presidential election when it became clear that the second round would be between Chirac and the extreme right Jean-Marie LePen, he had written and recorded and put on line a powerful protest song,“ Fils de France.”.
At the end of this month his new album will be released and the publicity campaign should already have begun. Posters on the underground, posters on the buses and on the newspaper kiosks that are so much a part of the French urban furniture, but it was not to be.
The Title song “J’Accuse” is full of meaning here. It was originally the title of an article by Emile Zola addressed to President Felix Faure when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly found guilty of spying. The article provoked a succession of crises which split France in two.
In this J’Accuse Damien Saez condemns our society in which we are led to believe that everything, from sex to the Christmas turkey can and must be bought and if it’s bought on credit, then that’s even better, especially for the shareholders who demand better returns year after year. “No, man didn’t descend from the ape, he descends from the sheep” sings Saez.
I hope the above goes some way to explaining the album cover which was also the poster but which has been censored. Saez then tried to replace the poster with a text but that was also banned. The reason? His poster demeans the human body. Well compare his poster with the one for a popular chain store. This photo was allowed, nothing demeaning here, it was inciting us to buy and that of course is highly moral. As he tried to say in the censored text, “Tell me, when will the time come when the ‘Liberty’ we see on our banknotes, is seen elsewhere.”
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